Hide And Seek

Everything was dark; pitch black, and silent. Venita Corbin felt as though she had died and now floated in the vast abyss that was purgatory. She opened her eyes into a suffocating nothingness – no matter which way she looked, it was all the same inky pool of black.

Shocked, confused, she heard distant sounds which escaped comprehension. It seemed like scuffling and whispers, and Venita became convinced that the monsters of her childhood had ventured outward from her imagination and had taken physical form, and now taunted and haunted her.

Panic laid its icy grip about her throat, constricting her breath, and she began thrashing hastily into the darkness, fumbling her hands forward, attempting to take a step even though she couldn’t feel anything beneath her feet. Yet she felt bound and heavy, something restricting her movement, enclosing her on all sides. The first crazed thought that came to her panicked mind was rebirth. First she had thought she was dead, but now perhaps she was encased in a womb. None of this made sense to her, but in a state of utter confusion and with a sleepy haze clouding her thoughts, sense didn’t have any hold here.

Her thrashing ceased when she felt a hard impact against her left side, rocking her senses and clacking her teeth together, nearly parting her from the tip of her tongue. For a moment, she lay stunned, confusion even more present in her mind. Slowly, though, her mind woke up further and a pinprick of light in front of her grew to blinding proportions. Outstretching both hands, she clawed frantically at the hole, trying to escape whatever it was that held her captive. The hole grew larger, and after many moments of fumbling awkwardly, she realized that it was a zipper, although the pull was on the other side. Sticking her fingers through, she pulled downward until she had enough room to push the heavy black fabric aside and sit up.

Yet she still felt trapped in a nightmarish world where nothing made any sense. The blinding light soon dimmed as her eyes adjusted and she realized that the source was nothing more than a couple bare bulbs that were apparently running on an old generator; they dimmed and flickered sporadically, doing as much to hinder Venita’s vision as it did to aid it.

Pulling herself to a standing position, she laid her fingers across cool steel to assist the movement – and then she recoiled in horror when she looked up and saw the object in front of her. An autopsy table, by the look of it, and a glance downward told her that she had just struggled her way out of a zippered body bag. Had she not had any familiarity with death, she would have retched and emptied her stomach of its remaining contents at that moment. Instead, her confusion grew and she remained wary as she stepped back from the table to survey the room.

Five more autopsy tables had been aligned in a rugged group, devoid of any pattern, in the middle of the room with emptied body bags atop each one. The flooring and walls were all white tile, but were far less than pristine and sanitary-looking; misuse as much as neglect had rendered the white a dingy gray, and there were black and red smears all over the place. Even the occasional obscene graffiti could be seen in clashing shades of hot pink, blood red, sky blue, lime green.

The room itself was more or less bare of any useful equipment; what looked like an old mattress lay decomposing in the back corner, the glass that had once resided in the cupboards along the wall to Venita’s right had long ago been smashed out and now littered the floor on that half of the room.

She turned in that direction and took a couple unsteady steps, hoping to find a surviving shard of glass that could be wielded as a weapon of defence – or revenge – but the voices interrupted her. The ones that she had at first thought were the distant voices from the nightmares that had plagued her as a child and followed into adulthood, only now they had a more human and less threatening nature. Nonetheless, Venita was cautious as she ventured toward the double doors which had been propped open and was the lone exit into a hallway beyond.

In the narrow hall, she found the others congregated together and talking in hushed tones. A blonde girl of about twenty sat on the floor with her back against the wall and cried mournfully while the others ignored her. Two men and four women in total – what surprised Venita was that she did not recognize any of them. As far as she was concerned, she had no connection to them whatsoever, so why was she stuck here? She was smart enough to realize that they had not brought her here, the numbers added up.

Then who?