To War with Insanity

The gleaming white light splintered across the black room, reflecting off the silver knife. As the knife bobbed up and down, following my chest movements, light leaking through the slit of the window danced across the room.
  There were only two of us left.
  Four days of time had witnessed the death of four other individuals. Though really, all six of us were still in the black room, but only two of us had oxygen in our lungs.
  "Put...the knife down!" the words were weak. They struggled to climb into my ears.
  The room went silent. The slit through the window for a split second became shadowed, engulfing the entire room in velvet darkness.
  Still, I could see the man's eyes, white balls stretched out of their sockets, quivering ever so slightly. Slowly, I lifted the blade to my own eyes and began to examine it. Thin ravines of day old blood ran across the once pristine blade.
  "Please, Jeff," the man whimpered. Tears were outlined on his cheeks and nestling in his eyes. His potbelly stretched his white dress shirt as he heaved in short, airless breaths.
  I scanned the room reliving the terrors I had witnessed.
  And created.
  Poor Dr. Jenkins sat slouched against the wall, a deep crimson river of blood across his neck. Next to him sat a nurse, Debra Winnfield. My eyes quickly moved to the stone wall behind, splashed with blood. It was the only decent wall, though still looking as if it belonged in a slaughter house, in the entire room. The room itself was empty, bland and resembled a prison cell back in the 1700's.
  My thoughts were quickly abolished by the potbellied man in front of me. His legs of pale jello sank underneath his weight in almost mute silence, collapsing the rest of his flabby body to the ground.
  "So, the big ole' whale has beached himself upon my shore," I snickered crouching beside him, still grasping onto the knife, the sweet precious knife.
  "Do...you think...you will get away with this?" the man, my boss for thirteen years, responded.
  My fingers tightened around the thick handle of the knife. Blisters dotting my hand burned as I swiftly waved the knife in front of his wrinkled, red face.
  "Well, my fine friend, what are you going to do about it?" the sentence had pinched the tongue of my higher colleague as he stared back at me dumbly.
  Glowing in my victory of words I backed away, tossing the knife back and forth between my palms. Sweat was flicked through the air.
  "You see, Dave, I have the power," I paused looking at the gleaming knife, "I have the knife."
  The eerie silence returned, the angered heart beat of the white shirted man vibrating against the walls of the makeshift room. Weaving through the swamp of the room, the motionless bodies the luscious vegetation, I pressed my ear against the debris masked, dusty wall.
  Nothing. Soundless. Deaf. Mute.
  That's all we were. We were the speaker that had been muted.
  An ugly growl sounded from my stomach, filling that void of disturbing, hopeless silence. Four days my body had eaten on the scarce fat reserves Big Mac's and pizza had created over the past months.
  We're bears! Bears hibernating, living off the white blocks of fat composing our bodies.
  Blue pipes ran down my wrists like moles as I clenched my fists drilling one into the black, cement wall. A cloud of dust slithered off the rock as my hand ricocheted back, the wall tearing the soft skin off my knuckles.
 
  "Kill me."
  They were clear, purely dignified words.
  "Sorry, what did you say?" I turned around to face the man.
  No longer flopped over as a dead seal, the man was kneeling wading in his lake of tears. His mouth gaped open, his eyes squinting sharply, he repeated: "Kill me."
  "What, you wanna die as a saint, now? It's not like anyone is gonna find us, at least alive," I chuckled, shaking my head at the man.
  The muscle in his legs tightened as he rose from what I thought was to be his grave.
  "Give me the knife, now, if you can't do it," his fat jelly roll of an arm extended towards the silver object still hanging between my fingers.
  "No-"
  "You could kill the other four, including your pregnant fiancée! Why can't you kill me?"
    His lips kept flapping but my ears began to fill with cement and blocked his cries like the collapsed building around us.
  The pale face, the white blood that had pumped her heart in her last minutes, scorned the blackness that was my mind. Her soft cry, the tears that profusely snaked down her face. The frigid palm that had lay across my arm as I waved the knife in front of her; the silver Devil that had consumed the room.
  The images quickly became vague memories as I snapped my eyelids back open, seeing the man standing there crookedly, his left leg severely bent inwards.
  "Just give me the knife!" the cement in my ears quickly dissolved.
  I shook my head.
  His arm, seemingly spring-loaded, spontaneously lurched towards the pointed object, swatting it out of my liquid hands. The knife shot rays of white light across the room as it tumbled to the makeshift, rubble ground. The white light, the sliver in the roof of the cave of cement had been our hope, our sanity. As the knife disappeared into the shadows of the dense cold rubble so did the dancing white lights beaming across the room.
  Total, utter blackness; no longer the Sun hung over our prison. No longer was the silver, gleaming knife, the peacekeeper and the dictator of the room, in sight.
  I dove to the ground, scampering for the only thing I had left to cherish. Glass bit into my paddling hands as well the crumbled stone that was sandpaper to my flesh. A sudden flash of white skin overpowered my eyes. Even in the pitch black darkness my boss had connected a fist right on the slope on my nose. Still, in my frenzy, the hot, molten, magma-like blood flooding out of my nostrils did little to deter my quest, nor the searing pain shooting across my face. The flailing sausage arms swinging around me had the effect of pebbles hitting a prison wall.
    It was then the flesh bubbles that formed sinking hills on my hands pressed against a metallic, cold object. Cold like no life, no soul existed in it.
  It was the knife.
  I gripped the familiar handle, still lubricated with sweat from my pores, and lifted it to my eyes.
  "No one touches the knife!" the remainder of the moisture in my throat sprinkled in the air as I thrust the Devil's hand into the man's belly.
  The knife was not consumed by the bowl of flesh, instead rebounding back like elastic. The silver blade of the knife no longer held it's past elegance or blood coated tip. The weapon was blunt; useless.
 
  Sighing, breathing heavily, the pot-bellied man collapsed once again to the rubble ground, clutching his unharmed belly.
  My fingers, wrapped around the knife handle, released. Again, the knife floated through the black dust, disappearing into the black shadows below. This time there was no white light beaming against the noir room, no sliver of light sinking into the room.
  As the knife left my grasp the muscles in my arm sank back into the pale flesh making up my arms. Another earthquake erupted beneath my legs, blending them into gelatine, crumpling the rest of my body to the black hell below.
  My fall was taciturn; the dark expanse so silent the flailing dust in the air whistled slightly. The blood in my veins slowed, the drumming beat of my heart becoming a slow metronome. 
  The black soul that had pumped my mind, my steady heartbeat disappeared. There was nothing left to feed the words that had rolled off my tongue.
  Or the powerful thrusts my arm had made.
  Blackness crept into my eyes, the breathing behind me fading from my ears. One last shot of white light illuminated the room revealing a white, plastic card beside my eyes.
  It was my employee card. It read:

Dr. Jeffery Newlands
Middlesex Psychiatric Hospital

  The blackness washed over my eyes. Insanity had won.