Chapter I - Execration

“Hello?”

The inside of my throat a membrane of paper mache and road salt, my efforts to get out the only words that come to me not without resistance. Beneath me it feels like a carpet of dirt. I open my eyes little by little achieving what little bearings there are to be had, but with only a single dimly lit light bulb flickering carelessly above me all I can make out is the simulacrum of a bed frame no more than 3 feet from my face. The air is a caustic smog of dust and mold. I try to hold back a mouth full of vomit but it comes spewing out with so much as an attempt for air.

“Hello!?”

I let out another mouth full before coming to my senses. Gaining just enough purchase to get to my feet and let my eyes dart around the room, I notice the windows are boarded up and the walls adjacent lit with a sickly orange hue and padded with a distinctive rough texture.

Upon further examination the bed in front of me appears to be a hospital gurney rusted to indignity and ready to fall apart. Rancid stains of what looks like an orange brown retain occupancy on most of the bedding. Far better I woke up on the floor I suppose. Next to the bed, a rotted out table home to only a single box cutter. I walk towards a door, and appraise immediately that it was less a door and more so a glorified piece of tinder ready to vacate solid state at a moment’s notice. The flickering light above me goes out and in a surge of panic I fiddle with the doorknob breaking free.

I open the door to a long stretch of hallway, with row upon row of similarly constructed rooms. Used sick bowls and dirty needles are strewn about carelessly on the ground, their previous tenants nowhere in sight.

“HELLOOO!!??”

My voice reverberates off the walls with no one around to register a response. I take a right down a hallway paying special attention to the pockmarked walls, seemingly forming sigils and codes. Otherworldly communication modules, esoteric synchronicity of hexed syntax. I hear an indistinct humming from the direction I’m bound. At the risk of antagonizing fate I carry on.

Opening another door to a similar hook shaped hall way, I’m welcomed by the mocking stench of sources unfathomable. I drop to my knees in a fit of coughing, for no less than 3 minutes, 4, 10 even. Getting back to my feet, I see I have no choice but to drudge on. The longer I walk, the more faint the humming becomes.

Spotting what I can only discern to be a nurses station, a solitary envelope earns my attention. I rip open the envelope only to find a newspaper clipping. Fuck knows if anyone could understand what it said though. The words are all jumbled and it’s about as useful as a ground up rosetta stone, its heirs lost to antipathy and incommunicable syntax. Making nothing of it, I put it down and press onward.

Suddenly gagged by a rush of blood to my head, I yelp out like a banshee. The blood curdling in my brain as if it were wrought to spectacle for itself. A public theater of exile from the vacuity of vacuity of vacuity. Dropping to the ground, I plunge awkwardly away from a nearby syringe so as not to have to answer to it too. A sharp screeching inside my ear canal makes its welcome and it seems as if time itself has left in a show of surrender. It must have been about 20 minutes before the pulse subsided.

“Do you understand why you're here?”

With an ice cold crack I return to form. Nearby is a razorblade strewn and clotted with a hellish red substance. I come to my senses only to realize my right arm had been stitched up with surgical precision and that I'm no longer by the nurses station but in another hallway entirely. Ahead of me is a door leading to a corroded stairwell, a poorly lit one at that, and on top of it- looked like it might crumble at a moments notice. Taunting and enticing me towards it.

...What the...?

A familiar hum returns, only this time from below the stairway itself. Beckoning... no... daring me to follow it. After a while I was beginning to wonder if there was any point in continuing. Did the my destination get lost? Did it flee? Did it emigrate past the gates of logic into a badlands of discohesion?

Fucking hell....

After no short venture downwards I'm greeted by a solid windowless door emblazoned with a crisp “B2” sunken into it.

Exiting to what heralds itself by stench and by sight as a boiler room, the machinery in here looks like it hasn't been used in decades, and the deathly cold air stands as epitaph to its dereliction. If the fungal stench doesn't get me, the arctic sub basement climate just might. My path is marked by a labyrinth of lead piping and pressure gauges, searing air and underfoot rivers of sludge. I take a splash down into the murk after a few steps as the awareness of my weakened faculties comes to the fore, a gag on a mouthful bolting me upright and sending me stumbling further down the corridor, periodically falling to my knees and collecting my agency enough to continue forward.

Weary and lethargic, I struggle and crawl to investigate, seeing a solitary door and some slabs of masonry by the artificial shoreline near a sealed shipping door and a steel door beside that on a platform. I fit into another rash of coughing, muted by hearing something off in the distance, the faint splashing and plopping sounds of viscosity echoing off the walls and I take no chances in trying the door.

Locked

The sounds getting slightly louder by the minute and a sandstorm of shadows dancing in the other room send my pulse in rapid tandem, I try for a piece of masonry, dropping it on my foot first but again muting the pain and heaving it over to the locked doorknob. Smashing it open with all my might, again, and again, and again, and again, disconcerted with the noise I was making and on the last strike, sending the lock flying to the ground before sticking my finger where the knob used to be and awkwardly pulling the door open to another staircase.

I gleefully limp up every step before I come to a door leading to a familiar hallway, with a familiar nurse station, and an unfamiliar exit sign pointing the way out. A passageway of flickering lights marks my way and I jog, no, run towards the front lobby and out the doors. I feel a rush of fresher air overtake me once I barge through the front doors and drop to my knees.

I'm out. I'm finally fucking out...