No Way Home by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dark Matter Publishing
Published: 2015-02-26T06:00:00+00:00

* * *

There were no windows in the room, but I could hear the rioting outside through the walls. Angry shouts, hostile screams – the sounds of discontent, of pain and resistance. I didn’t need to see it to know what was happening. I’d seen enough on the way in, as the Revolver security team picked me up from the displacement camp and delivered me here. This evening’s riot had been birthing then, but was in full swing now.

Three floors up and on the opposite end of the street, I could still hear the loud engine and clacking of treads against asphalt as police combat carriers, mobile assault units and tanks rolled into place. The gunfire was sporadic, but I knew it would grow as the evening progressed. It always did.

A week ago, I’d been on the outer edges of a riot that had engulfed the entire city square. I’d been scavenging for food and wound up with a mouthful of tear gas. That was before the police began firing their automatic rifles into the crowds. I’d been lucky to escape.

As the bourbon settled, my mind drifted. I couldn’t help but think of good old Ravencroft. When I was sixteen and Dad demanded to know what had happened to my wrist and why it was wrapped in gauze I had lied – told him I cut myself on a bush … best I could think of at the time. Stupid, I know. He demanded to see, and when I tried to weasel out of it, he grabbed my arm and tore the bandage away. Then he found the razor after digging through the garbage can in my bedroom. After that, we were off to the ER and a week-long stay in the psych wing where they pumped me full of drugs that made me want to kill myself even more, and then medication that numbed my brain and turned me into a zombie during the very few hours I was awake.

It had felt as if my mind were disconnected from my body, and that I was living in a frail shell where everything was slow and sluggish. I had existed for a time on two planes, both myself and not myself, a familiar stranger in my own skin. Another batch of pills made my heart race and the world sped up into a nauseating, dizzy spin. Eventually, they sorted it out, but not before a lifetime of cardiac irregularities had set in.

Like this guest suite at the news station, my room in Ravencroft had been windowless too. Except there I had a roommate who spent most of the time muttering to herself and drooling across her hospital gown. I’d sit in the rec room with drugged-up horrors who stared blankly into space. There was a window there, at least, providing a wonderful view of the lower adjacent wing’s roof.

“The attempt was serious,” I had argued in my earliest group therapy session. I had been exquisitely pissed off to have my aborted suicide brushed aside as a ‘cry for help’.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.