-The Last Hallway -
I forget entirely where I am going.
My mind is such a rush, such a motion-stain.
On the stairs as the thick snake pulls away and guts the wall with a glass-cutting sound, I hear him scream.
Chris tells me to go, I go. The wall is red where I touch it. I have no idea I am bleeding. I have to stop, tend to the hole in my hand, the rips in my leg and get up again. It hurts a lot. Like teeth in my skin. The flesh feels tight and scabbed, the muscle crudely stitched over.
I walk.
'I hate being tough.' I want to sit down and be rescued. My thigh feels like it's been murdered. I walk anyway. Each stride is knives.
This corridor is gray, shadow and dust draped with empty paintings on the wall and cupboards placed side-by-side. Glass and teak boxes full of china cubes and amber pyramids, photographs encased in silver. The blond boy and the blonde girl, the dying dragonfly. Their faces and their figures dusty. I break my thoughts and wander. There's a door in the corner between two dark cabinets. The knob shakes uselessly, loudly. It's locked.
'Goddamn.'
I call for him. My voice sounds dull on the low ceilings and the close walls. He doesn't answer.
'Damnit.' I can't help but swear. My mind, my self can't operate otherwise. Little releases of emotion so I don't dam up and explode.
'Ohgodohgodwhereishe?Ishehurt?Ishedead?'
My thoughts are a motion-blur and I can barely breathe. I am starving. I am tired. I want to go home. I want to leave right now. But I can't. This world is dying all around me and I can't leave.
My jeans are bloody, I touch my temple. It's burning. My brain is simmering in a biological vat. I am so, so dizzy. The red diamonds in the blue carpet jump up at me like ghosts. Their colors are unbelievable.
I want a drink. I want someone. Someone to throw the lever and make the world stop spinning so fiercely. I want off this world now.
And for some strange reason, I imagine Leon. The light of a plasma computer-screen in his eyes, touching the blue rings white. I imagine him worrying about me, asking Chris to let him come with and find me. I imagine him worrying.
I don't know why him.
I think about him watching for any word of me, any hint, any clue of my living or my dying to fizzle along the electronic airways threading from Umbrella. Leon waits in a softly lit dining room, the glitter of china glassy and blue behind him. Claire lies in the belly of a plane, the nuts and bolts trembling beneath her.
It feels like a long time. The physics of time twisting until days become years and we are dead before we are born.
I imagine Leon a final time. Standing up, unfolding his long bones, I've been gone a week and he seems so tall in my memory. He shuts off the electric square, there are no lights to mute, and he goes somewhere, anywhere.
I can hardly imagine that he and I exist on the same world. Or that there is any world outside of this frozen place.
I rise up off the wall. My body's achy. I thought I had slipped into that gray zone where my sleeplessness had sunk into me and become the waking but exhaustion still poisons me. My eyelids hang heavy, iron on my eyes. I walk with cement shoes, shuffle, shuffle.
It's the same hallway, dank and dusty and dim. I must be lost. The door at the end is unlocked. It opens onto black stone and rattling bars. Gray prisoners rotting behind.
I must be lost.
They clamor their chains and shake their bars, pressing against the metal. A red light burning in their eyes. Some of their fingers are gone, chewed to splintered bone and meat. They don't know pain, these people. Only hunger and starving. There is another door just to my right.
I hug the wall with my back and sidle inside.
It is immensely dark within, dark as the hopeless box.
The floor here is the color of coal. Great slabs of it are dropped unceremoniously into something like cobble across the room. The walls lift stark gray stretches into nothing. This place is small, a cell. There's a gate, a sunken gate before a long, long hall. Like the throat of a beast it falls into darkness, great knights bearing axes looming in the ancient gloom. I can see something, something so distant and a tiny blue light.
"Steve?"
end-
Okay, so my betas egged me on to post this. If only as a one-shot drabble since I don't know if there will be a second part. Don't own Resident Evil of course. Standards apply, review or eat shotgun. Kind words'll convince me to post other stuff. :D
Zel