Everything was black. Completely pitch black, like I was permanently blind or something. But I could hear. I could hear voices, static and monotonous. They were coming from another room, through a speaker. I struggled a bit, trying to open my eyes, trying to stir my aching body and rouse it into motion.

I couldn't. I found that I was strapped down to a cold table of some sort.

Why couldn't I open my eyes? Argh... there was something wrapped around my head.

A door clicked and swung open on creaky hinges, and the wheels of a cart rolled against tile floors. Yeah, I've got a good sense of hearing. But right now, that didn't really matter. I was more concerned with where the Hell I was. Was I in a hospital? Memories of... last night, last month? I don't know. Memories of the last time I saw my family flooded over in my mind.

Mutilated, bloody...

I found my voice. "W-where am I?" My neck was killing me, I was sure I had bruises all over my body, and my stomach only threw a dull pain radiating all over my torso.

The person who walked in rolling a cart removed some bandages from my face with gentle hands. As they fell from my face, I had to close my eyes for a second to shield them from the glaring lights.

Two big, blurry figures entered the room as I was just getting used to the bright whiteness of the room. The first person- a woman, I discovered- began injecting me with something.

"Ow!" I hissed, my eyelids flying wide open. She connected a tube to the needle, which I followed with my eyes... up, up, up to a machine that contained a huge glass jar with dark purple liquid inside. The substance flowed into the tube and subsequently, into my arm.

I felt the stuff pump into my veins.

"What the fuck is that? What is that?" My voice was shrill. Were they poisoning me? Using me like a lab rat?

Again, I tried to squirm loose but I was buckled down firmly with leather straps that were impossible to break.

The woman who was apparently a nurse gave me a half-bored-half-pissed look before taping the tube onto my arm and rolling the cart past the two big men and out the door. The two big men who walked just a minute ago moved to either side of me. Body guards, I suppose. The buff guys who get the dirty shit done.

At that moment, two other people in traditional lab coats stepped in. They looked like crap, to be honest. The guy scientist was handsome, but he'd look better without his disheveled hair and bags under his eyes. I'd've guesstimated his age to be in his mid-fourties.

He was the first one to talk.

"Good morning, Miss Richardson. You're probably wondering why you're here and how we resuscitated you."

"Yes," I blurted out, "and who the Hell are you people?"

"You're in the local research facility just out of town. We found your corpse behind your family's house. Your brutally slaughtered family." He added. I glared at him.

The second scientist, who was a middle-aged woman, put a hand on his shoulder. Her blonde hair was disheveled as well.

"Look," she said after giving her partner a critical glance, "long story short, we are running an experiment on corpses to revive and replenish them. We found you in the lake, as Paul said, after police started clearing out. A couple of our nosy interns were sniffing around your place and went deep enough into the woods to find your corpse floating in the lake. Halfway into the project, you were added as a test subject."

"All of our test subjects failed." Her partner broke in. The way he said it, with the pure look of despair in his eyes shut us all up for a minute.

A moment passed, as long as a century.

"But now, you- Jane Richardson-saved our research. We finally did it."

Both of them were tearing up now, smiles plastered onto their faces.

I got a sick feeling in my stomach.

"We drained your body of all the blood it had before filling you with Liquid Hate. It's the chemical we created for this experiment. The purpose of it was to bring you back to life, and make you faster... stronger... and you'd be able to live longer." Paul went on, "Basically, you'd be a superhuman. However, after 25 trials and errors and tons of other money lost, we were ready to give up until we remembered that we had you in our morgue for a few weeks."

Paul nodded when he finished, and we both knew that I could finish the rest of the story.

"So," I said in a husky voice, "you're telling me that I really did die, and I was rotting away underwater until you found me and injected this purple crap into me?" For some reason, I was disgusted, hurt, and relieved all at the same time.

Both scientists nodded after exchanging glances.

"Can I ask your names?"

Paul chuckled and shook his head. "Silly us, tired and stressed beyond belief. Where are our manners?"

"My name is Carol Aldine," said the middle-aged blonde lady, "and this is my coworker Paul Schwartz."

"Thanks," I heard myself say. That was the day I realized that mind and body are truly separate things, and that your body doesn't need you to work itself. I was on autopilot right now.

"Please leave. I think I need some time alone right now."

So, after laying here strapped onto a table for half an hour under dim lights illuminating a cold room, I pondered my current state of affairs carefully. What I've pieced together from my alarmingly sharp memory is this:

I got invited to a party at my family's house but apparently a psycho murderer got there before me and... well, did his dirty work. We had a little battle in the woods and he ended up throwing me down a hill into the lake. I broke my neck in the process, dying instantly. Police investigated my family's death but I was so deep into the woods and I had sunken into the lake, so no one found me.

The only way I could have been found a little later is if I had somehow floated back up. But did I? How did 2 interns find me while stumbling blindly around, and not professional cops?

That was a bit shady...

I looked back up at the tube that sent "Liquid Hate" (whatever that was) into my veins. They'd been doing this a while, I could guess. There's no way the transition from stone-cold death to animated life would be quick.

As I was lying on the table, I thought more about that fateful night.

The blood...

The severed parts...

Eerie silence and snagging branches...

Black ringed eyes, a pure white face and a red Glasgow Smile.

I wasn't afraid anymore. The pictures in my mind, the memories... they meant nothing to me right now. The only thing that mattered right now

was to hunt down and kill that psychotic bastard.