1The migraine subsided and I sat upright. I felt different. My skin was clammy and chalky white. I stared down and a chunk of broken mirror at my feet. Dark bags, like the ones the boys eyes were encircled with, also hugged mine. My lips were coal black. I opened my blistered palm, stared at the symbol, then up into Paul's mysteriously dark eyes. He offered a hand, I hesitantly excepted and he lifted me off the ground. My joints were stiff and sore, but I still managed to stand erect without toppling over into an unconscious heap.
"What happened to me?" I questioned, trying to keep my balance.
"The dizziness will go away eventually. It took me a while to get used to it as well." Paul said, changing the subject. A bell rang in the distance and caught his attention.
"I have a bit of business to attend to if you don't mind." He droned. "I don't completely trust you, but what the hell. There's not much you can screw around with." He sauntered out of the room to leave me alone and shaken. I zoned out for a minute, trying to remember the so-called-accident that I was in. My concentration was disturbed when the floor beneath me trembled and fractured. I stumbled backwards and steadied myself with the piping that lined the walls. Chunks of the ceiling quivered and fell, cement littering the floor.
I covered my head with my arms and slunk to the floor as the quake continued to bombard "Sweden Borgian Space". After what seemed like several minutes, the shaking stopped. I looked around, prying myself from beneath a sheet of concrete, coiled wires and rock.
"I'm getting the fuck out of here." I said out loud to myself. Stepping over the fallen chunks of ceiling, I hobbled out of the room and wandered helplessly through the sullen, dank, grey hallways.
I repeatedly passed door after door, pacing through the hallways, looking for a way out. Something told me that that would never happen. Something told me that I was stuck here for eternity. I felt like I was being followed, but when I looked over my shoulder, the hall was everything except doors and silky spiderwebs. I continued on suspiciously for quite a while until the stalker revealed himself. A teenage boy, leather-clad, tall and long haired appeared from the shadows. His gaze was just as deep and hollow as Paul's had been, but was more soft and sullen.
"New here to the Kingdom?" He asked. All I could do was nod.
"Anubis." He offered his hand in a polite shake, but when he noticed the cauterized symbol on my hand, all he could do was stare at it. Feeling foolish and ashamed, I lowered my hand.
"I see that he has already marked you." I stared down at the floor and again nodded.
"I can destroy you, you know. Any friend of Paul is an enemy of mine." He lifted my chin with his index finger and looked me over.
"But I feel like being generous. I'll set you free, but on one condition." Anubis paused, and I noticed that I was trembling frantically. "I mark you as well." Before I could respond, he had already branded a dog head on the opposite palm. This one blistered as well, but seemed to heal over a lot faster. A scream, that of a small girl, calling "Antubis" reverberated through the hallway.
"Mary needs me." He said, before once again, disappearing into the shadows.
"Wait!" I bellowed. But it was too late. I was alone, clawing through the dark corridor. A door to my left caught my eye. Pale light drowned out the dense black from the small rectangular window. I peered out into the entrance of Lewiston, Maine's Kingdom Hospital. I cautiously opened the metal door a bit and slipped through. I stood behind the security desk next to an old, scrawny man with large bifocals reading a dirty magazine. From what I could see through the sliding doors, it was raining heavily, causing puddles to form in the parking lot.
"Blondie no! That's Bobby's!" The man with the huge glasses scolded the German Shepard that was now digging in the cooler at my feet. The dog understood and backed away from the meatloaf, mumbling, "Otto, Tubby don't need it." I stared at Blondie, astonished at the dog's ability to talk.
I looked over the security guards shoulder at the four screens that represented the security cameras hidden in the hospital and the one at the emergency drive in. A red and white ambulance came to a sudden stop at the drop off. The two ambulance drivers scurried out, flung open the two back doors and carefully maneuvered the stretcher down the ramp. Another carried an umbrella and positioned it over the patient.
Otto didn't seem to realize that the ambulance had arrived. I tapped him lightly on the shoulder. He whipped around, found nothing, adjusted his glasses and looked at the screen. His finger clumsily found the button for the P.A. system and turned it on.
"Dr. Hook to emergency. Hook to emergency. Stat." Automatically, the doors slid open. A woman pushed a stretcher from behind, holding an oxygen mask to the patients purple lips. I shuffled out from behind the desk, into the rain and caught up with the paramedic. I held on to the metal side bar and stared down at yet another boy my age. His hair was plastered to his feverish forehead and around the bullet wound on the right side of his skull. His eyes were completely hidden beneath several layers of gauze. The nurse had carelessly tried to wrap an ace bandage around his throbbing wound, but the bandage was too moist from the excessive sweat that drenched the boys face and limply hung off the side. The wound was black with gun powder, probably ejected from the barrel of the gun at the same time as the bullet.
A fairly short, handsome doctor rushed down the hall towards the nurses, the stretcher and I. "Victim of a local school shooting. Unfortunately, he was also the gunman." The woman paramedic said at a quickened pace.
"Have the front desk call and alert the parents. I'll take him down to ER. Stat!" He took hold of the stretcher and I tightened my grip as we flew down the hallway directly for ER. The room was brightly lit and smelled of nauseating disinfectants and morphine. One nurse came rushing in, followed by several male doctors. She whipped out an identification bracelet and wrapped it around the boy's wrist. I picked up his limp arm and read the typed information:
Jason Armstrong. Caucasian Male. 15 yrs of age. Birth date: 7/23/89.
Dr. Hook pulled latex gloves over his newly washed hands and put on his surgeon mask. The lady doctor, Draper as the other surgeons called her, handed him a weird looking surgical tool that looked very similar to the tongs that people used to get hot objects out of a frying pan. He moved the loose flap of skin away from the bullet wound with his index finger and inserted the tool. Twitching it lightly from side to side, he worked the piece of metal out and it fell into his opened, latex covered palm .More blood trickled from the hole before Hook had a chance to wrap gauze around it. When he did, it immediately started to take the blood in like a sponge takes in water.
He flipped up a corner of the gauze covering his eyes and gagged, quickly replacing it and turning his head away from the corpse.