Chapter Eighteen
When you're alone, unable to speak, unable to move from where you are, unable to do much at all for a period of time, the world begins to change. More accurately, your perception of the world begins to change. Your senses, bored with the lack of new stimuli, become more perceptive, more sensitive. You are slowly able to distinguish between various sounds that you would never have thought were different; droplets of dew falling upon grass is an entirely different music than drops falling on dirt. Your eyes are ready to spot the slightest change in the environment around you. A single yellow leaf falling from a poplar tree is noted and recorded. Your confines become an array of dozens of different textures, the simple wooden floor is dotted with the slightly softer feel of sparse molds that have clung to its surface for who knows how many years. You observe all of this, but even then all of it eventually dulls into repetition, your mind craving more. So perceptions are fabricated to satisfy the hunger. In your peripheral vision, a blurry figure is running across the field. You swear you feel a raindrop fall on your brow. Your mother's voice dances in your ear; she's calling your name because you left a mess in the kitchen making lunch.
Another drop of water hits my forehead. Then, a third on my arm. I look up. A thin gray cloud floats overhead. Okay, perhaps I wasn't imagining everything. I relocate myself to the playground's highest point, just in front of the top of the plastic spiral slide, where there is a wooden roof built to look like some sort of tower, or perhaps a gazebo. The rain grows into a light drizzle, the kind that produces a mist that loves to cling to cheeks. I have foggy, enshrouded memories of this place. I remember coming here at least once before, long ago. I must have been somewhere around nine or ten years old, because I can remember feeling too old to play on a playground, but I really wanted to anyway. I think everyone goes through a similar feeling. I was sitting in this spot I believe. I ran up to the top of the slide, but rethought going down it because, even at that age I knew I'd gain static electricity going down and get shocked if I touched one of those thick metal screws holding the thing up. I peek down the slide to see if those devilish little fuckers are still there.
I look off into the distance, onto the playground and the rest of the small park. The scene pulls a memory into my mind of another time when I was young. It wasn't this exact one, it was some other park in which I remember very distinctly running away for a bit from my mother. I believe it was Tyler Park… yes, the one with the street bridge going over it. All I did was leave the park and take a walk around an adjacent city block, but it felt fantastic; to be free! Just to have the choice, should I want, to leave and never look back. Oh, I so wish I could do that right now. I so wish there was somewhere I could run to, to put all of this behind me and never look at it again. I would be there as fast as my legs could take me.
But just as I knew long ago that I had to come back to my mother, I know now that I have to come back to reality. But unlike the me many years ago, that keeping me bound to a stupid park is far more constricting than the threatening glare of my mother. Sure, something could've happened to me in that simple walk around a block, some crazy pedophile kidnapper could've snatched me up and the world would find my face on the 6 o'clock news two months later when they found the body, but the chances of that happening were about as probable as Louisville actually getting a professional sports team. Today, right now, though? The city's a whole lot meaner right now than it was twelve years ago. To be honest, there's really nothing keeping an angry horde of infected from leading an all-out assault on me other than that they simply don't know where I am and have the collective intelligence of a slime mold. This isn't some kind of saferoom I'm hiding in, it's a damn playground made of wood and plastic.
The rain is coming down just the tiniest increment harder, but my anxious senses notice it. It's still nothing to speak of, really. I could probably travel through it, if I hadn't thought up some problems with that scenario. First off, without the aid of modern medicine, a simple cold from standing in the rain could evolve into something much worse in little time. Second, I really have no idea how much my physiology has been changed from this infection. For all I know a sneeze could be fatal. It's worrying, and it makes me paranoid about things, but that paranoia is probably the only reason I'm still alive. Or perhaps it's the reason behind my downfalls as well. Who knows.
"Paranoia"… I can't help but notice I've gained some control over my own. When I was walking back from the incident at the mall, under that terrible attack of depression, my paranoia had a chokehold over me, subjecting me to constant fear. Was it just me, though? Was what my brain telling me really from my brain? It didn't seem like a thought of my own; it was like a voice almost, something tangible and noisy being implanted into my conscious. Whatever was happening, it's long since stopped, so one would think I'd just forget all about it, but it's because it just… stopped, so suddenly, that I can't help but ponder over it.
Too much thinking. My brain needs a rest. I think… whether I like it or not… I'm falling asleep…
I'm inside a building. A cold, gray, dead room inside some kind of building. The walls are concrete, barren, chipped in places. I can see no windows or doors. The air in the room is thick, not with smog or dust, but with the dream-like quality of simply being unable to see through. It's as if I'm looking into the distortions of light caused by immense heat, but the room is cold.
Wait, temperature. I can feel it. I can feel the lack of heat. Why can I…? No matter. I have to see through this, know where I am. I have a body, and I can move, but I cannot see myself. It is as if I am merely a sentient point of view, floating about this eerie building. As I move through the room, the thickness in the air stays a distance from me, as though I intimidate it. It hisses and growls at me. I pay no mind to its anger.
"Do you remember us?" a voice, perhaps a thought, says. I look back and forth, but see nothing to attach the sentence to.
I don't respond. I don't know if I can't, or simply don't want to, but the room's atmosphere returns to a perturbed silence. How long I can't say, as time holds little meaning in dreams.
It speaks again. "We remember you. We remember when we first saw you. You were so frightened." There is a pause in which nothing happens. "Are you still?"
I don't think about my answer. It comes naturally. "No." I have no voice. I say it in my thoughts. Did my company hear me? Do I care? There is another pause in the room, where all things seem to have been sucked away, leaving a lifeless vacuum in between words.
"You should be. We mean to kill you."