Everything was a blur, a thick haze was circling my thoughts which prevented me from fully understanding anything. I'm not sure how long, as I couldn't keep track of time in any capacity, but eventually I grew more lucid over a while.
Porridge was on my tongue, it was terrible. Not too hot nor too cold, but not just right either. The texture was sickening, like melted glue that was no longer sticky, it was more of a sludge than a goop. The flavor wasn't too bad, a bit bland though, but I still felt hungry so I swallowed it.
"Thanks Dad." I mumbled as he pulled away the plastic spoon from my mouth, my tongue worked to clean my teeth of any lingering remains.
From his spot, seated on a sterile plastic chair next to my hospital bed, Danny Hebert smiled gently at me, though in his eyes there was not even the smallest spark of joy. Those eyes widened as he noticed me examining his face. "Taylor?" His voice almost broke. That single word contained a maelstrom of emotions, from hope to despair.
Taylor Hebert, that's my name. The haze had made my memories of growing up seem a bit distant, but my brain and emotions filled in the gaps overtime. It hurt, like an ice pick digging into my thoughts when I tried to recall everything, but I remembered the basics.
Or not, it was hard to say. I have vague recollections of screaming, being tied down, growling and crying. And then when I exhausted myself, a man would stop by and whisper to me. He was my father, Danny Hebert, I was his daughter, Taylor Hebert, his words didn't feel like lies or wrong in any way, and my memories patched themselves up with that knowledge.
Danny had also spoken about old times, some stuff I remember and others I couldn't recall. I think it was the fact that I didn't soak in everything, that my brain didn't give credence to some stuff that I wasn't sure about, that gave me confidence in his words. I wasn't being tricked, made to believe something false, I was just helped along remembering myself.
Empty eyes looked away, a glimmering coat of tears appeared over them. A nose flared and a mouth twitched, but then they went still.
I had taken a moment to respond, apparently a moment too long for his peace of mind. "Yeah, Dad?"
A hand holding a bowl of room temperature porridge almost dropped it as my father's body flinched, his eyes darted over to me, to my eyes. He didn't say anything, he just stared at me in silence.
Maybe I was missing something, because I didn't really understand what to say next. I found my head tilting just a bit as I used my body to express my confusion. I thought about asking if he was okay, but from his posture to demeanor, I could tell he was exhausted in all aspects of himself.
"Taylor!" His own shout seemed to break himself out of his stillness, he placed the bowl of porridge down with the spoon he had used to feed me. And then he hugged me tight, his arms warmed around my shoulders and neck, and he held me like I was about to melt away if he let go.
"Dad, too tight." I reached up and patted the back of his left shoulder, he loosened up a bit and then started crying against my hair. He rambled a bit, mostly incoherently about how he thought he had failed me, had almost lost me, and how much he loved me.
"I love you too, Dad." My response had only elicited even more sobs from him.
…
…
It was a bit hectic for a few minutes, until the people who had rushed to my room and gathered by my side seemingly realized just how hectic they were.
People, nurses and doctors, had wanted to check up on me. I didn't really understand why, not their reasons, but why I needed to be checked up on in the first place.
Something had happened to me, but I couldn't recall it. When I voiced my concerns, the nurses shared a look amongst themselves and went to find a doctor. I was pretty sure they knew what was going on, but they deferred informing me to someone else.
A doctor, an Asian woman with brown hair, walked in a few minutes later with a nurse and introduced herself to me. She greeted my father with just a hint of familiarity, and then her face grew just the smallest bit more serious.
"Taylor, can you tell me your name and where you are?"
I blinked for a moment, though I then realized staying silent wouldn't help anyone. "I'm Taylor Hebert, and I'm in a hospital room."
There were a few more basic questions from the doctor, with equally basic answers from me.
"Taylor, can you tell me the names of your parents and the name of the city we are in?" The doctor seemed to like asking questions that had little to do with another.
"Danny Hebert and…" My tongue froze, unsure of what syllable to say next. I didn't know what my mother's name was. "Uh!" I groaned and held my head, a sharp and thin pain lanced my brain.
"—" I heard a muffled sound from my father.
"I'm fine." I hadn't heard his words, but his concerns were practically written on his face. "I don't know my mother's name, and… I'm not sure about the city either." I had been about to move on to the next part of her question, but I didn't know what city we were in.
"Taylor, what can you tell me about your school? Can you tell me your class schedule?"
"I'm a student at Winslow High, I have a computer class and… I don't know anything else."
"Taylor, can you tell me about the people at your school? Your classmates or teachers for example."
"…Emma Barnes, Sophia Hess, Madison Clements…" It hurts to even try and recall their faces to accompany their names.
"Taylor, who are those people to you? Are they your friends?"
"No." My answer was immediate. I hadn't been able to think of who they were, but I couldn't even imagine the thought of being friends with them.
I heard my dad take a quiet breath in, as if he had been pinched sharply.
"Taylor, I don't want you to try and answer if you can't, but instead tell me the first thing that comes to your mind when I ask, can you do that?"
I nodded, a bit unsure of what I was about to be asked.
"Taylor, what's the last thing you remember?"
A dream flashed through my mind, a foggy nightmare in a ruined world, but before that I felt something else shoot up in my memories.
The light in the room dimmed, the walls closed in, I couldn't breathe, I couldn't move.
Vomiting.
Crying.
Screaming.
Squirming.
Shattering.
…
…
I had fallen unconscious, though considering I felt a bit loopy after I woke up, I was certain I hadn't naturally gone down. As something that was probably a sedative worked its way through me, my father stayed by my bedside, I spoke with him. Mumbling my thoughts as they came to me.
I spoke of a happy child I vaguely remembered, of the confines of a metal locker, of a world left in ruin, and of my request to a Queen. I saw his eyes go wide as the skin on his face turned a deathly pale.
The world wasn't in focus, and as I drifted in and out of consciousness, I heard something about a brain scan. When I next woke up, in a lucid state, I was reassured by a doctor that my life wasn't in any danger and that my health wasn't at risk, but apparently, I had a benign brain tumor.
It wasn't cancerous, and although it was placed in a delicate part of my brain, it had stopped growing and wouldn't cause me any more harm. Any more harm, as in the damage was already done and it wouldn't get any worse. It could be removed, though at the moment I wasn't in any state for surgery.
I didn't know what to feel, my emotions were currently limited to an extent as I maneuvered around my confusion. My eyes itched as warm tears rolled down my cheeks, I was crying though I wasn't sure why.
The stress of the 'incident' and my tumor had caused my partial memory loss, oh and apparently the 'incident' had caused me to enter a week long comatose state before I emerged delirious. I had spent one more week screaming and rambling, then another week mostly acting like a babbling infant.
It had been a month and a few days since the 'incident' before I regained my self-awareness. The mental trauma had apparently pushed my brain past a breaking point, and it was a miracle I could speak coherently.
The nurses and doctors liked saying that, they liked praising me or parroting how miraculous my recovery was, it wasn't hard to see what they were doing. Making me feel better, reassuring me so I don't relapse. The fact that they kept trying to make sure I stayed sane, only added more pressure.
I cried again, it was night time and I couldn't sleep so I cried.
My memories still felt distant, what I could remember anyways. I couldn't remember my mother, I think I cried more because I missed my memories of her more than I missed her. Where was she? Why hadn't she stopped by? Even if I couldn't remember her, my heart ached for her, but it felt hollow, my desire to see her couldn't match my desire to remember her.
My father had left, I don't know why, but he had fled in a panic. He promised he would be back soon, but even a minute without him was too long.
My tears were blurring my vision, made worse by them fogging up my glasses. It was night, I should be asleep and I didn't take them off until I felt tired, so I had left them on as I cried. I removed them from my face, and folded them up as I placed them down on a bedside tray, I didn't need to see and I just wanted to cry some more.
"—"
Sound could be understood as vibrations that eardrums deciphered, and silence could be understood as the absence of noticeable sound. I think the 'understood' part carried those words, there were a lot of things humans couldn't perceive, certain frequencies and what not. So although some would say it quiet, that probably just meant they were ignorant of any sounds.
"—"
I couldn't understand what I 'heard'. No normal human could, they lacked the senses to even discern what I 'heard'. It made my ears ring, my eardrums cried as they almost crippled themselves in a futile attempt to turn the vibrations into sound I could comprehend.
I felt a jolt, and my head jerked back as my neck bent. I could feel my eyes almost roll completely up, almost tear away, as they attempted to turn away from reality. I fought against my body and looked down, my vision was blurry with tears and without my glasses, so I squinted and shifted my focus.
"It's not our time, we're still young." A multitude of hands, of various races and sizes, reached out from underneath my hospital bed and clawed at the edges. I couldn't describe every hand, there were too many, but I could spot a pattern, each of them was diseased in some way, rotten in some fashion.
Lesions, welts, rashes, marks on wintered skin that was hugging weathered bones. Young, child-sized hands. When clawing fingers found purchase, they pulled. My blanket was stretched thin, pushing me against my mattress, and thin arms grew out from beneath my bed.
The hands went limp as they fell around me. "I'm scared, can you hold my hand?" Fingers twitched as they curdled slightly,
A nightmare. This had to be a nightmare. I couldn't think straight, the emotions swirling inside my skull only fueled my confusion. A nightmare, like the world in ruin had been, this couldn't be real. I had fallen asleep and was just having a nightmare.
My eyes darted around, searching for some sign that this wasn't real. The hospital bed was in ruin, though not to the same degree as my school had been, most things looked abandoned except for the expensive stuff. My eyes hurt, almost as much as my ears, the information my senses were telling me was too foreign.
Something felt hot in my brain, something pulsed against my brain. I felt blood leak down my nose. Blood, my heart was pumping too fast, my veins itched. Something was squirming inside my skin, inside my veins, flowing against my blood.
A scalpel. One of the hands had dropped a scalpel on the bed. "If you're scared, hold me hand and it'll be over quickly." A thin line ran from wrist to elbow, separating flaps of flesh. "Get them out. Get them out and join us." Hands squirmed and flickered. "It's not our time, we're still young."
There was something inside my bloodstream, I had to get it out. Was I young? My nightmare about a happy child dying was becoming clearer, Taylor's being up to this point had died already, the part of myself with a childhood was gone. I wasn't an adult yet, I hadn't grown up enough yet.
I was in-between stages in development, a word came to my mind along with a distant memory of a classroom lesson.
Teenagers, around the 1920-1950s the youth had changed as society changed. Younger people could spend their money, and they did so because they dreaded growing up, they wanted to enjoy every moment they weren't completely responsible yet.
The threat of war never truly left anyone's mind, and if they were enlisted to go off and die, they didn't want to leave with any regrets. I couldn't remember everything completely about the lesson, but I recalled enough to give me pause. I would have many regrets if I died, mostly because I still felt incomplete.
Teenagers, to kids they looked like adults and to adults they looked like kids.
My child self had died, but I kept her corpse with me, I had swallowed it, consumed it. Like a stomach breaks down food into nutrients to supply the body, I had broken down the happy child to supply my being. It probably wasn't too different from what the small monsters had intended to do to me.
The haze and fog was fading from my mind, which wasn't a good thing as fear quickly moved in. I was surrounded by hands crawling out from beneath my bed and the squirming inside my blood picked up speed. "I'm scared, can you hold my hand?"
Something snapped, a few wavering lines flowing horizontally from me fell limp. Doctors. Nurses. When a line snapped, I couldn't recall their faces or names and then I forgot their occupations.
I didn't want to lose more memories, but I was frozen In fear and unable to act because of the hands around me.
It hurt, the scalpel was in my grip and the bladed edge had pierced flesh. I had to remove my veins to remove the thing crawling inside of me. I cried some more, everything was just too much. "Dad…" I whimpered. He was supposed to be here, he said he would keep me safe.
A line, his line, twitched and lost all its slack.
I heard a squeak, the small sound had been enough to jar me out of slicing my arm open. I looked over and saw a hazy rat, it was across the room and I didn't have my glasses on so I couldn't see any more details. Though I did see the stream of rats pouring into my room from the corners of the room.
The hands around me had spasmed violently and then curled into fists, as they struck out and smashed against the floor, most likely aiming for one of the two dozen or so rats.
With my hands distracted, I had worked up enough courage to grab my glasses and slip them on. The arms vanished from my direct sight, though not from my peripheral, I could still see them by looking around the rims of my glasses. The rats seemed to shrink when I looked at them straight on.
The hands pulling my blanket down had let go and joined in trying to smash down the rats. I saw mashed puddles spotting the linoleum tiled floor, about six rats had been killed already.
I wasn't sure what to do, the rats extended my life but the source of the hands was still under my bed. If I tried to leave, I would probably be grabbed, and I wasn't sure if the rats wouldn't swarm me even if I did escape.
Off in the corner, I noticed one rat doing something bizarre even for this scenario. It was standing on its hind legs, and using its forepaws to smear blood against the bottom of my door. The pattern it was making wasn't random, but instead it had careful and precise strokes as it drew out a circle containing a complex geometric design.
When it was done, all the other rats froze and then melted into steaming piles of gore. A wave of energy suffused the room, the walls, roof and floor, it was almost suffocatingly warm. The hands screeched as they clawed at the ground, but they couldn't leave even a single mark and eventually they fell limp.
The rat, the only one left after it completed its circle, turned and looked at me. It glanced away, and its nose twitched with hesitation before it turned back to me.
My head hurt, my emotions and thoughts were taking a moment to catch up with this nightmare. I panicked, my arms and legs acted without coordination as they attempted to throw me out of my bed as the rat walked towards me. A small creature, I should be able to escape even if it chased me.
"Taylor."
It took a moment for me to realize that it had been the rat who had spoken, another moment to realize it said my name, and another moment for me to recognize the voice.
"Dad?" I croaked out.