The Facility - Fighting Fate

1 Prologue

I blinked. My eyelids were heavy and as I tried to breathe something scraped my throat and I had to cough. My breast ached and a headache throbbed and droned in my ears. Very slowly my mind came to its senses and started to send signals into my body.

My body screamed of the pain as I tried to move my arms and feet. Tears were filling my eyes. My heart was beating intermittently.

Help! Where am I?

I breathed through my nose as carefully as possible so I wouldn't cough again. Again I tried to open my eyes.

It was dark. I was laying on a hard uneven ground. Then I felt an ice cold stinging trough my body. Reflexively I contracted my limbs and a high pitched painful scream was cutting the silence. I laid there panting and tried to listen to other possible sounds through the echo. As it fade away, for the first time I heard some knacking and rustling around me.

«Hello?», I called with a scratchy voice. No response.

Slowly moving my muscles I leaned on my hands while ignoring the pain and the cold. I felt sick and it was costing all my power not to loose consciousness again.

When my eyes adjusted to the darkness I became aware of the big pillars standing around me. The terms tree and forest came to mind. A forest? Like the one in the books? But I could not remember how I got there and from where I came. And if this really was a forest, then could it be that I was outside? How could this be? The throbbing in my head became worse the more I tried to remember.

I squinted my eyes and seeked to be able to spot more details but aside from faint lights in the distance everything was pitch black. On my left side I could vaguely see the ground rising up into the darkness while he seemed to be more even on the right. Could it be that I fell down from there? I hoped for more memories to pop up and answer this question, but nothing happened.

Finally I decided to stand up and search for help. Perhaps it would also help me to warm up my frozen body. Slowly and on all fours I crawled to one of those trees which stood the nearest and tried to pull me up. I realized that the pain was nearly excruciating.

Most of the pain came from my abdominal area, my breathing was achy and with my right leg I would only be able to hobble, too.

Please let there be a guard from the Facility somewhere who's searching for me.

I stumpeled from one tree to another to move forward. Everytime I almost lost consciousness I took a short rest. I didn't know how much time passed as I desperately searched for help, so I didn't noticed that it got light outside and when I left the forest I caught my breath.

Even as a little child the outside world was more interesting for me than anything else so I devoured every book I got my hands unto – regardless of the topic. Thanks to this curiosity I now knew I could see a sky, houses and mountains. But no book nor picture could describe this feeling of endless freedom. Some sort of euphoria began to spread from deep within me. All my life I only have known those grey walls without windows and could only dream of this beautiful world from the books.

I staggered a few steps into the light but then my legs just gave up and before I could react everything went black.