Thunder and Storm

The Underground

SALLY



The steady beeping of a heart monitor was the first thing I heard before I opened my eyes. I looked around the room trying to take in everything at once. All my senses were at high alert. I was lying in a hospital bed with wires attached to my body, a white covering hid half of my body from view.

How did I get here?

I sat up and placed my bare feet on the cold tiled floor. The covering slipped from my body and I looked down at myself. I wasn't wearing a hospital gown. Instead, I was dressed in a grey singlet and grey shorts, my hair was braided and hanging limply behind me. I took off the wires and stood up, looking around the room. The room was small, unlike all the other hospital rooms I've seen. It had a heart monitor, the bed I just got up from, and nothing else. There was no window but there was an air conditioning system on the wall. Everything in the room was white even the door and the walls.

There was a huge glass screen in front of me but it was a two-way glass. I've seen enough movies to know I was being watched from the other side. I stared intently at the screen trying to see if I could see who was on the other side. I couldn't.

A buzzing sound came from the door and I moved away from the screen. I looked down at the handle and grabbed it. A jolt of electricity went through me as my skin made contact with the handle. The current sent me flying across the room, hitting my head on the wall. Everything went blank as I fell to the floor.

******

The sun was warm on my face, I heard the sound of birds chirping. I opened my eyes and sat up on the bed. I could smell the banana pancakes my mom was making downstairs. I frowned. Something wasn't right.

I looked around the room, there was nothing different about it. The walls were dark blue, a One Direction poster was plastered on the wall above my reading table. Othello was open on my table with the bookmark in to mark the page I was reading last night. My towel was lying on the floor in front of my closet. Mom wouldn't like it if she came into my room. She hated seeing things on the floor.

I got out of bed to pick it up, that was when I realized what was wrong. My mom never made banana pancakes, my dad was allergic to bananas. I paused and looked around the room once more. My backpack was not hanging behind my chair like it was supposed to be. I always placed it there every time I came back from school. Something wasn't right here.

A stinging pain shot up my arm and I winced. I looked down at my right palm, there was a bandage around it. I folded my hand and moaned from the pain the action elicited. I tried to remember what happened to it and a memory flashed in my head.

A tornado. Lightning hitting our car. My mom screaming as the car was lifted in the air. My parents. If I was back in my room, did that mean we survived the accident and we were back home?

I turned sharply, heading for the door but another memory made me stop in my tracks. An electrical current flinging me across a hospital room. Hospital doors were not supposed to be charged with electricity. I looked down at myself and noticed for the first time that I wasn't wearing the clothes I'd been wearing earlier, instead, I was dressed in a white jumpsuit with an emblem on the chest. A X mark in a circle with the sides painted blue. I had seen the symbol somewhere before. Medex hospital.

My heart palpitated, my breathing quickening as the realisation dawned on me. I wasn't back home, I was taken.

"Nice to see that you're finally awake, Sally," a voice said and I looked around the room wildly.

"Who are you? Where are you?" There was no one but me in the room.

The voice chuckled. "You'll find out in a moment."

I looked up and there was a speaker on the wall by the ceiling. That was where the voice was coming from. Suddenly the room began to change, the walls peeled away to reveal a white room, the windows disappeared along with the closet, the table, everything. My room was gone leaving just a white bed in a white room. It had all been a simulation.

The doors slid open and I moved back. A man with salt and pepper hair wearing a doctor's jacket came into the room flanked by two men in military gear carrying guns. The guns they held struck fear into my heart and I stepped back, moving closer to the bed for protection.

"Sorry about that, the simulation was so you wouldn’t panic again upon waking up. Hello, Sally. I'm Dr Reynolds.” The man smiled. "Welcome to The Underground."

So I was thinking of the rate in which I update this book and decided to try something different. I'll be dropping a sneak peek into the next chapter every Wednesday on my Instagram account.

You can comment and tell me what you think about it. If you want it, I'll drop my username in my next post.