Beyond the Maze

Chapter 2: Consciousness

I felt very weird. I could really notice it and at the same time I couldn't. I was in a kind of trance. I had been given a shot of some kind of drug. Several minutes after the drug was in my bloodstream. Even though I was unconscious I could feel that fucking burning running through my veins, up and down and all over my body. It was horrible, like I was being put in a bonfire. Suddenly that ardor stopped, suddenly, as if the fuel that feeds a candle had run out. I opened my eyes and saw only a white world. No horizon, no sun, no sky, no earth. A totally white world, like a torture room. I couldn't tell if I was awake or not, if I was in some kind of dream or in the real world.

A very loud noise resounded throughout that kind of room. I covered my ears as hard as I could, trying to prevent that shrill sound from penetrating my eardrums. It was in vain. I fell to my knees on the ground, with my hands in my ears and with a major headache. It was worse than Umbrella's training tests. I almost preferred to flog myself to continue suffering the pain caused by that damned sound. Suddenly, the sound disappeared. Just as it began, it went. I got up, little by little, because my knees trembled a lot and I was panting, from fatigue and tiredness. It was as if all my life energy had been consumed. I couldn't fully compose myself and stood on all fours on the ground, panting and sweating like a chicken. About two or three minutes passed, perhaps some more because measuring the notion of time in that white environment, without references, was impossible. I was able to fully compose myself. An explosion of images came to me, suddenly, as if they were flashbacks to my past. I walked among that string of memories and images until I stopped at a specific one that had managed to capture my attention.

I was face to face with that image, floating. There were no cables or connections of a screen or anything similar. It was very strange. I took a couple of small steps forward, to get a little closer. I was a bundle of nerves, trembling like a flan or a jelly on a plate. A sense of sadness, agony, mixed with indifference and distance enveloped me and stirred my insides. The memory was reproduced. It was on a mission, unspecified, as if it were some kind of fictional construction to terrorize me. <<This can't be real>> I kept repeating myself over and over in my mind. A deep echo invaded that room and those words that I pronounced, in my sepulchral silence, resounded throughout the room, as if I heard them through a loudspeaker. I stared at the scene. I saw myself, as if I was facing a trial and a recording of guilt was being exposed.

It was one of many missions carried out. It didn't have much in particular, it didn't even seem to differ from some scenes I'd already seen. But no, something caught my attention. I saw myself, in cold blood, putting a lot of innocent people to the knife. He seemed to enjoy it, a smile escaped the protagonist of those actions in those images. It was as if he gloated in the morbidity of seeing so much blood, he seemed to enjoy it. I just felt indifference. Suddenly the scene stopped as the boy in the picture looked straight into my eyes. It was as if we were face to face.

I could glimpse everything of him, because he was a tall boy, he probably measured one meter and seventy-six centimeters and had a fairly young appearance, I think he could be sixteen years old, with silky blond hair, short and with entrances in the right area, he was also well combed to the left, he had like black highlights in that area of the right. The hair revealed the features of his face, a medium nose, ears thrown back a little and fleshy and well-defined lips. That arrangement of that boy's hair revealed several scars on his face, on the right hemisphere of his head. It was a large scar that came out of the hair area to the eyebrow, vertically. It merged in the eye area with a spot of the same color that surrounded all the corners, the eyelid and under the eyebrow. The scar extended downwards, towards the neck area, and there disappeared like the Sun on the horizon. The rest of his face had many scratch marks and small scars, as if it were an eternal sign of all the missions and extreme situations lived, as if it were a condemnation to remember all that past so that it would never fall into oblivion. He also appreciated a metallic tone in his right ear, in the lobe area and part of the outer area. The rest of the features were well defined, as was the chin. He was usually a rather handsome boy, but he radiated a very gloomy feeling, as if he had a significant lack of emotions and feelings.