MDB: Miasma Defense Bureau

The Revaluation / Examination

White light again. The stock fixture of my sanctuary, my new home, though for its homeliness it burns my retinas no less. I'm awake, but my head is foggy, and all my thoughts come to me partially formed. Why am I back here, feeling no better than when I started here, feeling even worse?

I sit up, a weightless sheet slips off me, and my gown wrinkles. Nobody's around. Only the pulse of an EKG reverberates in the empty hall beyond my see-through walls in a gap of white curtains, which otherwise surround me. I'm boxed in a prism of emptiness, magnifying the sterile ceiling lights and curtains into a monotonous glow that makes me want to go back to sleep forever. But I have to get up, and I have to leave this place.

I move my legs with effort, but first I must strip them from the bed. They stick from sweat that's drenched my entire underside and plastered me the way a slug adheres to a surface. I raise my back and my skin stays behind with the bottomsheet, peels with a long soggy sound and the air stings my exposed muscle--I reach to touch it, but I feel it's only my gown unsticking from my back. Under the gown, I notice a crust. It's a long oval scab, tough yet slippery like smoothed lizard scales.

I stand on the cold tile and a shiver jolts up to my knees, which immediately go weak. I catch the side rail to maintain balance. It too is cold. Everything is cold except my breathing, which is sultry, arid and almost nonexistent. I need water. But I can't stay here to look for it. I need to leave.

I throw a curtain aside and the light abates somewhat. I push on the translucent wall but it won't give. Where's the door? It's cold like death but my forehead is wet and boiling. How do I get out? I beat the glass with my fists. It dings with a dull thump and bends with a quick flicker of reflection, catching a brightness and the semblance of something like my face, warped and wild. It almost smiled at me.

"Hhhhh...?" I scream, but it comes out as a warm whistle. I wanted to say, help.

I slide to the floor and let my head incinerate like a furnace and pulsate with pain. I wheeze audibly, and I'm afraid I'll drink up all the air in this invisible prison. My breathing quiets as my ears swell with tinnitus. My vision is splitting in two, so I shut my eyes hard. Against the light I hide not in darkness, but a red shadow that suggests a memory before memories. The line where surely my lids join becomes a purple line, emanating from which grow the grooves between teeth. They smile, and without seeing I can sense the skinless face's hollow stare on top of me. Its two orbits leak rivers of wine. She's crying.

"Lloyd?"

Someone's standing in front of me. She looks concerned and tense. A nurse, standing opposite me. I'm curled up and holding my eyes just above the line of my knees. She's holding the glass door open and has entered my room with just one foot.

I jump up and rush her. "I have to leave. Fresh air," I tell her, but I don't think my rasping voice made sense to her. She grabs at my arm. I snag on her grip only for a second, then slip away. Her strength should be enough to have seized me, yet as I slipped away, I felt her slackened fingers glide on my hastening flesh like departing hope.

In the hallway, I run subconsciously like I know where I'm going. "Mr. Corbin, return to your room," reverberates through the walls. A PA system, but no speakers in sight. No cameras either. How can they even see me?

I suddenly recognize where I am and follow a path I've traversed many times before, down to the East wing. I run toward the destination without reason. I see the bodies laid up, all the same indefinite forms as before. But there's more of them. The bodies are nearly stacked on top of each other. And someone else: A man stands on the same side of the wall as me, standing like a mannequin, staring in at them. I step closer to the figure. It's a man with glasses. His face is pressed up so close to the wall that his nose is smooshed and his bent glasses look like they might crack. He wears the same gown as me, as them. And the same collar, but his blinks. His hand is clutching something. Shears.