Blackout

Blackout Condensed Version

I woke up in darkness. The air was thin and suffocating. The cold metal walls felt cool under my touch. A musty smell filled my nostrils, like salt water and dirty socks. And then there was light. It shone from the outside of my box, shattering into beams of light through the cracks of a door I did not see before. The illuminated walls burnt my eyes, making me coil into a tiny ball, hiding my face. The door opened. When I looked up, the silhouette of a broad, muscular man looked down at me. His voice boomed into the room, bouncing off the shiny walls, making me flinch. My ears buzzed, trying to adjust to all the noises echoing down the hallway just behind the man. It was an alarm. It rang in the distance, accompanied by a flashing red light. The man's husky fingers wrapped around my arm, tugging me upward and out the door. Water gushed into the hallway, soaking the bottom of my pants. Swirls of red curved and glistened in the colourless water. And then I saw it. Rounding the corner at the far end of the narrow hallway, was a body being carried on the freezing water towards me. I just stood there for a second and watched it. As it passed me, all I could see was a mangle of limbs and blood. The body - which was slaughtered to a degree in which identification seemed impossible - looked as though it was mauled by some horrendous animal. But we were on a submarine at the bottom of the deadliest part of the Pacific, so how could that be? The worst part of all was this body did not look as bad as the first two. A knot formed in my throat.

I ran to the end of the hallway and into the communication bay, leaving the strange man behind me with his thoughts and the body floating atop the now crimson water. The water was rising now, sloshing around my knees. People were screaming and running around me, because they knew even if we stopped the water, we were all still going to die. The propellers stopped working and we were running out of oxygen, so if that did not kill us - he would.

Chaos. Around every corner, in every room, down every hallway. The stench of death was finally settling in. To die in the confines of these metal walls - never to see trees or sky. To never feel a warm summer breeze or watch the snow fall on a cold winter night. The world would never know what happened to us. We would just be another mystery in a file, left in a dusty old basement to never be thought of again. These thoughts spilled into my mind, like a disease. Corrupting my every hope and dream with one sentence.

"We were all going to die."

I woke up in the tiny room again, but this time there was blood splattered on my clothes and smeared on my arms. This happened often. I had these strange blackouts and I was not sure why. I ran across the room, sliding my hands against the wall to guide myself in the darkness, and opened the door. The alarm had stopped ringing and the lights were back to normal too. The water was all gone, but the floor and walls still had splotches of water tattered across their surfaces. I ran across the empty hallway, my footsteps reverberating across the sleek metal walls. Turning a corner, I found myself in the infirmary. The entire room was filled with people, either dead or barely breathing. The familiar smell of bitter metal washed over me. As I scanned the room, I finally found who I was looking for. In the corner of the room lay my sister. She had been in a coma ever since he tried to kill her. The left side of her torso had been ripped open with a pocketknife and her skull had been bashed inward. It was a miracle she survived. Contrary to her wounds, she looked calm as she slept, almost like she was already dead.

There seemed to be a perpetual silence as I walked the corridors of the underwater vessel. I could not help but notice all the uncleaned blood streaks staining the grey walls. There had been more death in this ship in the past eight days then one would expect, considering this was an exploratory vessel. The branded smell for this sub seemed to be blood. It wafted through the air, reminding everyone the horrors they had faced. We had all been close to death one too many times, some more than others.

I happened to come across a little door at the far end of the submarine. This particular door was not on the manifest, which I had memorized before I took up residence in this ship which would now, under less happier circumstances - be my grave. To my surprise, it was unlocked. Everything inside was covered with a jacket of dust. When I got closer, I realized what was filling the contents of the room. It hit me, like a blow to the stomach, knocking the air out and leaving me gasping. Weapons - piled in every corner and on every shelf. Guns, pressure mines, grenades. Bombs of all kinds lined one wall and firearms lined the other. In the center of the room were massive cylindrical devices I could never possibly put names to. What bugged me the most about this new discovery was not the weapons, but the fact that the door was open when I found it.

I could not trust anyone with this information, not when there was a murderer walking these very halls. So I closed the door, and walked away. I suspected that if this room was a secret, only the selected few would have a key. Before I could do anything else, I was in the infirmary. I blacked out. When I turned my head, I saw my sister - awake. She was screaming something and pointing at me. I blinked a couple times to try to remove the layer of fog from my eyes. Everything was blurry, and my head was bleeding. She kept screaming

"It was you, it was you!" but I did not understand. What did I do? The captain of the ship stood by her bed, mumbling words I could not make out from here. He whispered something to the guard, and then everyone was looking at me. Disgust and hatred and fear flashing across their faces. Their outbursts caused a frenzy with the other patients, until everyone was chanting two words - kill her.

Things were finally starting to add up. I had been having blackouts. I never understood what I did in those missing chunks of time, but maybe I was him. But I could never kill anyone, could I? Would I? Why would I try to kill my own sister? How would I even open the door to the armory? What could I have possibly taken? I had so many questions, but the only one who could answer them was me.

I did the only thing one could do in this situation, I ran. The captain and the armed guards chased after me, not daring to shoot a bullet in a submarine at the deepest levels of the ocean. I ran down the narrow corridors, taking turn after turn, until I was back in the armory. An enraged feeling overwhelmed me, and what I did next was beyond human comprehension. If I was going to die, so was everyone else. I grabbed a grenade in both hands just as the guards entered the room. They stopped dead in their tracks, not daring to move a muscle. And then I pulled the rings out.

The explosion tore the vessel in half. Screams were the last thing I heard before the water engulfed me. We were so far underwater that all you could see was an endless inky darkness. The cold ocean numbed my charred skin, as my eyes strained to see the hundreds of people being sucked into the water. As I floated into the abyss, I smiled. Even in the water, I could still smell the faint odour of bitter metal.