Broken People

Chapter 1

I try to stumble to my feet but make it only to my knees. The crimson sheath covering the entirety of my field of vision leaves me vulnerable to my surroundings. My trembling fingers gently find their way to a small puncture towards the top of my head where the bullet had made contact.

I spit the blood from my lips and wipe my eyes and try to focus my vision. The dark apparatus is shaking and I don't know if it is he or my eyes that can't stop the subtle but noticeable movements. He clutches a bat in the opposite hand that the smoking gun sits, as he approaches me softly. His face shows sorrow and sympathy as he kneels beside me. I struggle to stay knelt, trying not to topple over. He whispers something but I am in no position to comprehend anything. He stands and turns away from me. It sounds as if he is quietly weeping.

I spit more blood and wipe my vision clear once more only to notice his grip on the bat tighten. He whips around and strikes the side of my head opposite to the gunshot wound. Everything goes black.

As I fade away into an abyss of deafening silence, it's as if I can feel each of my senses disappearing from my realm of perception. I hold on for as long as I can but my weak grip on reality is broken and I fall deep into nothingness.

I wake up, or at least I think I do, in a pitch-black room. I can't tell if my eyes are still closed or if they are open and the room is just that dark. I feel around to discover I'm in a bed. The covers feel of silk and the pillow of feathers. I outstretch my arms to find the bed is quite perfectly contoured to my body. I reach further until my fingertips graze a cold, bricked wall. I follow the lines between the near bricks until my mind is numbed from the sensation. The room smelled of musk and sweat. I feel around my body to realize I am moist from a cold sweat that has overtaken it.

Where the hell am I? I think to myself. I think about getting up but I forget how to move my legs. I sit and think about the act of standing but to my body the notion seems foreign. Before I can force myself to get up from what seems like the edge of death, the lamp that I now know sits on a desk next to by bed explodes on, filling the room with fluorescent light. The windowless cell is something out of a movie. I lift and crane my head to get a better feel of my surroundings. I follow the light to each of the four corners in my chamber and assess the situation. The bricks are neatly kissed with a layer of dust that makes the room feel like that of a basement in an abandoned house.

I follow the bricks to a smoother area in the wall that appears to be a door. I think about getting up again but my body screams at me again, letting me know it isn't happening.

Before I can further my investigation as to where the hell I am another thought occurs to me:

Who the hell am I? I don't remember a thing. The last thing I remember is going unconscious and sleeping. I don't remember dreaming but I know I wasn't conscious. And I know I haven't been conscious in quite a while; or at least it feels like it. My muscles ache and my head aches even more. I go to touch my head and realize there are bandages wrapped around my skull. The area is still tender to the touch and I wonder to myself what the hell I did.

Hell, Hell, Hell, the concept is everywhere and I wonder if this is what it is like: quiet and mysterious, isolated and lonely. Maybe I'm dead and this is my eternity room. Apparently whoever I was wasn't too great of a person if these are the digs I get in the afterlife.

The lamp spends the next forever flickering on and off. My pounding headache only worsens as I struggle to put together some sort of bridge between now and, well, not now. The only thing I know is that I'm a man and that's only because that's a pretty easy thing to discover.

My mind races to different avenues of thought but none of which come to a conclusion. I am unaware of who I am or where I am. I settle on thinking about other things before returning to such abstract concepts.

Before I can finish counting the individual bricks in my holding cell to keep my mind from collapsing in on itself even more, the lamp decides it has quit its job and turns off. I am back to a swallowing darkness. I can now feel my blink and pay attention to when my eyes are open and when they are closed which, hey, is an improvement in my book.

The dark is even more unforgiving than I remember. I know my immediate surroundings but the absolute pitch of the darkness is still making me uneasy. I close my eyes and start to breathe slowly. In and out, in and out, until my heart finds a uniform beat that seems to match the throbbing in my head.

I am on the verge of falling asleep when the light flickers back on. There's movement from behind the door to my room before it slowly creeks open. I didn't expect what I saw: a masked figure, and a pretty terrifying one at that.

The light behind the door is bright and it is intense, but it is definitely refreshing. At this point I'm not exactly sure whether to be terrified or excited or grateful or any combination of the three. The man speaks for the first time.

"My son, you have awoken," he says in a thunderous voice that echoed across the walls, disrupting the gentle layer of dust that had accumulated across their surface.

"Do you remember anything at all?"

I open my mouth to speak and realize it's the first time I've tried to say anything since I woke up. I actually don't have any recollection of what my voice sounds like. I struggle through cracked and broken syllables but manage a simple, but truthful, "no."

"I see," he continues. "I found you almost dead on the pavement. The gunshot wound to your skull was a nasty one. It took a while to stanch the bleeding, but once you were in stable condition we moved you to this room and waited for you to come back to us."

It's a lot to process. I'm told I was shot and I'm told I almost died. It explains the bandages but where is this place? What is this place? I have so many questions for this man I don't know where to begin. Who is this guy? Who the hell am I? And why was I shot? None of it made any sense. The panic began to set in and adrenaline became a catalyst to my body and I somehow force my legs down from the bed and sit myself on its edge. I do a mental count to 3 and push my arms away from the bed and attempt to balance on my feet. I crash hard to the floor and bang my head, which sends excruciating shockwaves of pain down the entirety of my spine and down to each and every bone.

I find myself fading in and out of consciousness while I try to focus and then refocus my vision on the mysterious figure that is now hovering above me. The swirling of my thoughts finally gets the better of my body and I vomit everywhere. Well, I dry heave. Nothing is in my stomach because I'm guessing it's been a while since I've been presented with food.

"Do not push yourself," he says as he kneels next to me helping me up. "You don't need to worry yet. You could be a friend not a foe. It all depends on how you spend your time here."

"Where is here?" I ask as the curiosity takes over. "And who are you? Who am I? What is this place?"

He picks me up and puts me back into the bed. After he orders a man outside the room to bring water and snacks, he speaks to me.

"My name is Oman. And this place is Heaven's Passage."