Destiny's Betrayal

The Escape

Years later I would still never be sure where the unexpected inspiration to get myself out would have come from. Sometimes I wasn't even sure it had come from me at all, but rather felt like I'd been pulled along by an invisible string. Maybe someone or something else was controlling my destiny after all.

Like most days however over the last few years that last one had been a bit of a blur, but that was to be expected from a life that had been quickly fading. Maybe the day of the escape had been the very last of me left, any longer and I'd have faded out completely, and so on that last day some unknown hidden little bit of human instinct to survive shone through, right in time. Surprising, considering it wasn't like there was much human in me left.

All I knew was that something possessed me that day to get out and blindly, I followed it.

It wasn't like I knew the plan, plans had become a thing of the past when I'd realised they never work, all I was doing was following that strange instinct. It wasn't like any instinct I'd experienced before, almost entirely unlike a call to survival at all... I didn't know what was going on but it seemed to be leading me out, so I paid attention.

Phil was asleep despite it being the middle of the afternoon, but all the better for an escape I figured, if the devil didn't catch you sneaking out of hell. Quietly I unlocked the door. Quietly I crept out. And quietly I shut the door again. Now I was outside in the hallway. Running down the stairs to make a quick bid for freedom happened less quietly.

I never stopped running once I made it to the streets. I'd keep running till the end of my life. Running to the end of my life.

The bus, like everything in that life I was running from, was something I had not seen coming and like everything else, it seemed, that had ever happened to me, it hit me, and it hit me hard. Not for the first time I was thrown wildly off course to be left struggling to move out of the way because of the agony of the ache that followed.

I'd been in hell for quite a while now but nothing had burned quite like this before. Every single inch of my body was alight and I was sure it would only take a few moments to burn me up completely, but I had to reassess when after those few moments the hell raged on.

The air was thick; it wouldn't enter my lungs properly. That was probably because someone had stabbed a jagged white rod through my side. There was red, lots of it, coating that stake through my side, painting the road, too much of it, but I smiled at the colour. It was the only colour that had painted my life in a long while. People crowded around, I could tell that much, but not much else. For a moment a loud noise almost startled me, my heart pumped faster, more red, but the sirens began to fade, fade into the background rather than come closer.

Thankfully my life didn't flash before my eyes. I didn't need to see all that again. Instead the fading intensified, the last few minutes acting as a deranged metaphor for my entire existence.

Over those next few minutes I continued to fade, I was a lost cause. The pavement was bright red and the burning had stopped. Then, so did my breaths. Quickly followed my heart, as if it hadn't shut down a long time ago.

In the last second, last chance I had, I smiled.

That last bit of life in me did fade out then and everything went black, like the whole Universe had gone out. Time stopped but I'd been granted my only wish:

I had escaped.