True Darkness

Return

The first thing Brent heard was the beeping.
It irritated him.
Assuming it was his alarm, he tried to get up. Pain.
He opened his eyes suddenly, and what he saw was not like his average Thursday. Gone were the red walls of his room and in their place were walls of a pale white. The bed he lay upon was not his own, too clinical and unforgiving. His desk was gone, replaced with a lone plastic chair.

He got up slowly and glanced around. His eyes came to rest upon the gleaming medical equipment that was the source of the incessant noise. Only then did Brent realise, with no knowledge of what had happened in the weeks before , that he was in a hospital.

On instinct, the first thing he did was to carefully detach all the various tubes from his arms before he moved any further from the bed. He then walked quietly to the cupboard on his right. While ensuring his footsteps were noiseless, he noticed a camera glinting off of the faint light given out but the heart monitor, which, to Brent's relief, was no longer beeping, and hoped to god that it didn't have some sort of night vision. Upon opening the cupboard he found some neatly folded clothes, not his own, nor in any brand he recognised, but anything was better then this hospital gown, he thought silently as he slid into his (most probably not) new clothes. The door to his right, to his surprise, was locked, so the only other option seemed to be the window. He silently paced to the window on his left and opened it.
"Dammit, it's too dark" the cursed aloud, and then froze as he heard footsteps from the direction of the door.
He listened cautiously as the footfall slowly faded down what he presumed was a corridor outside.

After minutes of struggling to open the window, it came to his attention that hospitals must have window-opening rules for depressed and suicidal people awaiting therapy. He then removed his shoe and dropped it through the small gap. Almost instantly it could be heard hitting the ground outside.
"Good news" Brent thought to himself
"I'm on the ground floor. Bad news is I have no way of getting out without making considerable noise and injuring myself"

He did another quick scan of the room, which had been lit up by car headlights momentarily, probably a late night visit. It was then that he saw that was he had earlier assumed to be a vase, was in fact not a case, but a metal jug with some vibrant plastic flowers arranged in it.

He brashly grabbed the jug and slammed it against the window.
It cracked.
"Dammit" he cursed again
"Plastic rip off"
He walked quietly over to the chair and sat down, desperately hoping that no one had heard the sound of the plastic jug splitting.

By sitting on the chair, he subconsciously remembered that there was a chair, and that came into his head while he was thinking about the quality control of metal-looking plastic jugs. Although the chair was plastic, and most probably of the same quality as the jug, considering the holes in it, it had a pretty hefty metal frame, which the non-opening window committee obviously hadn't considered while placing it in a room with a window in it, regardless of the small drop.

More carefully than he had picked up the jug, he lifted the chair. At this point it was a wonder no one had heard him, but this was probably because everyone on the so-named 'uneventful ground floor' were taking one of their frequent breaks to the pub down the road.