June 5th, 1998
The lights are bright and blinding. His head is throbbing and for all intents and purposes he is unresponsive. The doctors are poking and prodding him, begging him to say something. He will not. He tries. He opens his mouth and feels pain shoot through him like white hot needles. For once, the voices are silent. He revels in that fact.
The day slows down. The doctors realize that Thomas will not respond to any external stimuli yet so they continue to study him at a distance. No one aside from white jackets come to visit him.
Finally the man begins to move. It is just a twitch, but it is movement. The doctors send in a rookie male nurse to check on the spike in vitals. He is anxious, a coiling snake is sitting in the pit of his stomach.
Thomas smiles internally. He senses the man's fear and something inside of him, something that feels completely like him, urges him to take advantage of it. It isn't the voices this time, simply Thomas wishing to manipulate this poor lad. He knows not why, but a plan is already forming itself in his mind and he refuses to ignore it.
The nurse approaches cautiously, as if Thomas is a time bomb. He glances at the machines, unsure of how to proceed. Thomas is laughing internally now. The laugh is maniacal but still bares no resemblance to the voices. His insanity is his own now, and what he does next he cannot blame on anyone but himself.
The moment the nurse removes the needle transferring liquids into Thomas's arm, time slows to a crawl. Thomas is now acutely aware of everything around him. The smell of hand sanitizer and hospital cleanliness. The beeping of the monitors and whirring of computers. The startled gasp his nurse makes as Thomas snatches the needle from his hand.
The red of the blood when it plunges into the poor man's neck.
Thomas stabs him a few more times to be sure, and time speeds up again. The nurse stumbles back into the empty chair behind him and crumples onto it in a heap.
Thomas feels no remorse. He laughs openly now, a bitter yet amused sound akin to gravel on a washboard. His hands are dripping with blood, and he revels in the slick red substance.
A coffee cup crashes to the ground, and time slows again. The officer sent to question him is pointing a gun at his hand, but Thomas catches his arm and twists it in an unnatural angle. The gun falls into Thomas's left hand, and several bullets fly into the officer's chest.
Down the hall, now hiding around a corner, is Delilah. Her pupils are dilated and her breathing comes in harsh gasps. She is terribly afraid. She thought that maybe, just maybe, Thomas really was just disturbed. Maybe the man wasn't a monster. She really believed it.
But know she knew. There is nothing to believe in.
YOU ARE READING
State Of Mind
Mystery / Thriller"He stands in the rain, bloody and bruised, watching as the crimson liquid intermingles with the precipitation and flows down the storm drain. The voices have finally calmed down, and his mind is clear..."
