Vision

Chapter four

Chapter 4:

The Hospital

Jack wakes up at 12am. He feels like every bone in his entire body is broken. His head spins and he cannot think straight. He tries to focus, but every time he does so, he almost falls asleep. He looks to his left, turning his head slightly. He notices a few flowers that had been left there. They weren’t in their prime, but at least it was an effort.

 He stubbornly gets out of the bed, trying not to break his legs well doing so. He makes his way to a door and checks his surroundings. He is in a hospital. One of the doctors notices him and hurriedly walks over to him.

“Mr Walters!” he exclaims, “You shouldn’t be here…”

“Look, man. I don’t feel so bad,” he complains, “feeling a lot better, actually.”

The doctor looks at him for a moment with a nonbelieving expression on his face. “You have a really lousy poker face, you know that?”

The doctor takes him back to his bed and makes him sit down on it. “I need a small dosage of your blood.” Says the doctor. “I promise…this won’t hurt a bit.” The doctor injects a needle into his arm and it doesn’t hurt…for a few seconds, at least. Walters tries to scream, but no sound comes out of his mouth. He just blacks out.

A few hours later, he is revived by an old man with a pail of water. Walters shrieks and coughs until the water is completely out of his throat. He is sitting on an uncomfortable chair in a dark room. A luminous light is focused on him and he is tied up to the chair that he is sitting in. His knife is still in his pocket, though. That’sa relief.

“Thank you, Stanley.” A voice says from the darkness of the cold, terrifying room. “That should do for now.”

“Where am I?” Jack whispers wearily.

“It is alright, you are safe here…” answers the voice.

“The way I see this city, nowhere is safe.” Responds Jack. “Where the hell am I?”

The voice pauses shortly and then continues to say, “Very well, but you are not in the city…”

“The hell?” Jack responds. “Where am I then, you little piece of crap?!!”

“No need to moan and bitch, Jack.” Continues the voice.

“Wait…how do you know my name?” Jack asks in a quieter voice than before.

“We have…people,” explains the voice, “disciplined people.”

“What do you mean by ‘we’?” Jack questions?

The voice sighs, “You wouldn’t understand…we are a brotherhood.”

“Of what?”

“Would you like to know where you are or not?”

Jack listens impatiently.

“You are in the underworld.”

“You’re joking…right?”

“No, I’m not.” The voice says. A dark, bloody monstrosity steps out of the darkness and into the light. The creature looks like a gargoyle – grey, hard skin, crushed wings. Its snout has a ring in it and the hideous creature has scales all over its body. Its yellow eyes seem to bore deep into Jack’s soul. Jack notices that the monster has black claws that probably contain some kind of toxin. It leans in close to him and growls at him, revealing the rotting pieces of flesh between its teeth.

Ugh, that thing probably doesn’t brush its teeth twice a day, thinks Jack.

“Would you like to join our brotherhood?” asks the creature in a deep voice.

“Never,” spits Jack, appalled that the monster even asked. He stabs it in the neck with the weapon he had used to cut himself free, his trusty pocket-knife. The creature shrieks in pain and pools of dark blood oozes out of its stiff neck. It howls in pain and starts to lift itself away in flight. It crashes through the ceiling and lets out a wail which sounds like an emergency alarm.  Almost immediately, there are hundreds of creatures swarming over the roof of the small cabin.

As soon as Walters sees them, he crashes through a door and runs as fast as he can. When he has made his way through the worst of it, he notices that the demon didn’t lie to him. He is in hell. Fiery fumes detonate from the ground everywhere he looks and the entire place reeks of burning sulphur. As Jack gazes around, he sees the same portal that he found in the woods next to the main road. Jack hurries over to it.

 Before he can enter the strange porthole, one of the creatures lands in front of him and starts to close in on him. He takes out his knife and grips it tightly in his left hand. The creature swings its tail and knocks Jack’s knife out of his hand.

“Seriously?” he questions in an unsatisfied tone of voice.

“Seriously,” a big Negro with short hair answers as he stabs the creature in its back and cracks its spine. It groans in pain for a moment and suddenly falls silent. The man takes out a small knife and slits its throat.

“I’m pretty sure that it’s dead.” Jack says softly.

“With these guys you never know,” the man chuckles. “Name’s Dave. My friends call me Big Dave.”

“So what are these things?” Jack asks hastily. Dave doesn’t answer. He just cleans his weapons on his jeans. Dave looks at him for a moment and decides to reply. “That 'thing' is what makes people schizophrenic. That 'thing' is what makes people go mad. It kills people. It is pure evil.

“It doesn’t care for nobody. It kills everything it sees. Everything. It is destruction. It is chaos. It is hatred.”

“I’m dreaming this, aren’t I? This isn’t really happening. None of it.”

“Since when were dreams so real?”

“I kind of think you’d be surprised,” he explains.

Dave tucks his weapons in their straps. “We’d better get of here. Those scouts don’t mess around.”

Dave escorts him through the swirling vortex and it slowly closes up.

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