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Choice: Fourteen
You awaken in a small bed. “Hello?” you ask, feeling an uneasy breeze of déjà vu as you wonder how you’ve once again found yourself in an unknown bed. With the cold touch of sheets running all over your body, you realize you’re nude.
“Hello, there,” someone replies. Turning to your right, you see a young man sitting beside your bed. The young twenty-something wears a white lab coat with a pair of black short-shorts and nothing else. Seated on his little stool, his lab coat splays open and his hairless chest becomes plainly visible. You wonder if the man is a doctor, or just another oddly-dressed stranger. Whoever he is, he doesn’t seem bothered by your lack of acknowledgment; on the contrary, he seems rather chipper.
“Hi,” you sleepily respond.
“How do you feel?”
You sit up to answer to the stranger’s question. “I feel a bit tired.”
“That’s to be expected,” he replies.
This small room contains two doors: one on your left and another on your right, exactly behind the new stranger. In the center of the room rests the bed you currently occupy, and a set of fluorescent lights spans the ceiling above. Other than the lack of windows, the rooms seems rather ordinary, with its black wooden walls and untarnished features. All things considered, ordinary is a step in the right direction for you. A smile runs over your face after realizing this—until, that is, you feel the room shake.
“Did you feel that?”
“Yeah I did. It’s going to be a bit bumpy here, Icarus,” the man replies charismatically.
“How do you know my name?”
“It was written on both your shirt and jeans.”
“Did you take off my clothes? Why did you take off my clothes?”
“They were covered in blood.”
“Blood?”
The young man begins to say something, but stops himself before he does. He then stares up with a puzzled expression on his face. A few seconds of thought pass. The stranger gets up and exits through the door on the left, leaving you all alone in the empty room. You feel another tremor before the stranger returns with a clipboard.
“Your chart says whale blood.”
“’Whale blood’?”
“The blood of a whale, yes.” The information you have just been presented with has a transformative effect on your mind. First you try to ask the most obvious question: ‘Where did the blood come from?’ But due to the strangeness of the question, and the information related to it, your brain reconnects a constellation of mental dots that previously disconnected due to shock, pain, and probably a concussion. You remember the ground wet with blood, and a giant whale that soared through the sky. The creature was bizarre in both form and function. While looked like a whale, it was also obviously not. For a living creature, it was remarkably thin and shockingly wide. Its eyes were a glaring white, and its body was both red and black. The red was dried and wet blood, while its blubber consisted of the deepest black you have ever seen. It swam in the sky like an ordinary whale would swim in the ocean, except this one would appear and disappear in short, random intervals, and when the monster reappeared in the sky it would return with more blood on its body, along with a haunting roar. As you recall your encounter with the demonic creature, you remember something else too: a voice that feels both familiar and, at this point, familial. Where’s Fisher?
“Where is Fisher?” you ask. The question comes with stoic, cold desire. You give the young man an intensely serious stare: one showing that anything beyond an appropriate answer will result in violence. The rapid change in your demeanor leaves the young man taken aback. As he responds, all of the whimsy in his voice vanishes.
“I don’t know. But, I can go find him for you. Is there anything else you need?”
“My clothes,” you reply. The stranger fearfully smiles as he nods.
“Alright, no problem, not a problem at all. I will go do that right now.” The young man runs to the door on the right.
Now alone, you get out of your bed and walk to the wall on the opposite side of the room. Taking a skeptical guess, you test the wall. Using both your forehead and your left hand, you feel the wall. Tiny repetitive tremors run into your body through your head and hand. It’s clear what’s happening now: the room is moving.