“What are you talking about?”
“Look I don’t have much time. This – ” she said while motioning to our surroundings, “Is not what it seems to be. I don’t know if it’s a different world or a different reality but whatever it is… it's not the home you and I both know.”
I shook my head and turned away from her. “You're crazy.”
“Listen!” she quietly yelled as she stood and began to approach me. “I know you’ve noticed something off about this place. The wired electrical anomalies…people acting strange…the nightmares.”
“The dark sky,” I added.
She looked deep into my eyes and without breaking eye contact she moved over to the window and pulled the curtain aside. It was pitch black as though the sun didn’t even exist. “It’s 3:45 p.m,” she stated.
I shook my head vigorously as I tried to deny what she was saying.
“These ‘people’ aren’t what they seem,” she whispered. “They are monsters.”
“No…”
“They wear human skin as clothes and try to imitate us but no matter how hard they try they can’t figure out what makes a human, a human,” Melissa's eyes glossed over. “So, they keep taking people.”
“This is insane,” I rubbed my face. “What you are saying is insane.”
“Your name is Ava, right?”
I nodded.
“Everything you see here isn’t real. The only real humans are the eleven people they captured before you,” she swallowed and took my hand in hers. “And if you don’t get out of here before they destroy whatever way you came here, you will be stuck forever like the rest of us.”
“How I got here?” I questioned while scratching my eyebrows.
“For me, it was a bridge. I drove my car over a bridge, and it led me here. For the girl before me, it was an elevator. The person before her, it was an endless parking garage. The person before that, it was a bathroom stall,” she let out a sad laugh. “If it wasn’t such a shitty situation I would almost think it was kind of funny.”
“The tunnel.”
“What?”
“That’s how I got here.”
“Then that’s how you leave.”
“This doesn’t make any sense.”
“It doesn’t have to because right now you don’t have the time to try and make sense of it. You need to leave…now!” she pushed me off the bed. “Before he gets back.”
I just barely stopped myself from toppling onto the floor as I stood. “The injections,” I asked. “What do they do?”
“They wipe your memory and make you a walking drone so that the monsters can learn how humans behave in a normal environment. No one remembers anything after the injection.”
“But –”
“No, you have to go!” Melissa yelled, her eyes filled to the brim with tears that were threatening to spill at any minute. “It's too late for me. They destroyed the bridge…but you still have a chance.”
I rushed to put my clothes back on as Melissa peeked out the door to keep an eye out for the doctor. I grabbed my shoes and held them in my hands. “Okay,” I said, still unsure about this whole situation.
Melissa turned back to me. “Don’t look back, okay?” she said tears streaming down her face. “And tell my husband I love him.”
I nodded slowly and rested my hand on her shoulder as she opened the door. Immediately after leaving the room, I saw the doctor walking down the hall. His eyes met mine. Without hesitation, he booked it in our direction.
“Ava, run!” Melissa screamed while using her body as a barrier to shield me from the doctor.
Her voice seemed to echo as I dropped my shoes and ran down the hall in the opposite direction. A loud visceral scream filled the air. Every bone in my body told me not to look back but I couldn’t help it. I peered over my shoulder and saw the doctor sitting on top of Melissa while stabbing her in the neck with two syringes repeatedly. Blood was covering his face from the violent attack as he glanced up and smiled at me. It all seemed to happen in slow motion. I was still running but I didn’t feel like I was going fast enough. The doctor rose to his feet and started charging at me. His legs were faster and the distance between us was growing smaller. I dashed into a stairwell and ran down every single flight before bursting open the door to the lobby and running out the main exit. The doctor was right on my heels as he yelled aloud.
“Get her!”
More people began to follow, all of them desperate to stop me from escaping. I felt the blood drain from my face and my breathing quickened. My vision started to blur as I huffed with each step. The deafening sound of the footsteps behind me was all the motivation I needed to get moving. Melissa was definitely right about this not being our home but what I wouldn’t give to be there right now. I climbed into the back of a nearby ambulance and prayed the keys were in the ignition. Thankfully my prayers were answered when I sat in the driver's seat and saw the keys had been left on the dash. I turned the car on and accelerated down the road. The back doors of the ambulance swung open and flew haphazardly in the wind.
That’s when the sky shifted in color. The clouds turned black and began to expel ash. The wind picked up and conjured a spinning vortex of fallen leaves and debris. A loud roar of thunder sounded from behind me. Through the open door of the ambulance, I saw the doctor stop dead in his tracks. All of his skin melted right off his body. He turned into something I had never seen before. He had reptile-like skin and his eyes turned bright yellow. He hunched over revealing black scales along his spine and broken horns on top of his head. To top it all off, he was followed by several others who looked exactly the same after they too shed their false appearances and became something that no nightmare could ever have prepared me for. When he stood tall again, he was the size of a giant. He towered over the trees, crushing anything in the way with his large claws. I clamped my hand over my mouth and let out a sob. I didn’t want things to end this way but I couldn’t see a way out of this situation. Peeking over my shoulder through wind-blown hair, I noticed that the doctor was by far the biggest out of the crowd but regardless they were all much larger than your average human.
“There’s no way I can survive this,” I whispered.
But suddenly, in the distance, I could see it – The Quarry Station Underpass.
But if I could see it, that also meant he could see it too.
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