Bang.
Dripping red gore decorates the once sterile room and I stifle a laugh I know is coming, what if someone’s trigger was splattered blood? That would be strangely fucked up. I grab Lab Coat’s ventilator and ID.
It takes a single swipe to get me out of the blood caked room and into an equally haunting white hallway. I was expecting hordes of people, rent-a-cops, legitimate security, random do-gooders, but no one is here. A plastic hallway that’s as desolate as East Cleveland, but without the radiation, it gives me shivers.
I would never let my guard down, especially with a bizarre twist like this, but I put my gun in my right jacket pocket, safety still off. It certainly makes things easier if no one wants to get in my way.
The layout of the hallway is the same as all the others, I’ve seen so many of these facilities that the layout is burned into my head. Once, when I was dropped into the New Orleans site I had to carry a hand-drawn map to navigate the uniform hallways; no doors had labels, no one would give you directions and opening the wrong door could mean your ass, but I know what door I’m looking for now.
Hand along the right wall, I use the oldest trick in the book for solving a maze. The third immaculate door I come to is the one holding what I’m after, a vault for treasures of a type unknown. I pass door one, its wide open.
Fuck, gun’s out. In the style of police long-gone I take cover at the edge of the door and peek with one eye to survey this new trick. I see an impossibility, a small white room with a faceless man seated in his own blood; the pool is so large it threatens to leak out into the hallway, so much more blood than should have been there. How am I back at the start?
Keep going, that’s all I can do now. So there was someone watching me after all, someone or someones and now I’m stuck, most likely walking in a trap until they are done toying with me. I wander. The white halls never change, constantly pristine and quiet. The fluorescents overhead hardly flicker and are absent of the normal buzz of their burning. Around each corner I find the same hall, and after that hall I find the same door.
They must have a Minotaur on me, which means I’ve either never left the room or I’m walking around the room in circles, regardless of what I’m seeing. Minotaurs are just one of the many weapons that these people are after and using them to trap me must seem absolutely hilarious. I have to go back to the Lab Coat.
He’s still there, faceless and gore-spattered. Taking my original seat, I let out a heavy sigh. What can I do, I’ve never encountered a Minotaur before, at least not like this. Close my eyes, try and find out where I am with my other senses; forget about what I see and focus on what I hear, what I feel and smell.
Blood. Irony and rich, potent enough to make me gag. Powdered plastic gloves, the kind the dentists used to use when probing around in my mouth, fishing for faults that were not there. Cologne, cheap and stale, like rotten strawberries and the bottom of a trash can sprayed with air freshener. A thin vibration rolls through my chest, a tiny rolling thunder like a soprano’s voice or a placing a motorized toothbrush against my skin. The blood flow to my wrists is getting light, the pin-pricks are hitting my fingers.
I am moving. I can feel the air push past my face and the pressure of inertia. I’ve been caught. Fuck.
What does it mean? What can I figure out? I’m secured or strapped at the wrists –tightly – and along with that I’m most likely on a cart or in a wheelchair being pushed along by someone who had the shitty experience of falling in Lab Coat’s blood. It was at least two people, one of them a man with a deep voice and the other was probably the Minotaur.
I need to break the Minotaur’s focus, I know he’s not responding to the deep-talker, because he’s almost in a Drop-Out, and he’s sharing it with me. Hell, he might be in a wheel chair right alongside me.
Movement, I need movement. The best way to get moving when I’m not in control is to break the stimulus or cause a muscle reflex. That’s it! Clear my mind, drop away from these senses even further.
Fall asleep.
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