One (13 page)

“
Christine!” I screamed.

My screams bounced off the walls. I returned to the bed. I fell to my knee checking beneath it. I stood up quickly and the room began to spin. I closed my eyes and tried to focus on this reality, to bring myself back.

“
Please God no! This isn't real! This isn't real!!!”

I opened my eyes, the room was darker, the ray of sunlight gone. I rushed to the door slamming my fist against it screaming out in anger and fear.

“
Help me!”

I ripped the door open and ran out into a long hallway. The defining echo of silence had returned. The hallway was only lit with emergency lighting. My eyes scanned the nurse’s station it was devoid of life. It was not clear if I had crossed over back into that other world or if I was still in reality, but my mind prevented my eyes from seeing.

“
Please, if someone is there help me! Don’t leave me here!”

The whirling sound of the computer fan coming from the nurse’s station told me they were on. My body began to grow weak. My life felt as if it was being drained from me. The grip, ever so slight as it had been on reality was slipping away.

They were still there. I believed it with my very being. A fire extinguisher sat on the wall adjacent to the nurse’s station. I took it off its hook and lifted it above my head. If I was disappearing then I had to get their attention and I was running out of time.

Using the last of my strength, I threw the fire extinguisher through the glass window surrounding the nurse’s station. Out of the energy even to stand I fell to my knees. The window shattered showering me with shards of glass.

Falling on my side I began to shake. Bleeding from multiple cuts, tears flowing from my eyes I prayed I would die. My breathing was rapid, but my heart beat was slowing. I rolled onto my back; I could not even focus on the ceiling above. Reality was spinning into darkness taking me with it.

“
Don't...don't send me back, please...just let me die.”

Fractured

Learning to exit my dreams did not bring an end to my nightmares. Even when the lights in my room would turn on and I could hear my sister talking to her friends on the phone, some mornings, I felt as if the nightmares followed me into the waking world. There was a stain left on my soul from the events in my dreams. At times I did not even remember what the dream was about, but what I did know and what I would feel throughout the day was that a piece of me was taken during the night and was never returned, that is a nightmare you can never awaken from.

I did not want to open my eyes. The cold floor, the chilling feeling surrounding my body and the aching pain coursing through me told me where I had returned to. How long I laid there I could not say. When I finally opened my eyes a light shining from the top of the stairs surprised me. It did not seem normal; it was calling me to it. That calling aside, I did not want to continue. Why should one keep going if heaven is the dream and hell is reality?

There was no figure standing over me, whatever I saw or did not see was gone. I pulled myself to my feet. I did not want to think about what I had just been through. All I wanted was to reach the top of the stairs and find the source of the light. Each step caused a radiating pain throughout my body. I would say that it was due to the fall, but I felt it was much more than that.

At the top of the stairs I could see the light was coming from the first classroom on the left. The hallway was dark. There were no other lights, not even the emergency ones I had seen in the basement before. I entered the classroom and found the source of the light. A street lamp outside in the distance, there was nothing calling me to it. Once again something inside me was playing games and I was tired of it.

It was not just anger, I wished that was all it was. Maybe then I could reason myself out of it, but it was a feeling I knew was coming, I just did not expect it to arrive so soon. Despair, outside the window the clear night sky brought me no comfort. Lights from the street lamps, homes and businesses shined as if they were occupied, but the silence was still there.

I looked out over the courtyard to the street; my mind had nothing of value to tell me. Exhausted in every sense of the word I slid down the wall and sat on the ground. My head resting against my knees I blamed the tears flowing from my eyes on fatigue. Lying to myself was the first sign that I was losing my mind.

I have always had the ability to think things through, to rationalize as a fall back to any issue or situation I encountered. My unchecked emotions were not allowed to blur the lines between what I knew was the truth and what I wanted the truth to be. To me, adaptation was about dealing with the situation even if you did not fully understand it, but with the notion that in time with concentrated thought all the answers would be revealed.

Sitting there in that empty classroom lifting my head from my knees I looked at the empty desks through eyes blurred by tears and a mind unsettled by the memories, dreams and hallucinations I had been a victim to. I was broken, it had not been twenty-four hours since this had begun and I was already defeated. Unfortunately, I did not know how to properly surrender.

It was several moments of true silence in my mind before thoughts began to come through again. A reboot, Christine called it. It was a technique her grandmother taught her. Christine had anxiety attacks when she was younger. Her grandmother believed that mental and physiological issues could be solved through meditation and thought control.

While I credited Christine’s grandmother for believing in thought control I tried my best to ignore her meditation advice. That was until Christine helped me clear my mind. Not long after Jonathan and I had our final argument I showed up at her door extremely upset. Later she told me she had never seen me like that before. I did not even realize how upset I was. My thoughts were clouded with conversations Jonathan and I have had and what exactly had gone wrong.

Reboot

Christine sat me on her bed and told me to close my eyes. She slid her hand underneath my shirt she pressed her thumb into the center of my back.

“
Concentrate on the pressure,” she said.

I did not feel like even trying, but she kept repeating that phrase over and over again. I focused on where her thumb was just to drown her out. I just wanted her to shut up. I had the darkness now all I needed was the silence. Then, in an instant, it was as if I had left the outside world and turned inward. It was brief, but for a few seconds there was nothing. The pressure was even gone, as was her voice, her very presence.

Then it all came rushing back as if floodgates to a damn had been forced open. I opened my eyes. I felt better. She smiled turning me toward her and kissing me.

“
What did you do?” I asked.

“
I rebooted you,” she answered.

Christine had helped me and I was grateful and yet at the same time disturbed of her ability to do that to me. For a moment, I felt ashamed for feeling that way and yet the truth was that my mind and control over it was very important to me. I was sure that I would need more “reboots” in the future, but I promised myself I would learn the technique to use on my own, a self-reboot as it were.

Broken

My self-reboot only caused me to dwell on what the doctor had said to me. I have heard of causes where a hallucination was so strong that a person can become trapped inside of it forever. What world made more sense to believe in, a world where everyone has disappeared seemingly in an instant or a world where I suffered a mental collapse, was committed and somehow became trapped again.

I did not want to sit there anymore feeling sorry for myself. I picked myself up from the floor and walked over to the teacher’s desk. There were several notebooks stacked neatly on top of one another. I picked one up and looked inside. It was a book report on The Stand by Steven King. I remembered that book. I wished there was an evil here I could fight against. I wished I had my own Abigail to lead me down the right path, but I had nothing, no one.

With nothing left for me at the school I climbed out the window and walked toward my motorcycle. The smell of Chicago burning was everywhere. My thought was that perhaps this void world engulfed in flames would eventually burn itself in to inexistence. Part of me wanted to continue my search not just to find out if there was a reason for all of this, but also about the letter Christine was writing to me.

Home was the best place to go. To continue roaming the streets at night after everything that had happened would be foolish. I revved the engine on my motorcycle before heading east on Armitage Avenue. Passing each car I still looked inside just in case. It was surprising how many apartment building and homes had their lights turned on. It almost made me want to search them, almost.

I had decided that for now in order to continue my search I would need to accept this world. This was not because I wanted to, but because to believe in what Doctor Leafs told me then I should do nothing because nothing I do would matter. If I were still in that hospital bed then the only way to free myself would be to find out why I am here and to do that I had to go on the only history I knew.

I reached Lincoln Avenue and could see a cloud of smoke and flames coming from Lincoln Park. I almost continued on. After witnessing the fire, burning on Wells Street seeing another one almost did not matter. I was becoming desensitized, but my curiosity remained intact. I road past Clark Street and realized the fire was coming from the zoo.

The fire was spread out across the main zoo entrance. There was debris everywhere, but I could not make out what had happened. I parked my bike on the street in front and carefully made my way to the entrance. It was hard to see, the smoke was dark, thick and gray. It was hard to breathe. I covered my face with my sleeve and pushed through the smoke into the zoo. To the right of the entrance, I found the cause of the fire. Standing before it I could not believe what I was seeing.

A commercial airliner had crashed leaving a trail of destruction from the southeast corner of the zoo leading to the polar bear tank. The plane had broken in half. The rear of it had crashed into one of the habitat buildings. The front half sat teetering on the edge of the polar bear tank. It made sense that if people vanished in an instant it would not be only cars that would continue to function until coming to a stop, but even so, to see a plane broken in half in flames was, frightening.

I walked closer to the guardrail before the tank and found a way to climb into the planes cabin. Fear was kept in check by curiosity. I slowly stepped over the railing; it was a small jump through the smoke and into the plane. As soon as I was inside I was ready to leave. The smoke was everywhere, choking me. I was not there looking for people, but confirming of what I already knew. The oxygen masks were deployed. This could have happened after the event when the plane started its decent.

Just like in the street and in Starbucks, items laid on the floor and seats of the plane. The luggage was still stored overhead or under the seats. At the cockpit door I was upset to find it was still locked and intact. While not a pilot I would have been able to read any gauges that may have still been active.

I was running out of air. With nothing else to see, I started walking toward the rear exit when the plane began to slide into the tank. I ran as fast as I could and blindly jumped from the opening at the rear of the plane. I hit the ground hard and rolled trying to soften the impact. The plane slipped into the tank and fell into the habitat setting below.

I just sat there for a moment watching the fires continue to burn wondering why I continued to fight so hard to survive. Yet again, another chance for me to free myself came and went. All I had done was to add more scrapes and bruises, and more pain. I pulled myself to my feet. I was going to head back to my motorcycle when something in the distance caught my eye.

The Helen Branch Primate House, it was the only building I could access that was not destroyed or blocked by fire. I found the entrance unlocked and walked inside to complete darkness. There was something bothering me from the beginning. When I looked into the park and up to the sky, there were no animals. Christine’s fish tank was empty as was the polar bear tank. I had to find out if it was only the people that were gone.

The smell of the primate house brought some hope, but the silence inside did not. With the door closing behind me the sound triggered something. It was a memory, but it was as if I could see this one like I was witnessing it from the outside. A ghost being shown events of its life. There were people inside now, but they were not clear. The faces were blurred the only ones I could make out were my mother’s and Ashley’s.