Part 1: A Birth, The Death, and Questions

Chapter 1

The Fallen Hospital

Consciousness came upon me slowly, like strengthening echoes in an immense deserted valley, until something within coalesced anew and my eyes opened. I could see vaporous faces dissipating around me in the first seconds of that day. They whispered as they fled to the dark corners of my mind, as if they were a child’s bedroom bogymen undone by a light switch.

Before I could pull a face from the messy impressionistic painting of my waking vision, or even discern a clear voice from the vanishing sleeping microcosm that my senses were being pulled from, reality asserted itself.

Without a coherent sense of self, I merely had my surroundings and the senses which process them to work from, like an animal without the benefit of an enlarged forebrain.

There was water flowing all around me, a misty spray danced through the air, and the thunder of a nearby waterfall upstream shut out any other sound. I was lying prone on a lichen and moss covered boulder, my raised head revealing a deep, smothering, impression in the growth, my back to a sun that screamed its heat upon my flesh.

Positioned roughly in the center of a wide and rapid river, I was naked and alone. Gigantic trees and vegetation, in strange complex configurations to my blurry eyes, lined either side of the bank and downstream there appeared to be a concrete wall, with cracks and perfectly cut square and rectangular holes, into which the water flowed.

My body was in pain, but it seemed merely a familiar fact at the time, as if the condition was the norm and not a cause for immediate alarm. The back half of me burned as if something was adhered to it and still aflame. Reaching behind to instinctively examine the area, I let out an inaudible cry as the added sensation sent a thrust of agony, like electricity released from a mad scientist's experiment, which surely went directly to a nexus within my forebrain. Nearly loosing my hold on the rock as I convulsed, I steadied myself and attempted to stand.

Without warning, another attack on my senses was unleashed, as I tried to stand with what would later reveal itself to be a broken ankle. Barely awake for a few moments, I was knocked off my little island to tumble into the vicious flow of the river. Before I could orient myself underwater, my body was sucked through one of the fissures in the wall downstream and slammed into one obstruction after another.

Inside the wall was a maze of chambers and organic debris filtered from the river. The flow would have me linger in the swirl of one algae slick compartment for a few seconds, as if it was an amused predator and I its prey, before violently expelling me into the next. I grabbed at anything within reach. There was a metal bar on a fixture anchored to the ceiling of the next chamber and I willingly let my body be thrust toward it.

After a frantic water ballet, once attached I looked about me for some method of escape. Sudden nausea brought about by pain washed over me and I vomited into the water. The green fluid expelled diffused into the circling flow, reminding me of something I could not quite grasp, as it seemed far away in the foggy recesses of a forgotten dream. Regaining my purpose, I scanned the walls and ceiling.

There were squared porcelain urinals and toilets on the ceiling on the far side of the room and an obvious doorway in the corner beyond them. Tilting my head, I was able to read the 'Exit' sign to the right of this rectangular break in the ceiling. Swimming as best I could, with my body slow to respond, I reached the other side of the chamber. Standing slightly with one leg on an out-cropped sink, I pulled myself up into the room above.

As if gravity had changed its direction out of spite, I collapsed into a pile of garbage seemingly magnetized to a hallway wall that stretched away on either side. Panting in wonder at the broken fixtures and rusted equipment, a sensation of safety and familiarity washed over me. The burning sensation on my back had subsided completely. I struggled to sit up and examine my leg in the dim refracted light of the corridor. Strangely, my sight was blurry, but it seemed only when I looked at myself. In dull colors I could see, just above the ankle, a black bruise rimmed in crimson, standing out in clear contrast to pale, nearly chalk white, skin.

The backs of my hands and legs, and I assumed the whole dorsal side of my body, was stained shades of dark green, like a quilt made of seaweed. As I stared it seemed to fade like a mirage, a shifting impressionistic watercolor. My skin seemed darker then a second ago and I tried to blink it away. As the tan remained, I ignored this apparent illusion as so much did not make sense. From sensation I knew I was nude, but was somehow blind to myself.

I rummaged through the debris on my hands and knees for an object to help support my weight. Despite nearly drowning and the throbbing in my leg, I felt a surge of energy leading me on to explore and escape this strange structure.

Pulling a rusted metal rod from a tangle of forgotten equipment, I hoisted myself up on my uninjured leg. The overturned corridor was wide enough for me to stand straight up with a meter at least to spare. Looking for the source of light, I hobbled along through the piled detritus, which I can now see included bloated corpses and skeletal remains among the moldy heaps. A brief knot of tension formed in my abdomen, but I was not startled in any way. Dismissing the dead, my attention was drawn to a strong shaft of light down the corridor. Surprised at my animalistic instinct to be above, I removed whatever debris or remains from my path without thought or feeling.

Reaching the source of light after some effort, I looked up at a wide break in the ceiling, formerly a main entrance. Two fragments of what were once huge wooden doors hung down few inches on either side, their pieces lying around my feet. Hospital stretchers were piled on each other in a tangle with bones and blue colored cloth, filling the space. A single intense shaft of light came through an opening in the center, the birth canal from this ruined womb.

Standing on a mound of paper, that must have turned to slop then dried, I fingered a fractured and discolored plastic sign above me. I read the words "Intensive Care Unit 4".

There was no way for me to pass through this horrific aperture, however standing and bathing in the light gave me added strength. Like an infusion of stimulants, the rays seemed to have a profound effect on me, though not all of the effects were positive. As I gave my back to the sunshower, a throbbing pain rose, like a heartbeat with a progressively increasing volume.

Limping down the hallway through the debris, I searched for another way out. At the far end of the corridor, past the many rooms either clogged with weighty equipment and dislodged apparatus above, or below churning with flowing water, there stood a sealed metal door with the sign ‘EXIT’ beside it. More than half the door was dripping with condensation and creatively decorated in rust and algae. Without thought, I grabbed the deformed handle and turned the knob.

A wall of water hit me as the door thrust me down with explosive force. Knocked off my feet, I was sent tumbling into the hospital machinery forgotten in the overturned hallway. However, the sheer weight of these devices prevented my limp body from being flushed once again into the swirling rooms below. The strength of the unleashed water gradually subsided until all the trapped water was emptied. Fish imprisoned in the stairwell by the water flows brought the dead corridor to vibrant life. Their dense numbers gradually dispersing throughout the corridor and beyond. With much effort, I then released myself from the crevice made by the pile of EKG machines, defibrillators, and various organ support machinery.

On one leg, I held onto the ceiling’s old light fixtures, now a railing, as I made my way again to the sideways stairwell. My rusted staff lost to the still knee-high water, I leaned on the light fixtures, the familiarity of their form unsettling, and climbed on the stairway railing to move ‘over’ to the next floor. The stairway windows and doors were composed of a heavy metal and were sealed, perhaps by some automatic mechanism, which allowed water to collect over time. Crawling on the railing in the dark, I made my way to the next floor over and forced the algae-slick door open.

There was a similar hallway, with the exception that the wall on the far end had crumbled away and green foliage beyond was plainly visible. The sound of rushing water filled my ears again as I limped or hopped my way closer, stepping over piles of bones, clothes and hospital equipment, all the while careful of the water-filled rooms below.

Through the crevasse, I could see the dense trees on either side of the river. Looking down, the water rushed through the open windows below like a defective dam. Leaning through the hole, I was able to see that there was a metal structure of some kind attached to the outside of the building. It was an intricate rusted scaffolding, bolted to the side, its direction and purpose a total mystery. I reached out through and grabbed on to it immediately, as if I was coming up for air, and clumsily knocked a rusted cabinet into the rapids below. Dangling for a moment, I looked down and saw the cabinet crash into the rocks, releasing a cache of first aid supplies and realizing, if only for a moment, that I should have tended to my wounds before I exited the hospital.

Dismissing the thought, my strong arms responded surprisingly without effort as I climbed up along the rails. The sun and adrenaline fueling my assent like a booster club. In what seemed like no amount of time at all, I was on the top of the overturned building, the concrete hot and rough on my skin as I rested on my back to regain breath.

Feeling as if I could give myself up to an encroaching sleep, (or was it a dream?), I rose to my leg. Avoiding the windows and huge fissures in the building, I limped or crawled my way across the length of the hospital.

As I came closer to the base of the overturned structure, leaving the river behind, through the trees I could see other buildings and ruined streets below. Pain was again coming in waves as the sun heated up the green-stained parts of my body and I rushed for shade. Climbing down the crumbled chunks of the building at its base, I reached the ground and quickly sought the comfort of a shaded tree.

A massive oak was the centerpiece of a nearby park, the street lined with partially crumbled buildings, a light grass began to grow in the cracked tarred street and sidewalk. A faded and dirt-encrusted sign on a bent pole read “War Memorial General Hospital”. Several street signs were beyond it towering over an intersection cluttered with strange abandoned vehicles.

Reading the name on one of the street signs “Chaucer Street”, I realized the fact that I had no trouble reading this language, although the actual name of the tongue eluded me. At the same time, with not a small amount of shock, I realized that I too should have a name.

I thought, What was my name? Do I know who I am?

Struggling there beside the overturned hospital for my identity, there was a sound my brain struggled to reconstruct. Voices of many pitches and sexes cried out in a flurry. It was as if my neuronal pathways were a defective recorder playing ten messages backwards and at the wrong speed. I could not discern a single word clearly in my own mind, like overhearing the unintelligible mutterings of a patient in the far corner of a dark asylum.

Fearing that in this rush of stimuli, I may indeed become mentally ill, or was so already, I pressed my mind for any bit of information that could account for who I was and what happened. My heart seemingly fibrillating out of control as rising fear gripped me. I could not recall one single fact that had bearing on my situation.

I examined my body for any clue.

My skin was pale and smooth with youth. The arms were that of a child. Running my fingers on my forearm, it suddenly thickened. Becoming hairy, tan, and muscular, it clearly aged. My arms were certainly masculine.

All was blurry. My arms were partially stained with green fluid, paled again and were completely hairless. Looking down, there was a old scar, long ago healed like the uncheck growth of tree bark. It swept across the chest from my shoulder to my navel. I had no jewelry, tattoos, or any other marks that I could see. A second later I became dizzy and my skin turned black as coal.

In a panic, I limped to a vehicle, its rear crushed by a piece of the fallen hospital, to examine my face in a side mirror.

My face was a stranger to me.

I stared without recognition for a long time, struggling for a simple legend in the map of my face, any answer in the smooth roads of dermal lines or eye and teeth shades. Just as my mind would skirt the cusp of recognition of one certain feature, it would loose familiarity as if my vision, or my brain’s processing of my optical impulses, were losing cohesion somehow.

I thought, was I even changing or was my brain damaged in some way?

Staring at the whole of my face my eyes were certainly blue. Looking closer at one eye, one pupil, it might have been brown or green or even black. It changed quicker the more intense my focus, the greater my intent. Pulling my face back from the mirror as I looked at the whole again, order would return. My eyes were blue. When I stared at the whole of my face, or away to use my peripheral vision, it was certainly consistent, but as I focused my gaze, that consistency broke down. My face was hairless, but as I stared at my chin, I would feel a phantom beard. I could almost touch it, see it.

When I touched my chest, it was hard, muscular, masculine – or was it? As my hands lingered it would become soft, phantom softness. I could nearly touch the nipples, the breasts, of a feminine form.

As my hands traveled about my cheeks, lips, and nose, I noticed that all of my finger tips were dotted with dark brown, resembling what might occur if I had stuck them repeatedly with pins. Looking too deep at the dots, they would disappear. Staring too long at my bleached skin, the hue would shift.

I thought, I’m Darkskin. No, I’m Caucasian. Bleached white? Painted colors? I felt like a farsighted explorer who could discern a distant ruin but when holding a blurry artifact in the hand, was incapable of the simplest description.

I managed to release focus, letting go of something which felt like tension, without loosing concentration completely. My cranium seemed deformed to me, too much of it added on to the rear part of my skull, as if there grew an added organ, shielded in a thick green carapace. It was more like the head of a newborn, stretched oblong as it passed through the birth canal. As I stared, alarm steadily rising within, I reasoned that the injuries, my head and mind within, my memories must have been badly damaged, in whatever event created this apocalyptic catastrophe.

Concluding that this scene, and my recent ordeal with the river and hospital, was too fantastic to be real. I thought, I must be hallucinating badly.

I turned from the mirror screaming cries of help into the sky and silent architecture as frustration welled up within me, spurred to a brief neurasthenia by overwhelming fear.

“Help me! Someone please help me! Hello! Help!”

My cries were answered only with their echoes, reverberated off the empty caverns of multi-storied residential and office blocks.

As I looked through the valley of dusty buildings all around, minute vegetation beginning to creep through the cracks, I could see only deserted streets and abandoned automobiles stretching away from the ruins of the hospital and nearby river. In a cluttered intersection ahead, a domed vehicle, shaped like a teardrop, with a red cross insignia across its roof was overturned and abandoned after a crash. With the relentless sun at my back, seeming to push me along with pain, I hopped and limped my way barefoot through the broken glass and rough metal debris toward the medical vehicle. Necessity put my identity crisis on hold.

A corpse, mummified by the sun, was ejected when I pulled the rear entranceway open. Like a CPR practice dummy made of papier-mâché, it fell with an unreal weight, as if separating itself from the reality of once being a living human. Without thought, I removed its chest belt with side arm and slung it over my shoulder.

The equipment in the ambulance vehicle was initially unfamiliar to me. However, A deeper, possibly unconscious, memory moved my hands knowingly through the various sealed sterile packages. I apparently hunted for a support brace with healing pads for my leg and was quite surprised when they were selected. As my hands worked themselves with the equipment, of their own volition, as if I was merely a spectator, I realized that whoever I may be, there were medical skills that somehow remained intact. With the brace I was able to put my full weight on my leg and the reconstructive gel contained in the pads tingled pleasantly as it seeped into my skin.

“Doctor? I need your … “ A hallway from the perspective of a shaky video recorder. I was talking to … or was I being told? A man in a black coat that changed to white put out his arms, palms open. The memory shifted.

“May I take your … Mmmmm … dress?”, an elderly man whispered into my ear as he welcomed me into an ornate, candle-lit dining hall.

There appeared in my mind a sickly woman who warned, “Go into the woods, there is … for you here … do not turn back … ”

My emotions, twisting with multitudinous gradations, animated me like a marionette as the random images faded. Muttering voices receded into the shops and haunted avenues around me as I stared into the ambulance and clogged thoroughfare for a time, with genuine hope that they would return.

Far off there was a sound like an approaching thunderstorm. Crashing glass and the melodic sound of tumbling metal pieces along an empty street brought my mind back into focus to the present.

I have no idea what’s happening. Find help, I thought.

Climbing into a nearby auto, after removing its long dead occupant, I drove away into the obstacle course of abandoned and overturned vehicles.

Discarded ground and air wreaks, bodies in various stages of decay, crumbling or abandoned buildings, and empty clean air greeted me at every turn through the silent caverns of this once teeming settlement. Tiny sprouts, the reconnaissance of an advancing vegetation army were visible growth through every available crack and orifice in the artificial structure of the city.

As I drove along, sounding my horn and looking for any indication of sentient life, I looked at my arms, which clearly were now metallic green, and wondered if I had been recruited to fight on this new battlefield.

Indicator lights screamed at me from the panel and a surge of power accelerated the automobile. As I worked various buttons and dials, my mind strayed from the littered street. In an instant I crashed into a pole on a miscalculation and the car deflected into the window of a clothing store.

Inside, the city came to life. A hundred faces, all the same, dressed in the latest fashions and poised in delighted surprise, advanced upon me. They were all little girls with the same face. Voices rose in my mind, like the sound of spectral children at play, while images of sick, desperate and grotesque, victims grabbed at my body.

Though only mannequins were piled on the car, I fled the vehicle, running into the street on my injured leg with glass cutting at my feet and my mind aflame with terror. Stumbling over several ‘real’ corpses, I careened into a pile of sandbags and was knocked into the gutter. Falling face first into a moss and grass-ringed sewer grate, pain crushed my will as something popped on my skin, seeming to flush with hot fluid. My back, fully exposed to the sun again, somehow acted as instigator, adding fuel to the fire of my unrestrained breakdown.

To my eyes, the street scene no longer appeared clear. For a moment, it appeared to be drawn as if by charcoal sketch on rough parchment paper. The warm, oddly wet, feeling flushed through my shoulder. Looking to it, there appeared to be a copper boil upon it, veins of silver ran away in all directions over charred black skin. I put my head down, as it throbbed I progressively felt evermore sleepy.

The sound of water flowing down into the nearby grate eased my mind into some kind of trance, delegated by a congress of shades, as my consciousness slipped away.

Drifting, floating, far from my familiar and somehow comforting first memory - the rocks, river and hospital - reality faded as I lost that new zygotic sense of self. The only external, or bodily, memory I recall is that of an indefinite twitching.

There was a definite time of transition.

A heated debate, ruled by a morphing clan of mumbling black shadows, at a live artillery testing range in a blood-red desert. A broken television, hemorrhaging the remains of every program made, in reverse and at the volume of torture. Rolling down a marble staircase whilst having an orgasm, in a tangled ball of connected bodies held together by barbed wire.

There was a time of accelerating peace.

The forming of rough clay, the hard booting of a computer, the dose that kicks in, the inspiration moment, falling in love, I was being helped.

An under-mind of truth generated a wholly new reality. An existence of order. An awakening without questions. A fated self with beginning and end. Like a slowly drawn out string, whatever unpleasant ignorant states mated and their offspring gave rise to absolute lucidity.

Interesting start up, will read the rest and get back to you when I can.