Everything is still pretty blurry to me.

It was around 10 o’clock when all the prisoners were taken from the cafeteria and herded back into their cells to turn in for the night. The cramped beds did well enough for the back-breaking labor the women had gone through all day. Manufacturing, testing, and transporting weapons and supplies to be used for, what I assume, carnage that even most of us in this prison could never dream of.

I climbed up to my bed and flopped my head down on the pillow, only to painfully hiss at the firmness of it. Don’t know what I was expecting, but then again, being in this place, I’ve felt worse. I stare up at the ceiling, looking forward to the next two hours of insomnia I’ll have to myself, hoping to yet again dream of the outside world, to explore the fields and houses that haven’t been engulfed by war. No matter how cruel life had been to me, I would always value the dreams of freedom to lull me back to sleep.

As the lights begin to go out and the cell doors shut, I sit in bed and close my eyes in a futile attempt to fool myself into thinking that maybe it’ll be before sunrise when I get some sleep. I sit in complete silence. Well. Not exactly complete. There would be coughs, groans, weeping, crying, grunts, and pants, the usual around this time of night, but after about, maybe, forty minutes, everything would settle down. The night would become still, almost frighteningly so. I bask in the cold darkness, listening to emptiness surrounding me when I hear grunts from the bottom of my bunk bed.

I try to hold in a sigh and turn around to peek my head under my bunk bed.

“Hey, can this wait ‘till when I’m not in the fucking cell—”

I look and, surprisingly, she’s not lying down. In fact, she’s not even in bed, but rather standing next to it, her body twitching and shaking. I hadn’t even noticed her get out of bed, or come into the room. But then again, it’s not like she was the most talkative person. I climb down from my bed and reach out my hand to get her attention.

“Hey—”

She jolts and jumps back to the corner of the cell, looking at me with wide red eyes. From looking at her, I could have sworn she had been recovering from six different illnesses. She sits in the corner, shaking and rocking.

“It’s out there. It’s coming. It’s in the woods. It’s here. It’s here!”

I stand there confused at the sight I’m seeing, when I realize that the cell looks surprisingly darker than usual, to the point I can’t even see through the window on the door showing the few small white lights still present in the facility. Before I knew it, these white lights became increasingly blinding to me despite their small size. Even though it had eventually gotten to being completely silent a few minutes ago, everything became louder and grating.

The petite squeaks that came from the rats scurrying around the vents had become painful static in my ears, their noises clawing at every part of my brain. I felt my breathing become faster and harder, which I was befuddled by because, to my confusion, it had felt like all the air in the facility had been sucked out. As far as I was concerned, I couldn’t feel anything, not the temperature, not the small drafts in the room, not even the small hairs standing on my arms and neck. I was standing in a vacuum that simultaneously had no air and every noise in existence.

I try to get my bearings, get a sense of…anything. Quiet the noise, see the window, feel _anything at all_. But before that can happen, my cell door bursts open with a swarm of guards filing into the room and zoning in on my cellmate. My brain pulses as it is pierced by her screaming. The guards shout over each other before suddenly moving towards me.

“You gotta come with us!” One of them shouts.

This is where everything gets fuzzy. I only remember bits and parts of what happened after that. Obviously, there was kicking and thrashing. Me screaming. Them screaming. But I remember hearing one voice. One calming voice in the sea of blinding white chaos in front of me.

_Be free._

__

I don’t know where the voice came from. I had assumed it had just been my panic speaking for me, but the voice felt too…prophetic, to be mine. Either way, I remember biting into the exposed neck of the guard grabbing me, the metallic taste of his blood being the first sensation I felt since they came into the room.

I blacked out after that, and the next thing I remember is running through the woods, the freezing cold biting my arms and legs, but, again, considering the past events, it was oddly comforting to me. I kept running, looking ahead in front of me, huffing in nonexistent air. I feel a brief euphoria of feeling the prison grow smaller behind me as I look forward to the dull frozen greenery in front of me. Running further and further, the adrenaline I feel blinds me to the fact that the forest is getting colder and colder, the green of the trees turning to vapid gray, and soon, a cold blue.

Eventually, I am surrounded by icicles and frost with whatever life that was present being swallowed by ice. In front of me, I’m confronted with a blue-tinted darkness with someone standing in front of me. No, _something_, standing in front of me. Something, I want to say a shadow or vapor appeared in front of me, talking in a variety of voices. Some whispering, some screaming, some crying, some laughing. All of them, however, swallowed my senses, my brain pulsing yet again to the point where the pain temporarily blinded me. I saw a blurred image look at me with what I thought was a smile as a cacophony of voices all vied for my attention. But one voice speaks to me. It didn’t just talk to me, it comforted me, lulled me. I basked in the shrieking pain my head was in and heard it.

_I am what you seek. Seek me. Embrace me._

I felt a tear roll down my cheek before my skin became engulfed in black rot, every vein in my body darkening before every single one of my nerves was twisted and ripped apart. I remember shrieking in pain, my throat becoming sore and blooded right before…

My eyes open.

I awake in my bunk bed staring at the ceiling of my cell. I quickly sit up, recovering from my apparent dream. I feel my skin, the air. I hear the nothingness of the prison, close my eyes, and breathe out a slow, slow breath. When I was finally calm enough, I jumped down from my bunk bed, only to notice my socks splashing into liquid.

I look down to find a pool of blood at my feet, along with the bodies of multiple security guards. I look around the room to find blood-splattered walls surrounding my cell. My cellmate is nowhere to be found and I feel a growing panic inside me when I look down and see my own hands soaked in blood. My breathing is broken, with brief periods of me holding my breath and shuttering it out of my nose. I look up in panic and see the door to my cell wide open.

I shakingly step outside and see a similar scene in every other part of the prison. All the cells, the walls inside and outside the cells, the floors, the vents, all painted in buckets of red, and guards and prisoners alike covering the floors. I walk out into the scene wondering, begging for this to not be real, and look down into the rotunda below the gates outside of each floor of the prison. I stare into the small circle deep below thirty floors and see something. I look closer and see a figure standing below me. It’s too high to see, but I could’ve sworn I had seen it smiling up at me. My tiredness must have caught up to me, as when I squeezed them shut to take a quick, frantic breath, I opened them and saw it was gone.

I stood alone in the now empty prison, the doors likely being unlocked and unguarded. I would be free to leave. Free to explore the fields outside.

Free to see what’s outside.

I stand outside my cell. I stare at the dark room in front of me. I return to my cell and sit on the bottom bunk bed.

I’m free to go outside.