[DanaC]

Death's Door


With an almost inaudible swish the doorway disappeared leaving not the slightest hint of a seam. No indentation or roughened edge of door to tear fingernails on in a desperate bid for freedom. Freedom. Just a word like any other and yet now it carried such weight. Had it carried such weight before? Soph looked down at her hands. The blunt bitten down nails seemed criminally human. Experimentally she raised one to her face and traced a line down her cheek. A sharp burr of nail caiught and dragged at the skin, biting in and scoring a line which shone white then flooded red. Nothing. She felt nothing.

Why had she been left here? In her minds eye she constructed a gallows. Death should bring drama not this quiet disappearance. Was she to leave her world piecemeal? Sensation by sensation? Nerve ending by nerve ending? She shuddered as panic threatened to rise in her breast.

"Help"

She felt the word leave her lips, the puff of spoken breath but heard nothing. Such a small word.

"Help"

Louder this time.

"Help me!"

The words ripped through her, exploding out into the silent chamber, bouncing off featurelss white walls before falling unheard to the floor.

How long had she been here? A day? a week? an hour? It seemed almost impossible to believe she had ever been anywhere but here. She'd long since given up trying to listen through walls that told her nothing of the fate of her companions. They would be useful. They would be kept alive. This she knew.

Her captors had taken some delight in explaining this to her. Or rather...her guard. He was outside now. An unseen unheard presence. Redundant. She could no more escape this room than cattle make their escape from the slaughterhouse. If she closed her eyes she could see him. He would be there for as long as she was here, of that she had no doubt.

Above her head from one wall she was dismayed to see a small nozzle appear and begin to push out into the space. It stopped moving after a couple of seconds. Fear gripped her stomach, tightening and churning.
"Already"? she thought. She swallowed down bile. "I'm not ready". A rush of saliva to her mouth and the muscles in her throat tightened. She was going to vomit. It seemed wrong to spatter these clean white walls and clean white floor. The word "sorry" floated across her mind and almost made it to her lips. But why? Why be sorry? Why not scream and shout and hurl as much vile mess as she could into this inhumanly clean place? What had they given her, to tame her so completely?

There had been a time before this room. She barely remembered but there had been. There had been others. She tried to bring their faces to her minds eye. The old lady who had wept as they'd been herded into the holding pens. The young man, his eyes stark with fear, his hand gripping that of his younger sister. The child who nobody seemed to know, wailing in terror, eyes wildly searching for a familiar face. There were too many faces, too many herded bodies. A crowd of jostling, frightened people. Some fighting, some killed, many accepting. Docile in their fear, many just placed one foot in front of the next. They had given up. They would be first to go.

Tall and forbidding the Invaders stood ready, ever watchful of the herd. Their faces encased in helmets they watched impassively. A young girl tripped over the feet of a fallen man. Quickly, frightened of reprisal she scrambled back to her feet, instinct ducking her head down as she scurried along with the tide.

The noise was immense, a tangible wall. Frightened and distressed people clamoured for any kind of comfort any kind of reassurance. Parents held their childrens hands in whiteknuckled fear. Women sought the men they had lost sight of. Men wept for the wives they'd seen die.

Soph realised she was lying on the floor, her back to one of the smooth walls, her body curled into itself like a foetus. Soon it would all be done with. She would be done with. Fearful though that thought was....and it was...there was a hint of something else behind the fear. Relief? She couldnt tell. Never could she recll her mind being so inaccessible, so outside of her control.

She was to die. She was not one of those fortunate ones who would die their slow deaths across a lifetime of servitude. Many had already died. Some she had witnessed others she had merely heard. How many had died just in the holding pens? How many had died as an example for the rest? How many had breathed their last as sport for their killers?

The horror of it should be unbearable, she thought. Yet she felt more emptiness than horror. Had she found the extent of her capacity for fear? For pain? Had the myriad tests and examinations performed on her cauterised her emotions? Or was it the horror of other people's death moans which had robbed her of feeling.? Not, she reminded herself, that it mattered. Nothing mattered.

Some instinct made her raise her head from floor and look up. The nozzle she had seen appear through the wall was in motion again. It twisted a few degrees, a tiny aperture appearing at its mouth, from which a bland looking vapour began to pour gathering pace and substance as it flowed out.

Dragging herself up from her feotal position she hurled herself at the door, or rather at the place where the door had once been. This was it. It was now. Time to die.
the screams for help which she made but could not hear made no difference. Could her guard hear her? Would he care? Would he enjoy the sound? Her throat hoarse, the screams lessened to a high keening sound. How could he help them? Fury rattled in her breast. A collaboraor. One of us. One of them. he was the placator, the tamer, the trainer.His was the job of saling his own kind. His was the voice which soothed the terror in his charges to compliance. His was the decision. Who can and cannot be tamed?

The air was becoming difficult to breathe. Each inward breath scoured her lungs and sent her into spasms of coughing from which she found it increasingly difficult to catch her breath. And still the silence. Her hands travelled unconsciously to her ears, fingers tracing the line of dried blood. Freedom was a sound she would never hear again.

The white room began to take on a darkened hue. Flashes of dark edged colour plagued her eyes, blotting out the sight of clean walls and sickstained floor. She slipped down to the floor, leaning against the wall where the door had been, through which she imagined she could almost see her executioner. Why was she not good enough? Why had she been cast aside to die? Hysteria welled up and threatened to overtake her thoughts. Terrified she fought to hold on to her senses. How long had he said it would take? Once the gas began? She tried to hold her breath but the need to cough was to great. Choking and gasping she ran through in her mind, what her killer had said. Minutes? Two minutes. Maybe three. With a start she realised that she must have been in this room for a whole day. Loathe to waste even those that were to die, the Invaders sought information. Experimentation. What happens to a human when they are aware of impending death? Given a stark and sterile room with no distraction could that human be driven mad in a day just by the idea of death? Twenty four hours. Twenty four hours since she had limped into this room.

Every now and then she'd been checked on. Only once had she realised. Only once had the door opened whilst she had been conscious and awake. What a terror that was. To see the doorway closing . To realise she had missed her chance, waking to see the door disappear as if it had never been.

Her lungs were searing agony each breath drawing poison further into her body. Not much longer. How long had she been dying for? A minute? Two minutes? She couldnt think. The faces she had recaled earlier were as blurred and indistinct as her memory of home. Home. It had meant something to her once. She could no longer see. Her vision distracted by huge explosions of colour. Not much longer. With great difficulty she forced herself to breath deeply. Each breath forced another bout of choking coughs. Not much longer. Quickly now. Breath it deeper. This is your escape. All sense of her immediate surroundings ebbed away. She was in her mind. A beach of strangely coloured sands. Gulls cawed and called in loud joyful bursts. Wavelets brushed noisily across sand and pebbles. Sand crunched under foot. Almost home.