Behind Sanity

Chapter Sixty-One

Behind Sanity

Chapter Sixty-One

1

Johnathan Robertson awoke to the sound of screams.  He was lying on the floor in the dark basement, something soft was cradling his head, but around him was much activity.  He raised a weak hand to straighten the glasses across his nose, and finally he was able to focus.  Whatever grogginess remained faded instantly, making him quickly sober.

Some were sitting on their beds; some on the floor.  Some of them were crying, others were screaming.  Several of them were up and about – more than the doctor would like and more than he could handle by himself. 

These people in the basement room who had been asleep for years – many for longer than he’d been alive – had awoken. 

“Oh God…” he muttered. 

There were so many of these people, and he briefly counted the staff members here at Rutledge’s in his mind, desperately hoping that there would be enough to solve this problem.

Because things were getting out of hand.

While many were lost in their own confusion, others had turned to violence, clawing and damaging one another’s unprotected bodies.  The noise alone was nearly too much for Robertson.  He winced and sat up. 

It was then that he realized that the soft, warm thing that he’d been laying against was Elisa’s leg.  She sat behind him on the floor, her head lowered, her eyes closed, and her ears covered with her hands.  She’d had a difficult choice to make.  Leave John here and flee, or stay in this chamber of chaos and try to keep any one of these people – animals – from hurting him.  She’d stayed, and he felt warmly toward her for that, but they needed to get out of here now.  They needed to get help.

He didn’t attempt to yell her name over the noise for fear that someone nearby would hear it and both of them would become a target for violence.  Instead, he gripped her wrists gently and tugged her hands from her head.

For a moment, she struggled, but then her eyes lifted to his face.  For a moment, it was like she didn’t recognize him at all, but soon, acknowledgment dawned in her eyes. John, her lips mouthed, but no sound was attached.  At least, it was none that he could hear.

He didn’t pantomime.  He stood and pulled her off the floor after him.  Together, they made their way to the door that seemed so far away, keeping very close together in hopes that they wouldn’t catch a stray fist.  John had images of lamps being overturned and the people being burned alive in this room.  Elisa thought that they would all simply maul and kill each other.

They squeezed through any openings they saw between bodies.  John caught a sharp elbow in his ribs that nearly knocked his breath away.  The door was ahead, not much further.

John reached out for the handle a long time before he actually got there, as if he could will his body to appear at the exit just by his desire. 

Finally it was there within his grip.  He clenched it with a cold, wet hand.  The latch clicked, and then they were out, moving with so much force that they nearly fell. 

John locked the door so that the mess would not spill out and then took off running toward the stairs.

“John! Wait!” Elisa called to him, and he turned around, just able to catch her by the shoulders as she plowed into him.

“What is it?  Are you hurt?”

“No,” the nurse gasped. “It’s Alice!  I saw her, John.  She’s not dead!”