This was the dream best loved and most treasured by one Caroline Hart, a young woman with a shoulder-length mop of mousy-brown ringlets that framed a delicately featured face. Her large, round amber eyes took in her surroundings with eager delight; who knew when she would see it again? She adored the near-silence, delicately fringed with the susurrant titter of distant birds, the huge whisper of the nearby waterfall. It was a dream of peace, of sanity and freedom long lost, of aquamarine skies that now slowly grayed over, dialed down to monochrome as the thickening clouds began to swirl and tumble.
Then the burning began.
The feeling of joy inside Caroline's chest became less like love and butterflies and more like swallowing acid. With a sound like a burst of storm wind, there came the rush of flight as the birds took wing, scattering in search of safer environs, the waterfall began pounding against the rocks beneath it, the pulsing water darkening crimson. A stench like rotten meat flooded her nostrils. She began to gag and choke, to spit and sputter and finally scream as she sat bolt-upright into the reality of her bed, the bed that was still in her room at Adams Institution where she's been a patient
captive...prisoner...
for...God, how long?
Her tear-dimmed eyes darted around the room, trying to focus, slowly grounding her, bringing her back as familiar things began to take shape. Her breathing slowed, steadied, and calm eventually enfolded her, thanks to the injection being administered by the nurse at her bedside who had rushed in when Caroline began screaming in her sleep. Not to help her, by any means, but only to silence her, as she always did. She hated her job. It wasn't so much the job itself as it was Adams Institution and the patients, especially this one. Nurse Analise Harmon had always imagined herself as someone meant for so much more than this, playing zookeeper to these cretinous subhumans she deemed beneath her.
“I'm wet,” Caroline murmured softly as she slipped into pharmaceutical bliss, “I'm wet, I...I need to get up. Please? H-help me get...up.”
Nurse Harmon sighed in patent disgust. She pulled back the worn pale blue bedspread to find that Caroline was indeed wet, but not because she had urinated in her bed again, as was often the case after a nightmare, but because she was lying in a widening puddle of dark purple blood. Caroline slid a probing hand along the inside of her thigh, then brought it to her face, forcing her eyes open, eyes that now widened with shock and swelling fear. Her breathing quickened; her heart began to pound as her body fought the sedative that was still making its way through her veins.
“My baby! I'm just...five...five months!” she quietly gasped, her bloody hand trembling as she held it out to the nurse, who was still looking on with that sneer of unsympathetic repulsion. She took the small glass vial from the pocket of her lab coat and drew another dose into the syringe as Caroline began to go into hysterics, rocking back and forth while holding her belly during bouts of unintelligible screaming. One quick jab into the back of Caroline's left arm, and she began to settle down again, the psychoneurotic babble turning to a sobbing, desperate-sounding mumble. Had she been at all coherent, she would have been demanding to know something, like what was to become of her baby, why this was happening to them. Why did Nurse Harmon hate her so much? She didn't asked to get raped by the two male residents who escaped from the north wing or to end up pregnant as a result. She didn't murder her father, only witnessed it from the dark of the staircase, the killer unaware of her presence. The image flashed anew in her mind, the ax swinging down and landing with a sickening thump into his back over and over again. Her inability to cope with seeing the man she loved more than anyone else in the world split down the middle was the reason she ended up here.
“Someone...please...”
fading...fading fast...
Nurse Harmon backed away as Caroline reached for her arm, searching behind her for the door handle, finding it, and exiting without another word, only a derisive smile of pleasure when the suffering young woman reached for her a second time.
“God...my Lord. Anyone, anyone who can hear me...save her...”
Her voice was barely a whisper.
“N-nurse Har...Nurse H-arm...”
slipping awayyyyy...
“Please,” she softly sobbed, “somebody save us.”
sssshhhhhh...sleeeeeep...
