Prompted

The Prisoner

Written 5/8/17

Memories were drifting through his consciousness, so close and yet unreachable.
His house that horrific day, dark and silent when he'd gone inside. The eerie silence that had followed him up the stairs. The sick feeling low in his gut as he pushed open the bedroom door and had seen her lying there, covered in blood.
After that, there were only fragments. A police officer, telling him she was sorry. The way the blood didn't come out of the floorboards. A courtroom, filled with sunshine and people who watched him talk about her. Watched his hands tremble. Watched his eyes fill with tears. The jury, their faces closed when they came in. They wouldn't look at him. They didn't look at him, even when the judge announced "Not guilty." And the same sickening feeling stirred in his gut as he watched the man who had murdered his wife smirk.
He remembered the rage that had come then, and the knife in his hand. The terror that had replaced that man's smirk, until he was dead. The blood on his hands. So much blood.
Blood for the man that had killed his wife. Blood for the twelve people who had decided it was okay. And blood for the last one, who had said those two filthy words. So much blood--
Andrew Seals jerked awake with a gasp, clawing at his throat. It took him a second to realize he wasn't at home, there wasn't blood covering his hands. He sat up, still breathing hard, and looked around.
His surroundings were white, pristine. The bed he'd been lying on was in the corner of the clean room, a spindly plant at the foot of it. There was only one window that let in a good amount of sunshine, illuminating the drawers beneath it.
Andrew slowly shifted his feet off the bed and placed them on the ground.
The door across from him opened with a quiet click. Andrew tensed as a young woman came in, wearing scrubs as white as the room around them.
"How are you feeling, Andrew?" She asked, setting the clipboard she carried on the dresser.
"Where am I?" Andrew demanded, squeezing the mattress in his fists. "What's going on?"
The woman gave him a warm smile and clasped her fingers together. "A lot has happened, and I'm going to talk you through everything. But I need you to be calm while I do it, okay?"
Andrew studied her a moment before nodding, and she smiled again.
"Thank you. Now then, four months ago, you came home to see that your wife, Diana Seals, had been murdered. Is that correct?"
Blood in her hair, blood on the carpet, blood on his hands--
Andrew nodded, the motion pulling him from the dredge of memories.
"And you knew who had done it, correct?"
Another nod. Andrew's fingers were wooden on the mattress.
"But the police couldn't find enough evidence to support your claim, and when the trial came around, he was found not guilty."
Blood. So much blood.
"Andrew." The woman knelt in front of him, her hands on his knees. "I'm sorry for your loss. I just need you to get through this with me, okay?"
His chin tilted down the slightest bit. She took it as a yes.
"And within the next three days, you killed the man who murdered your wife, all twelve of the jury members, and the judge."
He tore his gaze from the phantom blood that was everywhere to meet her soft gaze.
"Is this the last thing you remember?"
"Yes."
She patted his knees comfortingly. "On your way back home, you were hit by a bus. You died, Andrew."
He pulled away to stare at the woman. "What?"
She stood in one smooth motion and put her hands back in their clasped position. "Welcome to the afterlife."
"This--this is heaven?"
A frown pulled at her lips. "No."
Of course not. He had the blood of 14 people on his hands. "Hell, then."
But she shook her head. "No such thing as heaven or hell. Andrew. Just the afterlife."
A quiet sliver of hope was rising in the back of his mind as he clenched his fists again. "Can I--can I see my wife?"
The woman smoothed out her shirt and picked up her clipboard. "Not quite yet. There's still a lot of processing we have to go through, and there will be consequences for what you did on Earth. But for now, rest, and I'll come back to get you in a few hours."
Andrew ran a hand through his hair and then nodded. The woman gave him another warm smile and stepped out, firmly shutting the door behind her.
Once out, she strode down the hallway purposefully to an elevator that took a code.
Eight floors up, she stepped out into an office lined with computers.
"Good work."
Two men stood in the room, one in a military uniform and the other in an expensive suit. She nodded at the General who had just complimented her before taking her place in front of a group of computers that showed Andrew Seals' room. He was laying down again, but instead of sleeping, he was staring at his hands.
"This is insane." The man in the suit said finally after observing the computers. "There's no way you can pull this off."
The General simply straightened his cuffs. "Sir, we've already had several successes. If you let us continue with the program, a lot of problems will be solved."
"This is--this can't work."
"If you shut us down, these prisoners will be sent to other jails. Normal jails. And they might watch the news. That Andrew Seals? He stabbed the man who killed his wife, but the man didn't die. He's still alive--barely-- and if Andrew ever found out he'd probably find a way out of wherever he was just to kill him. Here, he'll never find out. He'll never want to leave. The other option for him and the other prisoners is the death penalty."
The man in the suit ran a weary hand over his face. "You're saying you want to lie to all of these prisoners, tell them they're dead, and keep them here forever? What if they figure it out?"
"They have no reason to doubt it. And it's our afterlife--we can bend the rules any way we want. Any holes in the plan they find, we can spin some bullshit to cover it up."
The other man sighed. "Are you sure this will work?"
The General smiled. "I am."
The other man nodded. "Very well. The best way to keep a prisoner from escaping is to make sure he never knows he's in prison, after all. Program Afterlife is granted full accessibilities. Don't disappoint me, General."
He shook hands with the other man, both of them smiling grimly.
Alone in his room, Andrew Seals stared at the blood on his hands and wondered why he'd been granted an afterlife at all.