OBLIVION [Thomesa]

twenty four

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SLAM!
White light scarred the air as the chrome iron doors swung outwards,
banging heavily on the pale, tattooed skin of the walls that flanked them.

She froze, eyes glinting white, and instinctively collapsed, scrunching flat on the white leather seat, breathing in hard, praying they hadn't seen her.

She stared with wide eyes through the window diagonal from her,
at the long flat ceiling, where burnt-out lights hung pathetically like corpses strung from chain nooses.

Past the lip-stick stains that smudged the glass, and the water-spots,
She saw the long fingers of light reaching across the cement ceiling
with tendrils of brightness ribboning across the broad grey sky
like white cigarette smoke curling from the toothless mouth of the gaping door.

As her hand trembled, the scarlet that stained her knuckles caught in the light, and winked at her, slyly. Her hand throbbed - but the blood,
the blood was not her own.

Her heavy gasps filled the silence of the enclosed car,
still loud from the fighting and frantic wheeling, that had taken place in her escape.

Sweat shone on her forehead, the same blood splattered across her cheekbones as if her pale face and bloodless lips were an empty canvas,
with the first stroke of scarlet paint brushed across its smooth surface.

She doubted it would be the last blood spilled on her, she didn't want it to be. She thirsted for the blood of her tormentor -

Her hand clamped over her lips, masking her uncontrollable breathing.
Her nostrils flared, as her chest heaved for more air,
on the brink of hyperventilation.

She stared at the light, with wide blue eyes,
fringed by dark lashes,
waiting painfully in the silence.

They would hear her,
And find her,
and
take her
back.

And then,
The bright-hands recoiled, until piercing darkness swallowed whole the remnants of the traitoring light. The door slammed closed, and a lock clicked, but it was too late -
she was no longer alone.

She was caged in the dark cab of a jacked-up 1985 Chevrolet truck with chipped candy-apple-red paint. She lay flattened across the white-leather seat, her paralyzed legs awkwardly angled against the car door.
The leather was cool against her cheek, like flipping over a silk pillow in the night.

Her hair was fanned out beside her, falling over the edge of the seat like a net of ivy creeps over the edge of a vegetated cliff,
and was now jaggedly cut only slightly past her shoulders.

They had been sticking into the bloody wounds of her sliced back,
getting in the Rat Man's way;
he had choppily sawed off her locks and gagged her with them -
and the stunted remains now looked less,
and more, like a cascading fountain of blood bleeding from her mind through her scalp, to her sharply defined and bare shoulder blades.

Her cheeks were white and bloodless and cold,
her lips cracked and chewed-up. Her tongue ran across the course surface of her once soft and sweet lips in anxiety. Her eyes fluttered closed, as her almost-calmed breathing hitched and jumped an octave into hysteria.

She was trapped.

In a horrible game of hide-and-seek . . .
And if they found her, they would take her back -
the white-coats and kind faces
would take her back to the darkness,
back to that monster . . .

No.
She couldn't go back . . .
Not like that.

She would go, but on her terms,
with a gun in her hands.