Cognitive Deviance

53. Rabbit Hole Part 1

June 7, 2045 - 10:55 AM

The crash of Margo's feet against the van floor rang out through the garage like gunfire, her muscles tensing up. The driver stood four feet away from the van's doors, his uncanny expression tinged by the milky glow of the lights above them. The gun tempted Margo, tugging on her hand as if a string harnessed the two of them together. But she couldn't yet. There was a chaos down in the Rabbit Hole that ironically had its own method of functioning. No outside influences allowed. Otherwise, the chaos would no longer belong to the Rabbit Hole.

It would belong to Psychwatch.

Margo stepped out, finally escaping the paralyzing gaze of their Sentient driver. Jack followed behind her. The garage was a dimension separate from that of true reality. Not a single ray of sunlight reached them. No windows, no light entering through the slit at the bottom of the garage door. Just a spectral brilliance emanating from the rows of fluorescent lights above them. The walls and everything else were dark green, and the smell of burnt rubber from the tires permeated the room. Something Margo would never discover thanks to her mask's security.

She jumped at the sound of snapping fingers, her rabbit ears wavering with the sudden jolt, and she looked back to find Jack pointing at an open door behind them. There was an odd black scribble stretching across it, and upon a closer look, Margo realized it was a supposed to be a rabbit. A poorly scrawled one at that.

Another long row of lights trailing across the ceiling greeted the two doctor-cops as they passed through the door, and they stood in an unwelcoming hallway. Garbage sprawled across the floors. Soda cans. Trash bags. Condoms. Nausea briefly sparked in Margo's stomach as several ambiguous stains came into view, another thing she was relieved she couldn't smell.

A bloody handprint stretched across the wall toward the elevator. Small red blotches dotted the buttons on the panel, and a larger mess of blood splashed across the wall beside them, draining into the elevator itself. It was a light reddish-brown. Dry. Not soon enough to expect a bleeding corpse behind the doors, but not old enough to scrape off so easily.

For a moment, the diminutive crime scene took her attention away from the mission. Her monstrous colleague Jack pressed the down button with a roll of his eyes, and Margo swore she heard him mutter, "You're gonna fucking die in there."

"No, I'm not," she hissed, her eyes piercing into the elevator doors before her.

Jack turned toward her. "What?"

"I heard what you said. No matter how many times you say it, it's not going to happen."

"I didn't say anything, Sandoval."

Margo forced out a sardonic chuckle. "Sure, you did."

The elevator doors parted ways, and the first thing the two of them saw within their vessel to Hell were the words FUCK PSYCHWATCH sketched across the wall with a marker. A small black box protruded from the ceiling at the right-hand corner of the elevator, a single red dot blinking in and out of existence on its front. The officers took a gander at each other, finally coming to an agreement. That was the device that would scan their masks and let them down.

With shortening breath, a sign of the fear coming back for another round of mind games, Margo stepped in, Jack following. The doors closed behind them.

There were eight white lights the size of pills wedged into the ceiling above them, a brighter glow in that room compared to the garage back outside. Margo looked around their portable coffin, hoping to count the bodies forced into it. She jumped away from the wall after finding more bloody handprints, another line of red cascading down to the floor.