Hallucinations of stimulated blinding-white swarmed limb, upon limb, relentlessly as I arched up in the despairing need for air. Stifled chokes strangulated my hoarse throat as my heart struck against the smothered chest. I gasped, but to no avail did the suffering cease. A cloud of thick smog only seemed to grow from within my throat and lungs, cutting off the air supply.
Scarcely did my agonizing symptoms stop when I felt the iron-weighted feeling end, and I took my first breath of purified air from an entire minute. The illusive pressure released itself off of my sweat-shaking figure, and each ashen indentation had been etched beneath the hollow skin of my cheekbones.
“Er…” My voice attempted to make any sound, but it seemed to be cut off with the promise of sore pain. I laid sprawled out, shaking- and shrouded by fawn overgrown weeds. It was quiet, however, and the sound of my heaving chest filled my ears.
I sought to move, but sore promises continued to splurge themselves amongst my bruised remains. Sickening glee perverted its way into my emotion and I just now registered the enclosing surroundings. Fervorous heat scaled thicker and thicker to its aspiring licks of flame that ticked the dry grass beneath me. Every advancing trickle leaped upon another; drawing near to my blood-dusted protection of skin. I dislodged the first sunken hand from its mud imprisonment and shook the other free of the trailing insects taking refuge from the fires; curling the hems of my cuticle dirt-covered fingernails.
All creatures around me dashed from their hidden placements, parting in the ways of survival. They scattered through the nearing blazes, abandoning the disoriented life form in its center. Then, if a cue had been murmured from within the ear of desirable heat; they were on me.
Cool, chilling sensations licked up and down my skin, dashing their seductive hues of amber to each prickled nerve it willed to touch on my body. In strokes they turned on me, mutating from sensation to burning termination. The flares erupted into blisters, and the mind-splitting agony of unreachable searing failed to subdue the smell of my burning flesh. Blistering changed into melting pigmentation that skinned off bone and muscle into a heap of liquified, glutinous slop; clinging to my dissolving fingertips. I urged the muscle-ridden legs to lift with any flicker of movement, but they remained held threatened by an obscured weight.
I yearned to cry out with the sick lucencies entertained around the numbed headspace of my mind, failing to submit any sound of the ajar entrance underneath my flushed lips. All flames seared in rising heat until reaching the nape of my neck. Agonizing white reached deep from within the nerves behind the lolled-back irises my body permitted. Every aspect seized in the blinding blaze and blood-tinged foam spewed from within my mouth and spilled with every jerk of scattered movement.
The resolving taxation of death once again filled every sense, and in the final beliefs of my drawing breath, my lungs racked again; desperate for air.
Flutters of the singed lemongrass drawn against my skin remained effective in parts of a ghost sense. Eerie-finished rocks seemed to shift and crackle under the weight of my now-upright heels, sculpting themselves ajar of my toes.
However, down near the frigid-fermented soil were no pebbled rocks in recognition. The fresh sensation of an outer body casting immersed inside another twirled with the acid threatening to rise out of my abdomen. Few numbing-shivers spread through every interconnection of a fading heartbeat that met with steel veins of my body. A great deal of slivered drool tipped off the corners of slightly cracked-opened lips, and the sharp metal pricks pierced themselves deep through the layers of skin and sticky-sweat holding my wrists tighter into leather brown straps on either side of me. They retained the purpose in keeping me attentively aware as the forms of the fiery-fragmented delusion slipped away.
“Sequence twenty-three, of three hundred sixty-five,” An unregistered voice verbalized, short of a face and name. Its secreted tone kept the speaker themselves further out from under the bright luminescent source of sight. Each step made the veiled figure recover by another at a different distance each time, advancing across the unfamiliar space.
My head lolled back to all sides of the furniture clutching me to its frigid surface, confined by the inability to adjust the worn ankles through to the waist, and up to the pigment-deteriorated wrists. The tattered veneer in the reflection of the glass directly present met no shine, only the dusted cracks of shatter-formed edges.
Cryptic hazing faulted to differ in renewed blinding pain; reigning apparent. Sequences of capillary tubing commending chemical substances in my flesh, giving off little drops of rouge liquid beads; bleeding-out at entry points. Reflected silver wiring shone off the light, driving into the body with marks of purpled tint and freshly verdant coloring. Tastings of copper liquid swirled with the salivation underneath the tongue and behind the once pearly-white set of teeth. I licked my rough lips in a desire to momentarily moisten them, allowing myself to reach past the throb-aching tyrant in my headspace.
I was clothed in dampened garments that covered my chest and lower regions, revealing the scarred tissue flowing from the crown of my head to the curling of my bare, blackened feet. The forms of extended ivory streaks and the bare-white sickening color enveloped me entirely.
My focus captured the rhythm of a heartbeat, and the sense of my murderous delusions dimmed. My corneas peaked out from underneath heavy crusted eyelids and an instant reaction came to the squinting of newly found surroundings. I turned my head down to relieve harsh radiance from lingering directly pinpointed on my eyes, facing the materializing variety of figures advancing before me. Their presence reeked of government pawns; heightened inky suits and cookie-cut identical statures.
Coming forwards, the steel-toed loafers sized up in a control-coordinated array resembling trained shepherds. I shifted and the restraints shacked down; my breath letting in a sharp inhale through clenched teeth.
“That,” a brief pause formed, awaiting a sentence in two parts. “Was life sentence twenty-three of the remaining three hundred forty-two left.” I dropped my head as the voice carried- with a curl of the corners, my mouth upwards into a sadistic, twisted grin.
“You bring me back from the significance of death,” I slipped my words, strange chuckles racking deep within my rib cage. “Despite the constant blabbering of just how much you wish I died- I’m beginning to doubt your commitment.” Chuckling formed to bloodied deep-throated laughs now, squeezing tight around my stomach and tainting my lips with rouge liquid.
“Your humoristic remarks have yet to dim,” a man muttered with his emotion cloaked by the muscles configuring his face, approaching in the sense of caution. His steel-toed shoes slid elegantly across the charcoal flooring stained with fresh scarlet blotches.
He sunk into the torn-up chair across from me and I followed his movements to fragment the sight of his toes. “Quite the...nuisance...to our procedures, anyhow. If you’d just comply- well, we wouldn’t have to go through with the further precautions.” He motioned with the wave of the watch covered hand to the extension of twisted wires chained around me. I withdrew my amusement and slipped a cabbage-colored tongue through the curtain of my densely matted hair.
An impulsive jerk of my body in moving had the man flinch soundlessly- gripping the chair arm and shouldering the clasp of his gun open.
“Don’t be like that,” I crooned. “What’s wrong with a little heart-racing fun?”
“This isn’t the place for fun,” he sneered. “You’re here to serve out life expectancies of death; the life spans of all those you robbed.”
He sprang forward, reaching out to clutch my jaw with the tensed arm holding a steel band mirroring one circulating my bicep. Deliberately my jutted eyeballs watched as his attention drew from the squished lips between the palm of his hand, to the trail of blood that trickled down my forehead; resulting in the collision of the chair’s backend and the rear of my head when he had thrust his move.
The set of eyes before me softened and disconcerted themselves in bliss; the remaining hand lifting its fingers and gently dipped the tips into the stream of blood. He pulled back and turned his attention solely on the now reddened fingertips.
“So you do bleed. To think a monster like you could resemble a humane instinct so well, strange.” Focused on me solely once more, the fingers laid themselves pressed against the height of my cheekbone.
“You don’t get to ‘let go’, free from yourself. You’ll take all the anguished pain with every afflicted justice.” He mumbled, sliding his fingers down the sharp curve of my skin; streaks of blood left in their absence.
I watched as his eyes filled with a glossy haze of something recognizable. A sensible feeling so familiar it startled me. He had the look of a mad man- a man so gone from the belief of humanity, and deeper into a self-oriented righteous one.
“Careful,” I ripped my head out of his grasp and broke the draw between us. Slipping my tongue in between the cracked lips again and leaning forward in the instance a smirk slithered a form on my face. “Those who hunt the monsters, best not become one themselves.”
He adjusted the teased suit and unnervingly situated his stoic expression once more. “Righteous ones are never like those to which you belong.” He finalized, shouldering the view of my frailed shape, and turning back to the skittish rally of whom were witnessing the events unfold.
“Oh, we are all, like me one day!” I cried out after him, abandoning the pride of seclusion. Simultaneously each vibrant, tortuous light, shut. One by one, consuming me and each parallel consequence I had begun to resemble, in darkness.
“Begin life sentence twenty-four.” The speakers crackled, before cutting off.
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