Baked Scribe Flashback: Confinement

Jackson leaned against the bulkhead, and pressed his ear to the cool metal, listening to the wind howling outside in what had previously been his place of employment, now merely a graveyard.

They had just started receiving reports of the solar storms, massive blackouts, ships falling from the sky. There were urgent reports of splinter groups rising up, arming themselves and engaging with central forces. Fighting had sprouted up all over the country, and was raging all night. Outposts failed to report in, and dropped off the grid entirely.

Early that next morning, there had been an earthquake. Or at least that was what it had felt like to Jackson, even though there hadn’t been any registered tectonic events in several generations. The whole room spun violently to the left, throwing people off their feet and tossing furniture around as if it were nothing.

It was as if the ground itself was opening up to swallow anything within reach.

Jackson had been frozen, indecisive and David had been the one, in the end, who had saved him. Jackson wasn’t sure why he had done it but, as the tremors were becoming so violent that the building itself was starting to come apart, David shoved Jackson through one of the bulkhead doors and slammed it shut behind him. It was one of the silos used, previously, for launching inter-planetary probes. Now it was used for storage, with a few workstations and archived material as well. The reinforced walls made him safer than he had been out there, but even sealed inside, he could hear the sound of screaming. There was a moment when he thought he had heard gunfire.

Now he was alone.

He tried calling out with the digital receiver, to any stations that could have responded, but no one answered. Not just the static from a bad connection, it was as if the network itself no longer existed. He tried banging signals against the wall, but there was no response, the only sound being that of rain and wind, howling through a vast open space. He was afraid to open the hatch, afraid to expose himself to whatever it was that had happened out there. Every few hours, the walls around him would shake violently, either from residual explosions or from tectonic shift. The computer monitor only worked sporadically, but he had seen distress signals coming in from all over the world. From the corner of his eye, he saw the computer flick on and turned to look at the readout.

That was when the power failed.

Time slipped away from him at that moment. He had experienced the dark before, but this was different, so smothering that it immediately made him doubt that light had ever existed in the first place. The dark was so complete, that he couldn’t help but worry that he had simply gone blind. Either way, it didn’t make any difference. He couldn’t see.

At first, he focused on fumbling around in the dark, searching with his hands and finding equipment and storage boxes. He tried to sleep, knowing that his body would use up fewer resources that way. Also, there might be less need for mental distractions if he spent more time roaming the pastures of his own dreams. Time ceased to exist. He sat there in the dark, hearing noises, talking to the noises, to the voices speaking to him from his own head.

Someone would have to come eventually, free him from this prison, this sarcophagus, the metal barriers keeping him from the light. His rations were only going to last for so long. Once he was out of water and food, the choices would become simple. Either open the hatch and expose himself, or stay, and guess how long it would take for his air to dwindle into nothing.

Jackson stood up, flexing his arms, and began to walk around the room, holding a hand to the wall to keep from losing his balance. It would be a bitter irony to trip over something in the dark and break a leg or worse. He took a moment to curse himself for not familiarizing himself well enough with the room. He heard a tiny voice in the back of his head, mocking him for his denial of the inevitability of his fate, and reminding him how easy it would be to finish it all. All he could do was pace, hands pressed to his forehead, to try and smother his self-sacrificing thoughts in the blanket of darkness that surrounded him.

From somewhere high above, Jackson heard the sound of shrieking metal. It could have been something out there trying to force its way in. It could have been aftershocks from the earthquake, trying to pull the structure to pieces. No way to know from in here. The sound of the metal under stress cut out and was replaced by a moist sound of something sliding, slithering through a tight space. Was it wriggling through a hole in the roof? Something burrowing up from the ground below him? Or was it nothing at all, save for his own imagination, turned loose on his conscious fears?

He stopped walking, the effect of his now frantic pacing only serving to further draw out the mania. There was no sound, save for the swollen buzz of complete silence. His breathing began to fill his head and he slapped himself, the pain and ringing in his ears slightly overtaking the pitched volume of his own solitude.

At some point he fell asleep, or he lost the ability to think within the darkness. Was he even alive? Is this what the after consisted of? Endless disembodied awareness, with no one else there with you, a perpetual night of solitude? He called out into the silence, for anyone to open the door to this tomb, but no one answered. The sound of his own voice was becoming alien even to himself.

What was crawling out from under his fingernails? He could feel the slimy trail of them, as they wriggled free from the nail and began inching their way up his arm. They were coming for his eyes, where they would pry their way through the lids and burrow their way inward for the prize they sought. He tried to sit up, and only ended up falling to his knees, crying out for relief, flinging his arms around in an attempt to dislodge the worms that were already attaching themselves to his upper back and neck, working their way up.

Whatever the presence that was in here, it was the key to everything. It was the reason why no one out there knew he was in here. It was the evolutionary spark that was birthing this new creation, bursting forth from within him. It was the thing that he needed to eradicate.

He remembered seeing the tool box before the lights had gone out. It was on the shelf under the computer panel. He opened it and felt around until he found something that would work. The elongated screwdriver was still there, so he grabbed it along with a rubber mallet. His hands were actually shaking, anticipating the sweetness of relief. He placed the screwdriver with the tip against his forehead, to the left of his eye, and just above the bridge of his nose. He lifted the mallet and drew back.

One strike would be enough.

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