Chapter 1 - Untitled

I opened my eyes to find myself amid hospital beds. Countless thousands all aligned in neat rows, forming what looked like a field. In each bed was a person, and attached to each person was a heart monitor. The steady pulsing of every heart was made audible by those monitors. All those hearts beat the same rhythm, pulsed at the same instant. The sound of it was nearly deafening, that monotone beat. Slowly I began to walk among those bodies.



The further I walked the more it seemed that I knew these people. Among those people I picked out faces of people I recognized. People I'd seen once or twice. The more beds I passed the more people I recognized. I quickened my pace until I was running among these faces, recognizing more and more people. Suddenly I stopped. I looked down on the faces of the people I loved the most. My friends, all of them, lay in those beds. Each had a monitor and each one's heart added to the great cacophony of sound caused by those monitors. I moved to the bed of one of my closest friends and impulsively bent to feel her heart just to make sure it still beat.



As soon as I touched that heart I knew. Those machines. They lied to me. My friend's heart didn't beat, and it probably never had. As if they could read my thoughts all the machines ceased their old beat and began a new sound. It was that horrid sound the monitors make when the heart finally stops beating and the person has died. This monotonous sound was made by every machine attached to every heart. No one was left there with me. At least with those monitors beating I had the illusion that they were alive. Now I was alone. Nothing had ever surpassed this feeling of absolute loneliness, and I knew nothing could help it. The more I looked at the faces of my friends the more I wanted to die.



In my daze I had sunk to my knees. Tears streamed down my face as I slowly stood up. Amidst the flood of tears something caught my eye. It was just another hospital bed but this one didn't have a body in it, the monitor hadn't joined the others. It stood along the row that seemed dominated by the corpses of my friends. I walked over to it and had an amazing sense that this bed was mine. That it was meant for me. Slowly, as if my body was made of lead, I pulled back the covers and slipped beneath them. I attached the monitor and listened to it's steady beat against the sound of all the others. Quietly I waited for my heart to join those of the people I loved. I closed my eyes and waited to die.

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