MARY
Someone cries out for help in the distance. In the fog of my despair I sense motion nearby. A pair of feet flies by upside down at the end of my bed. Beautiful crimson is painted across the walls. It has been so long since I have seen color. I feel my dry lips curl with delight at the sight.
“Mary?”
The first time he looked at me I thought he was one of the frequent figments of imagination which have plagued me almost as long as I’ve been captive, but for a second time the man enters my field of vision. It takes some effort to focus my mind. My thoughts have become increasingly fractured as the days pass by, one day very much like the next except for the fact that every time I wake there’s a little less of me. I am shrinking into nothing in this bed.
His eyes are a slate gray, but the left one is half tinted with green. They’re the strangest eyes I’ve ever seen, and they’re set in a face which is pure masculinity. Hard jaw, low cheekbones. Thin slash of a mouth set below a rugged nose.
“Can you hear me, Mary?”
I nod. The motion feels strange. Nobody has spoken to me directly in months.
A knife cuts the bonds holding me. They fall away as if they were never there at all. He helps me to stand, takes one second to note how wobbly I am on feet which haven’t been used in weeks. He shakes his head and grabs my arm, lowering his shoulder. With a practiced move, he chucks me up and over his back and pulls me snug up around his shoulders, wearing me like a cape.
I wonder how he got here, how he got past all the doctors and all the scientists. Then I see how. They’re littered around the place like discarded trash. They’re dead, purposefully, definitely, utterly dead.
Months ago a sight like this would have made me scream. Now it makes me angry - not because they’re dead, but because those deaths came too easily. This man is clearly a professional. He killed like one. Too cleanly. They should have suffered longer, harder, felt more pain.
He carries me into the stairwell and down the stairs. I hold on tightly to him, my arms wrapped around his neck like a child’s, my head spinning.
Round and round and down and down we go. Is this really happening? I can feel him, but even the motion of his muscular body supporting mine isn’t enough to convince me that this isn’t a vivid hallucination. I squeeze him tight, lean in and breathe to smell his sweat. My tongue creeps out a fraction so I can taste him too. Male sweat and exertion, slightly salty, a hint of musk. He tastes incredible.
My greatest fear is that I might wake up, as I have so many times before, still in that bed, still unable to move, still at the mercy of the descendants of monsters.
He cranes his neck to look at me. He’s wondering if I really just licked him. In that moment of perplexed connection, I know this is real. No hallucination wonders if you’re going to take a bite out of them.
We leave the building. Step out into the sun. I feel wind. I feel heat. I feel the world rush back around me, color and sensation, wind and heat assaulting my senses. It is a gorgeous cacophony which I can barely make sense of. I close my eyes against the light and huddle into him. I have been absent for so long, and now I am riding with my head propped on the shoulder of a beast of a man who came from nowhere.
How is he doing this? Nobody stops him. Do they know of the dead lying upstairs? Wide eyes follow us, but nobody questions him. I catch a glimpse of him in a reflective surface and see his expression. His face is a mask of death in potentia. Nobody wants to ask the reaper why he carries a woman from this facility.
There’s a car waiting outside. He puts me into the back of it, shuts and locks the door, gets into the driver’s seat, and we leave. That’s how simple escape is. For now.