What Dreams May Come Ch. 03

"The 8th Floor of the Brethren Hospital Facility in Denver, Colorado houses the Acute Long Term Care Unit, which provides life-sustaining services to the bodies of up to 45 patients at a time. The average Brethren ALTC patient body has a stay of up to 2-4 weeks, depending upon their needs and awareness scoring on the Glasgow Coma Scale..." Tour Guide Sloan droned on and on, making me wonder if the people around here were actually in comas before they came here or if involuntary unconsciousness was just a perk of going on the tour. Unfortunately, Cake had run off to parts unknown, and Sloan was showing me around the place, which looked way too much like a nursing home. We walked past the front desk and down a long corridor lined with rooms. Most of the rooms' doors were wide open, showing 2-3 beds inside each, thick purple curtains were drawn around some of them, but most were wide open. I was surprised to see that people's situations were not all the same. I thought everyone would have the same setup as I did: respirator, food tube, IV, catheter... I shuddered, thinking about when I saw the last one. Having a plastic tube shoved up my cock was not my idea of a good time.

Uh oh, Sloan had stopped talking again and was looking at me like I should have been listening to the white noise he had just been spouting out. As if I couldn't just take a quick look at the Brethren ALTC home page and recite it back to him: I had a photographic memory when I bothered to pay attention, which admittedly wasn't often. Having an ADHD brain can be a mixed bag. It's like having a Ferrari with bicycle breaks. Not all of us have a photographic memory, though, that's actually pretty rare. What most of us have, though, is a lot going on upstairs without a lot of control over it. It was pretty much the worst day of my life when one of my teachers figured that out. Instead of writing me off as the little asshole I was, she started talking to my mom, who talked with a child psychologist, who asked me all the questions. Nothing good happens when women who care about you start conspiring with each other. Sugar? Gone. Routine? Rigid. Bedtime? Earlier and enforced to the minute by an armed guard. Screen time? Limited and educational only. Educational screen time is like listening to your grandma explain something to you: nice and all, but it's way too slow and repetitive and could really do with some explosions or naked bodies to spice it up. Huh... kinda like Sloan's nursing home tour that I was supposed to be listening to.

Sloan cleared his throat again. I jumped and looked over at him, wondering how long had he been standing there looking at me like that. You know, like you should probably run first and ask questions later? Something started squirming in my gut as I felt my adrenaline shoot up, which actually helps my ADHD brain focus better, but if you try to live your life only knowing how to focus that way, sooner or later you wind up flying over cows.

"Any questions?" Sloan asked, an unamused eyebrow climbing up his forehead.

"No, no... looks good. I get it," I said confidently. Teachers, moms and tour guides love hearing you confidently say that you get things.

"Good. Then, I expect you to have your assignments completed by this afternoon," he said, his eyes glittering with the full knowledge that I was bluffing my ass off. "Keep in mind what I said about your stamina as a novice," he said, looking down the hall over my shoulder distractedly. "I will likely be indisposed for several hours and will not be available to come to your aid, so do try to stay out of trouble. Cowboy."

Wait, he just did that thing I do to make fun of his name. A guy named Sloan just made fun of my name? Prick only wishes he had half my stamina, I thought, mutinously. "Uh, yeah, no problem. I'll go find Cake if anything comes up," I said, only because I was too pissed about being treated like a kid to ask him what the hell he was talking about. Cake could probably tell me whatever my assignment was about, too. Also, I kinda liked how she handled it when things 'came up.'

Sloan nodded once and began to walk toward whatever was distracting him down the hall when he turned and walked back to me, grabbed me by the upper arm, pushed me into the wall and got in my face with an intensity that shocked me. "One last thing: whatever you may see or do today, if you see a child like us - a girl - you are not to touch her-"

"What the fuck?" I interrupted, offended. "Touch a kid? Fuck you! What the hell do you think I am?" I yelled, yanking my arm away from him.

He continued as if I hadn't spoken, staring at me with the same ball-shriveling intensity. "You will not touch her. You will not speak to her. You will not remain in the same room with her. If you do anything but remove yourself from her presence immediately, I assure you that you will regret it for the rest of your existence. Do you understand?" he asked.

"Yeah, I understand! Don't mess with the kid! I have a kid sister, too, you know! Jeez!" Sloan gave me another terrifying, yet constipated, look and stalked off down the hall without another word. Nothing like a mind-numbing tour that wraps itself up with death threats.

Suddenly alone, I walked down the hall, peering into the rooms and wondering where Cake or Sloan's bodies were. If I touched their real bodies with my hand, would I be able to do that thing where Sloan felt what I had done with my body? And what was that deal with Sloan sticking his head inside mine? Was it the same thing as the hand thing? And what was Sloan supposed to be 'indisposed' with for several hours? The guy's in a coma - what does he do? Figure out how to make balloon animals with his cock and study grammar? I had a lot of questions and only more and more closed purple curtains to look to for answers.

I came up to a larger open area where a few of the coma patients that were able to be in wheelchairs had been put. I assumed they had been put there, anyway. They didn't really look like they could put themselves anywhere. They mostly stared blankly out the windows or in the direction of the TV that had a 24 hour news channel on it, blaring stories on repeat in a style most likely to produce bleeding ulcers, hair loss, and continuous watching in their viewership. Oh no! The flu is going around the world again! China is locking itself down and people are wearing masks! Yeah, like China wasn't locked down already and we haven't done this pandemic thing a dozen times before. It always ends up being nothing. Jeez, people, calm down and buy some Kleenex. I hate the news.

I looked around for any other pearly smoke people out of their bodies like me, but there was no one. Just tables and chairs for visitors, a place to fix a crappy cup of coffee, and the party animals in the wheelchairs. I sighed and reached for the copy of People Magazine sitting on a table, but my hand went right through it. Ugh. This sucked.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw something dark move past the party room in the hallway. I went out and couldn't see what it was, but I heard someone, a woman, crying in the stairwell. Normally, I don't freak out about hearing a woman having a cry. Growing up, I'd heard my mom and my sister do it enough to realize that I probably couldn't fix it and that it usually made them feel better, so I usually just let them take care of business. This was different, though. This woman was keening like she was trapped in a grave, occasionally startled like she was reacting to some fresh horror. Was that black thing I saw threatening her?

I reached for the handle of the closed fire door, but my hand went right through it. Right. Can't move solid stuff. Then, how do I...? The lightbulb went on over my head and I was relieved that no one was around to see how stupid I'd been. The door wasn't solid to me, so obviously, I could just go through it. I went through the door and saw the black thing crouched nearby and it was apparently the source of the crying. It had to be one of us, but I couldn't figure what was going on with her being all dark like that instead of pearly smoke. She was getting more and more upset and, wanting to help her or at least not surprise her, I reached out my hand and touched her shoulder. A boiling mass of images, sounds and sensations suddenly overwhelmed me until a black hand shot out and pinned me against the wall, holding me by my throat. "FUCK OFF, HOWARD!!" she screamed, and then she threw me through the floor like an express dumb waiter.

To be honest, I wasn't used to going through the floor. I was used to people telling me to fuck off, in quite a few languages, too, but the whole floor-throwing thing was new to me. Turns out, she threw me down 7 floors, actually. Nice girl. I wondered how she knew my name. Maybe she was a soccer fan. Probably Los Angeles FC. You know, all that black.

When I finally stopped falling through floors, I wasn't exactly in pain, but I was weak. Like barely existing, weak. I was almost completely transparent, too. I guess I wasn't supposed to go too far away from my body. Note to self. I sighed and started trudging up the stairs again, hoping she would be in a less floor-throwing mood when I got up to the 8th Floor again. She seemed to have an easier time figuring out the solid/not solid thing than I did, and like Golden Valley, she'd probably wipe the floor with me if she took a mind to. Climbing the stairs when you're weak is not a picnic. It was too bad I didn't have my old legs with me, though, stairs were child's play to them.

The stairwell landing to the 8th Floor was empty. I went back into the hallway, but there was no sign of the woman. There wasn't anyone. I sighed and began walking back toward my room, hoping maybe I'd see Cake along the way. For as great as the welcome was, this place was a real snoozefest.

That was when I heard the voice.

"Tell me what you did then..." a man said, his voice menacing and cold.

"I... I saw you watching me and I...," a female voice quavered. It was hard to tell how old she was, she sounded almost like a girl, but she might have been a woman. The fear in her voice, though, that was real. Hearing a woman crying was one thing, but hearing a woman frightened puts my back up faster than anything. I listened and went closer to the voices, entering a room where the curtains were drawn around a bed. I moved carefully to where I could see just hints of what was going on through a gap in the curtain. It was a woman, small, terrified. The guy was easily twice her size in height alone and he was circling her like she was something he was going to eat. I could see her breasts rise and fall with each frantic breath.

"And what did you do?" the man's voice asked softly, like a knife cutting silk. I heard her shudder and hiccough, choking like she was trying to force herself to speak through a lump in her throat. There was a cracking noise and a soft scream that was quickly muffled. I could hear her panic crying through her nose, as though a hand were covering her mouth. The man spoke again, "I am not a patient man, Little One. Tell me what you did." I saw a red mark blooming on her hip when she cowered from him on the bed. My blood was boiling at this point. Regardless of the fact I'd just had my ass handed to me by a LAFC fangirl in the stairwell, I psyched myself up to go deal with the prick, when I heard her whisper something that stopped me dead in my tracks.

"I started touching myself... Daddy."

Whoa... I'd heard about this kind of thing, but I'd never actually seen it in action before. I stood there, stupidly wondering whether to leave or stay. I'd done plenty with women, made them come time and again, but this felt different. What if I stayed? What if it turned me on? What would that even say about me? I was shocked out of my daze by the sound of him hitting her again, making her squeal and cry. She had curled into a ball on the bed, now, this time the mark was on her leg. Through the crack in the curtains, I saw him slap her pussy hard.

"Where did you touch yourself?" he shouted, leaning over her cowering body. She moved a shaking arm and pointed down between her legs. He slapped her pussy again, drawing another scream from her. "I don't fucking speak sign language, you little slut! TELL ME WHERE YOU TOUCHED YOURSELF!"

"On my p...p...pussy, Daddy," she whimpered, covering herself from the next blow.

There was a deadly silence. The guy began to shake silently, towering over her. I felt like I was going to throw up. This didn't feel like role play anymore. I was transfixed and terrified, worried about what he was going to do to her next. When he finally spoke, he was so quiet, I almost couldn't hear him. "Whose pussy?" he asked. Oh shit. My stomach dropped through the floor. She'd given him the wrong answer. She began crying and my heart twisted inside my chest. "Whose pussy?" he said, more loudly. She began to keen and shudder, begging and mumbling something I couldn't understand. He began slapping her pussy again and again, the sound ringing throughout the room, punctuated by her terrified screams. "WHOSE... PUSSY... IS... THIS?" he screamed, slapping her with every word, his spit spraying onto her face.

"Your pussy, Daddy. Your pussy... it's your pussy... I touched it... I touched your pussy... your pussy... please, Daddy please it's your pussy, your pussy, it's your pussy, Daddy please, please, please..." her incoherent pleas becoming audible just as he pushed her onto her stomach and pulled her knee up with his elbow, spreading her and thrusting in.

He took her hard, too hard, setting a punishing pace and slapping his hips into the swollen red pussy he had just abused. She yelped in anguish every time he pounded into her, still face down on the bed, her legs spread wide for him. He put his knee up on the back of her thigh, and leaned into her to thrust deeper, his weight controlling her and the pain in her sciatic nerve making her scream louder.

Retching silently, I ran out of the room and crouched in the hall, covering my head with my arms, wishing I couldn't hear him rutting into her like an animal, the bed muffling her screams. For some fucked up reason, I was crying my eyes out. I hadn't even shed a tear about my legs, but listening to that beast destroying her completely wrecked me. I bawled, crouched like a tornado was coming through the 8th Floor to lay waste to everything and for some reason I wanted to survive it. I didn't want to survive it. I didn't. Come get me, tornado, I thought. Let's go to Oz and join the Lollipop Guild. I had lowered my arms from shielding my head, ready to welcome my fate, when I became aware of someone standing next to me, staring into the room I'd just fled.

It was a little girl.

Oh Jesus, no. She stood in the doorway, her eyes huge, a Pretty Princess Pony forgotten in the hand at her side. My little sister was totally into that PPP stuff as a kid. This might surprise you, but I actually did remember Sloan's guidelines for the avoidance of little girls on the 8th Floor, but I was also pretty sure this fucked up situation didn't apply. So, like any decent person, I jumped up, put an arm around her, and steered her away from the scene. "Hey Kiddo, you like the Pretty Princess stuff? My sister liked Pansy and Tulip the best, she had them do all kinds of stuff together. She always made me be Dusty because he was the boy. Which one's your favorite?" I babbled, walking down the hall looking into each room trying to figure out which one was hers.

"Rope," the girl said, looking up at me.

I thought back, shaking my head, unable to remember any pony named Rope. I'd just seen a freak of nature destroy a tiny woman and then fuck her brutally in front of my eyes and I could still remember every Pretty Princess Pony my sister ever had. That told me I was pretty fucked up, but I also knew balls to bones that there was no Pretty Princess Pony named Rope. There was no Rope. I ran a shaking hand through my hair, trying to ground myself as she pulled me into a room with the inside of the purple curtains covered in Pretty Princess Pony stuff. "Is Rope a new one?" I asked, my voice sounding strange to me. "My sister never had Rope and I'm pretty sure she had every one that existed back then, even Clementine who smelled like oranges... or... or... clementines, I suppose. I always wondered why she smelled like oranges if her name was Clementine. You'd think they'd just have named her Orange, instead. Well, I guess that mystery's solved. Good work, Scooby Gang." I'd broken out in a cold sweat now.

She giggled, and I just about fainted in relief. Maybe she wasn't completely traumatized by what she'd seen. Not like I was, anyway. They had some tough girls here. "You're goofy. Rope is my name, silly!" she said. Unbidden, my mind flashed to dozens of ways a little girl could end up in a coma because of a rope and the room began to slowly tilt. I lay down on my side to balance things out, but then the room started spinning. Rope sat down next to me, brushing my hair off my face. Her hand was so small on my cheek. "What's your sister's name, Cowboy?" her voice sounded cloyingly sweet, like a layer of pink frosting spread over a corpse. "Rosie... that's a nice name. Did you like playing Dusty for her, Cowboy?" she asked.

"Uh... yeah," I said, confused, thinking Rope was really good with names. She was braiding my hair now. I couldn't even remember someone's name five seconds after they told me. Rope remembered mine and my sister's names without even hearing them. I was about to ask her what her secret was, but then she steered the conversation another direction.

"Did you make Dusty cut Pansy's pussy and taste the blood, Cowboy? She had such sweet blonde curls... did you brush Rosie's hair with the pony brush, Cole?" she asked. Uh. Yeah. All of a sudden, I felt a little uncomfortable being on a first name basis with Rope, especially since we'd never been properly introduced. That, and you really shouldn't hear someone say your name more than once in the average conversation. Anything more than that, and things just start to feel awkward. Rope apparently didn't know these helpful conversation hacks because she'd just used my name three times in our little talk and it was pretty creepy. You know, that, plus the whole pussy cutting and blood tasting thing with the Pretty Princess Ponies. Images of my sister flashed through my mind, and now I couldn't even lift my head off the floor. Yeah, this is a fucking scary little girl, I decided, hoping I wasn't being too unfair to her. First impressions can be off base, sometimes, cultural differences and all that. Maybe I should have listened to Sloan's nursing home tour a little better.

Rope put her face in front of mine down on the floor now, which was considerate I guess, because even my eyes wouldn't move anymore. You don't often see that kind of courtesy in psychopathic little girls, these days. "Pansies and Tulips and Roses... know what they have in common, Old King Cole?" she said, in a sing-song voice. Okay, the scary little girl knew my sister's nickname for me, now. Nobody likes a show-off, Little Bo Creep. I was pretty sure I didn't want to know the answer to her little trivia question either, but I had the worst feeling she was going to tell me anyway, you know, just before she stabbed my eyeballs or something. She leaned in and put her lips to my ear, "they're all edible, Cole..." she whispered. Yep, I sure called that one, I thought. I guess this is where I die, then. If it gets me out of this this conversation, I'm okay with that.

A black hand blocked my view of the world and the scary little girl that didn't respect my need for healthy boundaries was yanked up by her hair and then flung down through the floor. A bloody clump of curls remained behind, clutched in the dark fingers. Darkness Girl had just dumb-waitered Pretty Princess Psychopath. Wow. Now it's a party, I thought fuzzily. Darkness bent her face down to mine, the sunlight from the window casting it into contrast, revealing a young woman with delicate features. She seemed to be checking if I was dead, so I blinked at her seductively, in case she was feeling up for something. Not being a jerk about it, just putting it out there. I mean, you never know. She sighed and grabbed my hand, and pulled me out of the Pretty Princess Pony room that had the body of a doughy white guy in his thirties comatose in the little girl's bed for some reason. "You know," I mumbled, with a herculean effort to Darkness Girl as she dragged me down the hallway, "I bet you'd be really pretty if you smiled..." Girls love that line, I thought, congratulating myself.