You scan the floor in the dim light, its bland colours and the lack of constant, effective light (due to the flickering dim bulb overhead) made the spikes arranged on the floor more difficult to spot.
You can count at least twenty of the metal spikes, all systematically arranged around your bed. The spikes form a circle pattern each spike around thirty centemeters apart from the next. Looking out onto the pond of spikes you realise it's amazing you only hit two on your first death.
Thats right... you died.
Thoughts bubble in your head like hot lava bubbling in a volcanoe ready to erupt. How did this happen? Why me? Why is this situation so fucked? These questions flood your overstimulated brain.
You clutch at your throat fearfully and lean over the bed/cot, retching loudly. Throat convulsing as imaginary blood bubbles in your lungs, pumping wildly out of the hole the spike had made. Each breath is shaky gulps as if air is a delicacy you've starved yourself of for far too long. The deep retching progresses into full blown vomitting.
Stringy bile is spat out with violent urging noises, your empty stomach erupting in turmoil as you continue to cough and gag as if still drowning in your own thick, oxygen rich , blood cells. The strong phantom pains continue their assault on your senses, the scent of copper drenches your nostrils and an unpleasant, salty irony taste laces your tongue as the urging and retching continue in great wheezing gasps. The air forcing its way down your throat while the acid in your stomach pushes it back out with violent intensity.
After about ten minutes the retching calms as your mind starts to numb itself, distancing itself, dismissing the event as nothing more than a dream within a dream. A nonsensical event that happened while you are sleeping.
Your mind fogs over in that dreamy soft quality that calm brings, an almost drug like effect that helps your nerves relax and throat to stop spasming violently. The whole of your body's muscles start to relax, muscles melting like ice in a heat wave. The shaking and convulsing stops, your hand stops scrabbling at your throat. Fingers limp and useless as the tendons relax, letting go of their desperate fight going lax and pliable and eventually falling weakly to the sheets besides you.
As your breathing slowly evens out, chest and lungs finally finding that perfect rhythm that allows you to breathe without gulping air, to breathe without hyperventilating or reinducing the retching and vomiting. Your heart slows to its usual pace, the rough flight of thumping earlier a distant memory as it beats slowly and regularly in the usual thump thump that hearts make.
You look around more calmly now, eyes zeroing in easily on the ring of metal spikes that have you marooned on this hospital bed. You listen softly to your own breathing as the planning starts in your head, Its been around fifteen minutes since the reload and still no sign of the guardian that the Receptionist had mentioned, still no sign of any other living thing in this hospital.
Then the sound reaches your ears, quick and hurried pitter patter of feet down the hall. Soft in their echo and sure in their tone. The footsteps are fast and quiet, the kind of sound that, when paired with an echo, makes it near impossible to gauge distance and direction. For all you know it could be coming from your left instead of your right, where your currently staring. A soft near imperceptible hum starts up, thick with what you can only describe as unbridles joy similar to that of a child getting the exact thing they want on their birthday or Christmas. Or is it closer to the excitement that follows getting a particularly interesting pet that you didn't know you wanted. The humming is almost more disturbing than the feeling of the spike sliding out of your throat during the reload. The noise is both sweet and sharp, cutting through the air at its low volume, adding to the eerie atmosphere of your spike surrounded bed.
The soft click of heels replaced the pitter patter of bare feet, as if the owner had suddenly realised they were running without wearing their heels, or perhaps they felt the need to slow and walk rather than run which would've allowed them to wear heels without great hinderance to their movements.
A steady beam of light cuts through the air to your left, swaying in the tell tale sign of someone walking towards you, swinging softly sideways in gentle arcs as the harsh click of heels suddenly grows louder and more pronounced, the disturbing humming increases in volume as well. The melody drifting into your ears in its disturbing yet strangely hypnotic tone and rhythm that pierces the air like a spear pierces a fish, sharp and impossibly inescapable, like a weighted net you didn't realise you were trapped in.
The beam of light bounces off of the walls before a figure emerges from the hallway.
The figure bends down deliberately, the light blinds you as they set something on the floor. Through squinting eyes you can tell that it's a lantern, a flick of a switch and the lantern blooms into soft light helping illuminate the space without blinding you, the big industrial torch that they were carrying flickers out as they press the top of the contraption.
The figure is fully in the light as you blink the blindness away (an activity you have grown used to doing as of late. And when the blindness fades, you see a girl.