1 Awakening

"Ah...Too bright!", were the first thoughts that came to his mind when he opened his eyes to the blinding brilliance of surgical lights above. Raising a hand to his eyes, he instinctively blinked a few times before propping himself up with his other arm, visibly straining himself from the effort.

Finally opening his eyes, he took a moment to analyze his surroundings.

He was in a dilapidated hospital room, most likely an operation theater of sorts. Sitting on an adjustable hospital bed, there was a tray carrying surgical equipment to his right, the equipment stained with blood that had dried up a long time ago.

His blood, most probably.

Ungluing his eyes from the tray, he looked around, finding the room mostly empty, except for the usual stuff you would find in an operating room, the heartbeat monitor and IV poles situated to the left of his bed.

An eerie silence hung in the air, pervaded only by the monotonous dripping of water through a crack in the wall.

"How did I get here?"

As soon as this string of thoughts formed in his head, he realized something.

He didn't remember anything.

He didn't remember who he was, how he got here, or where he even used to live. Strangely though, it wasn't like he didn't remember anything at all.

He remembered driving his car on some highway, riding into the sunset. He remembered playing games on a handheld when he was 8. He even remembered shopping for groceries at the supermarket, alongside a beautiful woman around his age.

As soon as he saw her face, an intense pain exploded in his head, and the memory quickly faded away, leaving him gasping for air as the pain raged across his body, triggering every pain receptor he had.

After a few minutes of unrestrained agony, the pain started to gradually lessen, until his splitting headache was reduced to a dull throb in his head.

Deciding to get up, he slowly disentangled each of the IV drips connected to his hands, and removed them one by one. He failed to notice however, that his hands were a sickly shade of white, which was a far cry from his naturally tan skin colour.

Lowering his legs to the ground, he almost fell down when he shifted his weight to his feet.

Grabbing the bedrails, he waited for a few minutes before his body accustomed to its own weight.

It seemed like he had been strapped to this bed for a long time.

Forcing himself to stand up, he awkwardly hobbled towards the single door that connected this room to the rest of the building.

Opening the creaking door, he stepped outside to what seemed like a narrow corridor that led to a staircase at its far end. The door Infront of him read "TS-03". Paying it no mind, he walked in the direction opposite that of the staircase, towards the restroom at the end of the hallway.

Reaching the door, he noticed that there was no indicator of which sex the restroom was designated to. The words "WASHROOM" were etched onto a metal plate on the door.

Pushing the slightly ajar door fully open, he stepped into the threshold.

*****

After relieving himself, he proceeded to wash his hands in the sink. Splashing water onto his face, he finally decided to look at himself in the mirror.

Something else stared back.

His skin was pale. Deathly pale. As pale as a person that had already succumbed to the claws of death. His hair and eyelashes had turned white.

"Were they always that way?", he thought.

Failing to remember how he looked in the past, he quickly rolled up his shirt to witness a scarred torso, freckled with long healed cuts and incision marks. A particularly large scar covered almost the whole of his left pec. Shuddering from the amount of damage his body had been exposed to, he quickly rolled down his shirt to hide his flabby, hideous body. He didn't even want to imagine what kind of injury he had suffered to force the doctors to go to such drastic measures to save him.

"Judging from the amount of incisions, I must have been really hurt for them to go that far." he thought, quite unsure of himself.

Stepping out of the lavatory, he walked back to the metal door labelled "TS-03".

Out of curiosity, he pulled on the latch in an attempt to open the door. Finding it locked, he walked to the next door and found it locked too. He tried all the doors on the floor, and tried knocking on them as well.

Realizing that his endeavours were in vain, he finally gave up. The only useful piece of knowledge he acquired was that all the doors were assigned a number, from "TS-01" to

"TS-06". In fact, the room he had come out of was marked as "TS-04".

"Where is everyone?", he thought to himself.

Finding no point in lingering around, he headed towards the staircase.

Reaching the stairs, he slowly ascended, his hand tightly clutching the metal rails that accompanied the stairs. A flickering light bulb being the solitary light source here, the stairs wound up in a spiral towards the next level, being made of the same material as the door of the room he had left behind.

Arriving at the top, he waited for a few seconds to catch his breath, leaning on the door labelled "U-1" in front of him.

"Here goes nothing", he mumbled to himself as he pulled himself up and proceeded to open the door.

What awaited him was about to turn his world upside down.

An intense coppery scent invaded his nostrils as soon as he set foot in yet another corridor.

The walls were stained black, dried blood coating them, and the floor was littered with mangled remains of headless corpses. Half-gnawed bones and viscera lines the floor, accompanied by the foul stench of rot and death.

Feeling dizzy at the sight, he proceeded to empty his guts over one of the corpses, the revolting sight causing him to spill more.

Coughing violently, he steadied himself with one hand and looked to his right, sighting another restroom in the distance, the path lined with the half-eaten remains of this compound's former inhabitants.

Taking a deep breath, he put a hand over his nose and headed in the opposite direction, refusing to walk the path of the dead.

Here, the carcasses were placed at larger intervals, making the path seem slightly less harrowing than its counterpart. Moving as fast as his legs would allow, he rushed towards the end of the hallway, towards what seemed like another set of stairs leading away from this hell.

In his haste, he tripped over what appeared to be someone's detached arm, falling face first to the floor.

Trying to minimize the damage, he attempted to slow his descent by grabbing on to the metal latch of one of the doors to his side.

What resulted was an awkward tumble that sent him falling sideways at an angle, into the door. The sound of his elbow banging into the metal reverberated through the hallway, ringing in his ears as a harbinger of doom.

Groaning in pain, he struggled to get up, his legs straining from the effort.

Forcing himself up with his back against the door, he struggled to catch his breath, the pain slowly subsiding. Except for the throbbing pain in his arm, he had come out pretty much unscathed from the fall.

Cursing his luck, he looked back in the direction he had come from, and that was when he saw it.

A nightmare straight from the depths of hell.

A tall bony figure covered by a layer of paper-thin skin, with sharp claws for hands, and almost humanoid skeletal feet. Measuring up to atleast 3 metres, its face resembled that of a Lynx spider, with 8 eyes above a long jaw armed with two canines at the end.

Blood dripping from its maw, it looked straight in the eyes of its newest prey, with a distorted expression of inhuman glee.

And then, all hell broke loose.