AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Was I trapped in some sort of mental home?
I felt at the gown material. It was rough and coarse. I instinctively felt it wasn’t the right material.
Something bumped against my arm. My bracelet. I clutched the locket between my hands, grateful it hadn’t been taken from me. This small object was important to me. I couldn’t remember how or why, but it was.
I focused. I could remember what happened. I just needed to concentrate.
I shouldn’t be wearing an itchy hospital gown. I should be wearing a cute little dress…
What I’d been wearing in the last memory I had.
My last memory…
I tugged at the thread.
A blinding light had sucked me toward it at an impossible speed…
And before that, clutching at a floating seatbelt…
And I’d been driving a minivan…
With my friends in the back. All six of us. Celebrating my best friend’s wedding the following day…
We’d been partying at a nearby party resort town. I was so happy. Yes, a little sad at losing my friend, but mostly happy…
The floodgates opened and the memories poured into me all at once. Tears rolled down my cheeks. Not with any specific emotion but a confusing miasma. Relief, fear, sadness, excitement…
Everything congealed together in one noxious mix. The only way I could express it was with tears rolling down my cheeks and a giant grin on my face. I must have looked like a madwoman.
My friends…
I turned and peered at the pods, arranged in a single long row. I moved past them, one after another, counting dozens.
They were empty. None contained my friends. Then I came to both larger and smaller ones. In that one, a fat pig. Beside it, two smaller pods with baby piglets inside, still fast asleep the way I had been.
In a much larger pod stood a dairy cow. Her bell was still wrapped around her neck with her name (Daisy) engraved on it.
In another pod, a full-grown male African lion. In another, a female Bengal tiger. That one housed a polar bear…
On and on they went as far as the eye could see.
They were all frozen, asleep, maybe both. They could have been dead if it wasn’t for the fact I’d woken up.
But my friends weren’t there.
And suddenly I felt very alone. There probably wasn’t another living soul for miles around…
“Hello?”
The voice shocked me.
I flew back, my arms waving from forgotten self-defense classes. I fell and slid back on my ass and didn’t stop until I reached the far corner.
“It’s okay,” the soft voice said.
She carried a lantern that illuminated the area around us. She didn’t come any closer.
There was something strange about her voice. She spoke in English but in the background and all around it, there was a slight humming, as if a thousand other voices were speaking at the same time, each in different tongues. One was a twisted grunt, another the shriek of a cornered rat.
