I wanted to get out. I wanted to scream too.
But I couldn’t. My mouth couldn’t open so, of course, no voice or sound could
come out. I cried though, that was one of the things I was able to do. My tears
tasted funny, salty but weird. I got tired of crying after a while and then I
just feel asleep. When I woke up, some doctor was poking at the machine that
was connected to my body. He didn’t even look at me, as if I wasn’t there. He
just wrote some things on a note pad and then left, leaving me trying to ask
what had happened.
Because,
no matter how much I tried, there was no way I could remember what had
happened. I was certain I had been sick for a couple of days at home, some kind
of flu or maybe a virus inside the stomach. It was awful but not strange,
nothing out of the ordinary. And suddenly, one day, I woke up in that hospital
feeling as if I had been beating up by someone. From the first moment, I wasn’t
able to speak and whatever the put in my veins was making me doubt every single
thing that I thought when I was awake.
My body always felt awful. I was hurting too
much every day and it felt there was something strange. One would think I would
feel better as the days went by but I didn’t. I was feeling just as bad on day
one as on the other ones. I don’t even know how long I was there. One night
though, I heard something odd. Someone was crying very loudly and then she
began to scream. She screamed for a long while until the voice stopped.
Somehow, hearing her had made me feel a bit better, as if I could finally step
out of that bed.
But I didn’t do that. I glanced at the machine
that was connected to me and realized it was probably telling the people in
that place how I was feeling and maybe even what I was doing. If I disconnected
it, maybe they would notice it in a few minutes and I would be caught before I
could imagine a plan to get out of that place. I had to be smarter than them; I
had to really think of a good plan to run away, to escape what was most likely
some kind of prison or mental hospital. An awful place in any case.
They kept injecting me with the same drugs
but, luckily, I realized they really didn’t work anymore. My sore legs and arms
where fighting the poison they were pumping in my veins. I felt better by the
hour and they had no idea. I was tempted to smile but I still couldn’t do that.
For some strange reason, I wasn’t able to speak yet. I couldn’t make any sounds
but I had grown accustomed to that. In my head, there was only the idea of
escaping that place and talking had nothing to do with that. I had already come
up with a plan and didn’t even care if it could be successful.
That very night, I stood up for the first
time in a long time and I grabbed the machine to avoid getting disconnected
from it. I then peaked through the nearest window, which was almost impossible
as it was a bit higher than me. I had to stand on the tip of my toes in order
to look down at a large yard made of stone. It had been raining. There was no
one outside and the place looked as if it wasn’t precisely populated by many
people. By the look of the place, it seemed to be far away from any city or
town.
I
then walked to the down and realized it wasn’t locked. They didn’t have a
reason to lock the doors as they kept me, and probably all other patients, too
drugged up to even walk around the room. I have to confess that I wasn’t
feeling perfect right then, but I had to do something soon because I didn’t
know why they were keeping us there. Maybe the final step in their “care” for
us was to kill us. So waiting forever was not really the best choice. I just
had to do something, no matter the result.
I opened the door a bit, enough to look
outside. It was very dark and even colder than inside the room. I couldn’t hear
any sound, not a voice or anything else. I closed the door and faced the
biggest problem I had: the chord in the machine was not long enough for me to
parade around the hallway outside without the nurses and doctors noticing I
wasn’t in my bed anymore. So I had to make a choice. It didn’t took me very
long to decide to rip off the thing that was loading drugs into my system.
The moment I did it, my body felt a little bit
weaker but I had to go out soon and run down the hallway, hoping the nurses and
doctors were kept away from the rooms outside of their working hours. It seemed
I was right, because I didn’t see any of them as I descended to the ground
floor. It was only when I got to the yard I had seen from above, that I
actually saw a group of them running up the stairs, probably going to my room.
I hid in the shadows for a bit and then stepped outside, in order to find an
exit.
It seemed nature wanted me to be successful
because a storm begin brewing in a few moments and then rain came down hard.
The water and the mist caused by the cold was enough to hide my body from my
captors. I stepped out into the garden and tried finding a way out. But there
was a tall brick wall all around the compound. So I had to make an effort, I
had to make myself feel like shit once again, swallow all the pain in order to
finally escape. I jumped many times until I finally got a grip and then my
muscles ached as I hoisted my body to the other side of the wall.
Everything hurt, but I knew I couldn’t just
stay there complaining. I ran through some fields of wild flowers and then
deeper into a forest. I had no idea where I was; I wasn’t able to recognize
anything about my surroundings. But I was certain that no hospital of that kind
could be too far away from some town or city. They probably needed a supermarket
for groceries and pharmacies to get some of the drugs. At least I hoped that’s
the way it all worked, because I had no other thing to do.
The forest was rough and I had to stay there
overnight. It was too dense and there was nothing I could grab to eat, but
somehow I felt much better there than in the hospital. I felt all the drugs
coming out of my body as I peed and sweated, feeling much better by the next
morning. I walked even more that day and was lucky enough to find a small
village. I got there walking by the road. I hoped not to look too scary, but
there wasn’t a lot I could do related to that. I just needed to do something,
to take the final risk.
The first person that saw me was a little boy
and that wasn’t probably the best thing ever. He got scared and called her
mother, who came by very fast. I tried to talk again, but I couldn’t. She
screamed and said things and I felt very dumb for not realizing that it would
be very hard to communicate with others without being able to talk. So I just
knelt in front of them and tried to show them how defenseless I was and how
much in need of their help I was. I stayed like that for a while, until they
left.
I thought they had been scared and had just
run away, but they did come back in a few minutes with a policeman. I was glad
to see someone that could actually help me. I knelt again and put my hands
together, trying to make him understand that I couldn’t talk. He apparently
understood. He asked me to come with him and I nodded. He put me inside his car
and we then rode for a while, until we got to the police station. There, some
doctor checked on me, which made me feel awful but I knew it was necessary.
Luckily, I still remembered how to write. My
hands were not very ready to do it, but it was clear enough for the cops to
understand. They sent patrol cars to the hospital and freed many people that
were being submitted to experimental drugs of many kinds. None of them could
talk either.
I eventually realized I wasn’t in my own
country. I couldn’t remember everything
from my past but it was clear I was completely out of my element. I had to
learn to be unable to speak and it took me a while to get to the memories that
would help me getting back home.
