His brows furrowed and she raised her hand motioning for him to stop.
“I am begging you, listen, because I will not get the chance to speak with you like this again.”
Warning bells rang and the paranoid panic reared its ugly head, but he nodded.
“There are things behind this door that are unsettling, but you need to see them. You’ve been living in a loop of ignorance. I think you tried to fight. I think you gave it hell in the beginning, but after every reset you lost a little bit of spark. I think she beat you down until you didn’t know who you were or what your purpose was.”
She?
Loop?
“That watch under your bed was never meant for you, Brooks. It was meant for her, and when it started ticking again it became her countdown to failure.”
“Lytta. I don’t–”
“Listen!” She hissed, and those ocher eyes of hers filled with black that spilled into the veins of her face.
Brooks jumped backward, but he was met with cold, unmovable railing.
“She knows her time is up and she will be plotting her next move. That is why you have to see this. You have toremember.”
He didn’t know what to say, or how to think or feel. It was all so overwhelming. Brooks tried to recall facts that grounded him in reality, to convince himself that this was all a hallucination.
If it were, though, it would have been a constant projection rather than shadows moving in the hall or a voice here and there in his head.
He didn’t know what was fact or fiction anymore, but what he did know was that when he was having a nightmare, the only way to wake from it was to play it through.
“Okay,” he swallowed. “Show me.”
She nodded grimly before rising to stand and checking through the window once more. When she was sure it was secure, Lytta motioned for him to move as she opened the door and stepped through into his deepest nightmare.
Darkness.
His vision was the first sense to react.
Death.
The stench that filled the dank space nearly sent Brooks to his knees.
Buzzing.
Insect activity flooded his ears as they swarmed his head and crawled over his bare feet.
Blood.
The tang of copper was so heavy in the air that it coated his tongue alongside decay and dust.
“Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil. That’s what we say when we choose to live in ignorance. You and I, though, Brooks, do not have that luxury. If we avoid evil, then we cannot do our part to change it. If we live in ignorance, it consumes the world.”
Her voice was but a whisper in the dark, and maybe it was for the best. Brooks wasn’t sure he had the courage to face what lay in this room full of death.
“My ignorance was the catalyst and yours was the flame.”
A soft shuffle sounded to his right before a loudclickreverberated through the dark space.
A flickering light sparked above them and more lit down the large room systematically. With every loud flip of a switch, decimation unfolded.
Bodies were flung carelessly across the floor, entrails thrown about and dripping from the walls. Most of the gore wasn’t even attached to its owner any longer, because most of them were not whole. Scattered limbs littered the space.
