The Man in the Gas Mask nosleep

I barely remember the man in the gas mask.

In fact I remember nothing before the night I escaped – well, almost nothing. My memories are damaged. Fragmented. They appear in my mind like a slide show. Some of them are like stray puzzle pieces that seem to fit nowhere in space or time. I remember a white room – very white, blinding. I was strapped to a cold table. I remember the pain of a syringe going into my arm and…

The man in the gas mask, draped in a white lab coat, stands over me. The memory is distant and foggy. All other faces in the room are incomplete. But I remember him. I have good reason to believe it was the gas mask man injecting me with something. He made my memories go away. He wanted something from me – perhaps he wanted to do something to me. One more feeling remains: fear. Then the reel ends and everything goes black.

The next thing I knew, I was driving. It was night; the windows were black, the kind of thick black that presses against the glass and threatens to break it and drown you. Past the narrow vignette of the headlights I could see trees on either side of the road, walls of forest flanking my vehicle and casting wicked shadows in the corners of my vision. I was somewhere in the country with no recollection of the previous days or hours… or years. I might as well have been born at that moment. But the man in the gas mask haunted my mind. Of my own past, for whatever reason, he alone was all I could remember.

I passed the occasional streetlamp and watched the orange light wash over the car. I once caught my own reflection in the rearview mirror: I was a girl. I had brown hair and fair skin and I was wearing a weird shirt. I looked down at myself. It wasn’t a shirt – it was a gown. Like a hospital gown. There were bloodstains all over it, though the blood wasn’t entirely dry, which meant it was recent. I felt no pain in my body, or at least not right then. But there was something wrong with my head. It had started as a steady throbbing, and it was growing worse. Growing to the point that I couldn’t ignore it.

I didn’t need to catch a glimpse of myself in the rearview mirror again to know that I was exhausted. I might have fallen asleep at the wheel once or twice – it wasn’t a problem considering no one passed me on this road in the middle of nowhere. I drove on for minutes, maybe hours. It was nearly impossible to tell. But in that infinitesimal amount of time driving into the night, I became certain of something I’d been trying to ignore. The ever present feeling that the man in the gas mask was nearby. The man in the gas mask was angry that I’d escaped. The man in the gas mask was coming to get me.

Miraculously, a gas station appeared on the left side of the road as I rounded a bend in the trees. Its glow sent a surge of relief through me, the only sign of civilization I had seen in who knows how long? I steered the vehicle into the lot and put it in park. In the passenger seat were clothes (were they my clothes?) – jeans and a baggy t-shirt. Knowing I couldn’t enter the gas station looking like this, I pulled off the bloody gown and managed to dawn the shirt and pants. They were wrinkled but otherwise fine. Looking down at myself, I guessed that I was young. Maybe in my twenties. It was a strange feeling, not knowing my exact age. I felt timeless.

The car door opened with a satisfying crack – a wave of cold night air rushed at my face and I suddenly felt like I could breathe again. I slowly stepped out of the car feeling weak and shaky. My bare feet touched the asphalt and I realized there had been no shoes in the car. My legs couldn’t support me at first; I toppled to the ground, picked myself up. I dusted myself off and looked around to make sure no one had seen. Then I limped slowly to the glass doors of the store, squinting against the light. A bell jingled as I entered.

Off to the right was an acne-faced kid behind the counter, probably sixteen or seventeen years old. He looked up as I entered and his eyes grew so wide I thought he might scream. I must have really looked that bad. He pulled an earbud from his ear and said, “Yo, can I help you with something?”

Fearing that if I opened my mouth I might vomit, I just shook my head. I wanted a phone to call for help, but I couldn’t remember what the emergency number was. Something with three or four digits, maybe? The kid stared down at his iPhone and continued scrolling, stealing the occasional suspicious glance at the stranger walking in at – a grimy clock behind the counter told me it was 1:00 am. I limped off toward the aisles, acne face staring after my rear as I went. It wasn’t until rows and rows of snacks caught my eye that I realized how hungry I was. I grabbed several bags of chips – I didn’t even notice the labels – and popped open one of the refrigerator doors to snag a giant 2 liter of Sprite.

That was when I noticed the palm of my right hand. There was a tattoo on it – something like a bar code. Above it was a number: 729450119. Just looking at it seemed to amplify the pain in my head to an unbearable level; it was throbbing intensely, like a heartbeat. Pulsating. On, off. On, off. I closed my eyes, feeling dizzy. Took a minute to steady myself. Then I decided to nip what I assumed to be a migraine in the bud and headed over to the next aisle for over-the-counter medications like decongestants and Aspirin. I grabbed the biggest bottle of Ibuprofen I could find and headed back around to the counter. On the way was a rack of pamphlets. I found a map of Oregon – assuming, of course, that’s where I was – and somehow shoveled it into my arms along with everything else.

I was almost out the door when I heard a voice from behind me, “Yo, Miss, you know you have to pay for that, right?” I turned to look at him, ripped one of the packages open, and started eating chips straight out of the bag. Acne face watched me. He looked extremely uncomfortable, almost frightened. Then I turned and headed to the door.

“Lady! Don’t make me call the cops, oh, come on…”

He came around the counter and snagged my arm on the way out. He shouldn’t have done that. I felt a rush of anger and adrenaline start in my chest and course to the rest of my body. It was like I had been electrocuted. For a single instance, the pain in my head was tantamount; I went momentarily blind, feeling nothing but absolute hatred for this little twerp who just wouldn’t let me go…

My vision returned. The glass windows exploded into a million tiny fragments. The doors flew outward. The lights flickered violently on and off. Items on the racks and shelves leapt from their place. The acne faced kid who had been holding my arm lay several feet away on the slick floor, his neck broken, his body twitching. The lights stopped flickering and became a steady glow of white. Strewn all around me was glass. The smoke detector had gone off and now sprinklers were flooding the place with water. Blood was coming out my nose. The headache was worse. My vision was fuzzy at the edges. I had no idea what I had just done, and no time to figure it out.

I hurried to the car and threw my items into the passenger seat, then went back into the gas station, the shards cutting my feet. I stepped over the kid and managed to open the cash register. Then I grabbed as many greedy handfuls of cash as I could and stuffed it into my pockets, in my shirt, in the waist of my jeans. With any luck, I could use the map to get back to civilization; after all, the next town over couldn’t be far from here.

That was when I saw him. The man in the gas mask.

As I raced out of the gas station, I saw him in the road beyond the pumps. Just standing there. Watching me. Behind him was a white van with the words Vincent Laboratories printed along the side. I could remember nothing but those words somehow made me nauseous. And then I saw that the man in the gas mask was holding something. A syringe.

I clambered into my car and started it up, put it in reverse, and slammed the accelerator. The vehicle peeled out and rocked violently over a curb. I twisted the wheel around as fast as I could and drove in the opposite direction. In the rearview mirror, the man in the gas mask climbed into the passenger side of the van. Someone else was driving it.

The pain in my head was killing me. With one hand on the steering wheel, I twisted off the cap to the Ibuprofen and drank five or six of them from the bottle. I looked in one of the side mirrors. The van was far behind but gaining quickly. The man in the gas mask was aiming something at me… I heard a pop and the rear glass of the vehicle shattered. Pop! Something metal ricocheted off my car. I ducked my head and swerved onto the left lane to avoid the shots. One of them caught my back tire with a hiss. Suddenly, I wasn’t in control of the car and it went fishtailing off to the right side of the road and continued into a ditch. The next thing I knew, the windshield was cracked and beyond it, the hood of the car was crumpled against a tree, smoke spilling out from underneath it.

Slowly, I stumbled outside and up the side of the ditch, onto the road. The van was coming straight for me. It was difficult to see in the dark; the headlights had been intentionally turned off, as if the people inside wanted to remain undetected, but I could tell they were coming fast. More shots fired through the windshield. They strafed the ground ahead of me, and I held up my hands in a useless defense of myself.

Only it wasn’t useless.

My head exploded with pain. My vision was white and fuzzy, but only for a second. When I came to, the air around me was filled with bullets. They were suspended in mid-air, right before my eyes. For a moment I thought time had stopped, then I realized I was about to be flattened by the van. I did the only thing I could think to do. I tried to use my power intentionally. To send the barrage of gunfire back. To turn the dogs on their masters.

It worked. Pain erupted inside my head – no, inside my brain. I felt a shockwave of energy go out from me, and the gunfire hanging around me snapped toward the van. The bullets rained like hail through the front windshield as the van swerved to avoid them, an unsuccessful maneuver which caused it to skid past me and crash into the forest on the right side of the road. Then everything was quiet. There was a soft ticking in the van’s engine as white smoke poured upward from the hood.

Thinking fast, I extended a hand and clutched thin air. I felt the van in my palm – it was so small and fragile. The actual vehicle was yards away, motionless, but now I was in control. I made a fist, slowly curling my fingers to my palm. On the side of the road, the van began to crumple like an aluminum can. I thought I might be killing people on the inside. Then I didn’t care.

I might have been screaming. I only stopped when the vehicle was a crushed hunk of metal, surrounded in glass and partially on fire. Somehow I liked the fire. I was like fire now.

The crushed door of the van suddenly popped open and the man in the gas mask tumbled out. His white lab coat was tattered and bloody. In his hand was the syringe. He slowly stood and looked in my direction, then began to stagger toward me. About ten feet away he stopped. Dropped the syringe. We watched each other.

“I made you,” said a muffled voice from the inside. It wheezed. He was bleeding out. “Do it.”

Only then was I aware that my hand was raised level with his chest. In my palm I could feel his beating heart. My mind was a finger resting on the trigger of a gun, loaded and eager. He wanted me to kill him but I could not stoop to that level. Killing him would mean allowing

I made you

him to win.

Then hatred boiled through me like white hot fire and all rational thought shrank from my brain. I was electrified; my fist clenched and I heard all of his ribs break in a single note. The man in the gas mask went limp before me and fell lifelessly to the ground. His body lolled like a puppet. My puppet.

I just watched him, tears brimming my eyes, unaware that the fire to my side had spread to the forest. It was in that moment, after killing him, that I realized what I was running from. The man in the gas mask had created me. He was not the monster I was afraid of. It was me. I was the one with unstoppable power, I had killed that boy at the gas station. I could do things with my mind that no one else could. And my creator had surrendered to me. In that moment I understood: I was the monster. Me.

Sirens sounded in the distance, and, as the police arrived, I would kill them too. I would kill anyone who wanted to hurt me.

I would kill anyone I wanted.

Submitted June 20, 2017 at 03:39AM by AustinTheWeird http://ift.tt/2sM541G nosleep