Creepypastas

Pills

You take the pills to keep them away.

That's what we were told when we were first brought down here–down through the sterile white halls with their flickering fluorescent lights, and our small, Spartan cells. Down into the nightmare.

Why would we agree to this?

I was tired of being homeless. I was tired of smelling like urine. I was tired of the looks that people gave me, like they knew I was there, but if they could just avoid eye contact maybe I wouldn't talk to them, wouldn't show up later, in their dreams, tugging at their consciences. I was tired of sleeping on cold concrete every night.

I was tired of being so fucking hungry all the time.

The man in the suit had come with his pretty white teeth and his expensive sunglasses, asking for volunteers. Medical trials, he said. I know, a scary movie waiting to happen, right? But when he promised full meals and warm beds, how could we pass that up?

Being homeless, your life is a scary movie. You sleep in the alleys normal people refuse to walk down, hurrying by in case whatever is lurking in there reaches out and grabs them. You wait until the gangbangers and the prostitutes and the pimps and the junkies all pack it in for the day before you dare shut your eyes, and even then you aren't sure you'll ever open them again.

Now I lay me down to sleep, and all that bullshit.

On any given day, you don't know what might get you: the knife of some strung out hophead, a stray bullet from a drive-by, the cold, the hunger.

So when Mr. Fancy Suit–he never did give us his name–came along with his bright smile and his promises of food and beds, I couldn't hop in the van fast enough. I didn't care if this was the beginning of a real life horror flick—it couldn't be any worse than what I lived every day, right?

There were seven of us in the back of the white van. We were clearly picked off of the streets; you could smell the desperation in the thick air—piss and sweat. We sat, hunched, quiet, our eyes taking each other in as the bumps in the road jostled us, our heads bobbling with each jolt. It was like in the movies when you see a bunch of soldiers in the belly of some plane, getting ready to parachute into a hot zone. Everyone's just quiet, and waiting for whatever the hell is coming next, and hoping it doesn't end in a body bag.

The van didn't have windows, and there was a solid divider between us and the cab, so we didn't know where we were being taken. If we thought we would find out once we got to our destination, we were wrong.

After a couple of hours in the van, the back doors swung open to reveal a giant bay, like a hangar, constructed of corrugated metal. One part warehouse, one part garage, one part I don't know, it was filled with shelves stacked with boxes, big, silver, industrial piping with valve handwheels the size of a bus steering wheel, and half a dozen more white vans.

The bay doors, like oversized garage doors, were already shut. There were no signs, no clue as to the identity of our hosts.

Even the man with the bright smile and fancy suit was gone.

Instead, we were greeted by a younger kid—like he was straight out of college—with sandy hair, thick glasses, and a clipboard. He barely looked up at us as he said, "Okay, if you'll follow me, we'll get you guys processed."

The college kid—he also didn't introduce himself—shuttled us from place to place for the next few hours without saying much beyond giving us basic instructions. White hallways with waxed floors and fluorescent lights took us from one room to the next, where college boy would tell us what we were supposed to do and make a little tick on his clipboard.