Room 303

Chapter 5

                                   Rachel

  Beep, beep, beep. The sound was familiar. Rachel had heard this sound before. She just can't recall when or where. The sheet under her body felt cold. Her surrounding was cold. There was a fearful chill in the atmosphere. Her feet were freezing and her hands were losing their sensations. The room was quiet and dull. She could feel it without opening her eyes. She tried to shift her body to sit up, but she failed. The gap between her eyelids was growing wider. Where am I? This isn't my room. The padded ceiling was gone. The padded walls were gone. She could see that from the edge of her eyes. She couldn't move her head.

A mixture of electrical noises was filling the room. The chill in the room was much worse than she had been accustomed to the past few days. She was restrained and couldn't move a muscle. Her heart raced and her breathing deepened. There were two men wearing white coats talking in the background. One had a notepad in his left arm and a pen in his right. He was jotting down whatever the elder amongst them was saying. The room was filled with different machines operated by medical practitioners. She couldn't move her head to further observe her surrounding. She was restrained from head to toe. She felt numb.

  "Help, somebody help!" she cried out hoping her voice would be heard. She twisted in the bed trying to free herself, but the restrains were very well fixed. She squeezed her hands through the leathery cuffs that pinned her down on the bed and wiggled her legs wanting to free them. She wanted to run, to scream, to get as far away as possible from where she was. Heavy footsteps approached the bed.
  "Good morning Rachel," said doctor Steven coldly.
  "Where am I?"
  Doctor Steven asked the men to leave. "Relax Rachel. We are just carrying out normal routine checks on you."
  "Let me out of here," she said ignoring him.
  "I am afraid I can't do that. Not yet."
  Doctor Steven loaded a syringe with some liquid from a small bottle. The writing was too small to make up the name of the drug he was about to inject in the serum that was linked to her arm.

  "Maria said you had an episode yesterday."
  "Episode?"
  "Yes another one where you started screaming asking for your daughter." He tilted his head sideways adjusting the liquid in the syringe.
  "I did see my daughter. She was there. I know it."
  "Of course she wasn't Rachel. You were imagining her. Another one of the many hallucinations you thought were real."
  "It wasn't a hallucination"
  "See Rachel, you have been seeing things and hearing things way before you were admitted to this institute. Let me put it this way. There are a lot of things that you think happened when they didn't, and many that didn't happen and you think they did. Do I make sense?"
"I am not crazy I told you that before."
He smiled pushing whatever extra air was trapped in the syringe.
"What is this? What are you injecting me with?"
"Something that will ease your tension. Something to relax you."
"Stop! Get away from me," she screamed at him.

"I am just trying to help you Rachel." He ignored her and injected all the fluid into the serum. She felt dizzy. Her heart raced at what felt like two hundred beats per minute. Her breathing rate increased. She felt like she was running a four-hundred-meter race, and was leading, winning the contest. She felt her soul soaring. Leaving her body and going somewhere else.

A heavy pull of gravity pulled her back into her body as she started to tremble. The chill in the room was falling below what her body could withstand. She was shaking. Her eyes felt heavy. She could see a faint doctor Steven watching her with a broad smile on his face. The shaking was getting worse. She was trembling on the bed like a dying fish. Fingers cringed. Toes stiffened. Her body went through a shock that she never experienced before. The shaking was like an earthquake. So powerful and sudden.

"Shhh, you are okay, shhhh" doctor Steven's words were as sharp as a shriek in her ears. His hand stroking her now wet hair. He took a tissue out of his pocket and used it to dry the saliva that oozed out of her mouth, down her lips, and onto her neck.
She let out a loud cry.
  "You are going to be okay. Everything will feel different after a while."
  "Please...take... me ... back ...home," she pleaded out as tears rolled down her cheeks.
  "Shhh, I will, I will." His comforting words sent her into a deep sleep.