Covid Chaos Chronicles, Story 1

The alarm startles me. It’s 6 a.m., the usual time, but this morning I am extra tired. What day is it? Tuesday, Wednesday? They all have bled together. Why do I still dream about being back in high school? I can’t find my locker as usual. Ah, it’s Wednesday, I’m working from home today. The 40-minute drive can now be replaced with three or four snooze button presses. Thank you snooze button! It hasn’t always been like this, my job didn’t allow for any ability to work from home. But times are different now and here I am, all I have to do is walk across the hallway into the “office.” Actually, a bedroom with a desk in it. At least I have a window in this office. Now what do I do?

Might as well start with my e-mails. I have a half a dozen work ones, nothing serious. A few from UPS giving me an update on some tools I ordered. Wait… There is one from Dylan. Haven’t heard from him in months, maybe even years. Last I heard, Dylan was living in Costa Rica and working on a small farm. I had no idea Dylan even had the Internet down there, let alone knew how to send e-mails. I opened the e-mail with some trepidation. Dylan always brought trouble.

Dylan took a position in an engineering firm which is how we became acquainted. Our company had Team Building activities which often resulted in Happy Hour at a local establishment, Zoomers. Dylan was an outgoing, fun-loving, charismatic young man. He loved the ladies and he loved beer. Often the overindulgence lead to altercations of varying degrees; hence the trouble, and a lot of it. The last bout of trouble had Dylan fleeing to Costa Rica.

It started at cabernet night. That is where Dylan first met Lola. She was a showgirl with Red Bird feathers in her hair and a dress cut down to there. Lola was trying to be a star at that Zoomers night club bar. His name was Peter, he wore a diamond. One night he called Lola over to admire her mood ring and went a bit too far. There were punches and single gunshot but just who shot who.

When Dylan woke up, his head was throbbing and his vision was blurred. As his vision cleared he cautiously scanned his surroundings and gathered that he was in some type of medical facility, but it did not appear to be what you would consider a typical hospital to look like. It had a cold, dank, utilitarian feel about it. Once Dylan began to take account of his physical condition, he felt cold steel pressing against both his forearms, which were strapped at the wrists and keeping him restrained to the rails of the bed he was lying on. Last thing he recalled was being in some sort of a scuffle and the thunder of a single gunshot ringing in his ears.

While Dylan was trying to figure out where he was, a door opened and a tall man wearing a white lab coat entered. He pressed a small red button on the side of Dylan’s bed and the steel straps around Dylan's arms unlocked. “You can choose to go out through that door” the man said, pointing to a door with a red exit sign on it, “or, you can follow me into the lab,” he said while pointing to a door in the opposite direction. As Dylan slowly releases his arms from the steel straps, wondering who is this man, where he is and which door to take, to his surprise he noticed on his left forearm four letters – L.O.L.A. ‘That is odd, I never had tattoos’ Dylan was thinking to himself ‘how did these letters end up on my arm?’ Dylan started to feel nauseous. Not sure what to do, he got off the bed, feeling something itching under his shirt. He reached in to see what it is, it was a red feather!

He thought for a brief second about following him into the lab but had seen enough movies to know that such a move never ends well, so he instead bolted for the exit as fast as his wobbly legs would allow. Once he cleared the door he realized it was just a bleak and dimly lit hallway with many unremarkable doors of which all were locked, all that is except for the one that was oddly only about half of his height. Cautiously he opened it to find a brightly painted windowless room lit only by a single fixture hanging precariously from its wires. The walls were covered in strange handwriting as if a child was given a box of pencils and left there for days. He then realized there was such a child hiding in the only shadow to be found in the room. It was at that moment he heard the door he entered through slam shut and click loudly as it was locked from the other side. With no other options he approached the child, trying his best to seem friendly and genuine, when a voice from behind the now closed and locked door bellow ‘Let the games begin!’

Dylan stopped for a moment staring at the door. Although he knew it was locked, he approached it anyway just to see and noticed it was one-sided and only had a key lock and a slot that opened from the outside. Still confused he looked towards the child who was sitting on the floor humming and seemed to be writing on a piece of paper. She was a young girl and appeared to be healthy and well cared for. “Hello, my name is Dylan. What’s your name?” She didn’t respond. What is this place, he thought, and began to kneel down to see what she was writing. As he did, he felt this sharp pain come from his right thigh. It was a pin from an injury he suffered years back that had dislodged and was starting to protrude through this skin. Dylan looked at the girl and then the paper with shock to see written– L.O.L.A. All of a sudden he felt cold.

Dylan started to remember that night in SoHo. The champagne was abundant and the dancing was lasting all night. He was having the time of his life with this beautiful woman, but suddenly he realized something was different and he came to his senses and tried to push her away but she was very strong and he fell. That’s where he got the injury that has suddenly resurfaced. He remembered for a moment that he didn’t want it to be true, that he wanted the night to keep going and wanted to have more nights just like it, but he also knew that it would never happen and that it never should happen and he had to get out of there as soon as possible.

Dylan woke up in a cold sweat and realized he had been dreaming. The dancing in SoHo was the real part of the dream, and the rest just took a very strange twist like most of the dreams he had. He had dreamt that he did go home with his dance partner and that they had a daughter, but he knew that this wasn’t possible and perhaps that is why he seemed trapped in this room and that his leg injury would suddenly cause him problems. He knew that night had been haunting him for years. He wished it didn’t turn out the way it did, but at the same time he remembered how much fun he had up to that eye-opening moment. That night changed his life forever. He stopped going to dance clubs and never took another sip of champagne ever again and for some reason he also will not take one sip of Coca Cola.

‘There must be some way out of here,’ said Dylan to himself. As he looked around the dimly lit room, he couldn’t help but notice that this time it was filled with a strange haze, almost purple in color. ‘This is so absurd,’ he thought, but lately things didn’t seem the same. The little girl was once again sitting on the floor, humming and writing on her paper. ‘None of this makes any sense,’ Dylan thought, ‘Could it be that this girl put a spell on me?’ In that exact moment the pain in his leg was back with a vengeance, and he dropped to the floor, gasping for breath.

Dylan lay there on the floor for several minutes, waiting for the pain to subside. He listened for sounds of life from the outside, but all he could hear was the wind. The little girl finally took notice of Dylan and without looking up said quietly ‘The wind, it whispers my name.’ He listened once again, and through the wind he almost thought he heard what sounded like a wildcat growl off in the distance. ‘Little girl, can you please tell me your name?’ he asked, and the wind began to pick up in intensity. ‘The wind, it cries my name,’ she replied, focusing even more intently on her writing. ‘There is too much confusion’, Dylan thought, but he continued, hoping to make sense of it all. ‘But all I can hear is the wind’, he said cautiously, hoping to coax the girl into saying her name. ‘The wind, it screams my name,’ she said intently, clearly frustrated with Dylan’s lack of comprehension. As the wind began to howl outside, the little girl scooped the paper from her lap and shoved it at Dylan. Even though the room was still hazy and dimly lit, Dylan could clearly see ‘MARY’ written upon the paper in purple marker.

Between gusts of wind Dylan thought he heard another voice from outside the room. It was a familiar voice, but he could not place from where he knew it. Whoever it was, they were speaking in a monotonic voice as if reading out loud. The wind started to die down more, and the voice from outside the room slowly got louder as if whoever was talking was slowly approaching the door. By sheer coincidence as the voice got louder, the light in the room also got brighter. Mary cowered into the only remaining shadow in the far corner of the room. Dylan became frightened at what might happen next. He could hear and feel his heart start to race.

In the next instant Dylan was sitting in a swivel chair in his office staring aimlessly out the window wondering how he got there and what had just happened to him. In the background his office stereo was tuned to his favorite classic rock station. The DJ had just ended 30 minutes of commercial-free music and started reading the grim news regarding the latest overnight death toll attributed to COVID-19. As he swung his chair back towards the desk, he rubbed his right hip a couple of times before opening the first email of the day.