Chapter Two: Scarlet Abyss

Vicki quietly and raspily whispered a poem she wrote:

"I am infinite, that lonely sorrow, facing off against the rain; never blinks as death surrounds me, making angels deal with pain; of all my dead, I felt the tears flow deeper down from reddened eyes; the task of killing living things made gentle fingers feel like knives; hate towards me is just excuses for the instinct deep inside; when even darkness shudders at me, down in exile I reside."

She had written it in an hour and memorized it in a day. It was her comforting lullaby when it seemed that all things had gone downhill. And at the moment, she was undeniably screwed. It was ironic that she would die from the things she thought were cool. Demons were truly the only things that could be the darkness and the thunder. Another screeching, unknown scream pierced Vicki's hearing, and caused a waterfall of tears to fall from her face. She couldn't see anything in the pitch blackness anyway, but she kept her eyes shut tight. It felt safer that way, so nothing could surprise her.

Vicki sat crying in a fetal position, her arms wrapped around her curled up legs. It was humid and disgusting, wherever she was, and she constantly had to wipe the moisture from her face and legs. Her hair was flopping down, as if she had just gotten out of a pool. After a few hours, she tied it up into a ponytail to keep it out of her face. The air tasted wet and bitter. Random screams rang out, shattering her hearing. She didn't know how long she had been there, but it felt close to a week. She stayed hydrated by drinking the intense amount of moisture in the thick air that accumulated on her skin.

Her stomach felt horrible - Vicki kept herself form passing out of hunger by waiting until she vomited, then eating whatever came up. Sometimes she made herself puke to keep the morsels from digesting completely. Her throat burned violently. She tasted blood all of the time, probably form her scarred esophagus.

Beyond all of the torture of eating acid and being terrified for days on end, the smell was unbearable. The odor made her old teacher Mrs. Cunningham smell like roses. Mothballs and roses. Lovely, compared to the gagging stench here.

The thought of the word "gag" made Vicki vomit. She got out of her fetal position and got on her hands and knees, upchucking the slop she had eaten a few hours ago. After a violent coughing fit, she fell back and sat the warm, sticky foundation she was on, wiped her closed eyes, spit out some blood, then weakly raised her hand and let it drop in the puddle of throw up. After getting a good handful of what was still solid, she shoved it into her mouth, swallowing as soon as possible, letting the vile acid taste get washed away by the blood in her mouth.

Another metallic, piercing scream. This time, Vicki moaned back at them, angry. Her voice was raspy and hardly above a whisper, thanks to her new eating habits. She was tired of being scared. It was in her natural instinct to want to survive, (opposite of what her gothic mask of a personality was) but enough was enough. She couldn't live like this - eating vomit, always afraid of death hitting her painfully and horribly, her hearing being torn apart, and her nose being tortured by unbelievable odors. If she was going to die, she should just get it over with. "Get it over with, and I can just die and go to heaven," she whispered, warily adding, "If there is one."

She remembered a book she read about the laws of evil. 'If there is ever proven truth that there is pure good anywhere, it is automatically a fact that there is pure evil somewhere too. But on the other hand, if pure evil is discovered, divinity is still unsure.' She had no idea where she would end up; would she go to Heaven, would she go to Hell, or would she just rot in the ground? Perhaps the vomit acid was getting to her head, making her wonder if it would be better to die than to keep trying to live here, torturing herself for as long as she lasted. She slowly got up off of the ground, her eyes still shut tight, her hands dead at her sides. She was wheezing badly, and she had to constantly spit out blood. "Time to open my eyes. Time to just take what they have coming at me," she managed to scratch out.

She squinted open one eye, then the other, and finally saw that it was still bitch black.
"Kill me, already. Kill me!" She tried to scream at the monsters in the darkness. But what she got what not death, but something significantly worse.

Light flooded the area.

A huge blast of light shot Vicki right between the eyes, blinding her and causing her to screech, which in turn made her throat bleed. She fell down coughed violently, throwing up blood and a few bits of food, but before she could finish, a powerful hand grabbed her by the arm and wrenched her up and up, out of the darkness. It then plopped her down onto a cold surface, where she lied on her stomach, still coughing and crying. She could feel cool air on her face, and the smell was watered down, but not gone. Even with her eyes closed as tight as she could manage, it was exceedingly bright.

"God... what have you done...?" She wheezed after a few minutes.

"There is no God," a deep voice, almost robotic, answered. "Not anymore."

Vicki opened her eyes. It took ten minutes for her eyes to fully adjust to such light, but finally, she could make out a figure standing in front of her, wearing black. That was all she could make out through blurry squints.

"You're a mess. I'm impressed you stayed alive for so long," the voice continued when Vicki decided to get off of her stomach and sit down on the floor, her legs limp and going everywhere. "Do you know what happened to you? Do you know what you survived?" Vicki was too weak to talk, so she shook her head slowly. Still squinting, she managed to see the person step over to her and put his arm underneath her back, supporting her. In his other hand he held a wet rag, which he placed on Vicki's forehead.

"You're doused in blood. We need to get your clothes off, hang on." Vicki was too out of it to get what was going on. She was blind, half-deaf, she had scarred her throat, her nose was tortured by that smell, and her stomach pains wouldn't go away. She passed out as the man in black began taking off her shirt and skirt and burning them. Just before she left consciousness, she could feel a puddle of blood forming beneath her. But it wasn't her blood.