Forget About Me: 3rd Floor

So, I know I've been kind of hogging the space around here, and this one is definitely going to knock a few entires off the front page (I think... after all these years I'm still not really sure how that works), but seeing as how my last submission form the Forget About Me chronicles was OVER A YEAR AGO I thought I should play a little catch-up. The lateness of this posting may be for a few reasons:

• It's the longest "chapter" in the story, and I was worried about how it would fit onto the site.
• I've been using this as an excuse to go over the story word for word and make any corrections and alterations I need, and I honestly didn't relish going over this entire section again for this final reason...
• I was worried that it was too long.

But I finally did it. I bit the bullet, made my adjustments and am proud to present the DENOUMENT of Forget About Me; the heartwarming tale of a boy and his dog. I've also decided to break it up into two separate chunks, which I think I'll post about a week apart, or at least another entry or two apart, whichever comes first. Just as a break in between the two chunks. Like I say, the thing is long. You may want to go back and read a little bit of the last chapter, just to get yourself back in the mood so you know where we're at. A bit of a running start onto this floor.

Enjoy!

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3rd Floor

DAY 1

…THUMP…

I raised my head experimentally off the ground, or, out of the ground, more like. I opened my eyes and winced, the light still blinding me, the sand stinging my face.

Sand.

I raised myself up on my elbows and coughed out a mouthful of dry, fine grain sand. My eyes were starting to adjust to the bright light, its heat pounding down on my back and neck. I made myself salivate, trying to wet and spit out as much of the sand as I could and rolled onto my back, dusting myself off. The sand seemed to be everywhere.
I looked back to where I’d come through the door. A desert stretched out before me.
I tried to spin around again, hoping I’d lost my bearing during my fall. I remembered the floor with the maze, the initial panic, and I tried to convince myself that I would find my way out of this, as I had found my way out of that. The thing about panic is that it makes it exceedingly difficult to convince yourself of anything at all.
As I turned to try and find the door I’d come through, I cringed in pain and, realizing what I was about to see, looked down at my knee.
The cap was flapping uselessly against its joint, blood flowing slightly but not at a dangerous rate. Enough to turn the sand around it a nice, primal red, and enough to wet the wound to allow sand to get stuck, trapped, and worked into the injured flesh. The initial fall must have driven a large amount of sand in. When I moved, I could hear, more importantly feel, the sand being moved around and crushed between the bones in my leg.
With great difficulty and a considerable amount of hot pain I got to my feet, my good leg bearing most of the weight. Standing up, I could see only huge dunes of sand around me, but a distinctly larger one loomed to my right. I thought a better view might have be had from the top, as I seemed to be in a kind of crater formed by the surrounding hills.
Climbing the steep sand wall proved more difficult than I’d thought it would be. The use of one leg out of two is taken for granted until the workload is shifted to just the one. With a crawling, half-lurch step I adopted, I made my way slowly up the dune. I fell a few feet every now and then, but eventually reached the top. I stood on my good leg and balanced myself with my arm outstretched. I shaded my eyes with my left hand, realizing with a quick brush that the stitches the nurse had sewn had not become damaged in the fall and had kept sand from entering the wound. I was momentarily grateful.
With my whole hand shielding my eyes I looked toward the setting sun, still high enough to burn with heat, but casting long shadows on the sands. They literally glowed with beauty, their sunward slopes shining bright, orange-brown slivers against the deep, yellow-tinged purple of their shadowed faces. I smiled.
Scanning the horizon, I saw, in the distance, a mountain range. Nothing like in the States but a low, brick-brown, Saharan range. The desert in all other directions looked barren and unchanging, the mountains were the only defining characteristic of the landscape. I decided, by some logic I never fully understood outside of that place, to head towards the mountains. Something would be better to head towards than nothing.
The path to the mountain range crossed the crater I had just crawled out of, so I began my shuffled limp across its rim, peering down into the crater as I went. As I rounded the edge, I noticed something. My imprint still remained where I fell in the sand below, and I could make out where my hands had fallen. The interesting thing was that both imprints were the same size, regardless of the fact that my left hand was now missing a sizable chunk. The imprints themselves were round and undefined, so that could have explained that, however they were also facing the opposite direction I was looking.
At first, I didn’t realize what this meant.
I turned away from my imprint and took three steps toward the mountains. As I took the last step, a thought occurred to me.

I’m heading the wrong way.

The imprint was facing away from the mountains, so I must have fallen out of the door in that direction. Every other floor I’ve been in, the door to the next stairwell had been across from the one I’d entered through. I was going in the completely opposite direction from where I should be going. The desert. The open desert. The nothing and heat and sand and… nothing. That was where I had to go.
Something was better than nothing. You’d think after my experiences since coming into this building, I’d know better.

Was I still in the building?

I had to keep moving, this close to the bottom floor. I hobbled around the other half of the crater’s rim and headed out, across the dunes, striking from the imprint in the sand out. The sky had turned red with the setting sun, and the pain in my leg was getting worse the farther I went, but I kept going. Where else would I go?

Night came slowly a few hours later, the sun lazily falling behind the dunes and the sky fading from red to purple to blue to black, opening up to innumerable bright, white-blue stars twinkling in the night. So many and so clearly that in places they seemed to blur together into milky swirls and oddly-colored nebulae, not stars at all. Walking through the night, with my leg screaming its pain and my neck tingling from the slight sunburn I’d sustained before the sun had set. I looked up at the stars, and at the crescent moon, and I looked out at the dunes, now midnight blue, so bright against the edge of the black, black sky.
Even with all that had happened, it was the most beautiful night I’d ever seen. My leg seemed to almost fade from my thoughts when I looked around me. I walked for hours in the dark. I walked until the sun had started to rise. I remember thinking that I should go to sleep. I remember trying to remember when I’d slept last… it must have been over twenty-four hours since I’d entered the building.

Was I still in the building?

I remember stumbling, not exactly understanding what I’d tripped on, and I vaguely remember waking up for a moment with my face in the sand. Other than that, I did not know how far I traveled, I did not know which direction I was exactly heading anymore, and I could not see anything on the horizon before me.


DAY 2

…swishhhhh…

When I first woke up, before I opened my eyes, I knew only pain. Pain in my knee, which had somehow become worse, but had faded from its red, searing pain to green, rotting ache. Pain in my neck and back from having passed out, exhausted, on the uneven peak of a dune. Pain on my face, which was relatively new, from having been asleep in the glaring sun for what must have been a few hours now, and pain in my mouth from having been half-filled with sand all night.
I sat up, emptied my mouth of sand and cringed as I wiped my lips. A few small chips of dried flesh came off, having become extremely chapped during my time in the sun. Judging by its position, and I was never much of a boy scout, it must have been about eleven in the morning. I squinted up at the sun, shielding my eyes with my good hand. I looked behind me. The mountains didn’t seem any farther away than they had the day before. I stood up.
A slight breeze was lifting the sand off the desert floor and stinging my face. I teetered on my supporting leg for a second, looking around me to see… I don’t know what I was hoping to see. Maybe a door with a red EXIT sign floating above it, sure. Maybe a cleaver-wielding maniac. Out there, either seemed equally possible.
The wind had turned the tracks I’d left the night before into little more than dents in the blanket of sand, but at least the direction from which I’d come was obvious. At least I knew which way I was going. As little consolation as this provided me, I clung to it as my last constant there, like the hulk in the darkness, or the bloodstain in the maze.
The sun was almost directly over my head now, and I could feel the heat radiating through my hair, like an electric blanket on my scalp. The back of my shirt was heated as well and I could feel my skin, covered with insufficiently thick cotton, beginning to prickle as the sun baked it.
The oddest thing was my knee. Apart from the normal pain, along with the sting of the new scab tearing along the edge of the incision as I got up, there was another sensation. The small patch of showing skin, the sinew and secondary flesh that was exposed to the sun, seemed to vibrate slightly and tickle. Few people ever feel any sensation on any tissue that deep inside the body other than warmth and pressure. Feeling a blade penetrate it is rare, but even more rare is feeling a sunburn develop on the tissue, if you can even call it a sunburn. It’s UV exposure to a piece of human anatomy that was never meant to see the light of day.
It wasn’t altogether painful, but it wasn’t altogether pleasant. I rolled the cuff of the leg down, so it extended halfway onto the knee. It hardly helped.
I started walking then. There was nothing else to do. No puzzles to solve, no challenges to rise up against. There was only the desert, epic and unfeeling and sizzling hot. At least during the night I could keep moving to stay warm. During the day, there was no shelter, just the dunes. No shadow. No chance to get out of the sun or the heat. I kept walking.
By sundown, I’d gained a substantial sunburn on my face, from what I could see of my nose and feel from my forehead, and the movement and punishment had mildly numbed my knee. Again, as night fell, the desert turned into something beautiful. During the day yes, it was beautiful, but a terrible beauty meant to be respected, not admired. At night, appreciating the coolness of the breeze on my burnt face and the darkness allowing my eyes to relax was almost painful for me to consider. It was like the night was the end of the journey I’d traveled all day to arrive at.
I walked for most of the night, like the night before, and my head began to ache. Before even thinking about it, I knew what it was. I’d been worrying about it as soon as I’d seen the desert sprawled around me. It felt like a mild hangover, like I’d had one beer too many the night before, but I knew it’d get worse. I was becoming dehydrated. I wouldn’t last long without water, I knew that. I only hoped I would find a way out of here and out of the building…

Was I still in the building?

…before I passed out and died, too dry to move. For some reason, the idea of a slow death by dehydration was more tangible to me than getting eaten or gutted or sliced apart, and it honestly, deeply frightened me. Frightened me like the thought of nuclear warfare. Helpless to stop it, still time to think about all the things you never got to do, still time to sit around hoping by some miracle you’ll be saved. The hoping just made it worse.
I walked all night and only fell asleep, this time carefully laying myself down, when I saw the sun starting to rise. I positioned myself on the lee of a dune to be shadowed from the sun for at least a few early hours, and closed my eyes.
I dreamt of sand, and blood, and sand.

DAY 3

…sssssizzllllle…

I opened my eyes. The sun stared back.

My lips were now starting to become painfully chapped, and my nose seemed darker red than last time I’d seen it out of my eye’s periphery. My forearms had joined the movement too, crimson and flaking, along with my bare lower leg. The gash on my knee was still wet at the exposed patches, but had stopped oozing blood when I attempted to flex my leg. My head hurt.
As I stood, I noticed I’d rolled down between the dunes while I slept. Fortunately I’d managed to keep my mouth closed somehow, so I was spared the morning mouthful of sand. Unfortunately, however, this minor comfort didn’t seem to matter that much today.
I was intensely uncomfortable. Sunburn covered my body, my knee hurt worse than ever, though it seemed to healing, and my headache had graduated from its previous phase of “nagging ache” into “mild migraine.” Suffering, I started walking.

There was nothing else to do.

After a few hours, at about three in the afternoon, from what I could tell, I sat down in the sand. I bent my head down to shade my face from the sun. I couldn’t take anymore. I could see the unhealthy color my nose had become, almost Christmas-red, and the pain was becoming unbearable. I wanted to somehow get out of the sun before I developed second-degree sunburn or worse. I could only think of one thing to do.
I dug a trench on the east side of one of the taller dunes, which wasn’t saying much due to the relatively flat landscape, and laid down in it. I unbuttoned my jeans and slid them down a few inches so the trimmed cuff could cover the injured knee. I then took off my shirt and covered my head with it, shielding my face and neck, before sweeping the sand over my entire body, burying myself in the trench, and plunging my arms into the sand after I was done. I was now completely buried under the sand with only my head poking out of the ground, covered by my filthy but mostly sun-proof shirt.
The sand chafed and rasped against my sunburned skin, but none was getting into my knee, and the sunburn wasn’t getting any worse. I decided to wait until the sun went down then do my traveling at night. I’d repeat the process the next night, if I hadn’t found a way out yet. This, at least, was better than walking in the hot sun day after day.
My body had been confused by the fluctuations and discontinuities in my rest schedule, so while I was waiting for the sun to set I fell asleep again. It was a good, refreshing nap, and by the time I woke up the sun had completely set, and the black, starry sky had come out again. It almost made me smile to see it.
I left my shirt on my head like a sheik’s turban, covering my shoulders and the top of my head. It felt good to have the breeze on my back as I walked in the night. My head still hurt, but after resting it hadn’t grown any worse, and I marched through the desert all night, heading nowhere for nothing, wishing in the back of my mind that I knew a specific where and what.
I marched through first light, but once I saw the sun I picked a good spot on a dune and dug myself another trench. By the time the sun was high enough to burn down on me, I was long asleep and smiling.