Playlist for the Apocalypse

Chapter 19: I'm Still Standing

EVELYN

A windowless, grey room with nothing but a toilet, sink, bed, and slot in the wall for food and water. This was how they broke people.

This was probably how they'd broken him.

Adam.

Her last image of the world before they locked the door was Adam standing across from her, all the fear and terror on her face reflected in that ridiculous mask he wore. 

Adam, who had looked after her in the bunker. Adam, who betrayed her.

His words were still ringing in her ears, "We are here to help, you'll see."

She spent the first hour screaming. Caution be damned. She'd yelled and cursed until her voice came only in rough whispers. She beat her fists against the door until her knuckles were raw and blood stained the fabric that blanketed the walls.

The next few hours were spent scouring every inch of the room, from the food slot to the ceiling tiles. She even tried to rip the padding off the walls seeking any means of escape. When her efforts proved futile, she'd curled up on the bed in frustration and tried to save her strength.

The room must have been soundproofed because apart from the noises she made it was worse than anything she'd ever faced in the bunker. Silence had always unnerved her but here it was deafening. The silence engulfed her like an ocean, and she didn't know how to swim. She'd tried to sleep, but even that proved difficult. She woke every so often, haunted by the stillness. She realized she'd lost count of the minutes she'd been there.

Time disappeared with the loss of the light.

There was a quote etched on the wall, the same words Adam had spoken when he brought her to this forsaken place.

"When thoughts arise, then do all things arise. When thoughts vanish, then do all things vanish."

They must have been written there first in marker, but someone's fingernails had traced it over and over until it was carved into the wall. She wondered how it could be that people could twist the meaning of someone's words into something so far from its intended meaning.

16 words.

95 characters.

2 sentences.

1 paragraph.

15 spaces.

Uses the letter "t" 8 times.

4 in the first sentence. 4 in the last.

Evelyn had counted.

How long did it take that person to inscribe those words on the wall? How long did they leave people here? She'd read about people who were kept in solitary confinement in her psychology textbooks. How long was it before people lost themselves? She didn't know. It took weeks, right? Not days. Surely not hours... Had it only been hours? It hadn't been days yet... Had it? It felt that way but she wasn't sure.

She realized that time didn't matter if no one knew where she was, and no one was coming for her.

Food and water seemed to come whenever someone remembered to drop it off, sometimes the next piece of food came immediately after she'd taken out the first, sometimes it came after long periods of time. The meals were always cold, stale slop from what looked like the colony's compost bin. Apocalypse cuisine was never glamourous, but this seemed especially cruel.

Her thoughts wandered.

What would her parents tell her to do?

If they knew where she was, they would have saved her.