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I dropped my hand and realized that even though the light of the screen was dim, it still had stolen the little adjustment my eyes had made to the dark. The room was pitch black again.
I darted sideways, moving at a shuffling run as I reached out with my hands.
I only made it a few steps before arms caught me around the waist.
“HEY!” I yelled, kicking my feet into his stomach.
He snatched the medication dispenser out of my grasp.
Then he threw me.
I screamed as I arched through the air, my arms windmilling, trying to grab anything. My flight path was clear. My feet hit first, but they didn’t meet the squishy floor under the cold water. No, the cold water enveloped me, surging up my thighs and waist as I slipped into it like a drink sliding down the esophagus, the water covering my face as my entire body sank into a deep, icy, black depth.
The cold shock of the water caused me to exhale, my air rushing out of me.
I couldn’t think as I clawed at the water, trying to find the surface as my need to breathe burned at me with an urgency beyond any I’d ever felt before. My muscles weren’t responding. My movements were jerky and uncoordinated, but I barely noticed, my mind consumed with the sole thought of the surface.
A hand wrapped around my arm, dragging me into the air, and I sucked it in, coughing with the urgent need to breath. Then the rattle went off right next to my head, the noise loud and overpowering, shocking me as I flinched away from the painfully intense sound. I scrambled away from it and something wrapped around my ankle and yanked backwards, sending me face first into the icy ankledeep muck water.
Some of it went up my nose and I choked, pressing my hands into the squishy slippery ground as I lifted myself up to my hands and needs, my fingers digging into the marsh to get a grip and keep them from sliding out from under me.
Something heavy pressed down on my back, knocking me down into the water, pressing my face into it again. I struggled, my hands and feet tearing at the muck around me, the material sliding away as I failed to find a purchase to push against the overwhelming force that was holding me down, that had hunted me, that was going to kill me.
I was going to die.
My body flooded with the singular focus - I had to survive.
With a moment of strength I didn’t know I could possess, I pushed up from the floor, just enough to suck in air and let out a scream. The weight shifted forward, sliding up my back until something wrapped around my chest and neck. I clawed at it with my fingers like an animal, twisting my chin to bite down into the flesh. It felt like biting leather over steel. My teeth couldn’t pierce it.
I flew backwards through the air, the sudden yank cutting off the air as the thing wrapped around my neck tightened. I was lifted up in the air and suddenly I was hanging, kicking. I was fighting for my life but there was nothing for me to grab onto, nothing for me to fight against but the inevitability of the darkness.
Something wrapped around my waist, supporting my weight.
The tight wrap around my neck let go, and even as I twisted, fighting like a feral cat caught in a cage, something pressed against my neck; there was a light pinch, and I heard a small cool hiss of machinery.
Then arms wrapped around me and I felt myself pressed back into a warm chest.
Fear ricocheted through me, layering onto the already overwhelming layers of primal terror that had fully consumed me in a state of fight because flight wasn’t an option.
“No! Red!” I screamed. “Red! Earth!”
“It is over,” Aeson murmured. “Do you want me to carry you out of here or do you want to walk?”
I shuddered against his chest, pressing myself into his warmth as my heart continued to careen, my body still seized by the absolute certainty that I was under attack, that this male that held me in his arms was about to rip me to pieces.
I pushed my hands against his chest, pushing away, my fear clawing at my mind.
He lowered me down to the ground, setting me down on my feet. I took a few steps back, my chest heaving as I sucked in the oxygen I needed that I had been deprived of. A light lit up from his wrist display, illuminating the curving shape of his serpentine form as he loomed over me. A moment later, the room grew brighter, and I could see the columns and curtains around me. I could see the dark hole in the center of the room, filled with the water. I could see the floor underneath me was a wet carpet, covered in layers of old decaying plant material to create the slippery, muddy sensation.
On the ground next to him, half in the water, was a large brown gord like thing. I poked it with my foot and it let out a small sliding, rattling noise as whatever was inside it shifted.
My fear reduced, but it didn’t have anywhere to go, so it transmuted, surging through my chest like a wave, a swell of anger that carried the memory of helplessness. I clenched my hands into fists at my side, my jaw tensing.
How the fuck could he do that to me?
He almost drowned me. He choked me.
I couldn’t do anything to fight back. I took a deep breath, and the smell of ammonia wafted up.
