Chapter 2: Apocalypse

Life wasn't fun as a homeless person. But being a prisoner with a mind that didn't understand captivity wasn't any better. I would constantly pace my cell, forgetting that there was a dead end each way and feeling angrier with every step. I grabbed my head, screaming for the voices to stop but they only grew louder. I always did what they told me to without reason, but now I couldn't do anything.

The torment got so bad that I started banging my head against the cement walls until my forehead was covered with blood. One of the prison guards saw and panicked at the sight. He called for back-up and they came in to stop me. They could only think of handcuffing me and holding me in the center of the room while one of them went to see what they could do to prevent further self-harm.

I couldn't hear anything from the screaming in my head and I moved violently. I just wanted to tear my brain out of my skull. I managed to lean over and hit my head on the floor before the guard that was watching me pulled me back up. When the other officer came back I couldn't hear much of what they were saying and I was distracted from the hallucinations around me.

I assumed the solution was to move along with the decision to move me to a psych ward because they took me into a holding cell that included a chair with straps on it. I started to freak out as soon as I saw it and they had quite a time getting me into it. Once they finally strapped me in they left the small room and I was left alone with the monsters and spiders that appeared to be crawling all over me. 

I lost my perception of time there, but enough time had passed for even I to wonder whether they had forgotten about me. I soon found out that the world had bigger problems than to find a place to put me. I discovered that there were buttons on the armrest of my chair and pressed them to see what they did. Most of them did nothing, but one turned on a T.V. screen over the door in front of me. I didn't notice it before and wondered why it was there. It distracted me from my hallucinations and at the time I didn't know what was happening, but the magic box told me what was going on in the world that I could no longer see.

Apparently, there was a research lab conducting experiments on deceased rats to see how certain chemicals would react on dead skin cells. The project backfired and they had accidentally created a formula to bring the rats partially back to life. The chemical didn't reverse the decaying process, nor did the rats test to be conscious. It was like they were empty shells with nothing going on in the brain, however, they were very aggressive. The scientists had unknowingly created a highly contagious zombie virus. They were bitten and turned into the undead as well, and the disease spread horribly fast. 

I watched as the world slowly fell into chaos. At first, the few human zombies were shot and killed on sight, however, the rats that were still infected escaped and started spreading the virus again. The rats traveled in unpredictable patterns and humankind couldn't keep up with the rapid spread. Reports even came in of the undead being sighted breaking out of their graves in the cemetery. Officials believed that it might've been caused by the rats spreading secretions over the soil, but no one knew for sure how it passed through the coffins until it was discovered that the rats had burrowed into the wood.

The population of zombies was growing too fast to keep up with, and panic enveloped the globe. Humanity became desperate and began the construction of walls around their cities, and one of them was near the prison I was in. While the survivors built the walls, scientists were pushed to come up with a cure as soon as possible, and it wasn't too long before they figured out that the enclosure and high security of the remaining prisons prevented zombies from entering quite well. They were perfect to start experimenting and the scientists moved in immediately. Since all the rats and rodents were either diseased or impossible to find, they found that criminals would make perfect lab rats in their place. 

Morals and ethics were forgotten, and they began inhumane testing on the prisoners of any prison that survived, including mine. After all, who cares about keeping around the human scum during the apocalypse? Soon I was found in the holding cell, where the new men in power moved me into their new idea of containment. They received unlimited funding from the government to practice finding the antidote, so they renovated the cells to grant easier access to their test subjects. 

I was placed in a small bulletproof glass box next to hundreds of other prisoners. The glass reached the ceiling, but it was only a couple of feet wide and cramped with only a hole in the floor for human waste. We were given one meal of dehydrated food per day, and each prisoner was provided a file of which experimental antidotes they were injected with on the door. My confused mind couldn't take the claustrophobia along with the constant murmuring from the other prisoners, the voices in my head, and the hallucinations I experienced. Everything was so loud. I plugged my ears and struggled to get out of the box, but I couldn't no matter how hard I tried. 

When I was taken out of the box I was dragged into a lab and strapped back down onto a testing table. I was there for hours, being stabbed with various needles that were filled with experimental fluids. I screamed in pain and suffered from the effects of the substances. It was an understatement to say that the experiments made my schizophrenia worse, and I suffered with symptoms tenfold. My hallucinations became more violent, I experienced vomiting, pain, extremely murderous and harmful tendencies, allergic reactions, insomnia, rashes, headaches, dry mouth, dizziness, and increased paranoia. 

I thought I was going to die with every painful injection, yet I kept on living to endure another day of torture. I was experimented on every day for seven years, meanwhile, the situation outside the prison only worsened. The apocalypse had completely spread throughout the world, and the only survivors left were in the cities who chose to build walls. I had forgotten when my birthday was, but I knew the year and somehow pieced together that I was around twenty-eight now and had been broken in those years. I didn't know whether it was the years of experimental drugs, but my hallucinations didn't bother me anymore. 

They were just as terrifying, but I had somehow given up on fear. The voices in my head were the only entertainment I had so I stopped trying to block them out. Now I lay void of any life in my eyes and wait for my daily testing so I can get it over with and continue to sit in the suffering of my new symptoms. Hopefully, I would get used to them so I could finally sleep. Sleep was the only place I liked now, and I wished I could sleep forever. The scientists had found out years ago that I was prone to injuring and perhaps killing myself, so after every experimentation, they injected me with tranquilizers so I wouldn't attack them or myself anymore. Now I was just the opposite of a zombie, with large brain activity, and no movement.