MiT : Line II ,part I

LINE II: Trans Sending

His eyes shot open, jolted from the depths of darkness by a searing pain that ripped through his abdomen, and he was confused by the fact that he could remember the entire accident as if he was remotely viewing the whole event.

I remember the sun was in my eyes, and it was too late when I noticed that the minivan cut me off and then slam on its brakes. It was almost like I was forced into the construction site on the shoulder before it all went black.

From there, it was as if he was a bystander to what transpired next, seeing the motorcycle swerve and crash through the lane-closed sign and then slamming into the concrete barricade.

At the same time, he was hurled from the motorcycle; time seemed to freeze while he watched from some unknown plane of existence.

Witnessing his body violently separated from his soul, his physical form soared through the air, and his essence, his very being, escaped from the confines of his mortal shell. The man's soul was untethered in that fleeting moment, floating weightlessly above the chaos below, witnessing the majestic beauty of his ethereal form hanging in the sky, he felt it locked on- to his gaze as if it were aware of his presence.

The force of the collision acted as a powerful magnet, pulling the soul back towards his mangled body. Like a gust of wind, he was drawn downward, compelled to reunite with his battered vessel. The transition was abrupt and jarring as his soul merged again with his broken form, the pain and disorientation flooding back with a vengeance.

Pain, there was so much pain.

This thought engulfed him as he struggled to piece together his surroundings, blinking away the haze and realizing he was lying on his back, sprawled on an unfamiliar road.

Panic set in; he attempted to rise only to discover his legs were unresponsive, locked in a state of stiffness that rendered them useless.

Before he could process the situation fully, a disoriented blur of people rushed towards him in a frenzied state. Their words that shattered the silence slurred together, making it difficult for the injured motorcyclist to comprehend their urgent pleas.

Blood pooled around him, crimson droplets cascading from his torn right arm. A burning metallic scent filled his nostrils, intensifying his growing dizziness. The gravity of his injuries became painfully evident, and he teetered on the edge of consciousness. Time seemed to distort, elongating the seconds as his eyelids grew heavy, threatening to seal shut.

The group of concerned individuals who halted their cars and abandoned their own urgent agendas to rush to the man's aid and surrounded him. He saw their faces were etched with worry and urgency as their voices overlapped in a flurry of panicked conversations. The fallen biker strained to make sense of their words as he was fading in and out of consciousness.

"He's severed an artery!" exclaimed a man who appeared to be a delivery driver, his voice tinged with alarm.

Even through the intensity of his pain, the biker had one minor comfort: he could still feel his back as the gravity of the situation sent shivers down his spine.

A woman wearing a U of M sweatshirt broke through the crowd, offering a glimmer of hope. "I called 9-1-1, help is on its way!" Her words, laden with assurance, provided a semblance of comfort amid the turmoil. The biker held onto them tightly, clinging to the notion that help was imminent.

Through the cacophony of sound, a sense of collective concern echoed through the air. A slender man in a business suit was talking on his phone, expressing worry about the dense rush hour traffic, underscoring the urgency of the motorcyclist's dire condition.

"He's losing a lot of blood. Will the paramedics make it?" A young woman asked the highway patrol officer who had just arrived on the scene.

"Everybody step back and make room; the EMS unit is on the way." The officer commanded before turning his attention to the broken and bloody man on the side of the road.

"Sir, I've got an ambulance that will be here as soon as they can. I need you to stay awake until help arrives. Can you do that?" The officer's question went unanswered, from the biker who was drifting in and out of darkness was unresponsive.

The patrolman, who was now kneeling next to the biker's head made another attempt to get a response, "Sir, can you hear me? Can you tell me your name?"

Uncertainty hung heavy in the officer's words and cast a shadow of doubt over the fate of the biker.

Rising out of the chaotic scene, a man with a scruffy beard emerged from the sea of faces, his features marked by determination and compassion. Without hesitation, he cradled the broken man gently in his arms, providing a measure of solace as darkness encroached upon the bikers' vision.

In that fleeting moment, the biker emerged from his blackout long enough for their eyes to lock, and the bearded man's gaze communicated a silent reassurance that he would be okay.

Succumbing to the overwhelming pain and exhaustion, the biker caught one final glimpse of the bearded man. In that fleeting instant, the man's eyes sparkled with a mix of empathy and confidence. With a subtle wink, he conveyed a message of hope that resonated deep within this biker's fading consciousness.

'Sir, Are you okay? '

The world slipped away, swallowed by darkness, and he surrendered to the lull of unconsciousness.

▼▼▼

Everything was white, pure and beautiful. Nate thought 'this must be heaven' until his eyes began to focus, suddenly realizing that he was not in heaven, but his definition of hell; a cold, windy blizzard, and he was staring out of the windshield of an unfamiliar truck parked in front what appeared to be a gas station.

Dazed and confused, he exited the cab of the truck and traversed the hellish conditions and into the gas station.

"Sir...Excuse me, I'm talking to you. Are you okay or do you just want to stare at the cigarettes all night?" The clerk asked from behind the counter of the gas station.

"What, uhm...I..I don't know. Wait, where am I?" Nate asked with a confusing stutter.

"Welcome, you've been captured by my impulse shopping tractor beam and brought down to planet Earth. I am Robbie, ruler of all overpriced snacks and tobacco." The snarky clerk replied.

"Seriously, you don't have to be a dick," Nate said.

"Oh, in that case, you're in Colorado, the birthplace of legal marijuana. You should fit right in here, bud."

Nate wasn't bothered by the clerk's overly sarcastic response. What did bother him was the vision of a bearded man and the feeling that he was supposed to be someplace else.

"Now, are you going to buy anything, or do you want another bong hit before you make your decision?" The clerk asked.

"Yeah, give me a pack of..." Nate paused as he reached into his coat pocket and found a large knife and no money. "Uhm, never mind," he said as he left the store abruptly.

A confused Nate got into the truck and sped off. Suddenly, the sound of a siren and flashing lights illuminated the rearview mirror. Still bewildered, he didn't know what to do when suddenly three more patrol cars with lights flashing came to a screeching halt behind the truck. Three officers got out with their guns drawn, ordering Nate out of the vehicle. He paused, trying to wrap his head around the events that just seemingly transpired out of no- where.

"Exit the vehicle with your hands up!" One of the officers demanded.

Suddenly, Nate felt himself lose control of his body like someone or something was controlling it, and he was a remote viewer.

"They will have to kill me before I go to jail! "he said in words that didn't feel like his own. His vision started to get blurry as his body exited the vehicle and pulled the knife out of his pocket.

"Kill me!" He heard himself shout, "Do it!" and watched as his body, which he could no longer feel, while it raised the knife into the air. He heard a gunshot, and everything went dark.

CHAPTER TWO

Nate's eyes fluttered open, only to be greeted by a hospital room's sterile, fluorescent-lit environment. Confusion and despair washed over him as the reality of his situation set in.

The weight of his pain and suffering engulfed him, leaving him with an overwhelming desire to escape the torment that had become his existence.

"Sir, you were in an accident three days ago. You had surgery on your clavicle, and a steel plate was used to fuse the bone back together. However, you have been in a coma ever since. Can you tell me your name?" The nurse asked.

In a moment of raw vulnerability, he uttered the words he had kept hidden within the depths of his anguish, "Let me go. I want to die."

Those words, spoken in desperation, seemed to reverberate through the room, prompting a swift response from the medical team attending to him. Concern was etched across their faces as they discussed Nate's declaration. Determining that he posed a risk to himself, they made the difficult decision to have him committed for further evaluation and treatment.

When they told him of the plan to move him to a locked care facility after he was healed enough to be moved, he reluctantly agreed, knowing he was not going to allow this to happen.

Two weeks had passed since he awoke and uttered the words that would set him on the next forced roller coaster ride of his life; he was starting to notice a pattern of thought-less words that he would spout out that would result in some uncomfortable and uncontrollable event that would shape his future.

Words really are weapons, he thought as a sinking feeling began to grow in his abdomen and very soon engulfed him after the further realization of the people he had hurt with those empty, meaningless words.

But even at that moment, he couldn't allow himself to dwell on the past for even a moment longer; he had just overheard the nurses chattering outside his door that he was being moved to the facility tomorrow morning; it was time to spring his plan into action.

After determining his transfer to a locked facility, the hospital had a nurse sit-posted outside his room to monitor him for safety.

That day, he was to have his afternoon physical therapy session when he would be taken into a different room. During this time, the nurse on watch would take her break. That's when he would show them how much he had healed.

The physical therapist arrived on schedule, as the watch nurse greeted him and went on her break as usual.

"It's Lenny from PT here to help ya hop again!" the overenthusiastic man with the blonde ponytail would say every time he would enter the room.

"Can you hop in this wheelchair so I can take you to the PT room?" Lenny asked with a smile that was so large it was almost unsettling.

"I can't wait to show you how much I've progressed since we started, Lenny," Nate said wryly as he slid into the wheelchair.

Before they got to the door of the physical therapy room, Nate knew this was his chance. He hopped out of the wheelchair and ran full speed down the hall, spilling a medication cart and pushing past a confused doctor and his terrified nurse on his mad dash toward the emergency exit.

As he followed the signs to the stairwell, he could hear the calls for security over the intercoms; luckily, he didn't have many stairs to run down on the second floor. Not that it mattered anyway, considering he jumped over most of them.

As he exited the hospital and found his path to freedom was clear, he

had a brief moment of clarity in the chaos of the moment.

"What now?" he mumbled, thinking perhaps it was best to see what the psychiatric doctors could do for him; after all he was serious about wanting to die.

Just as he turned around to return inside the hospital, he was suddenly paralyzed with a pain that came from nowhere, causing him to collapse rigidly on the unforgiving concrete, where he began seizing. The last thing he saw was a hospital security officer and the taser he held right before losing consciousness.

CHAPTER 3

Transported to a psychiatric hospital, Nate found himself thrust into an unfamiliar world of clinical routines and therapeutic interventions.

With each passing day, the doctors prescribed a cocktail of medications to manage his mental health, including an anti-psychotic drug known for its potential side effects.

Little did Nate know that these medications would soon plunge him in- to a distorted reality and a nightmarish descent into a realm of terrible hallucinations.

As the days turned into weeks, Nate's psyche became a playground for his tortured imagination. The anti-psychotic drug brought forth a parade of strange and unsettling visions that defied comprehension.

One particular medication made him sleep all the time; every time he would fall into slumber, he would wake up in a jail cell.

But he couldn't move. He didn't have control over his body. He would just lay there and stare at the ceiling or the steel cell door for what felt like days until he fell asleep and was right back in the psychiatric hospital and able to move again. It was like he was awake twenty-four hours a day.

This made it nearly impossible to define what was reality and what was a dream.

In what he convinced himself to be his true reality, the lead doctor assured him that these visions were merely the result of his condition and not the medication he had been prescribed.

One particular slip back into the jail cell revealed another person was there with him. He was praising him for making the police shoot him. This instantly reminded Nate of something he brushed off as a dream sequence when he was in a convenience store in Colorado that ended in a police standoff when he blacked out as he heard what sounded like gunshots.

Could this be a continuation of whatever that was? He wondered.

Doing all he could to maintain his composure through the barrage of hallucinations that plagued his vision.

When he would go to the restroom at night and turn the light switch on, he would immediately see blood oozing from wounds on his face and from his eyes, or his face would appear to be missing his jaw. On what he deemed to be a calm day, he wouldn't dare to glance in the mirror to avoid seeing his distorting reflection transform into a grotesque caricature of a face too sinister to be his own. A face contorted with an otherworldly malevolence that seemed to lurk beneath the surface of his skin.

After a few instances of shouting for unseen people to shut up and leave him alone and the unwanted attention he received from the nursing staff, he managed to ignore the audible whispers which taunted him, calling his name in haunting whispers.

One night as he lay in bed drifting in and out of sleep to the echoes that reverberated through the corridors of his mind, until suddenly he was in the back of a police car with his hands and feet in shackles.

Like every other time, he was just an observer. He came up with a plausible theory for these episodes. When he was the observer, the stranger's body he was occupying was asleep in Nate's actual body. Lucky guy, He thought while wishing he could sleep.

All he could do was stare out the back passenger window that had bars on it. Silently and perplexed by these events.

Finally, the officer driving spoke, "Welcome to Curve County Correctional, which is where you will be calling home for the next few years, pending you make parole. I still cannot believe that the toughest judge in Colorado showed you mercy and dropped two counts of first-degree assault on a police officer with a possible sixty-four-year sentence into three years and a slap on the wrist. Excuse me, gunshot to the wrist. Ha-ha, forgive my un-sympathetic police humor." The officer's overtly haughty tone filling the police cruiser like a cloud of harsh smoke. "You're one lucky sum' bitch, Nathaniel."

Nate tried to ask how he knew his name, but he couldn't even make a grunt. Did the officer make a mistake? Could this person share the same name or even more troubling to think about was if the officer was aware that it was actually Nate who was looking through the eyes of this unknown shackled prisoner that he was transporting.

Each hallucination intensified Nate's fear, amplifying the torment that had brought him to the brink of despair. He couldn't even bring himself to speak to the doctors because his voice came out in choked squeaks like someone who was about to cry. He wished he could cry; he wished he could experience anything for even a brief moment that would alleviate just a little of the perpetual torment he was experiencing.

One day, while sitting in the common area of the psych ward while watching television, Nate felt an odd tenseness form in his neck, followed by his head uncontrollably rotating to the right, as if he was positioned to do so, like some living marionette controlled by an invisible entity acting as a puppet master. He tried to turn his head straight again, only to realize that he was powerless while his head uncontrollably turned back to looking over his right shoulder. Not understanding what was happening, he went to the nurses to show them what was going on, and they brushed it off as a cry for attention.

Weeks turned into months, and the involuntary neck movements had gotten worse; in addition, he had developed a problem with his tongue that would move around wildly and his mouth, which would open and close for no reason. This eventually got the attention of the lead nurse, who brought the matter to the Head Psychiatrist of the state hospital, Doctor Avell, or as the patients referred to him, Doctor Awful. He was given this nickname due to his foreign accent, bald head, and round spectacles. He had the appearance of a villainous scientist like you'd expect to see in the movies.

The doctor spoke of tardive dyskinesia, an incurable neurological disorder caused by long-term use of anti-psychotics, leaving Nate with a sense of hopelessness that eclipsed even his darkest moments.

Two of his three worst fears had come true. He had lost his freedom

and developed a permanent disability.

Every passing day seemed to bring new challenges, both physical and emotional.

It had been quite a while since his last perplexing trip to his prison dream. If there was one thing he learned through this maddening experience, it was to never believe that any problem would go away, and he was right.

The very night he thought about it, he fell asleep only to awaken in a prison cell.

This time, he was staring out of the narrow rectangular window to the right side of his bunk. Something was different this time; he felt like he could move and talk, so he tried.

"What is going on with me?"

His groan was answered by an unseen voice from the lower bunk.

"You drank too much hooch, bruh. Just keep staring out that window like you always do and keep your mouth shut when the C-O walks by for checks."

Suddenly a slender man in loose-fitting green coveralls ran into the room with a strange message, "Yo homey, B-Dup caught that Corona and got sick as fuck, Yo. They're taking his ass to the hospital."

"This prison has beer?" Nate asked the stranger.

"Shut the fuck up, bruh. He's talking about that C.O.V.I.D. shit that's all over the news. He ain't talking about no damn beer, pinche." The voice from the bunk below sounded more aggressive than before.

"What the hell is C.O.V.I.D.?" Nate asked; however, before he could get an answer, two large men stormed into the cell, shoving the skinny stranger aside and telling him to watch the door.

One of the men grabbed Nate from the top bunk and said,

"This is for getting us locked down last weekend, asshole!"

As fast as his head was smashed into the concrete wall, his eyes opened, and he was relieved to be back in his bed at the hospital.

This would be his final dream of being in prison.

He assumed the reason for this had likely been a result of