My last memory had been that of being thrown off my feet by the explosion at the factory. I remembered how cold the water felt on my knotted hair – but after that was nothingness.

Dark. Cold. Alone.

Occasionally I felt waves of pain in my left arm and flickers of consciousness, but these were like split seconds of time and my mind was unable to make sense of it.

In between these snippets of reality I stood in a desert surrounded my nightmarish visions of Deacon and mutilated bodies – and the blood, how it curled round in circles and ravaged everything in its path. At one point a snake-like tentacle of blood began to curl around Deacon’s ankle and I almost shouted but was terrified of alerting it to my presence.

Just as this whole bloody thing couldn’t have got any weirder, Claire suddenly appeared in a bed next to Deacon. The bed was floating in the blood and tendrils were reaching up the bed posts, slipping and failing to grip. She rolled over to look at me and sat up, her gaze looked as though she was half aslseep or something.

“Look past it all Ray.” She said in a haunting, un-natural monotone voice.

“Are you OK? What are doing out here in the middle of the desert?” I asked, ignoring her words.

“Don’t worry about me, I am fine. You need to look past it all Ray. Look past it.” She repeated.

I strangely became upset and then suddenly a vicious man who reminded me of a Terminator machine came racing toward me with a bucket of ice. He stopped short of me and tipped the bucket, launching the contents at my face.

I was jolted awake.

“Who the fuck are you, man?” A violent voice shouted from the darkness. I looked through the melted ice and blood matting my hair and caught a glimpse of some turning headlights casting temporary light into the room I was in.

I was in an old, grim-looking motel room. The darkness returned and a sudden horror gripped me; I was in the motel I had visited so safely weeks earlier. I had been right after all.

Then quickly more pain embraced me.
The beating had begun…

RDK