TRAPPED

The Room

I — Before

I remember the hallway. That is always where it starts when .I reach back through the fog , the long  corridor of St. Maren's General, the one I had walked so many times that my feet knew its rhythm without instruction. The lights buzzed. They always buzzed, just slightly, just enough to sit at the back of your skull on a long shift. I was tired. I remember being tired. 

I remember reaching for my badge. And then, a sting. Precise and deliberate, at the back of my neck, just below the hairline. The kind of pain that is almost polite in how quickly it finishes. I turned or I tried to  and then my legs made a decision without me, and the floor came up, and the buzzing lights stretched into white, and I was gone. I did not dream.

II — The Room

The smell reached me first.

Cold. Antiseptic. Concrete left to its own company for a long time. I know that smell .  I work in a hospital, I live in that smell — but this was different. This was the smell without the warmth, without the movement of people and purpose that usually underlies it. This was the smell alone.

I tried to open my eyes. It took longer than it should have. The ceiling was concrete. A single bare bulb hung from a wire above me, casting light in that specific shade of yellow that does not illuminate so much as stain. I was on a floor. I registered that slowly , the hardness beneath my hip, the cold seeping through my red shirt, my blue jeans. I had not yet made it to the locker room. I had not yet changed into scrubs.

Then I felt it. The weight. Across my legs. Heavy and fixed and wrong. I lay there for what must have been nearly an hour, my mind refusing the information my body kept sending. Eventually, I sat up.

Chains.

Iron cuffs at both ankles, connected by a length of heavy chain to a loop welded into the base of a narrow metal bed. Hospital-style frame. A thin mattress I had evidently rolled from in my sleep. I stared at them. My hands were free. My legs were not. I looked around. Four walls, grey and bare. A door — solid, flat, no handle visible from my side. An opening to a bathroom: dark, silent. No window. Not one. No gap, no suggestion, no borrowed light from any world outside. I could not tell if it was morning or midnight. I could not tell if anyone knew I was missing. I could not tell anything at all, except that my throat was bone dry, my head was pounding, and I was chained to a bed in a room with no windows.

And someone was watching me.

I cannot explain it better than that. It was not a sound or a shape — it was a certainty, the kind that lives in the oldest part of your brain, the part that kept our ancestors alive. The back of my neck prickled. I turned toward each corner of the room in sequence. Nothing. No one. The room simply looked back at me, blank and patient.But the feeling did not leave.

I got to my feet. The chain allowed just enough slack to reach the door. I pressed my palm flat against it and pushed with everything I had. It did not move.

I knocked.

"Hello." My voice came out barely recognisable — dry, cracked, stripped of authority. "My name is Loyola Channing. I'm a nurse at St. Maren's General. I don't know where I am. I need help. Please, if someone is there, I need you to open this door."

Silence.

I knocked harder. The metal was unyielding and my knuckles split and I did not stop.

"HELP."

It came from somewhere deeper than my chest. I screamed it until it had no shape, until it was just sound and need and please .... please ......and I sobbed between the screams and pressed my forehead against the cold door and my throat shredded itself willingly because what was pain compared to this room, these chains, this silence? I clawed at the door frame. I screamed until my voice gave out and then I screamed in the register below voice, raw and broken, and still no one came. The watching feeling returned. Right between my shoulder blades. I spun around. Empty room. Still watching.

"PLEASE. SOMEONE HELP ME. PLEASE."

The lock turned.

III — The Way Out

The door opened inward. A man stepped through. Broad. Expressionless. He moved toward me like I was a task to be completed, without a word, without acknowledgment that I had just screamed myself hoarse in this room for God knows how long. A second man held position near the door frame, arms loose at his sides. I did not deliberate. I swung. I hit the first man with my open palm, then my fist, driving my elbow toward his face as he caught my wrist. We struggled. He was bigger than me. I was dizzy and dehydrated and the chain dragged at my ankles but I was terrified, and terror, I have learned, runs faster than reason.I saw the key. Small, on a short ring clipped to his belt, catching the yellow light.

I took it.

He lunged for it back. I drove it upward into his eye. He went down. The second man reached for his hip. I did not give myself time to process what I was seeing — I drove the key into his wrist, felt his grip release, and took what his hand had been holding. I fired once. I ran.

Corridor. Flickering lights. Another door. Then — air. Open, cold, real air. I could see the outside ahead of me, a clear opening, the edge of everything that had been done to me, and I ran toward it with every last thing I had, my red shirt burning like a signal flare . The impact came from the left. Metal and weight and then the ground, fast and final. Then nothing.

IV — The Room, Again

I open my eyes. The ceiling is concrete. The light is the color of a bruise.

My wrists, this time, are bound as well.

I lie still for a long time. I feel the watching. I always feel the watching.

I think: this is a mistake. This is someone's terrible mistake and when I explain it, when someone finally listens, it will be corrected.

I think: I am the victim here.

I close my eyes.

Epilogue — Channel 4, 8 A.M.

"Good morning. Our top story: authorities have named the suspect in Tuesday night's incident at St. Maren's General Hospital as Loyola Channing, 34, a registered nurse employed at the facility for six years.

"Channing is alleged to have administered a fatal overdose to a patient under her care — an act investigators believe was connected to a prolonged dependency on controlled substances taken from the hospital's secured pharmaceutical stores over a period of months.

"When attending physician Dr. Harlow intervened and administered a sedative after Channing became combative on the ward floor, she was moved to a secured room within the facility. Hospital security restrained her there pending police arrival, as per protocol for incidents of this nature.

"What followed, according to both police and hospital security, was a violent escape attempt in which Channing critically injured a hospital security officer and shot a responding police officer in the chest. She fled the building and was struck by a vehicle on the adjacent road."She is currently in stable physical condition at Ashmore Psychiatric Centre, restrained under psychiatric hold, pending formal charges of homicide, aggravated assault, and attempted murder of a law enforcement officer.

"The patient she is alleged to have killed has been identified as Marcus Webb, 61, a retired schoolteacher admitted for routine post-surgical recovery. His family has asked for privacy. Colleagues at St. Maren's say they are, in their words, 'completely devastated.' Channing had, by all accounts, been regarded as a dedicated and trusted member of staff.

"She leaves behind a hospital still in shock, two men fighting for their lives, and a family waiting to bury Marcus Webb.

"We will have further updates as this story develops."

IN a room with no windows, Loyola Channing opens her eyes.

She feels certain someone is watching.

She is right.

She always has been.