The Cost of Living Read online

  Feeling slightly drowsy, she fought sleep just long enough to see the distorted figure of the goat-nurse depart from her room.

  The eyeless goat came to her regularly after that initial encounter. Whenever Erin came round from her disturbed, chemical-induced slumber, she would try to move each of her limbs. If there was enough of a twitch as a result, the immediate stinging sensation of the multiple cannula needles digging around beneath her skin would make her stop.

  The feeling usually began to return to her body like this just before the 'nurse's' visits. Her thoughts would become more lucid too.

  Sometimes, when the creature was finished attending her and topping up the administered substances in her intravenous bags, it would do things to torment Erin's motionless body. On two occasions it had cut her numb flesh then rubbed its hands in the blood that showed on her skin. She had tried in desperation to move her arms, but could do nothing but watch it helplessly. Other times, it wouldn't administer the numbing agent to Erin until after it had finished slicing her flesh.

  Each time, she was never sure of what might happen, powerless to stop any of it, unable to move, and unable to scream.

  It wasn't always the goat either; some visits would be made by something else. One time they just made her watch, for hours. Two creatures in grubby white lab coats brought different live animals into her room and slaughtered them over her bed. Tears formed in her eyes that she couldn't blink away due to the eye-opener devices they had forcibly fitted to her face. These also made sure that she was also unable to close her eyes or simply look away. That particular time, her bed linen had not been changed for a day or two afterwards. Erin had been left lying beneath their drying blood, the sheets glued onto her skin as clots hardened where they had fallen and blood pooling between her legs where it had soaked through the sheets.

  It was permanently night here, no light ever showed at the window. Erin was no longer able to tell the horror of her reality and her own visceral dreams apart, but she knew now that the man in the fedora that had come to her front door had merely been a distraction. Whilst he kept her occupied, another person had entered her home, gutted her dog, and drugged her. There was little in this place that she was sure of, but she felt certain that those events in her memory had indeed all been real.

  She had witnessed horrific acts and endured all manner of mental torture in the indeterminable time that she had been in this place. None of the things that came to attend to her or torment her ever spoke a word, she hadn't heard another person's voice since the disembodied welcome on that first day.

  Having no idea where she was, or what the purpose of it all was, Erin could only conclude that she must be in some sort of demon dimension, if not Hell itself. Had she really been that bad in her life so far as to end up here, in this seemingly eternal torment at the tender age of twenty-three?

  Erin awoke from yet another nightmare. In the last few days, or maybe even weeks, violent and terrifying visions had haunted her waking hours as well as her slumber; though she struggled to determine which was which through the drug-induced haze in which her mind seemed to permanently reside.

  Hearing the sound of a door gently closing, Erin forced her eyes to look up with rising dread. It was back.

  The goat had arrived, with a bowl and a cutthroat razor. It pulled out the stool from under her dressing table and dragged it to the bed, where it sat with the bowl on its lap. Long fingers slowly dragged back Erin's bed sheets, exposing the pale skin of her legs. As usual, she could do nothing but watch, screaming out in her head for it to leave her alone. It opened the razor, the limited light in the room glinting off the cruel metal surface. The goat turned its sightless head towards Erin's face, as though watching her intently, whilst it lowered the blade and pressed it to her thigh. It put enough pressure on to make the flesh near it pale, stopping just short of actually piercing the skin. Erin was utterly terrified. This is it, she thought, and she could only imagine what the cool steel should feel like against her skin as her body tried to tremble.

  The goat-nurse stroked the razor over her flesh as goosebumps began to appear. Abruptly, it threw its head back around to face Erin's thigh and began to scrape the edge of the blade in long, sweeping motions over her leg. It would stop every now and then and dip the razor in the bowl. Is it... shaving my legs? Erin wondered incredulously. That did, indeed seem to be what it was doing, but each swipe of the metal against her flesh made Erin flinch, or at least go through the motions in her brain, waiting for the one stroke that would slice through her flesh right down to the bone. It never came.

  Drenched in sweat from the tension in her body, Erin's tears flowed freely as the goat lifted the bowl off its lap and stood. It reached again for the bed sheets and scraped them roughly back over Erin's still-damp skin before stepping backwards away from the bed.

  After a few minutes of standing stationary, head facing in her direction, the goat rushed forwards and leaned down right into her face. She could feel its breath across the bridge of her nose as she tried her hardest to screw her eyes tightly shut, struggling against the effects of the last dose of paralysing drug before the latest administered dose kicked in. After a minute or so she felt it lick her cheek. Its long tongue felt desperate as it connected with the area at the side of her mouth and finally flicked away from her when it reached her temple. Then Erin heard the sound of retreating footsteps, the sensible footwear squeaking quietly as the creature walked. With the closing of the door hiding the exiting goat-person from view, she knew that the latest horrors were over and she was finally able to relax her muscles. Wait, that shouldn't happen. The paralysis that usually caged her seemed to be fading, her thoughts not as hazy as she had become accustomed to. Hearing a faint dripping noise, she managed to turn her head slightly and looked at the intravenous bag holding a clear liquid. As she watched, the liquid was slowly, almost imperceptibly draining from the leaking bag.

  Her gaze moved down the tube to its lowest point where it looped back up to enter her cannula. Clear liquid was suspended in a drop on the outside of the tubing, beneath which a steady flow of rapid drips was falling to the floor.

  Within another few minutes, Erin had gained enough motor control to shakily remove the needle that was feeding her from her right hand. Another was nestled in the crook of her left elbow, a constant stream of blood syphoning away through the tubes that were attached. She pulled this one out faster in disgust, holding two fingers to her skin to stem the blood flow from her open vein. She slowly managed to sit up on the bed, desperate to move around but conscious of the fact that moving too quickly might cause her to pass out, and that the last thing she wanted was to do something stupid like fall off the bed and bleed out through the hole she was currently applying pressure to. When she felt ready, Erin steadied herself with one hand on the headboard, and stood up off the bed. Legs shaking, she stooped to where the bloodied cannula lay on the floor and followed the attached tubing behind her bed to find that it disappeared into the wall of the room. Christ, what is that for? A blood offering to some all-powerful being? Something worse than those beasts that I have seen already? She shook the horrifying images away.

  Erin's thoughts were clearer now and focused on just one thing; escape. She attempted to yank open the door to her prison, but her weakened muscles meant that it was more of a gentle tug. Once it was open wide enough for her to step through, what lay before her confirmed that Erin had not been in her bedroom at all. She was standing alone in a stark corridor, dozens of doors leading off on both sides. A grubby, off-white lab coat hung on a hook outside the door that she had just come through, contrasting the cleanliness of the white walls and floor. Next to it, hanging floppy and unthreatening was a mask adorned with what appeared to be real animal hair. Erin turned it around to examine it and was faced with black, eyeless sockets. The goat-person. It isn't really a goat-person at all, just a person! A sick, sadistic person.

  Each other door that Erin could see also had its own hook wit
h a coat and animal head mask on. Creeping along as silently as she could, she saw that there was a window to go with each door. Curiosity got the better over her survival instinct and she cautiously peered around the edge of one of the windows. Inside was a fully furnished bedroom, completely different in taste to her own, but with the same level of detail. A motionless figure lay in a bed at one side of the room as Erin had done. An IV fed one arm, and tubing came from the other, the dark red substance inside flowing out of the rear wall as her own blood had in her room. Each window she passed revealed a similar scene; more captives. Both sexes, all races, but all young, with each 'bedroom' different.

  For the first time since Erin had been here, she could feel her heart hammering in her chest; the numbness now completely subsided. Has it been beating this fast the whole time? She doubted that it had ever worked so hard in her life so far. She heard a door open ahead, and a nurse with the head of a pig entered the corridor from one of the rooms. It was dragging the body of a young Hispanic man out by his feet. Its face was turned away from Erin so she ran clumsily, her bare feet just quiet enough to be imperceptible moving over the cold floor tiles.

  She tried the first door that she came to without an accompanying window. Please, please, please be unlocked, she willed. Leaning on the door, she slowly turned the handle. The door wobbled a bit, but didn't immediately open. Glancing back at the approaching figure, it appeared to be about to turn around. Erin mustered all her reduced strength and managed to push hard enough. She cheered internally as the door gave way from its frame beneath her weight and almost fell out of the corridor into the next room.

  Inside, her eyes took a moment to adjust to the warm light cast by the bulbs in the room after stumbling in from the glare of fluorescents in the white corridor behind her.

  The room was a disorganised office, with paperwork scattered across a couple of desks. A number of photographs and notes hung precariously on a pin board on the wall opposite the desks. Erin moved closer, running her shaking fingers over the images of the various sleeping faces, youth the only visible common factor. Each photograph had an accompanying serial number, and a three-digit number, possibly a room number. Are there really hundreds of people held here?

  A noise in the corridor behind her reminded Erin suddenly of the urgency, the approaching animal-nurse could be headed to this exact room. She turned to check the desks for keys or access passes, and anything that could be used as a weapon. As she searched, the scattered papers caught her eye. A photograph at the top of what looked like a personnel file was of a young, Hispanic male. The man that had just been dragged from his room and out into the corridor. The file listed his 'talent' as golf and had the words 'USED UP' stamped across it.

  Intrigued, Erin began to look through the other papers in the office. She uncovered a memo from the 'Research Department' to a team called 'Donor Care'. Forgetting the seriousness of her plight for a moment she read its summary.

  'It has been found that effects of the treatment are particularly potent when the harvested blood is rich in adrenaline. We recommend achieving this by keeping all donors in a constant state of heightened fear. Research from our other centre has suggested that a subject's fear is amplified when the threat they experience is in familiar surroundings, and the feeling of violation is strong alongside the torment.'

  Erin lifted her gaze from the text, 'familiar surroundings', that explains the efforts to replicate my bedroom so closely. Her mind racing, she spotted flashing lights in her peripheral vision, and whipped her head around to find the source. There was another door to the office with a thin glass strip in it. On the other side of the glass Erin could see an array of machines with flashing lights and screens. Stepping closer, she stared into the dimly lit room. About a dozen beds were laid out in two rows running the length of what looked like a medical laboratory. Almost all of the beds were occupied by seemingly unconscious bodies that appeared to be being monitored by the flashing machines.

  Pausing a few moments to be sure, Erin decided that the lab was empty, and slowly pushed the door open. It was silent inside but for the whir of fans in the monitoring equipment and a low hum from an extractor fan. There was a strong clinical smell in the room, the smell of bleach and cleanliness, not quite managing to disguise the underlying stench of human excrement. These people, patients, have basic bodily needs, and are obviously held here long term. Someone will likely be in soon to tend to them. I can't stay.

  Erin didn't waste any time in closing the door behind her as stealthily as she could manage. She spotted another exit at the far end of the room, and began to creep along the central walkway between the two rows of beds. She stopped after passing the first four people, curiosity getting the better of her once again, and grabbed an observation chart from the nearest bed. Her eyes widened as she read. Throwing the chart back into its position, she rushed to the bed opposite to see that chart. After checking the third chart too, there was no escaping this new horror. These people are being experimented on.

  Each of the test subjects was wired up with tubes in a slightly different manner to the next, all in order to investigate, according to their charts, the best 'delivery method' of human blood into their systems. The researchers were attempting to determine which methods produced the strongest results, as well as the longest lasting results, and the 'shortest time to present observable change'. There was no mention of exactly what these desired 'results' or 'changes' were.

  Erin ran past the last few test subjects, one whose body was jerking in gentle spasms, likely because of the chest-tube that disappeared into her open mouth, a steady stream of dark liquid visible in the tube. As she stood waiting by the door, checking beyond it as best she could for any signs of movement, she did her best not to look at the subject directly in front of her, whom she had noticed had a thin tube, presumably delivering blood, taped across his cheek and inserted into the inner corner of his eye socket.

  A speaker above Erin's head came to life with a quiet hissing noise before a voice came clearly through it. 'Staff announcement; the front-of-house area is now closed. All medical staff should now attend to their donors and test subjects.'

  Erin knew that either she or at least her absence from her room would soon be discovered. No matter how daunting her escape attempt felt, she knew she couldn't just sit around here and risk being found. I will not accept a fate like this. Squeezing her eyes closed for a moment, she took a deep breath then yanked the door open.

  She was greeted with a new corridor. She looked in both directions for a clue of which way to go and spotted a 'fire exit' sign. That will do. She followed the signs until they led her to a door that opened onto a set of stairs leading down. On the other side of the door she pushed open at the base of the stairs were plush hallways, comfy-looking sofas and sales posters. She read them to herself as she padded further away from the stark corridor of horrors: 'Youthful blood infusions help keep the mind sharp,' they read. 'Regular infusions have been found to reverse the signs of ageing, giving your skin and muscles a new lease of life.' Then Erin read the worst one; 'Full transfusions of adrenaline-rich blood can even transfer natural talents.' But a full transfusion would kill someone. This must be what happened to that man being dragged along the corridor.

  Reaching a dimly lit sales floor, Erin suddenly came face-to-face with the man that had knocked on her front door before this nightmare started. Once her initial terror had subsided she saw that it was just a poster. It declared him 'a visionary,' responsible for 'the best cosmetic discovery since Botox.'

  Erin turned away from the picture, and saw a wall covered with posters featuring photos of young people. She browsed their faces until she was met with her own. A large photo of Erin peacefully sleeping, stared back at her from a poster. Directly underneath the photo was a serial number, her name had not been used at all. Below that it stated;

  "Talent: Concert Pianist.

  Price per half pint: £5,000.

  Full transfusion: £120,0
00."

  Understanding hit Erin. A blood factory, their lives for sale. The horror that she had witnessed in the past few days carefully orchestrated to keep her precious blood supply adrenaline-fuelled to order.

  "I'm a bad person," said a voice behind her. Spinning round she saw the man declared as 'a visionary'. "A very bad man. I'm going straight to hell. I've a one-way ticket, but at least I'll be rich during my time on this earth, which is possibly forever," he grinned at Erin. Petrified, she tensed to take flight but before she could make her move she felt the sharp scratch of a hypodermic needle in her shoulder. Her thoughts instantly clouded over to darkness.

  When Erin regained a slight awareness, she was being held halfway between waking and sleep. Conscious enough to see that she was back inside her false room. The IV and blood tubing had both been reconnected and she lay paralysed, inwardly wailing in despair. As she lay on that bed once again, she couldn't decide which future would be worse; the days and weeks of torment to come, or the bleak prospect of being purchased by a stranger for a 'Full Transfusion' service.

  As she contemplated this, her thoughts were interrupted by the arrival of a goat-headed nurse, a scalpel glinting at its side.

  ###

  The origins of The Cost of Living

  So, not my usual choice of genre to write, but what started as an exercise at a writing group yielded the start of this story, and I wanted to follow it through. I hope that you enjoyed the end result, and if you did, please take a minute to rate or review it either on the site that you downloaded it from or on Goodreads.