The Quiet Afternoon

A muffled bang, running footsteps leaving a rich fragrance of panic behind them. And then, nothing.
Somebody must have drawn some thick curtains closed, for the world had turned pitch black around J. An excruciating pain tightly embraced the back of his head. Something had gone wrong. He could not remember which side of the vast hallway he was facing before he collapsed. There was nothing left to be heard but the thumping of his blood in his left ear. He could sense he was alone, more than he had ever been, a shapeless presence in a colorless void. Yet, D Must be somewhere around.
But his legs failed him. He could not feel them.
He started to pull himself across the cold smooth floor with his shivering arms, like he would a heavy bag. Like he would a corpse. The pain seared across his neck, a hug from behind. He wished he was going the right way, he wished he could tell which way he was going. Something warm and moist had leaked underneath his collar. Monsters spitting at him from the ceiling, he reassured himself. Space was not like it should have been. Without sight, there was no possible representation. Not the one he was used to.
The air smelled of metal and medicine. Numbers started dancing before him in the dark: self-solving equation, lethal calculation extending toward infinity, synaptic discharges with a reason of their own. He knew it meant something. He thought it did. But the figures scattered. And he remembered. He stretched out his arms again, weaker with every crawl. The floor hardly had any texture, as if matter changed or melted when nobody could see it. And suddenly, his fingers clasped something else.
The pain was gaining his whole spine, absorbing it, absorbing him.
There was cloth under his fingertips. Skin also. Still warm. But he could sense he was alone. His own deconstructed, uneasy breath alone processed the air in the hallway.
J no more felt pain. Just a cold anesthetic sensation into which he diluted with apprehensive comfort.
Something had gone wrong, said the numbers, blocking his annihilated sight again. Very wrong indeed, asserted giant clockworks of unearthly complexity, oiled and cogged like a chainsaw, sharp hedged like wheels of lancet, perfectly paced machine with a mission to complete that, he thought with a desperate sense of revelation, he could almost feel under his fingertips. But he soon was doubtful he could make the difference between wheels, numbers, floor, cloth, skin, and monster spit anymore, for all coagulated, necrotized, tear itself, went slippery, subtracted into nothingness, unwound its spring into the unfathomable darkness that comprised him more and more, as every path in his nervous system was disabled one by one. The thump in his left ear turned out of beat, and grew fainter.
J deposited his head with D’s arm. It was ok.

Two corpses laid next to each other in the sunbathed hallway. Male. Caucasian. Two sleeping kittens in the quiet afternoon.

Soundtrack: "Augmatic Disport", Autechre