"Well, that didn't work."
I hear Sarah's voice through my headset as everything starts to come back to me.
What the fuck just happened? How was Sarah talking to me? She was dead. I saw her die. I was dead too, wasn't I? I remember everything. Waking up on the floor of the test room with a headache, going up to the cafeteria to get lunch, the attack, Sarah bleeding out on the floor, the pain of the bullets as they entered my body, my whole life flashing before my eyes. Was it all just a dream? How hard had I hit my head when the blast from the mirror knocked me back?
Maybe the mirror had worked and had shown me some alternate world, or maybe I was just imagining things. It had been a while since I had slept more than four hours at a time after all, so it could have all been some kind of crazy stress hallucination or something. It all felt so real, though, and I can remember almost every detail of it vividly.
I decide to just chalk it up to stress, file it in my brain under "horrible things to sort out later," and go about my business. I must be showing it on my face, though, because as soon as I step into the control room and take off my mask, Sarah asks me if something's wrong.
"I'm not sure. Something happened to me in there but I don't know what it was. I think that maybe the mirror might have actually worked."
Her face lights up and she rushes over to me, grabbing me by the shoulders.
"What?" She almost yells in my face. "You have to tell me exactly what happened."
It was hard enough to keep it straight in my head, let alone voice it out but I try my best.
"The mirror flashed and I got knocked out. I woke up and we went to lunch in the dining hall while we let the mirror cool down. Then some guys came in with guns and started shooting up the place. Then…"
I stop. Her eyes were wide but cautious.
"Then?" She asks, barely containing her anticipation.
How could I tell her what I had seen? How much of it would I need to leave out? Would it even matter if it was just a dream? I would certainly feel weird if someone told me that they had a vision of me getting brutally murdered. I decide that I may as well just come out and say it.
"Then I turned around and saw you lying on the ground. They shot you a few times and you were bleeding out. I made my way over to you but you were really hurt. I tried to run to the infirmary for help, but I didn't make it far. I got cornered by two of the attackers and they shot me. I felt all of it, and I swear it seemed so real at the time."
I put my hand on my chest where the bullets hit me. I can still feel a tinge of the phantom pain left behind from the wounds. I try to measure the look on Sarah's face. It's somewhere between stunned disbelief and shocked disapproval. I wait for her to say something, anything, to help me make sense of what happened.
She speaks up.
"You're fucking with me, right?"
I frown.
"No. Why would I make something like that up?"
She punches me lightly in the arm. "Because you're a dick, and you want to get back at me for making you be the one in the containment room."
"I'm telling you the truth," I try and explain,. "Maybe what happened wasn't real. Maybe it was a dream or something that I had when I hit my head, but I didn't just make it up to mess with you. It was horrifying."
"You hit your head?" She asks.
"You didn't see what happened?" I return.
She shakes her head almost the exact same way as before.
"I was looking at the console monitor when it happened. I…"
"Saw the flash and when I looked up you were getting up off of the floor," I finish. This is too much to be a coincidence.
"How did you do that?" She asks, confused.
"No fucking way," I mutter as I take a step back. "You said that exact same thing to me last time, word for word."
She gives me a look that I've seen hundreds of times over the years. She still doesn't believe me. I can't even bother with that. This is all too much. It's real, or at least the things that I saw were real. But how could that be me? The mirror was supposed to let us see into other worlds, not be in them. This doesn't make any sense, nothing makes sense. I say the first thing that comes to mind.
"I need to get out of here. This is all a little bit too much. Even if it is just some crazy coincidence, which it probably is, I need to get some air. Do you want to come with me up to the surface? I've got a few passes left over from last month that I haven't used yet."
She still looks worried, but whether it's because she believed me, or because she thought that I was going crazy, I didn't know.
"Sure," she finally says. "I could go for something outside the cafeteria, and we have to let this thing cool down for a few hours before we try again either way. Let's do it."
We walk through the doors and the security checkpoint and head down the long hallway to our dorms to grab the surface passes and change into our street clothes. When I get into my room I go to the bathroom and took a long look in the mirror. I splash some water on my face and try to convince myself again that none of it was real. I tell myself to keep calm and that it never happened over and over in my head like a mantra. Once the still-freezing spring breeze hits my face, I'll snap out of it. I've just spent too much time in the lab, right?
I meet back up with Sarah at the elevator and we step in. I press the button for the first floor and swipe both of the passes when it prompts me. They were a pain in the ass to come by, and I was saving them for a special occasion, but I have to get out of these endless, sterile hallways and breathe.
We start going up in the elevator and I keep repeating the mantra to myself. Then suddenly, we stop. My heart sinks into my chest. Sarah looks at me. I think she's waiting for me to say something.
I press the intercom button quickly, probably a little harder than I need to. I'm starting to panic. I start repeating my mantra out loud while we waited for a response.
"Don't worry, it never happened. Don't worry, it never happened."
Over and over and over. The more I say it, the more it'll be true.
Sarah grabs my arm.
"Can you chill out, please? You're freaking me out. Just calm down. I'm sure everything's fine."
Before I can say respond, someone finally comes through the intercom.
"What's happening?" Sarah asks.
"The building is in lockdown." The voice says. "There's been some kind of attack on the lower levels."
Everything that is happening around me at that moment ceases to matter. The mantra failed. It was real, all of it. This can't be happening.
"Fuck," I say, under my breath.
"Fuck, fuck, fuck," I say louder as I put my back against the wall and slide down to the floor.
Sarah looks down at me. She must be nearly as shocked as I am.
"This is impossible," she says, slowly. "The mirror worked, or at least it did…something."
I barely hear her. Fear grips my heart and clouds my mind. I'm lost to the world. Sarah gets down on the floor and sits beside me. She wraps her arms around me and tries to comfort me.
"Think about it this way," she says, "maybe what happened was real. Maybe somewhere out there we got caught up in all the mess and died downstairs, but that was a different us. Maybe when you came back and gave us the chance to escape, you changed history. Hell, you probably saved both of our lives!"
I hadn't thought about that. I got us out of there in time. I may have actually, literally, changed history. The horror is still unfolding below us, but this time we aren't in it. Sarah isn't lying in a pool of her own blood, and I'm not moments away from getting blasted by assault rifles. If anything, this was the best-case scenario.
"Maybe you're right," I say, my voice still a little weak. "Maybe everything will be fine."
And of course, as soon as I say that, the elevator starts to creak. Sarah and I lock eyes as we hear something rumbling below us, most likely from an explosion of some kind. Then, we're in free-fall. My head smashes into the ceiling and I lose my grip on Sarah. The tumble down to the bottom only lasts for a few seconds, but it feels like an eternity. I have just enough time to realize the absurdity of the situation that I'm in.
I'm about to die for the second time in less than an hour. How many other people could say that outside of a hospital? Then, something even worse occurs to me just before I hit the ground. What if I have to go through this again? That thought is almost as horrifying as the fact that I'm about to be smashed to bits. It's the last thing that goes through my head before the ceiling of the elevator does, and then, once more, I'm thrust violently into darkness.