Ishmael suddenly regained consciousness, but he was no longer in the office of Nicholas Swister. In fact, he wasn't anywhere that he'd ever been before. At least, he didn't think he'd been there before.
He found himself in a dark room that appeared to be flooding. He felt something flowing from his head so naturally he put his hand up to feel what it was.
RED.
His hand was painted with a red coat of something which he guessed to be blood. When he looked down at the liquid that had flooded the room, he realized that it too was his own blood. Until this moment, Ishmael wasn't aware he had that much blood in him.
He looked around the room to see if he could find some kind of answer to the predicament that he had found himself in. He wandered from wall to wall looking the concrete slabs up and down until he found a small yellow sticky note. He grabbed it and attempted not to bleed on the words. As he raised the note to his face, he discovered that it said the following: "Please pull out the plug at the center of the floor to drain your blood from the room"
The message's origins confused him, but he decided to follow its instructions. He wasn't in the mood to disobey, after all disobedience had put him into this situation in the first place. Against his better judgement, he took the dive into the murky blood pool.
As his hands and knees entered the slightly viscous liquid, he couldn't help but wonder: was he dead? I mean it made all the sense in the world. How many people can survive a brick to head? He took a moment to try to think of one person who had survived what he had and the only one was Marv in Home Alone 2, though he suspected that movies weren't the most reliable source of things that human beings can survive on.
What would it matter if he was dead? If he was dead, he wouldn't have to go to work tomorrow! But he also would never find out what happened to his runaway partner or his clown sister. He would never get to give Mr.Swister the talking to he deserved. So, there were ups and downs to the "I'm dead and this is the afterlife" theory.
After a few minutes of contemplating and running his hand against the concrete floor, something grazed his hand. It felt almost like the cork of a champagne bottle. He moved his hand back to where he had felt the sensation and grabbed onto the item that had done the unprovoked grazing. He was slightly impressed at how spot on his champagne guess had been as the thing plugging up the room did seem to be a cork of some kind. He latched his fingers to it and attempted to pull it out only to find that it was lodged in tight. He rethought his plan of attack and moved into a squatting position.
He began to pull and even felt a slight movement, but the blood on the cork made it quite slippery and he ended up going ass over the tea kettle. For a moment, he laid on the ground and attempted to think of another strategy. Then the perfect plan came to him.
This exact sequence of events happened on repeat for about 6 hours. A conga line of "perfect" ideas seemed to march out of his brain in a similar manner to the blood that oozed out of the gaping wound in his cranium. After a particularly embarrassing failure, he was over whatever this riddle was. Removing his suit jacket, he took it and began to beat the cork with it. This continued for ten minutes before in a state of utter rage, the 29-year-old man started to jump up and down like a very fussy child.
However, in his rage he failed to realize how the room seemed to bounce with him. The walls of the room began to push outward as the blood on the floor bubbled with the intensity of a million cans of fizzy water. As Ishmael came down for his final stomp, the room filled with an anticipation of sorts.
The moment the heels of his feet touched the floor, a pop rang out. An immense force hit Ishmael directly in the cranium and knocked him back into the wall. A whirlpool formed in the middle of the room as all the blood rushed out at once. Ishmael touched his forehead to see what had hit him. As ran his fingers along his skull, once again he felt a cork like sensation against his finger once more and it just so happened to occupy the space that the gash like sensation once had.
"What a stroke of luck."
Though the idea of having a cork in his head wasn't an idea that thrilled him, no longer bleeding out was. He looked at the floor which was now lacking much of the blood that had given it so much personality. The draining seemed to slow a bit for some reason. When looked into, Ishmael discovered a small crumpled up piece of paper that had likely been white at some point, but now was a brutal red hue. As he uncrushed the note, he noticed that the words on the page seemed less like they were written and more like they just happened to occupy the space that blood didn't. The white voids spelled out a simple enough instruction.
"Look behind you"
Ishmael quickly spun around and to his amazement, a heavenly white door had appeared on the wall in front of him. The door had a small engraving on it that very politely asked him to enter. For a moment he considered if this might be some kind of trap being played on him by an evil entity. Eh, what difference did good and evil make to him at this point. He accepted the polite doors offer, as he thought that suffering eternal torment would at least be a hell of a lot more interesting than sitting in a concrete cell for all of eternity.
As he stepped through the door, his eyes were hit by powerful rays of pure sunshine. He took a moment to allow his eyes to readjust and as they did, he began to make out a silhouette. He rubbed his eyes one last time and then gazed upon the person who he was sharing a room with and what he saw was, well.
Me.