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Chapter 1

         Can you imagine what your own personal Hell would be like? I mean really picture it in your mind. I always thought it would be unimaginable torture of a physical nature. Something more along the lines of having my flesh torn from my bones, or burning in liquid metal while simultaneously reassembling for a horrific never ending experience of agony. Maybe I'm wrong about this, but I feel like most people have similar assumptions regarding Hades. How I wish I were correct. If I'd only known... I could only have imagined just how absolutely dead fucking wrong I really was, maybe I would've done things differently. I long for a chance to repent. To make things right. To beg for forgiveness for the err of my ways. Though I know deep within my soul that this is my exact comeuppance, I can't help but lament.
         Dying, for me at least, wasn't all it was cracked up to be. I didn't go peacefully in my sleep as I'd always hoped. Hell I'd have taken a car accident, a shooting, almost anything over this. I'd always heard about these clinical trials. How everyone made ridiculous amounts of money for seemingly nothing. The worst I'd heard about them was unseemly rashes. So I signed up. I waltzed right into that God forsaken office I wrote my name, phone number, address, and medical history down on that form with an idiotic smile on my face. I thought I would be getting an experimental vaccine, or maybe a pill regiment of some kind. What I hadn't prepared for was this Mary Shelly meets The Twilight Zone nightmare I find myself in now.
         I guess by this point, you're probably wondering what you've gotten yourself into. What exactly you're reading, or listening to, or whatever. I'm not really sure how my thoughts are being conveyed, as you will surely understand soon enough. After I got accepted for the trials, I was told to wait for a phone call. My memory is clouded to some extent, but what I do remember from that point is this. The call came, I was given an address and a time to appear there. I went, answered some questions, there was a LOT of redundancy in them, and the next thing I knew I was laying on a table. The nurse, her name was....Hope. I'd laugh if I still had the ability. She strapped my wrists and ankles down. It would've been hot, had I not been on the verge of shitting myself given the tray of needles sitting beside me. I recall the room was not unsimilar to that of your typical hospital operating room. Bright lights, sterile, the smell of unbearable cleanliness. I'm talkin' eat off the floor level clean.
         The last memory I have before...this...is that of Nurse Hope counting backwards from 10. By the time she got to 4 I was gone. Not dead yet, but not alive by any real meaning either. The drug cocktail they gave me, whatever it was, removed whatever I am now from what I was. Though I have no real understanding of what I am anymore, I remember myself. My name was Patrick, and for all intents and purposes I was your average neighborhood scumbag. I'd work at dead-end jobs, do whatever I could to get let go, collect unemployment, buy drugs, rise and repeat. My family had disowned me, and I was in a perpetual state of rock bottom. I always figured, this was coming. I always assumed that I wasn't going to be reunited with my grandparents, or my childhood dog Buddy when I crossed into the next life. Like I said, I just never really thought that Hell would be Hell.

Chapter 2

         So now that you have a brief overview of Patrick the Pathetic, I guess it's time to really delve into the madness that is my current state of existence. To introduce you to the consciousness that is speaking to you, in whatever way I am currently. I am...empty. Nothingness. I have no sight, no sound, no taste, or sensation of any kind. I just have my thoughts. I have no way of keeping track of the passing of time, so I'm not even going to venture a guess as to how long I've been trapped here. I don't know if I'm truly dead. For all I know, I'm in a coma. And these thoughts are just an internal monologue. Nothing more than a defense mechanism of my own invention to mitigate my psychosis. But from time to time I get these flashes. Like flipbook images coupled with bits of sound. Memories. Memories of my life spanning from birth till those last moments. And that's all I have to go by.
         From what I've gathered from these flashbacks, I believe that I am dead. But again, I can't be sure. The most vivid of these memories, begins with me laying on that table. Bound, needles in both arms, slowly drifting away. Nurse Hope counting down. Then darkness. After a while, it's as if I am viewing the world from outside my body. Though I'm not sure if I truly remember, or if it was just a dream or side effect of the drugs. In any case, the next "memory" I have is the most troubling of all. A man in blue scrubs and a face mask enters the room and stands before my inanimate vessel. He's equipped with surgical gloves, a scalpel, and... a saw? Yes. A small, electric saw. I remember the buzz. No pain, just warmth. Friction. He's cutting through my skull cap. Then with the scalpel, he's cutting...cutting my...back.

<TO BE CONTINUED>