When I woke up on that hospital bed, the first thing that came to mind was the red car suddenly appearing around the corner, and my motorcycle crashing and bursting into flames near a lamp post. I remembered the endless flips in the air and finally the painful crash against the wet asphalt. Then the darkness.
I got up from the bed and looked down at my feet. I was expecting to find my body covered in a cast, but was surprised to find that I didn't even have a cast on my arm. I had miraculously emerged from the accident unscathed, and my head hardly hurt, though I felt more dizzy than anything else. I turned my gaze to the window; Although the blinds were closed, I assumed it must be night, because the hospital was calm and the usual bustle of a sanatorium was not heard during the daytime hours.
"It seems like a lucky accident," said a voice to my right. I looked in that direction, and saw an old man lying on the neighboring bed, reading a book. I said yes, it probably had, and then asked if he knew how to call the nurses.
"It has a bell there on the side," said the old man, with surprised gestures. Does something hurt?
-No, but I'm thirsty. Very thirsty. Have I been here long?
-I have no idea, friend. They brought me in this morning, and you were already in the room.
I rang the bell several times, but the nurse never showed up. I was really dying of thirst, so I got up and went to the bathroom and drank water from the tap. When I returned, the old man seemed asleep and his body was floating, like a balloon, about eighteen inches from the bed. He began to convulse, and when he opened his eyes I saw that they were in blood and his face was grimacing with pain or suffering. I left the room and closed the door behind me, my heart racing in my chest. At that moment, down the long hallway of the ward, a patient was walking leaning on a tripod. Her robe was open and there were things moving on her back; he turned to look at me, and his face was an eyeless skull. I ran in the opposite direction and found the nurses' room at the end of the hall.
There was no one there, although it struck me that the place was so dirty and untidy, as if it had not been used for years. Some tiles had fallen off the walls, and the desk was covered in dust and chunks of masonry from the ceiling. Before my bewildered gaze, the place grew more and more ancient, the walls became covered with mold, the ceiling lights flickered and then went out, more pieces of masonry fell and some glass from the windows exploded inwards with a shrill chirp. I kept running and came across a ladder: I hurried down it as I sensed that the entire hospital was shaking on its foundations, as if it were going to collapse at any moment. I finally found my way out and pounced on it. I ran a few meters at night and then stopped and looked back, but my surprise was complete to discover that there was no hospital there, only a field covered with grasslands as tall as men.
I walked a few steps down the deserted street, not knowing what to do. Immediately I ran into the neighborhood watchman who, taking refuge in his booth, was trying to light a cigarette.
"Man, you don't know what I just saw," I said with a trembling voice. The watchman paid me no attention, so I kept walking. Two blocks later I ran into a group of people gathered in the street. When I got closer I saw the red car wrecked, and my motorcycle a mess of twisted iron on the sidewalk. There was an inert body on a stretcher, bathed in the flashing lights of the ambulance. I got closer in time to see my bloodied and disfigured face, the eyes already lifeless, before one of the paramedics covered it with a sheet.