Caleb glanced down to the small key in his hand. It was appropriately sized, and he knew it would unlock all the doors of all the hallways - and there were people still here. Did he abandon them to their fates, or did he leave them? It was his choice. It was an easy choice to make on the surface? If he unlocked every cage, he would be heralded as a hero, and loved by all. If he let them rot, they would not know any better. But why should he release them? Caleb glanced back at the straw-berry haired girl. He could not understand why there was such a need for haste. They could walk and they would face the same amount of difficulties as they did if they ran. If they walked, they could conserve their strength - he hadn't eaten in years, and he could not remember what the flood of strength from eating had felt like. There were pills ground up into his food. They thought that he couldn't seen the chunks of the capsules amongst the mush of creamed corn - the over cooked string beans and applesauce. No, he could see them. He had not been blind then. The chunks of pills that he hadn't eaten, the hunger that had first hurt, and then subsided to a dull ache. No more need for food. No more need for any sort of human life. He hadn't felt a need to eat, he hadn't felt the desire too anymore. He loved apples in spring, he loved hot showers and chips with salt and vinegar. He -had- loved those things, really. But he had denied himself his humanity, and left something else in its wake, a void filled by Arthur Prince. He glanced down at the key. What would be the human thing to do?
There were code-pads in addition to the keys. He'd memorized his own dial-tone. His number was Two-Two-Three-One. He knew what sounds his door had made. he had never escaped because there had never been a reason to leave. There was sometimes a discussion that they were going to release him, send him to someplace that could remedy his facial affliction. But they never had. Caleb slowly began to understand that this was his fate. His disease was not simply the product of events, all leading up to become his fate. One thing begot the next. A man has a weakness. Man is flawed. That flaw lead him down the path of guilt. The guilt leads him into the waiting arms of shame. The shame, he will compensate with pride and vanity. And when pride fails, despair will crash over him like a wave. I will be set adrift on the sea, reaching out a grasp a woman's hand, a hand that is no longer there, knowing that destruction is ahead. It will become his fate. And perhaps, he thought to himself, he had stayed out of some karmic because he wanted to punish himself. He knew that he was responsible for killing his father. he had seen his blood on the bowie knife that he had used to slaughter him with. Or had that been his blood? Did it even matter anymore? Caleb stared at the key. The human thing would be to run but he was not human anymore. He was Arthur Prince, he was filled with the salt of the sea and void and madness. He was not human, so he did not have to run. But then again, there were humans locked up in here, and those humans were mad and wrong ; and he held nothing in common with them. He might have been mad but he wasn't wrong anymore.
Caleb glanced back at the girl with strawberry hair, and said the first words that he had said to her, the first words that he had said to somebody other than Doctor Friedmont or his own fevered subconscious in three years, "We should let them out?" The question was implied, as he outstretched the hand with the key towards the strawberry-haired girl. That was the really human thing to do, he realized. To let another human decide. To push the responsibility upon another person and hope that they would make a more capable choice than you could. Responsibilities were for the living, and he was dead, even though he walked amongst them. This was apparently a subset of the schizophrenia that he was reported to suffer from, these delusions of grandeur - or non-grandeur as the case might be. Believing, no - knowing you were dead - was not a delusion of grandeur. It was the simple truth. His psychiatrist had been wrong. Of course he had read his own file. He and Doctor Friedmont had an understanding, after all. He offered the girl the key, and then said softly, with the same, flat tone; "We should walk, not run."
Caleb continued to loot the corpse in-front of him. There was a taser, which he tossed to the side - a pack of chewing gum - which he peered at curiously, before returning it to the corpses' pocket, and an iPhone. That, Caleb held in one hand, the gun in the other. He rose to his feet, and walked calmly over to the girl. But calmness was a facade - his shoulders were shaking and his fingers twitching around his prizes. He glanced back at the corpse and muttered somehting soft and indistinct. It was a prayer, a prayer to God to forgive him for what he had done, to take the man's son to the Lord God with haste. Caleb did not relish adding another ghost to those who already plagued him, haunting his steps with spectral fingers. He looked at the girl with watery blue eyes that faintly flickered in the gloom. "I know what you must be thinking..." He murmured. He was thinking about his face. The face that was Arthur Prince's face, the face of the notorious traitor who had betrayed the states in favour of extremists. He could not cover his face with his hands. One held a gun. He did not want to blow his head off. He could come bac, he was sure, but then there would no escape. Not ever again. He would sit in his padded cell with Doctor Friedmont, and she would ask politely why he shot her. And he wouldn't have an answer.
