"Beep—beep—beep—"
A sharp, piercing alarm rang beside his ears. Mark shot upright in the hospital bed, gasping for air as he stared around in confusion. Where was this?
He looked toward the machine making the sound. It was a heart rate monitor. Mark instinctively reached up and touched his chest. His heart was still beating, and it was beating steadily.
After looking around the bed, Mark threw back the covers and climbed down. Some papers were posted on the wall beside the door, covered in things like medication schedules.
Just as Mark tried to decipher some information from the text, someone suddenly knocked on his door. He rose warily and turned his head, only to see someone who looked exactly like him standing outside.
The man looked cold and impatient. "What are you still doing here? Come with me!"
Mark had not figured out what was happening, but the man rushed in, grabbed his arm, and dragged him outside. Only after being pulled through the door did Mark react. He shoved the man away and assumed a defensive stance. "Who are you?"
The man turned around and looked Mark over from head to toe, still speaking coldly. "I'm Jack, your other personality. Whenever you fainted or lost consciousness, I was the one controlling the body."
His answer was so straightforward that Mark froze. He looked at himself, then at Jack. "So I really do have dissociative identity disorder?"
"Then where is this? How did we get here? What happened before this?"
"Come with me." Jack walked toward the other end of the corridor without looking back, explaining as he went, "Just now, I died."
His first sentence shocked Mark beyond measure. Mark hurried after him and asked as they walked, "Died? You mean this is Hell??"
"More or less. They