You can’t scream if your diaphragm has been shredded. My mouth hangs open and inconsequential sounds come out from incidental air passing over my vocal cords. At this point, it was an endurance test between the hyper-oxygenated blood and cocktail mix of drugs pumped into my heart, and the blood loss, weakening heartbeat, and my cerebellum calling it quits to let me die. With barely the strength to keep my eyes open, I see the grids of sharpened metal blades ahead of me, awash in pinkish-red mist, as I am relentlessly dragged forward…

I wake up screaming the guttural scream I was unable to do in my nightmare. Eyes open but unseeing, I marvel as I use my arms and legs to push myself back, back, back. I press myself into the headboard against the wall. Hands grab my wrists and I fight them off. I was dragged along that bladed track by my wrists and the constriction brings back my helplessness as blades sliced my body open. One of my hands breaks free and I lash out, hitting something soft. I hear a grunt and my hands are free. My captor’s hands are now gently but firmly holding the sides of my head, and my terror-stricken eyes gradually recognize the face of my roommate, Hannah. She is saying something, but I don’t hear or process her words.

I can still feel the slow, slicing drag of the blades against my clothes, then my skin, then my fat and muscles, then my organs. I’ve had this nightmare every time and it’s always the same. I am taken by unknown captors and drugged to unconsciousness. I awaken face down in a large room on a metal slide. My wrists are bound in front of me, tethered to an overhead track. A tube emerges from my back, feeding my heart oxygenated blood and drugs. My head is shaved and I feel a mesh over my scalp. In time I learned this is a full-brain transcranial magnetic stimulator to awaken me should I pass out.

An electric motor on the track above me starts and I am dragged along the slide. Ahead of me, the slide angles down into a grid of sharpened metal blades. The track itself adjusts, raising my wrists above me. It will self-adjust to keep my head a couple of inches above the blade grids. The rest of my body is fair game. I am fully clothed as the motor’s slow, unyielding pull drags me onto the grid. I am dragged into a channel. The blades are arranged in three-foot-square grids. The first grid’s blades are straight along the movement of travel. The next grid is angled forty-five degrees to the right. The grid after is straight. Then a grid of left-angling blades. The set of four grids—straight, right angling, straight, left angling—repeats in an oval-shaped track, along which I will be dragged repeatedly.

At first I don’t feel anything, since the blades make contact with my clothes and shoes. As I am dragged from a section of straight blades to the next section of angled blades, the cross-cutting action begins to tear through my clothes and shoes. The blades are smooth, like a sword blade or a scalpel, so the pulling action and my body weight perform the blade’s work. I try to struggle, but my wrists are ahead and above me causing my shoulders to strain. I attempt to stand and am somewhat successful. Automated sensors detect my body position and the track raises automatically to prevent me from grabbing onto it. The forward pull continues and after a few steps and the angle of the blades change, I stumble to my knees and am rewarded with instant pain as the blades slice through my pants and slice my skin at the knees. I scream as the blades drag my skin and create new paths. With a shock I begin to sink on my front. The track above me lowers until my head is inches above the track once more. I am dragged on my belly and legs as we reach the far curve of the oval.

I scream and sob as the blades slice into me, straight, left, straight, right, straight, left, the forever “S” pattern ensuring my whole front from the neck down is sliced apart. My thighs and knees initially take the brunt of the slicing. Shoes protect my feet a little bit longer, but they too are eventually sliced off as my legs increasingly slide side to side behind me, skin and muscles tearing away. I become aware the room is empty. Cameras capture my flaying from every angle as I am dragged around the oval.

As I pass through the turn at the end of the oval completing the first circuit, I see a pink mist ahead of me and capture the unmistakable scent of alcohol. As I pass from grid to grid, robot arms remove the larger pieces of cloth, skin, and viscera from each grid. Then the grid is sprayed with alcohol to clean the edges to ensure they sharp and free of oversized debris. Of course, alcohol has the wonderful side effect of burning into open wounds. An internal heat wave passes through me and my breath catches as my limp body is dragged into lap number two on the alcohol-soaked blades.

Most of my clothing is shredded from my front and the blades freely slice into my skin, fat, and muscles. The alcohol burns my nerve endings sending waves of additional pain into my tortured nervous system. My brain turns off, sending me into unconscious bliss. An indeterminable time later, I feel more than hear a rapid succession of clicks as the transcranial magnetic stimulator reactivates brainwave function. I also feel a surge of adrenaline from the drug cocktail. I will be forced to endure this unending torture awake and aware.

Through waves of pain, I become aware of a small screen extended from the track above me. It shows a top-down view of a woman being dragged along an oval track. Yellow, pink, and red viscera litter the blade grids behind her. Thin robot arms pick up the bits of Chlöe that don’t fall between the blades as streams of alcohol rinse the grid and clean the blades.

Around the oval I go. Countless circuits. Eventually there is nothing left of me except a head, arms, and torso forever dragged around the track. My legs are gone. My pelvic bones rattle behind me. My lower spinal column drags along. My intestines and stomach litter the track behind me as robot arms pick up the detritus. My rib cage scrapes along the blades. I am not sure if I am even breathing any more. I lost the ability to scream or make any noise laps ago. When I see the screen above me, I just see blood flowing out of my torso, replenished by a seemingly endless supply above me fed into the tube straight into my heart. I continually try to pass out, but the TMS and drugs kick-start my system again. I feel my heartbeat becoming weaker every lap. I barely feel anything but the scrape of my ribs and the dragging of my spine. My eyes, if they even see anything, are unfocused. My ears hear the droning hum of the motor and the scraping of bone against metal. All I am now is a heart weakly pumping blood to keep my brain alive, the rest pooling out of me as the motor drags me along. My brain screams internally, trying to turn itself off but getting reactivated. Magnets clicking around my skull and stronger doses of drugs try to keep my body alive. Eventually I will give out and no amount of clicking will revive me. In the meantime my mind howls…

I become aware of a slight pressure against my head. My eyes are still wide with fear but gradually focus on Hannah’s worried expression in her forest green eyes. My ears begin to hear and my brain processes sound. “You’re safe. Come back to me. I have you.” I sob and tears run down my face as I fall against Hannah’s chest to hear the rhythm of her steady heartbeat. Arms enfold me and we gently sway back and forth.

Copyright © 2024, 2026 Hanna Goodbar.

Chlöe’s side of night terrors mentioned in Hannah:1.