Embraced by an unknown woman, Tony felt his limbs fall limply to his sides while dry tears rolled down his face. He was almost scared to death twice within minutes and now he was captured by this woman. It was unclear what she stuck in his neck, but the effect was quickly robbing him of his ability to move anything, including his mouth. His mind trembled as a horrific thought occurred to him that this woman had given him a muscle relaxant, and a very strong one to boot.

“Don’t worry, darling. It’s only a simple cocktail to make you feel more relaxed.”

Tony felt his vision shift as his head dropped down and his body was moved into a wheelchair. The woman’s hands ran along the front of his chest as she leaned forward and whispered into his ear comforting words that only made his skin crawl. Then her lips pressed against his own before a long roll of gauze slid across his forehead and got tied to the handles to raise his head up. He had mixed feelings about losing his first kiss to a woman that was mentally ill and a complete stranger on top of that. It wasn’t that he never had any feelings for the same or opposite sex, just that he was too socially awkward and busy to make time for a relationship.

As the wheelchair rolled past the nurse station and down the hallway, he could hear movement in a side room but not see inside it. It was relatively muffled by the closed door, but he felt like whatever was inside was not something pleasant either. When they reached the end of the corridor, the woman kicked open the door and pushed him inside where new horrors awaited him. From within his limited view, he could see a woman’s corpse sitting in an executive chair with a face of betrayal and her throat slit behind an oak desk. In another chair to her side sat a headless corpse whose skin tone matched the head in the elevator’s ceiling. A laptop sat open on the desk connected via HDMI cable to a wall TV running replays of babies being delivered from a questionable camera angle. Clearly the women being recorded had no idea that there was a camera in the room and a wave of disgust washed over Tony as he tried to decide which person in the room had the nauseating fetish.

“Let me introduce you to my parents, darling. This is my mother, Ruth, who kept me in her tummy as a caterpillar until I could break out of my cocoon. See my wings! Do you like them?”

The woman strode in front of Tony wearing a sunflower dress filled with butterflies with bloodied bed sheets taped to her elbows and spun in place. Her sing song voice and happy personality betrayed the cruelty she showed to her mother and the other man in the room. The woman’s tongue stuck out after spinning in place and she turned Tony to clearly see the other man’s corpse before continuing to talk.

“This is her terrible choice in a husband, Chris. He may have created me, but it broke his mind and he became obsessed with other butterflies breaking out of their cocoons. He was a bad daddy and tried to take away my wings after making me do bad things with my mouth…so I removed both of his heads.”

A giggle left her mouth at the end as she motioned to the neck without a head and the missing package below his waist. His wrists were tied to the chair so the man obviously couldn’t resist and the blood covering the bottom half gave a strong image of his final moments. Tony felt his stomach churn at both her father’s sexual predilections and her willingness to kill without any remorse as evidenced by her monotone description of the even. He tried to move anything aside from his eyes and found the sensation of his tongue touch his lips and his little finger twitched slightly. The cocktail was not as potent as he originally worried that it might be. Before he could try anything else, he was shifted once more to face the woman introduced as the mother of the crazy butterfly.

“Mother Ruth knew what he was doing to me at home and did nothing to stop him. I told my best friend in high school and she disappeared two days later and I ended up in here on the psych ward floor. Mother told me that since I couldn’t behave at home, then she would let daddy Chris take care of me. She looked so shocked when I hugged her tightly, right up until I sliced her voice box so she could never lie to anyone again.”

The woman in the sunflower dress stated as a swirling mix of sadness, grief and determination could be seen in her eyes. She bent down and kissed her mother’s forehead and whispered something that Tony couldn’t hear from his position before she turned back to Tony. A beautiful smile blossomed on her face and her eyes turned into crescents as she looked at him and a bad premonition struck his mind. He didn’t need to wait long to understand why as she awkwardly climbed onto his lap before stating her expectations.

“Darling, do you want to become a butterfly too? Oh, right, where are my manners! My name is Olivia and I’m a red lace butterfly…do you know that red butterflies symbolize love?”

Olivia whispered the last question in Tony’s ear as her hands pressed against his chest while her legs kicked excitedly over the left arm of the wheelchair. She was clearly broken by her circumstances and he felt his heart and mind waver with sorrow for her. Despite his feelings though, he was still clear-headed enough to realize the danger of his own circumstances right now. His hand to the wrist, toes and head had recovered enough to move and it would probably only take another ten minutes to regain use of his limbs. Playing for time, he looked into Olivia’s eyes and blinked encouragingly so she wouldn’t suspect that the cocktail was already beginning to wear off.

“Wonderful! Let’s go meet the good doctor, he lived down the hall from me previously and pinned an ugly moth in my room, but I forgave him. He is playing with our floor nurse down the hall and she assist the good doctor in sewing on your wings and implanting our antennae. Then we can go to the roof and fly off into the sunset together like a beautiful romance movie I once saw when I was young.”

Olivia cooed in Tony’s ear her primary dream of their future and stared at him with expectant eyes for a short moment before climbing off him. Then Tony felt the world begin to shift once more as she turned him around and wheeled him back towards the earlier hospital room where the muffled noises originated. Tony felt his heart kick up another few tens of beats faster as his mind spun into hyper speed for solutions. The man that he wanted to avoid meeting the most would be in front of him soon and the muscle relaxing cocktail was still running rampant in his veins. He could see the elevator from his seat and began to calculate how long it would take to get there, get inside and escape from the ground floor before Olivia or the man could catch up to him. He still wanted to see what the outside world looked like first but his hand was already being forced and he could only think of future consequences after he escaped.

“Doctor, I brought my future butterfly husband with me. You said you would help us…”

Olivia’s voice chimed in from the hallway as she pushed open the door while dragging the wheelchair behind her. Her voice slowly dropped off as she took in the scene before her and her fists balled up in anger. A man in a white doctor outfit was bent over a young woman with her top removed and her chest cracked open while he performed a live autopsy. Fear and pain contorted her face as her life slowly drained away while she could not even scream with her mouth gagged by a rolled-up blouse. Her body had already begun convulsions from shock as blood covered the nearby tray, a partially removed kidney sat on top of it.

“What. Do. You. Think. You. Are. Doing…”

Olivia growled out between gritted teeth as she stomped over to the good doctor with rage filling her every bone. This nurse was the only kind person in her life beside the doctor and she wanted her help and to stand witness to her flight. Olivia had planned to let her go after she flew away with her new butterfly husband and the doctor was ruining everything.

“Ah, Olivia, you are just in time. Help me with her lungs. My hands are a bit too large and I can’t get my fingers around them.”

The doctor addressed Olivia with a kind tone, completely oblivious to her rage, as he continued poking around in the nurse’s abdomen. His bare fingers working to pull the remainder of the first kidney along with the second kidney. A pool of red liquid mixed with yellow already starting to coagulate around his feet. When he heard no response from behind, he turned his head slightly, just to catch Olivia pouncing on his back.

“Why did you hurt her? You are ruining everything! You are acting bad, just like father and mother!”

Olivia screamed as her nails dug into his shoulders and she began biting his neck ferociously. The good doctor let out a guttural scream and grabbed at her head with his large hands with incredible vigor. Her small canines tore at his skin but were too late to sink deeply enough to tear any arteries as she was yanked forward and thrown into the opposite wall. The doctor slapped his hands against his coat to dry them slightly so he would have a better grip before rushing at Olivia. In turn, Olivia flapped her bed sheet wings and charged back at him, using them to wrap his head and block his vision temporarily while her long leg struck out for the space between his thighs.

Meanwhile, Tony shifted back and forth in the wheelchair and managed to get his fingers around the wheels. Pushing himself forward with the determination to live, to survive, he pulled back on the wheels and moved forward into the hallway. Then with inhuman strength for his condition, he pulled the left wheel hard to face the elevators and pulled himself forward on both sides once more. The chair spun from one side to another as he yanked hard, nearly slamming into the side walls before the elevator began growing bigger in his eyes. Then he recalled that he couldn’t control his momentum well enough to break so he straightened out his left leg as best he could and put it in front of him to break his forward momentum at the elevator doors.

Pain shot from his toes to his brain in a straight line as his foot collided with the doors but he didn’t have the luxury to do more than grit his teeth. Tony adjusted his arms with some difficulty and slid the gauze rope off his forehead so he could bend forward enough to tap the elevator call button. Then he pushed himself back and moved the chair in front of the opening elevator doors before stopping just short due tot he wheels being caught on the groove.

A scream rolled down the corridor behind him as Tony went all out to pull himself from the wheelchair, slamming into the handrail as he stumbled inside. His right arm shooting forward to slap the ground floor button as he lost his balance and crashed to the floor. The doctor staggered from the previous room and stared at the open elevator before falling flat on his face, a number of tools jammed in his back. Olivia stumbled out after him and looked to the doors as they closed with a forlorn look in her eyes. Tony smiled apologetically as his heart twisted in a mix of pity, survival instinct and guilt for betraying the only caring person he found in this city.