Don’t look up by Indecisive_Wanderer

Alternate title: The Call

Jagged teeth stained red by my very essence ripped through my forearm as I jumped back.

I was now backed against a wall of jagged metal spikes.

If the beast charged now, I would be impaled from two sides, but as I looked at my watch, worn from the months of hardship, I gained a flicker of hope.

Suddenly, it barreled towards me, fangs bared. I jumped to the side just as the watch struck twelve, a skull-splitting headache assaulting me. I writhed in incomprehensible agony, but to my relief, when the pain stopped, I heard a screech behind me die out.

I turned around and the beast-turned-shish-kebab was now dead. At any other time, it would’ve reacted to my movement in an instant, but in the moment I jumped, something I had named ‘The call’ occurred. It would happen once every twelve hours, at midday and midnight and would cause unbearable agony to everything that heard it.

A rusted metal grate lifted over a now unblocked doorway, granting me passage.

Giving the finger to the beast, I winced as the wound on my arm made itself known. As I exited through the doorway, I tore a piece of my already tattered shirt and wrapped it around the gashes, hoping it would do until I could get help.

That was to say, if I could get help. I would have to escape this hellhole first and my many attempts had proven that task to be an arduous one at least, but I was closer now than ever before.

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I continued down the hall, growing increasingly antsy at the itch forming in my head, a constant buzzing of swarms unseen.

Coming across a steel door, I tried to open it to no avail. When I surveyed the walls around the metal door, I saw a hole with a sentence scrawled in blood above it.

“Insert finger and hold button for three seconds”.

I trusted these words deeply. After all, whoever wrote them saved my life multiple times.

So, I inserted my finger into the hole and felt a button. I pressed said button and waited.

3…

I heard gears turning and metal clanking, and the door started shifting.

Just then a voice from the arena where I had just fought the beast said “Oh daaarliiiiiing~ where aaare youuuu~”

2…

I stiffened, but kept my finger on the button, silently urging the door to hasten. Calling from behind me was the voice of my captor. She had tortured me day in and day out, all the while pretending it was ‘couple’s bonding’ or ‘getting to know each other better’. She was crazed, and I didn’t want to spend another second near her.

1…

The door clicked open and something inside the hole snapped.

I looked at my hand. That’s odd, I thought I had five fingers, not four…

Then the pain hit me. A bit of indignation filled me at the harm the writer of the text had inflicted on me, but I pushed it down for now as the door slowly started to close.

Bearing with the pain of what used to be my finger, I ran through the closing doorway.

Now through the door, I was surrounded by darkness and brick walls with a light in the distance.

My legs groaned as I pushed them to bring me towards the light while I applied pressure to my finger to stem the bleeding. All the while the itch became stronger and stronger in intensity the closer I got to the light.

But I didn’t care, I was so close to freedom.

I heard the metal door opening some distance behind me, and I knew my captor was pursuing me, like a beast with its prey.

The light came closer and closer, the itch becoming stronger with every step.

Finally, I exited the tunnel and observed my surroundings, relieved.

I looked around at the dead foliage, the occasional rotting animal carcasses, and the flaming buildings in the distance. Then I looked to the sky.

Instantly the itch transformed from a buzz to a roaring cacophony of screams, my mind going numb with pain.

In the sky was a behemoth of incomprehensible size with one giant eye looking down at me with a malicious glare.

I collapsed onto the ground, holding my head and screaming.

I knew I would die here. My mind would fail and my body would be like a puppet whose strings had been cut.

Still though, I mustered my strength and crawled back to the tunnel’s exit like a corpse reanimated.

I reached out my hand, now covered in the blood trickling out of my nose, and wrote one last message.

“Don’t look up”.

END