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"Mark!"
Thap thap
"Mark. . ."
Thap thap
"Is he dea-"
"Mark!"
Thash
"Mmm. Awake. . .mmm."
I open my eyes to a blinding sea of white, vague silhouettes of shadows dancing in my vision. Rubbing my eyes, I try to focus again, but to no avail.
"Hey, stop that, you'll push your eyes in if you continue rubbing them like that. Just give it some time to adjust to this brightness first." advises a familiar gruffly voice.
"W-winston, is that you?" Again, I try to pry my eyes open - I never thought I'd run into them again, I'd convinced myself that I'd never see them again.
"Stop man, it's okay, it's me - Winston," I feel him pry my hands away from my face, examine my eyes - they feel swollen, "Conny, fetch the ice bag from the cooler," a moment of hesitation, a short silence, "NOW!"
"There you go buddy, apply light pressure," he instructs as he pulls me to my feet.
Ack!
My leg.
“Aye!” Winston says as he shoulders me. With his support, I shift my weight to my good leg.
"Thank you,” I say, wincing at my stretching jaws, smiling seems to be a no go for now.
Thok! Thok! Thok!
Opening my eyes just a little I see a metal door on the ground in front of me, vibrating at regular intervals in tune with the impact it takes. So that's the metal door I got pulled in through.
"Don't worry, that right there is a door that's apparently made of bulletproof material,” Winston says, giving a pointed look to the right, “it can withstand even a machine gun barrage.”
"Mark!"
"Woah!" I get tackled with love. Opening my left–less swollen–eye I see that it's Melissa. She hugs me tightly, a little too tightly. "M-melissa, loosen up, you're choking me."
"Ah, sorry. Wait, let me help you sit down somewhere. We should have a comfortable chair here somewhere." She guides my limping self to a big brown Swivel Chair behind an office desk, and slinging my arm from behind her she sets me down on it.
She gently lifts my injured arm and I feel her unwrap my makeshift tourniquet, "I have some hot water with me, let me clean the wound and retie your wound with a fresh cloth." I humm my agreement.
Minutes later, I feel warm water trickle down my arm. “It’s Melissa,” she says, so as to not startle me. Holding up my arm, she gently rubs down, cleaning the trickled down blood on my arm I think. The retightening hurts a little though, but she eases up when I hiss with pain.
"Thank you." I appreciate her help. She then ties another ice pack to my broken ankle.
"Am I alive or are you all dead with me?” I ask genuinely, “Is this the afterlife?"
Melissa chuckles, "Yes, and I'm your guardian angel."
"It may as well be the afterlife, it sounds like a living Hell out there," confides the looming security guard–Conny, I think. I look at him, with my one good eye. He's standing in the middle of the room with his arms crossed, his eyes staring right back at me, as if he's challenging me to say something.
Thak thak thak!
"Please help! Is there anyone there? If you are, please let me in,” the pounding on the door continues, "Please!” he begs, desperation clear in his voice, “they're coming . . . I-I'll die if I stay out here any longer."
Conny strides over to the door, to open it I hope. "Conny, you son of a b*tch, get your ass back here. I already told you not to help that ass open the escape door," I follow the trail of the voice to a face I hoped I'd never see again after today. Conny being rude to me today is one thing, and even though it pains me to say this; I understand his situation. He was just doing his job, but what this person did was both illegal, illogical, and unfair - my old Boss. I look at him, my eyes narrowed to slits of fury.
"Conny, I warn you again, you musclebrained idiot. You'll lose your job if you disobey me one more time."
Spinning on his heels, the looming security guard faces the bald headed idiot, "If you haven't noticed till now, Boss, the world's gone to shit, and so has all its logic. You're gonna make me do some more heinous shit to keep your shitty job?" he spits on the spot in front of my ex-boss, "Go to hell with your f*cking job, and your f*cking fancy requirements."
Spinning back he resumes his stride towards the door, but just as he's about to fling it open, the pounding stops. "No, no, no! Stay back. Don't you dare come any closer, shoo, shoo!"
"KREE!"
"Aaaaaa. . ."
Silence.
Munch munch munch
Tearing of flesh, munching of meat, crunching of bones. Aaa, I can't take it anymore. I clutch my ears shut, whimper. I am overwhelmed by the memories of what I've seen till now, what I’ve experienced till now. I'm finally registering what I've gone through, and it doesn’t feel good. I was so close to dying - I’m mortified by how happy I'd thought I'd be dead, oh how wrong I'd been. I feel cold.
"What exactly is going on up there, Mark?" Asks a gruffly voice. I try to answer, to summarize the reality of what I've seen till now, but I can't - the images, the screams, the Krees. I shake my head in the negative, unable to answer.
"You better answer!” croaks a shitty sounding voice, “I saved your life, you're sitting in my chair, in my bulletproof room. Speak boy!" I stare, dumbfounded at the actual f*cking audacity this man has. How dare he spout such bullshit. I try to infuse all my rage into the stare that I give him.
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"You didn't save me," I say with as much malice as I can muster. "Winston and Conny did. If I must answer, I will - to them," in turn, I look at both of them with my somewhat-better-feeling eye, still pressing the ice bag to my other puffy eye. "If I tell you, all the noises you've been hearing till now will no longer be only noises. They say ignorance is bliss, do you guys still want to know?"
"If that freakshow down there is any indication of what's outside then I'm sure that it's terrifying, but ignorance can get us killed. So, yes, we do want to know what's going on out there, Mark," explains Winston.
I take a deep, calming breath, readying myself to begin. "Wait," I look over, there behind the Boss's shoulder I find the speaker, Sally–the 5''8', fashionably dressed, blonde, ex model, trophy wife–my Boss's trophy wife, "Can't I opt out of this, I think I'm not ready to hear this." Whatever goodwill she had earned from me by listening to all of my plans for progress have been swept away by the actions of her bald-brained husband, so I look away from her, I won't hold back precious information on her refusal alone - the rest deserve a say in this as well.
So, I look over at Melissa–the only individual left in this room who has not expressed their opinion yet–and I raise my eyebrows at her, asking her if she thinks the same. She nods in the no, indicating that she wants to listen too. So, I too, mimic her nod and begin my tale.
"Calling it Hell would be the most accurate way to describe what it is like out there.
I was at the Russian roundabout. At half past ten or so. The air began crackling with electricity, I was feeling pretty numb to everything, but even to me it felt like I was about to get hit by lightning, hah, would have been quite a fitting end to a day like this." They cough awkwardly at this.
"And so that's when all this started. A massive gaping hole the size of a football stadium opened up in the sky, purple electricity was crackling all around it, and this massive gushing stream of red came out of it. What–at first–looked ethereally beautiful to me, turned out to be the dreadful reality that we are in right now. That ethereally beautiful red stream was actually hundreds of thousands–if not millions–of tiny red demons.
They began picking up the people from the streets, and carried them back to the red stream, and once they'd carried enough people up in the sky, they began snapping their necks mid-air. It was a horrid sight."
Sally burst out into violent fits of sobs, Melissa's eyes watered with tears as she hugged herself in a desperate attempt to soothe herself, Winston began to sigh out loud while massaging his temples, Conny sits down clutching his head, and my asshole of a Boss strides towards the far right wall, and extricating a key from his pocket, unlatches the casing with the shotgun inside and begins tinkering with it, ensuring its proper function.
Everyone had begun trying to cope with it in their own way, while I just tried to shove down my frothing emotions for later. I failed to cope with it - failed to deal with my inner demons, almost as bad as I've failed to deal with those outside.
"Wait, you only said that tiny demons came out, then why is the demon down there so big?" Asks Melissa.
"I'm not too sure about that myself, Melissa, all I can surmise from what I've experienced thus far is that that red demon gained size and strength as it killed its own kind. I think they don't eat their own kind though, in fact, I don't think I've even seen a demon corpse till now, once they die, they just blow up into brilliant red and gold flakes of ashes - it's quite mesmerizing actually." I surmise from my experience with the demons, and still try to piece together the missing plots of information in my index of intel.
Sighing deeply, I close my eyes, an attempt to relax a little, to catch my breath, after such a long time. My eyes feel a lot better now, so I open them once completely, before shutting them back again.
Thash! Thash!
Taking a peek at the lid I came out of I see the once only vibrating metal lid begin to slowly form dents. Following my intense gaze, everyone else looks at the lid too.
One tiny dent, multiple tiny dents, a moderate sized dent, a big dent, a massive dent.
Bam!
The lid bursts open.
"Fuck!" Conny exclaims, I agree.
Large red hands jut out from the black hole, and accompanying those hands emerge bulging forearms; they grab onto the bent metal lid and pull on it, and slowly but surely, the red giant’s head emerges.
Properly placing its hands on both sides of the metal lid, the creature does a pull up, pulling its massive form completely up and into the enclosed room.
They all look in a quiet stupor at its massive red form, and I too, see it in its full glory for the very first time—its form looking exponentially more otherworldly in the intense light of the room. It looks as I imagined it to look, just a hundred times more menacing.
It searches the faces, looking for someone - looking for me. Its eyes finally meet mine, and its face breaks in a wide grin, "Oh shit."
The walking danger sign charges at me, nostrils flaring, eyes bulging. I freeze on the spot, but my instincts take over. Flight or fight are the only options open to me, and I choose flight. I dive to the right and it exacerbates the pain in my fractured leg, but hey, I get to live, for now. Sparing a momentary glance I look back to see what the monster would have done to me had my survival instincts not taken over. The chair I was calmly lounging in just a few moments ago was no longer there, it had disappeared. I didn’t know the giant red demon was also an aspiring magician.
The demon, however, does not relent with just a broken chair. Turning around, it again hyper fixates on me, and I yell for help. But as I do, I also hear yells erupting all around me, as if the collective stupor everyone was in has finally given way to complete chaos.
As it chases me around the vicinity of the whitewashed room, I catch glimpses of motion behind it; Winston running over to the bald headed prick, the both of them tussling over the shotgun, and then, as I finally catch a glimpse of Winston start to take aim, I come to a halt in the farthest corner of the room, trying to make sure that the gigantic demon faces me, its back turned to the aiming Winston. It displays a large grin, the largest grin of triumph I've ever seen. Belching a loud Kree of joy it plunges its claws at me and I instinctively close my eyes, my arms shooting up.
Bam!
The shotgun goes off with a resounding boom in this enclosed space. Peeking behind the curtains of my eye, I gape, astonished at the humongous gaping hole that decorates the center of the damned creature. I never knew Winston was such a good shot. Mentally thanking him profusely I begin to sit, expecting the demon to fall on its face any minute now.
It doesn't.
Eyes turning red, pupils dilating further, nostrils elongating into almost chimney sized holes; it turns to look at its assailant. Winston looks at me, his eyes shining with tears of regret. The demon, now angry like a bull, inflates. His large foreboding wings open up–almost twice the size of his body at its maximum width–and then subsequently it shrinks as his hole patches itself up, a hard sheen closely covering its body, and then it starts its bull-like rampage towards another target, Winston.
Winston shoots at it, the bullets simply flying off of its shiny hardened body. Losing all hope of firing back, Winston dives to the right at the last moment, letting the rampaging creature hit the far side door–the door from where we heard the wailing man die–straight on. It completely goes through it.
The large white washed room remains pin drop silent; all of us stuck to our positions in limbo, unsure of what to do or how to proceed. The freeze frame persists for a few seconds longer when the bald headed jackass runs across the room and snatches his shotgun out of Winston's hand and begins reloading it, his trophy wife scurrying after him.
The seconds stretch into minutes as I questioningly begin to exhale a sigh of relief, the others following suit. But then our collective ill luck strikes again. Similar to what I'd seen before; two beefy, giant muscular hands grab onto the doorframe, and try to push itself in through the small hole it created itself. But that is not what scared me, the other five pairs of tiny red hands did that. It's almost like it learned that it's stronger if it's got more numbers on its side.
Surprisingly squeezing through the tiny little gap, the demons emerge into the whitewashed room. The bald eagle runs off to his bullet stash on the far corner of the room and begins jamming bullets into his retrieved shotgun, leaving his wife behind like discarded trash.
Two of the tiny demons track his dash across the room, and follow suit. They charge at him, not letting him finish reloading his gun. Caught in a dire situation, the bald bastard stops trying to reload the damn thing and instead uses it as a shield, a tiny shield, to hold off the clawing arms while he desperately tries to get out of the clutched situation. Conny, left with Sally to defend along with himself, breaks off the main office table's steel stand and begins swinging it at the two demons that charge at him and Sally. The remaining demon begins to lunge at me but is stopped midway by the extended hand of the larger one.
The larger demon, having lost its red rampage in that wall tackle, again hyper fixates on me. He redirects the halted tiny demon towards Winston as it begins to charge towards me.
As it reaches me, I dive at the last moment, and scurry off to the hole I came out of. Standing over the manhole that may lead me out of this situation, I ponder a moment on whether I should save myself, abandon them all. That moment of hesitation is all that it takes for the big red demon to catch up to me.
"Mark, watch out!"
"Oh God."
Thwack!
I feel myself fly for a fleeting moment before hitting a surface hard. I feel my bones smash and crumble to dust. How the hell am I still conscious?
The charging demon wastes no time in its relentless pursuit of me. Looming above me, it readies its fists in the air–it's going to smash me into the ground.
"Die! You monster," exclaiming with all her might, I watch from around the demon as Melissa drives the swivel chair into its feet, and successfully trips it.
"Mark, are you okay," why do they always ask that, I think it's more of an instinctual response than a proper question, "No," I say as I spurt out blood from my mouth. I feel her hands skimming across my injuries, hot tears splash on my skin. She's crying. Sniffing, she says, "H-hey Mark, how about we get that cup of coffee after this is over with?" I laugh, a weak laugh, but my first laugh in a month.
"No." Behind Melissa I see the giant demon, its fists descending upon us. In a near instant decision–and unfounded strength–I manage to shove Melissa to the side, and accept death's descent upon me.
I've used the fleeting moments of my life to save a soul, I am content.
Glowing wisps of threads coil around me in my lingering last moments. I'll close my eyes, feel a little pain, and it'll all end.
. . .
VTOOM.
“You alright there, kid?"