His steps were heavy, his skull throbbed and pounded as noise and voices flooded his wounded mind. Jackson clawed his head. Blue blood seeped down as he tried to ignore them. But they were loud and too persistent to not respond. Crossing the road was a challenge. He had almost got caught because the sound of car engines was muffled by venomous sounds at the back of his skull.

He leaned against a tree, panting with his mouth open like he was trying to cool down as a crocodile would. Jackson Abernu, the reptile that believed he was human. His mind was in conflict with him as the noise became louder. A hundred voices, all familiar to him. All had something to say.

‘You are all wrong! There is always a way to get vengeance.’ Jackson responded to himself, to one of the voices that shouted the loudest.

‘No!’ The reptile snarled. ‘The world changed, but I haven’t. I can still get it done.’

‘After? I keep my promise. That is what will happen after.’

‘Hold your tongue! I will not have my wishes mocked.’

Jackson pushed himself off the tree, pressing on in the hopes of finding something to cure his ill mind. ‘Every sickness can be cured, or healed from.’

‘You don’t know me.’ The reptile replied as he looked over his right shoulder to find no one there, yet he continued to speak while his eyes darted around. ‘None of you are real.’

‘If they can play a film in their homes, they will have medicine.’

Jackson shook his head in disagreement, yet his voice rang with consideration of the offer. ‘I don’t need you.’

‘Point?’

‘No, you are just noise.’

The reptile grunted as he fell to the ground. Coughing out bile as he clenched his stomach. He lightly bit his tongue, a way to ignore the rancid taste before he stood up. ‘Noise, just noise.’ He said over and over again.

With every step, the noises became louder. His brain hammered against his skull. He hugged himself while Jackson felt as something moved under the skin of his nape. They weren’t real, a figment of his pained mind, hallucinations of a wounded soul derived from his near endless service. Without any stimuli or human contact for 75 years, his illness became pronounced. It cultivated at the darkest depths of his psyche and was born into the world the moment Jackson took his first breath outside of the bunker.

His thoughts were one of many. His identity and sense of reality in question by the persistence of the noise and voices that plagued him. There was a wound, one Jackson recognised couldn’t be fixed with thread and needle. All he could hope for was that the future had made medicine to remedy his mind. Without the means to quiet the roaring storm of sound, he would be incapacitated and incapable of direct action. The reptile refused to be debilitated!

Jackson approached a lonesome pharmacy near Cherokee Village. The neon sign near the store gave Jackson a glimpse of hope. ProPharma. Jackson went around to the back door and broke the lock with a nearby rock. He rushed inside, looking through every cabinet as he read the labels for something that could help him. The voices grew louder, more violent as he kept searching. Desperate, he tore the place apart, inch by inch, cabinet by cabinet. Frantically searching for something to help, something to silence the noise!

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His mumbles to tell the voices to silent became bursts of shouting. Jackson’s world was a dark haze, he couldn’t think beyond anything besides what his next move should be. The reptile was no better than a desperate, raving animal. Panic sets in! Every heartbeat was faster and painful than the last. All of his senses were overwhelmed and subsequently shutting down so as to not send him into shock. His vision dulled, his touch became nonexistent, his keen sense of smell was nothing but a memory, and his hearing was gone. He was running out of time.

His body flared up as a memory flooded his mind once more. Jackson fell to one knee while he gritted his teeth. He was too late to save her, too preoccupied to notice the trap set for him. The fire! Oh how the fire consumed her body and turned her to ash. How her screams mixed with the cries of their child. A death of his love, a death of a life he wanted.

A small drawer with the anti-psychotic label caught his attention. He opened it and grabbed the nearest pill bottle of Abilify without hesitation. He glanced at the contents of the bottle and how to administer it, but the screeching and scraping at the back of his mind forced him to take two pills with a vain hope they would work.

Jackson slammed his back against the wall as he panted while one hand clenched his chest. To his surprise, his heart slowed. The noise in his mind, once loud, was now calmed and silent. Sluggishly, he opened his eyes. The dull ceiling above him gave him a sense of sanctuary. A place to ground himself, to return him from his nightmarish state. He looked at his pills and pocketed them. He wouldn’t want to admit it, but he believed he would be dependent on them for a while. Or at least, until he got his revenge.

In the carnage of his frantic search, he noticed a brochure on the floor across from him. Curious, he reached for it and read the contents inside. It revealed that the pharmacy he was in, ProPharma, was a store chain owned by a much larger company called ProTech. Jackson raised a brow. He couldn’t understand why a tech company that was making a new power source also owned a pharmacy chain.

However, his questions about the circumstances of the company had to be on hold as police lights and sirens blurred through the pharmacy front window. He was weak and tired, but he knew he couldn’t be caught, not yet, at least.

With a pained grunt, he stood back up and snuck out from where he came from and retreated into the forest. But with a plan on what he needed to do. His goal remained unchanged. He desired revenge for those who put him in that bunker and slaughtered everyone he held dear. However, he needed information. He needed to find who was alive, if any were. Most importantly, he had to figure out what else had changed in his absence.

As the reptile disappeared into the dark with a silent mind. His hands would itch for gore. 120 people were involved in a massacre, he knew all of their names. The leaders who gave the orders, the grunts who pulled the trigger and buried the bodies in unmarked mass graves. Jackson held a promise, and he intended to keep it. He would do everything in his power to pulverise their flesh with a ball-peen hammer.

… But would the world be ready for his rage?