Neil came too and he was smothering. No matter how hard he tried to breathe nothing happened. His lungs were spasming and everything was black. It took him several seconds of panicked struggling to realize that nothing was covering his face. The reason he was unable to get any air was his lips were stuck together & his nose was blocked. He wrenched his mouth open as wide as his jaw would go. This managed to get his lips to rip open. Gasping for breath and letting out a pained “FUCK!” between them. He let his curses out freely as he ground his face into what he assumed was the asphalt of a parking lot. Then a shuddering “Oh gods.” a couple heart beats later. The pain was like ripping apart super glued fingers. Except it was his lips this time.

Now that he didn’t feel like he was drowning, other things became easier to notice. He was on his stomach, the skin on his face, hands, and arms felt tight. His skin was a sausage casing boiled too long and ready to split. And no matter how hard he tried he couldn’t seem to open his eyes. There was no pain yet. Except for his raw lips and his blocked nose was throbbing. “Was I in a… car accident?” he thought dizzily, as he panted. Other than the weird feeling in his skin, nose & face, nothing really felt too bad. He rolled himself over to his back. Nothing seemed broken, well other than maybe his nose. There was a hard lump on his right side but that was nothing new.

No stranger to odd situations and a lifetime of injury led him to investigate the situation. If he was in some sort of accident, he needed to know how bad his injuries were. To figure that out he needed to see. If he was blinded, and that needed to be sort out fast. He reached hands shaking for his eyes. His eyes, like his lips, seemed stuck together. He also noticed his skin felt dry and itchy. After some sighing and psyching himself up he managed to pull his left eye open. “Fuckyoureverlivingbitchassuncle…SHIT!” he sputtered out as he closed his newly liberated brown eye and curled up on his side. He usually didn’t swear like this but the pain was incredibly acute and kinda felt familiar. As a teen while in the kitchen he accidentally flash steamed his hand with a pressure cooker. When he hit the release, a white cloud came right at his face. He moved his hand out of reflex to shield his eyes. A half a second was all it took, and his hand was red like a lobster. His fingers were stuck together just like his lips and eyes are now. Didn’t hurt until a while later other than pulling apart his fingers. Years of experience at the ER had educated him that injuries in general but ESPECIALLY burns usually didn’t hurt real bad if at all until later. He wasn’t looking forward to the next couple of hours.

He reached for his right eye next but got distracted when he observed what looked like scorched light brown hair in his hands. “That’s my eyebrow...?” He touched his face and had a gritty & swollen. “I’m burnt.” He stated dumbly to himself. He sat up rubbing the top of his head and burnt hair came off in his hands. He sat up expecting to find himself in a hospital or maybe even the scene of a fire, but he was staring at dilapidated Suzuki Samurai with a broken windshield. It had a surprisingly decent flame job across its dark blue paint. With high detail and polished finish, it must have taken a good amount of money and time to put it on. “Why would someone put so much effort into such a shitty car?” It was sitting in front of a decrepit standalone garage that was no longer standalone. Directly to its left was a maroon wood paneled house. The pair of structures seemed like a couple staggering home from the bar. The structures both relied on the other to keep defying gravity. The house was vacant with several years of disuse. Most windows were broken. Shingles and siding were hanging and at angles. He looked at clumps of dry grass. Brown, grey and brittle like old hay left in a barn much too long. A mailbox stood perfectly straight in defiance of everything else casting long shadows across the yard.

“This is not the hospital…” James stated flatly. “And I am burnt…hurt.” He said wincing as he touched his now confirmed broken nose. It was turned to the right at a weird angle and gave out pathetic whistles when he tried to force air through it. As he carefully scanned his surroundings he saw more of the same. Dusty & cracked streets with overgrown yet dead yards. The buildings seemed to be mostly standing if in in various states of decay. “Here’s and even better question…. Why am I not at the Fu…fudging ER?”

He remembered working his shift at there. The sheriffs had brought in a couple of guys for medical clearance. There was a fight over something in a bag. The jackass…. I mean, patient punched me when I tried to prevent him from pulling what James had assumed was a gun from the bag.

James stood up on shaky legs like a newborn colt. With a disgusted click of his tongue he tried to dust off his light blue scrubs. The results were not good. His hands and face were beginning to sting confirming his burnt face hypothesis. He scanned his surroundings with his watering left eye. “Nope, I got nothing…” Nothing even hinted at why he was in the middle of a cul-de-sac surrounded by the remains of a suburban ghost town. On the one hand it filled him with nostalgia and on the other hand it deeply unsettled him. It was very familiar, like an old photo album. You recognize the resemblance. There is something very familiar. Your mom’s eyes or dad’s smile. Yet without someone else to help you. You can’t name them or say how you are related. In the end it seems familiar but uncanny.

The air was too dry. Stale like someone had taken a breath and forgot to let it out. He was looking at a neighborhood, if everyone just packed up one day and never bothered to come back. It could have been any small-town neighborhood. Nothing jumped out that was familiar. He never got that “Ooooh, this is old Blorgensmorgen town. Thank the gods! Now I know where I am!” He kept hoping for that detail or sudden recognition. That feeling must have packed up its things and just took off while he was at work. No it felt like a random old neighborhood pulled from the 90s. Giving up on the “Where?”, he now started on the “How?”. He inspected again and yet nothing jogged his sluggish mind. No new details divulging how he arrived here. Something else began to bother him. He didn’t notice it before but the silence bothered him. If this place was long abandoned, then the lack of people sounds made sense. The part that made him feel really uneasy was the lack of any sounds. No breeze blowing. No birds calling. Not a single mosquito trying to bite him or a fly stubbornly trying to go up his nose. Everything he associated with being outside just absent. Just an oppressive hush. The quiet had a sterile quality. He mused that if his hair wasn’t burnt off this realization would have had them standing on end.

He looked up and saw an endless grey above with occasional gentle and distant colored flashes. Not just the normal yellow or white he enjoyed with years of storm watching. No the rolling grey clouds were filled with flashes of green & occasionally purples. “It’s kinda beautiful in a disturbing way.” Even worse these didn’t really make any sound either. After gaping at the alien sky he looked away. The boiling scene made his stomach spin with nauseas and prickly feeling. The possibility of him having a sudden psychotic episode came to mind but he discarded it. He wondered if he had been drugged or exposed to psychedelics like Kat that one time. He started laughing despite himself at the memory of babysitting Kathrine. She came in as she accidentally started tripping balls from an exposure at work. He didn’t feel high but he wouldn’t really know since he never really experienced that much.

Stolen story; please report.

His reality checking and wondering about if he was lucid or not was shattered by a slow hiss. For the first time since he had been here, he heard a sound. One that he didn’t make. He stopped to listen. Straining with his whole body. Again, a slow dragging began. Sounding as if a sleeping bag pulled across a sidewalk. Then it stopped. Another soft dragging “SSSssssssssss” but it was coming somewhere from the dark of the garage. Then nothing. He held his breath with his lobster red face staring into the yawning opening. The buildings continued leaning drunkenly. But nothing emerged from them. He was getting ready to call out to whoever was in there when another sound to his right interrupted him. It was louder and hollow. Something metal and open slowly dragged against asphalt. He turned to his right looking at another dusty yard and empty house dead center of the cul-de-sac. It fell quiet. Whipping his head back and forth he heard nothing else. James backed up away from the garage and the other house. He held his breath waiting but nothing started up again. He backed to the center the cul-de-sac and spun in a slow circle staring at the rancid looking neighborhood. Broken windows jaggedly stared back at him.

He let out a loud sigh when nothing happened after a good 30 breaths later. He felt calmer and more at ease. He needed to figure out where he was. How did he get here? Where was everyone else? What was this weird place with its abandoned town and trippy sky. These questions didn’t help him stay any calmer but he was going to need both eyes to figure it out. After a short cursing session without any substitutions, both of his eyes blurrily were open to the neighborhood.

He took a quick breath of rusty tasting air to settle his mind before he would take a walk and try and find his bearing. He procrastinated thinking about what he could remember before being here. He woke up in the morning, dropping off his daughter at her elementary school and his son at college after saying goodbye to the roomies. He drove his own POS car (that was not as shitty as the one present thank gods) to the Knudsen Memorial Hospital. He was trying to assess the patient the sheriff brough in. He was wearing grey colored military fatigues and cuffed to the side rail of the gurney. The guy was silent and never looked me in the eye. He only glanced once at his bag by the Sheriff and the rest of the time he was looking straight ahead and upwards at the ceiling. One of the other sheriffs started yelling and the Sheriff...Gil I think ran out. The guy in grey jumped over his rail and tried to pull the whole bed towards the chair with his bag on it. Scared of what was in there I grabbed it. We fought. I got punched in the face and there was a struggle. A very bright flash of light. After that nothing and then I am here.

I felt something bump into his foot right after I heard another light scraping sound. Jerking away my foot away I noticed something. A booger wearing a rusty coffee can collided with my shoe while I was distracted. The goober the size of a cat had just tried to grab on. Neon yellow and glistening it reached with several whisker-like strands. A tiny sphincter like mouth pulsed and strained upwards, to touch my raised foot. Disgusted, I stomped down on it. It was surprisingly resistant but with another full weight stomp the thing popped like a water balloon. A third stomp also hit the can. The coffee can gave off a loud crunched too. The florescent snail-thing had splattered with more mucus that was appropriate for its size. The now broken “coffee can” that held the creature was organic on the inside. It shined like a wet pearl. As he was wiping his defiled shoes, he caught that familiar dragging coming again. He movement a skuttling towards him with the same short “ssssss” from before. He turned to see a disturbingly vibrant blue claw and a cardboard moving box like some sort of stealth game disguise. To many legs were creeping it out from the garage into the driveway towards him as he was stomping the snail-can-thing. He turned towards it and looked directly at it. The creature’s “clever disguise” dropped back over it. James caught a glimpse of it. He would have laughed at its antics if he wasn’t so scared. What he saw was enough. A wicked hooked claw that could snap a broom handle with ease. “Nope!” He shouted and angrily he began looking round. Trusting nothing he backed away from the samurai. “It’s the stupid Larrio’s haunted castle all over again.” Glaring at everything he waited. He felt ramping paranoia. Naked and exposed before a hidden audience. At first slowly backing up and then with confidence walking while glancing behind him. Nothing seemed to be following him but he was confronted with a new problem. Where to go?

This was solved by a distant “pop, pop, pop” coming from a few blocks away. “Gunshots?” he thought never taking his eyes fully off the box until he gained some distance. He began jogging down the street away from the cul-de-sac in the direction of the sound. Holding his right side to stabilize himself. The pressure in his abdomen threw off his gate and prevented anything else other than a light jog at this point. He felt a little weird jogging towards gunfire…but gun shots meant people. After what he had just seen he was feeling vulnerable. He glanced back but didn’t see anything else following him.

Jogging down the shattered street only more dusty yards and broken windows. No sign of people or living vegetation. He crossed 3 more streets when he noticed a sudden change. The houses were straighter, and the windows were no longer broken. The yards were greener and cut short. This trend got stronger until he reached an intersection with the crossing road gently curved towards his left and right on either side. Gently curving out of view. The way ahead had a large pine tree growing out of what should have been the street. The asphalt ending after it. The houses and yards were quickly overtaken by a forest with grass up past his knees and a few scattered bushes. Everything else before in the neighborhood was arid, dry and long dead until right before the last couple blocks. This sudden change to nature was much more comforting. The plants were lush and alive. The grey and brown of the suburb ended after this street. It was taken over by greens leaves, lush grasses and deep brown broad leaf litter on the ground. That meant water was present for there to be green vegetation. After the brief jog he was feeling a little dry. He really wasn’t looking forward to having to go into one of the houses alone to try a tap. He was looking forward to the option of finding running water. The woods thickened a little way ahead of him and the house quickly halted half a block into the trees. Far past that was a shimmer in the distance like heat off the pavement in summer. Except instead of waving a little way in front it went as high as he could see in front of him. It also seemed to curve and wrap a way to either side in a gentle curve past the woods.

While trying to decide on right, left or into the woods he noticed around the curve to a person. They rounded the corner and were running at a fast clip in his direction. In light blue scrubs was a petite looking woman with black hair in a hangered pony. Upon seeing him she began running faster and waving frantically. “Bree? As he recognized her dark hair as all 100lbs of his coworker sprinted towards him. Behind her quickly came someone else. Even at this distance he was probably the most muscular man he had ever seen. He was quickly out pacing Bree with long trunk like legs eating up the distance between the frantically waving Filipina.