Not breathing,
heart unmoving.
Deceased.
"There were no witnesses, but judging by the blood analysis and apparent state of decomposition of the corpse the death occurred more than 32 hours ago."
"Reason. Unknown..."
The words coming out of the doctor's mouth were sharp and cold.
Almost completely devoid of emotion.
That eagerness to save lives and help people had long been extinguished.
Asphyxiated by that uncomfortably cold, refrigerated air.
It shouldn't have surprised him.
The morgue was a cruel place.
The man narrowed his eyes.
"Autopsy will be necessary..."
As far as the police reports went, the body had been found in the middle of a nearby forest by a group of high school students a couple of hours ago. Yet the reason for death was still an utter mystery.
It had not been a wild animal.
It had not been suicide.
Not an accident either.
Not at all, the body was completely healthy.
No external injuries, not even bruises.
"This is weird."
...
Done with writing down the excruciatingly long report, the man gave one last glance at the body lying in front of him.
For a second, the man's face tried conveying the emotion of sorrow for that empty carcass before him...
But he couldn't bother.
At the end of the day, that body was just a number.
Another checkmark in a long list of people, all waiting to be written down.
"Tssk- Another youth."
The man murmured to himself before turning around.
Then everything went dark again.
----------------------------------------
The compartment closed with an echoing metallic clangor just before silence engulfed everything.
For some reason, he was aware again.
The corpse's whitish and lifeless eyes stared passively at the ceiling, thinking about nothing in particular. Its skin's color approaching now a pale shade of grey.
Ever since he was a child Elgan had always been scared of darkness and small spaces.
Yet despite that... Everything seemed so calm, so peaceful.
It had ended.
That had been his life right there... And he couldn't be bothered,
after all, Elgan knew what was coming.
He was dead after all.
Now he would be left to rot in a wooden box, somewhere a couple of feet underground, eaten by worms, soaked by the cold, pouring rain.
It was an ending fit for someone like him.
'Scum.'
That muddled thought stuck in his head for an eternity,
until it didn't anymore.
The steel trapdoor to his death compartment opened, and once it did Elgan's world crumbled.
Their voices could be heard outside, cries, sobs, accompanied by a shout of anguish every once in a while.
That was probably Elgan's mother...
Another voice, another soul sounded young, muffled, distant. A teenage girl, that was his sister.
Ragged breathing, hyperventilating, breakdown, his brother. He was having another anxiety attack.
Then another person... An adult, a man. The one who was supposed to be the pilar of that family crumbled like sand. Paralyzed on the floor, his father.
It was a nightmare.
One fit for him.
Yet somehow he remained idle, uncaring even. He was the same as always.
Once more, Elgan could feel nothing.
Nothing but absolute numbness, that was.
It didn't matter whether he was dead or alive, it had always been like that.
'Sorry.'
His apologies couldn't be heard anymore though.
No matter how much he willed for them, his eyes didn't budge, they wouldn't budge.
His gaze remained calmly fixed at those fluorescent lights in the ceiling.
Not bothering to think too much.
Just accepting.
Accepting, no. Hoping some of this had some meaning... Perhaps in the afterlife.
----------------------------------------
Then there was one last scene...
The rumbling of a nearby thunderstorm echoed through the cloudy sky,
it had been raining for the last couple of days nonstop.
It was not exactly what you'd expect of a day of summer in the South,
but it did rise up to the occasion.
The drums of thick droplets bathed the scene.
Accompanied by the same monotonous sounds now carved into his mind.
Cries, sorrow, remorse, deceit, even rage.
None of the men and women invited raised their gazes.
Their black suits hung darkly, as their spirits faded away in that seemingly unending field of tombstones.
He was being mourned.
How sweet...
'Let me go.'
Further and further away.
All their voices kept slipping away from his ears. Each second, dimmer, quieter, fainter.
Gone.
----------------------------------------
Elgan had once wanted to live without regrets.
That had been his dream,
the way he wanted to live his life.
That was the only way to erase the monsters that could hunt him in the afterlife.
To earn eternal peace with himself.
Pitful, was it not?
'If I had fought harder. Studied harder. Pushed harder to make the people around me proud.'
'If I hadn't lost to living this shit life, living and embodying mediocrity to my very last breath.'
Elgan wanted to cry.
'If I had convinced my brother...'
'If I had helped my father with the burden...'
'If I had been nicer to mother and sister...'
'If I had spent more time with gramps...'
'If only.'
Elgan had once wanted to live without regrets.
Yet now they piled up before his tomb.
Those monsters. No, those devils of regret.
So many of them.
...
Then.
An eternity later, the eternal question was summoned amidst the mist.
Erasing his devils, even if for a short second.
What are you?
Elgan was dead, long dead.
Yet that omnipresent voice demanded an answer.
Another eternity passed.
"Let me find out."
...
Hidden in the shadows the echoes of a dead deity smirked, for it had, at last, found an answer to its tasete.
One of its ancient, reality-bending fingers pointed at the tiny, withering soul.
Infusing it with a curse.
Then one last voice sparked in the void.
Let regret fuel your heart,
let pain curse your soul,
callous your mind.
For once, from now onwards...
You are not powerless anymore.
Then, something inside him moved.
Bump
Bump Bump
Bump Bump
Bump Bump
Bump Bump
Bump Bump
Bump Bump
Bump Bump
You can't escape hell anymore.
Finally.
Elgan's hand reached the surface of the seemingly unending earth, blood-soaked nails grabbed onto the soil with the ferocity of a starving beast. His battered, torn arms struggled to unbury the rest of his body from the depths of the ground for a few whole minutes before finally being freed.
The exhaustion was palpable in his pained expression if not for the adrenaline pumping through his veins.
For a second, Elgan tried to grasp his surroundings but it was useless, his senses were returning to him and with them, horrible pangs of palpable agony.
| Ghtjt!! |
It was not only his nose, mouth, and ears...
If you encounter this tale on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.
Even his eyes were filled with the arid sensation of lifeless powder. They were fucking dry.
He couldn't hear,
couldn't see,
couldn't breathe.
Ah... Yes, breathing. Right. He forgot about that.
'FUCK. I'm Dying!!!'
Elgan gasped in shock at the sudden need for air.
The unholy amount of dirt blocking his trachea was mistakenly inhaled into his lungs, forcing him to enter into a mad coughing fever.
His bloodied nails grabbed onto the ground
as a thick paste of mucus and tears covered his face.
Minutes passed...
Surprisingly, the dust didn't cause his demise.
A ball of disgusting mud escaped his throat, freeing his trachea.
Sweet air flooded his lungs, extending over his body an intoxicating sense of safety.
Then...
Then it was the splitting headache.
The pulsing waves felt as if about to split his skull open and threatened to send him back to wherever he had just crawled from.
They said you have to relax in panic situations,
but dark thoughts were the only thing that showed up in his turmoiled mind.
The coughing kept going for what seemed like an eternity, all before his breathing pace settled. The pain and anguish from almost choking are replaced by the dull, cold feeling of his own flesh. He rapidly notices his arms and legs won't stop shaking... The crying had freed the layer of filth covering his eyes His vision is in a permanent blur.
Still, Elgan could manage to grasp his immediate surroundings.
"What- is this place?.."
His eyes shift all around, trying to get a clue of his location, alas everything was too dark for him to discern sky from earth.
The veil of a starless night makes it impossible to grab onto anything.
No moon in the sky, no breeze, just warm dry stationary air, and no sounds whatsoever.
There is only one certainty.
'I'm alone.'
His instincts screamed that something was wrong, and he couldn't refute that logic. Anxiety and headache merge together, pumping up his adrenaline and stress in a perfect concoction. His body instantly locked in a state close to paralysis. His stiff, cold muscles and weak articulations decide to contract in a defensive position, ready for whatever was coming.
Yet nothing does. Seconds pass in the hurry of solitude, that silence doesn't fade though.
| Step |
And then...
Through the edges of his vision, he spots a shadow moving in the distance.
His paralysis seems to temporarily recede as Elgan manages to spin his body around, getting ready for the worse.
...
That was, the moment they met eyes.
The moment he turned around the echoes of his heart came to a halt. Elgan felt his tension dropping to extreme levels, his skin chickening and paling.
Elgan's gaze remains affixed to the bright orange glow on the horizon.
The only light in that world was that of mayhem.
His knees collapse to the barren ground below him. Elgan does not dare to move a single muscle as he admires in terror and confusion the now nitid scene that inhabits the distance.
Hidden under columns of smoke, hellish fireworks shake the earth. The sea of flames refrained from expanding through the visage of the city, instead, it nested on its territory, vigilant, but dormant.
Skyscrapers in flames, collapsed buildings, entire districts burnt, sunken houses. And the worse of all... That silence. That silence made him doubt he was even there, to begin with.
...
Through it all, Elgan's eyes were kept low, scanning the suburbs of the city from far away, trying to rationalize the nightmare his senses tried to feed him.
Staring up from that hill, envisioning the chaos that consumed the place he grew up in. The image sank in, drowning his mind in the abysm of doom.
He tried to get a hold of himself.
Nuclear war; A conflict of some sort; The apocalypse; He thought of the possible causes. Just like that man in the morgue, detached, distant. It couldn't be real, after all.
What he was looking at. What he was seeing couldn't be real.
He was dead.
Without realizing it, Elgan had emptied his timer.
That monster was ready to wage war on him, and Elgan didn't even imagine it coming. With an ear-splitting shriek, the order was sent.
Even in his state of avoidance, the sound was impossible to miss. Elgan noticed but consciously fought to ignore it.
His eyes didn't move. They kept circling the city, watching the destruction from afar like in some sort of cheap movie. Racing through the same, empty lines of thought like a broken vinyl.
They both knew the truth, though.
Elgan didn't want to face it, that thing.
Like a child, he stood up from the ground without lifting his gaze from the floor. He walked in the opposite direction.
How couldn't he?
Hiding and running away from what he feared had always worked for Elgan, and he hoped this would be no exception. He stuck up behind what looked to be a gravestone and sat there silently.
Against all rational, he kept attempting to convince himself of the fact that this wasn't real. Some hallucination, joke, nightmare, dream. He didn't care which one it was, as long as it was not real.
Still, each time his mind pushed that fantasy forwards. The agonizing headache would push against it.
His hands started shaking uncontrollably, the stress was taking a toll on him.
He tried focusing on something else to think but It's all useless. That Goliath's smile had already been carved inside his pupils.
You can't escape from the devil.
'Maybe if I look back again, it will all be gone right?'
All logic crumbles under pressure.
Elgan glances just a little bit behind his back. His own lies defeat his fear, at least for a short moment.
Unlike before. That thing's eyes weren't lethargic anymore. Its hundreds of eyelids were now fully open. Piercing, maddening. Its gaze lands on the same spot as it did before.
Elgan.
He closes his eyes and turns himself into a ball. He starts to hyperventilate, an anxiety attack. A big one at that.
'Does it know I'm hiding? Is there anyone else in here? Am I alone? Is my family fine? Did they escape? What am I doing in this place? Should I run away? I should ask for help. There is no way this is happening. It must be some kind of delirium. Where did that thing come from? Where is everyone?
Why is everything so quiet? Why won't anyone come? How did this happen? Will I be safe if I just stay here? Should I go? Where should I go?
Should I hide somewhere else? That's it, I'll just continue hiding away. That thing won't move.'
'I'm safe here right? Am I?'
You are alone.
The answer is clear enough to see, but at that moment, Elgan was blind.
Always have been.
The silence that permeated that new world was lost to the thunderous sound of crashing concrete and bending steel.
The very Earth bellow him starts rumbling, louder, nearer, with each minute, with each second.
Doom draws closer.