I was going to die without ever having loved and experienced love

I was going to die a virgin

I was going to die never having experienced all those cute, romantic and lovey-dovey moments with a girl.

I was going to die without a single achievement

I was going to die without having mastered anything

And without finishing my bucket list.

I was never going to get to that tearjerker movie I’d stowed away on account of being busy.

I was never going to mend my relationship with my parents.

I was never going to tell them how much I loved and appreciated them.

All my wishes and desires, all my goals for life… they were all useless now.

And to be very brief, I was going to die without ever having lived.

Reality dawned on me. This might very well be my last day.

A spark lit inside me— one that I didn’t know I had.

Was it… anger?

As the ugly creature fully pulled the blanket and revealed itself in all its disgusting nature,

I became angry.

Fine. I was going to die. Fuck it. If it was going to kill me, I wasn’t going down without a fight.

So I pushed Janco away with all my might and scrambled to the other side, away from the monster. It let out an ugly screech and followed after us under the bed. It’s bony hand scraped my shin as I scrambled to get to my feet.

Without thinking twice, I jumped onto the bed and then leapt out of the window. A jolt ran through my shins as I landed on the grass. In front of me, Janco rolled with his landing— more deftly than I ever could. And without even a glance of shared understanding, we both bolted away from the house in the same direction.

There was a distant screech and I threw a glance back.

There it was in all its ugly glory, the sight of which made me cringe in disgust and wonder if I was actually dreaming.

It was a creature with squirming, squelching tentacles for a lower body and a bony, almost charred upper body. With empty eye sockets, its head looked like an eyeless charred skull with skin. From far away, it looked to be a good 10 to 13 feet in length.

How the hell did that thing even fit in the room?

We continued to run.

“We have… to… lose line of sight.” I panted.

I threw another glance back.

It trashed and slammed the floor as it dragged itself along with only its hands. Despite this apparent ‘flaw’, it was unnaturally fast. Almost as fast as a running dog.

“Holy shit it’s fast! Here! Take a right!” I yelled.

And we bolted into the home on the right— slamming open its door and continuing to run through its narrow, cramped interior.

“How do we get out?”

I stopped and looked to the staircase on my right only for the briefest of moments.

And then bolted up the staircase.

“Upstairs??” Yelled Janco, but I didn’t pay him any attention, because the moment the thing came at the door, he ran up the stairs as frantically as I did.

I ran into a warmly-lit bedroom and looked out the window. All of a sudden my knees felt weak.

Janco stood next to me, panting.

“Don’t tell me you’re going to jump.”

My knees felt very, very weak. Jumping out of a window on the ground floor sent a jolt up my shins. What would happen to my legs if I jumped from the second floor?

“You’re crazy. We could’ve distracted it some other way.”

The thumping and squelching on the stairs got louder and we both turned back.

“Yeah well… There’s no other way now.” I murmured.

I climbed onto the window sill and turned back to see a few tentacles reaching up the staircase.

And I jumped. My heart felt like it was going to explode and my mind screamed at how much of an idiot I was. But when my feet hit the ground, I followed Janco’s example and rolled. Surprisingly it worked! Even though my legs received quite the impact, it wasn’t as much as I’d expected.

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I looked up and saw Janco hesitate for a second, but then he jumped as well— landing deftly on the grass beside me.

A bony hand grabbed the window sill above us, and then another, and then the creature’s hollow face stared at us from above. Again, we bolted, running down the well-lit streets to wherever.

We didn’t even bother to look back, we just kept running.

We ran and ran until we collapsed on some patch of grass that was quite far away.

The endless expanse of the starry skies was drawn out above us, and we both lay spreadeagled on the grass, trying to catch our breath and cool down. The grass prickled my back and my shirt stuck uncomfortably to my damp skin.

If this was all it took for us to survive, we might end up dead in a few minutes. Something I didn’t even want to think about— lest it come true.

Wait a minute… The objective was to survive wasn’t it?

“Hey…” I called out to Janco, who turned his head, exhausted.

“How long are we supposed to survive?”

Janco’s brows furrowed, and then he turned pale.

“I… I don’t know. He didn’t tell us…”

A chill ran down my spine.

“So there’s no time limit?” I asked.

“I… No, it can’t be. There has to be a time limit.”

It was then that reality dawned on me.

“That thing has to die.” I murmured.

I got up even as my body ached. Ah. I hadn’t exerted myself to this extent since the day I came out the womb. And I sure as hell didn’t have much more fuel left in the tank. I looked to Janco, that beady eyed, spectacled boy who looked like he’d been buried in books since he the day he could read.

“You ever run this much?” I asked.

“I was in the track club… I’ve run a few marathons before. Why?”

Ah. So I was the one who was going to die. Unknowingly, a laugh escaped me. And then it cascaded into silent peals of laughter. I couldn’t be as loud as I usually was, there was a monster prowling around after all.

I looked to the stars and gazed at them in silence.

“You said that thing has to die. Why?”

Man. Why does he have to interrupt my melancholic silence with stupid questions.

“With no time limit there’s only two ways this game can end. I’ll let you figure out the rest yourself.” I said, and stood up, dusting my back and pants.

Janco paled and stared at the ground in a daze, but I paid him no mind. I was surprisingly quick to accept my death. Maybe I’d made peace with it under the bed when that thing had found us.

“What else did the old man say. Quick.” I asked.

A long pause later, he finally answered.

“He said… He said there was a rule. Only one rule.”

“And that was?”

“Never go out of bounds. He said not even he could guarantee our safety.”

‘Out of bounds’? My mind flashed to the strange reflective fog beyond the fence.

“Did he say anything about what these ‘bounds’ were?”

“No.”

I felt it in my gut that the fog was the key to this riddle. But how? And even if it was, how was I supposed to use it? I couldn’t just push it into the fog.

I struggled to get up and helped Janco up as well. We couldn’t stay here for too long. And now that we knew our objective, we had to atleast try to fulfill it.

“We are a bunch of idiots.”

I murmured as I crouch-walked towards the door.

“What do you mean? Wait— why are you going inside?”

As I silently unlocked the door and beckoned him to come inside, my gaze darted everywhere— from the streets to the various houses lined up on it. I even strained my ears to a level I’d never done before, all in the hopes of picking out the monster in advance.

Once we were inside, I tip-toed to the kitchen, not caring if Janco followed me or not.

“I said we’re idiots because…” The drawer in the kitchen slid open— revealing a glinting assortment of knives.

“Only idiots would run around with no means to defend themselves.”

I stared at my reflection in the knife and then slipped it into my pocket without paying a second thought. My heart beat soared— not with nervousness.

But with excitement. In all my life I’d never lived a moment such as this— so close to death and thus fully, truly living in the moment. I was aware of every breath I took, every blink of the eye and every beat of my heart.

At this moment, I saw two choices in front of me: The knife in my hand, and the fog-gate at the end of the street. Although I had the knife in my hand, I had no intention to engage it in close-quarters combat without knowing what it was capable of. To do so would mean death, a hundred percent.

I picked up a fancy electronic egg timer and stuffed it into my pockets.

“What is… No… Are you trying to draw it to us?” Janco said, his face pale. I looked at him and clicked my tongue.

“Are you an idiot? I don’t have a deathwish. It’s just for an experiment.”

The two of us stealthily went outside and I directed my hand towards the fog-gate at the end of the street.

“Why are we going there?? We should be trying to hide!” His face was one of disbelief. And I too, looked at him in disbelief. This man. Even after telling him that the only way out was to fight, he wanted to hide.

I felt disgusted by his ideology and it must’ve shown on my face.

“If you’re not willing to come, this is where we part wa—”

There was a loud scream and we both whipped our heads towards it. Instantly, we hid inside the thorny bushes— its branches scraping against our skin.

Tap tap tap tap tap tap

The rapid tapping of shoes on asphalt.

We saw a man zoom past us and down the road— the creature following closely behind, slapping its tentacles on the floor as it went. It was baffling how it could drag itself that fast. Just as one of the creature’s bony hands almost touched the man’s leg—

SLAM!

Someone stepped out and slammed a baseball bat onto its bony body.

The two of us almost shouted in jubilation. Finally, someone else had come to the same conclusion as us. Before I could even turn to Janco and tell him that we should assist, I heard the man’s scream.

The baseball bat fell to the ground as the man screamed. His hands were held down and when a slithering tentacle from its mouth jammed itself into his mouth— his screams had finally died down as his body jerked.

I felt bad for the man. I really did.

But was I a bad person for thinking that he was an absolute idiot?