My mother's last words ring clearly throughout my dream: "I can't believe my baby is finally graduating!"
Her crisp voice was filled with joy and love, her beautiful green eyes were full of pride, and her arms would hug me tightly. My mother's embrace – just like aunt Lily's – was so tight and reassuring. I crave my mother's security right this second, as I look out into the wilderness of the moving island. What I could see from the small pockets in between vines was scary, to say the least.
More red flowers with spores came inside my car while I slept in the back seat. My green Kia didn't look like a car anymore; at this point, it was covered with leaves, ivy, and malicious looking flowers. I noticed the darkness inside my vehicle as soon as I woke up and started to untangle the vines covering the windows and the flowers protruding through shattered glass after ridding myself of my stupor. All I could ask as I separated the vines from my abused car was, Where the fuck am I?
I made a small hole for myself to walk through, but I'm indecisive about going out into the wilderness. The red sun is glaring down on me, the green ivy and shrubs make rustling sounds once and a while, and for some reason, the vines encircling me keep growing and putting pressure on the car. Not only am I lost on a mysterious moving island with deadly creatures, I'm also foreign to the rest of the world's circumstances. Is the rest of the world as bad as here?
Putting my foot through this exit could mean death, and I'm not ready for such a fate. I feared death before this whole incident even occurred. But I must get out of my crumbling car at some point, no? Better now that I am fed and hydrated than when death is at my door. Maybe this island is a safe haven, and I don't know it yet. Yes, that could be the case…fingers crossed.
As my right foot makes it through the hole, I hear a familiar dinging sound. My phone! I almost forgot about the message I received before I crashed my car. My phone lights up, and I take it into my hands and see the message 'Buy milk' displayed on the screen. My mother's last message to me had me laughing with tears in my eyes. I couldn't help it.
In between my chapped and bruised hands, I held a cracked screen with the last few written words of my beloved mother. I don't know if she's alive, or if uncle Culhane is alive, or if my younger brother and sister made it through this ordeal. Are they even going through the same situation as me? It is tempting to conclude that this is all a dream and that the people I love are safe, but if the pain and suffering I've felt until now have not woken me up from this dream – no, nightmare – then nothing will.
My fingers start to expertly slide across the screen to send my own text, but my phone turns off seconds before sending a message that asks about their wellbeing.
Tears stream down my face at the thought of all my loved ones being dead. My dirty nails scratch my sore arms, and I once again bang my hands against my dashboard in the hopes of going back to the emptiness that has kept me captive these past few days.
The world starts to shake, but my numbed senses don't respond. Can this nightmare end already? My mind doesn't respond to my car being submerged in water, but I still hold my breath.
Everything is underwater: the greenery, the trees, and my car. The island seems to have turned upside down, and when I finally come to this conclusion, my body responds. I swim through my little hole, and my limbs spread out as far as possible – performing a subpar butterfly motion.
Thankfully, my car wasn't too far from the island's edge; otherwise, I would have drowned after a few seconds of taking in the murky water. My head makes it past the surface tension, and coughs slip through my tightly sealed lips. I doggy paddle to the bisque-colored edge – that stretches out in every direction - nearest to me, and I climb on top of its slowly moving surface. My breathing is erratic but not as loud and imposing as my beating heart. It hurts to even exist at this very moment.
I sit and wait by the edge, and after hours of waiting for something to change, I groan out in frustration and yell, "Fuck!" more than a couple of times.
Getting up from the smooth ground, my swollen legs with missing shoes start to walk me towards the sound of movement. This might not be my brightest idea. The shuffling and clacking I hear in the distance are not sitting well with me, and even though I'm sure I outran the overgrown lizards, anything could be waiting for me on this smooth sailing land.
The sun is almost setting, and night is almost upon me, but before everything disappears from my sight, I see a brown dot in the distance. I start to run towards the distorted figures in hopes of finding some edible wildlife, or – if I'm lucky – a person to guide me back to my car. My footsteps are heard, and the brown dot scrambles in my direction.
I'm a fucking dumbass! I internally scream as I run back to the island's edge. Was I honestly expecting someone to walk me back to my car?! For fuck's sake, have I not watched a movie before? Well, at least I didn't scream for help.
My legs start running at full speed, but the crab-like thing behind me has some sort of advantage. After only 3 minutes of running, it caught up to me. One of the shelled creature's pincers latches on to my right ankle – surely causing a gaping hole – and my face hits the hollow ground. I wait for the pain to kick in or for unconsciousness to take over, but neither do. I feel no pain at all.
With all the strength I can muster, I push myself up onto my back, and with my bare fists, I hit the animal's head – right through his two shelled eyes. The creature unlatches from my ankle and, with its six legs, moves back a couple of feet. While unable to put enough pressure on my ankle to get up on my own two feet, I manage to start crawling. The creature begins to swing its claws erratically – scratching my legs and back - as it successfully catches up to me.
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Thankfully, I can't feel the pain. I realize, though, that my death is more than assured if I don't kill the creature. My crawling doesn't stop, but neither does the animal's swiping claws. I keep getting pierced by the creature's sharp needle-like claws, and the pain is unbearable. Why are his eyes shielded with a shell? Is that its weakness?
Without further deliberation, my two-pointer and middle fingers extend towards the creature's eyes, and they pierce right through the little fucker's bizarre pupils. My fingers curl up, and I rip his eyes out, which causes a vicious response from the six-legged animal. It thrashes its pincers towards my thighs, and it pulls towards his body – making a large but shallow - gash in both my thighs.
After a minute or so of screeching and thrashing, the crab stops moving. My arms move away from the creature's perforated eye sockets, and I remove the pincers from my thighs. The bleeding from my ankle and thighs was astronomical, and although the pain hasn't come knocking at my door yet, at some point, the adrenaline will completely wear off, and I will be in a world of torment. That is, if I survive the blood loss, of course.
As if things couldn't get any worse, the world starts to shake again. The island was flipping itself around, and this time I would be prepared. I take off my black shirt, rip it into small shreds, and I tie the shirt strands above my bleeding wounds to stop the flow of blood. The bleeding starts to slow down from the pressure.
With a small sigh, my arms latch onto my fresh kill, and I wait to be immersed in the bloody water. When the island goes back to its original state, I swim up to the surface.
I couldn't see my green Kia anywhere, but it's too dark outside to really start looking for it, so I try to dismantle the creature.
After a while, though, the task seemed impossible. The bisque-colored shell was too hard to break apart. Although, if you knocked on it, the body felt hollow…as if there was something inside. I turn my nemesis around and search for something soft. The meter-tall creature was difficult to search, but I found a softer part of its body on its backside. If I'm not mistaken, this must be the crab's asshole. I don't want to go there. God, I really don't want to go there!
But it seems I'll have to go there since there is no other alternative after an hour of searching.
With a disgusted expression, I reach in through the hole and start to pull out shit, but when I try to grab the intestine from the inside and rip it out, nothing works. It's tough on the inside too. The animal's pincers were sharp…if I can find a way to remove the pincers from the body, then maybe I won't die just yet.
I was so preoccupied with my survival that when my legs began to fall asleep and my wounds began to throb, I didn't – even for a second – concern myself with my wellbeing. Isn't that ironic?
After just a couple of minutes, the discomfort was too much, and instead of figuring out how to dismantle the crab, I just sat down to take a breather and figure out how to treat my wounds. There was this nasty bloody-gel substance on all my injuries, and I'm no expert, but as long as the wounds aren't bleeding, I should be fine…right?
The black strips of cloth – that resemble the tourniquets from action movies – above my wounded legs are causing momentary paralysis, but I was scared to untighten them because I didn't know if my wound would open again. What a mess!
It isn't the time to beat myself up over my medical inexperience. I'm proud of myself for even knowing what a tourniquet is if I'm honest. With a slouched sitting posture, my scarred hands continue to look for the crab's weaknesses. Surprisingly, I find something: the joint atop the foot-long pincers was made of flesh and was considerably unprotected.
I don't wonder for too long, though. I grab the creature's other arm, and with the pincer, I smash through the exposed flesh. The bone is more rigid than I thought - maybe that is why the area was unprotected - but it soon gives in to the pincer's sharpness and snaps in half. With an elated expression, I start to swing the foot-long claw around.
After playing around with my sharp new weapon, I try to remove the bone from the pincer but am not strong enough. The chipped bone will have to be my handle. With a weapon of my own now, I try to crush the creature's shell, and to my surprise, the protective layer on the deceased crab started to crumble into pieces—one hit, two hits, and then three hits. After the third hit, the creature's shell was shattered entirely – leaving behind only the right-hand pincer and the pink, soft flesh of the overgrown crab. I perform the same operation to the right-hand pincer as I did on the left-hand one, and now I have two very sharp weapons at my disposal. The crab's flesh will serve as my dinner, and maybe it can even work as bait for other island dwellers.
While thinking of the uses for the crab's meat, I start to take off my pants to use the cloth as a makeshift bag to hold the meat. The meter-tall creature won't fit in my small pair of tight jeans, but if I manage to cut the meat into squares, I'll be able to include at least half – if not all – of the meat. With my food problem solved, I now had an even more critical issue to resolve - water. Finding fresh water should have been my number one priority. Having quenched my thirst last night, my mind did not register the dangers of dehydration. With a sigh, I start to stab the crab meat with my pincers. The pink flesh was challenging to cut through, but my pincers are sharper than steel, and thus within an hour - or two - I had dozens of cube-shaped crab meat stuffed inside a makeshift bag.
Midnight was officially upon me – according to my watch – and as much as I wanted to sleep, I couldn't. Yes, I tried to forget my thirst, hunger, and throbbing injuries, but not at the expense of remembering my family and how much I miss them. Especially not at the cost of questioning my existence and vulnerability in this new, dangerous world.
The adrenaline in my body officially dies down completely, and what I feel is no longer a throbbing sensation near my wounds. No, now my legs are made of cement – immovable - and it feels like the crab's pincers are still lodged inside my wounds, stabbing me continuously without end. God, I missed only feeling pain during my periods. Something tells me that the pain and suffering I feel now are only the beginning in this crazy world.
With a sweating and aching body, I manage to get up from the ground. With all the strength I can muster and the two pincers by my side, I walk to the nearest tree. My tired right arm takes the pincer holding the jeans full of meat and throws it atop a sturdy branch, a head or two above me.
After performing such a tiresome feat, I collapse below the tree, and without my permission, my eyelids close on their own. Only a second later, all I could see is black.