I sat back in the seat and calmed myself by watching the timer. I felt like drifting off but the sound of teeth and gaping, hungry maws trying, mostly unsuccessfully, to open my fucking car door dumped another hit of adrenaline into me. I slammed the lock down, calmly, in only a minor panic. Now that was settled, at least for the moment, I refocused on the fact that having a branch tip or whatever it was punched through my shoulder probably wasn’t great from an infection standpoint. Not to mention whatever else I managed to get in there by sliding on my back down the hill.
Once the process of cataloging injuries started, all of them fought for attention. At least I didn’t have to worry about insane wolves and their sniffing and huffing.
I checked my head first, thankfully unharmed, though I definitely had a good bump on my upper right forehead. Concussion? Maybe, but it was impossible to tell since it could have been a hundred other factors. I reached back over my right shoulder. Shit! Damn it hurt, I pulled my hand back a bit then paused before touching over it again. My hands were probably filthy.
Okay, I need a new order of operations.
What do I know? Well first off, these dogs, or wolves or whatever the fuck they were, were insane. Ok, maybe not insane but definitely something had them spooked and hungry for my ass. Maybe it was just all the weird shit going on. Now that the immediate threat to my bodily integrity had passed it seemed obvious that all this was affecting them as well since I would have been dead if it wasn’t.
That was interesting. It was affecting them too. Dammit, focus Thomas. FOCUS.
First, I need to clean my wounds. No. I need to clean my hands, then clean my wounds, then… Well,, maybe that would be good enough for now.
I heard their jaws working at the handle, slapping it up and down. That would have opened the door if it still had been unlocked.
Okay, new first. Make sure ALL the doors are locked. I took a deep breath. Then another. Then I moved. I could breathe when I was dead. Or not, I guess. Whatever.
Crawling in my truck was easy, I’d owned the car for a decade. Making sure all the doors were locked? Priceless, and easy.
Remembering where I put my medical kit? More difficult. Some rummaging around turned up my car’s medical kit, but I needed my other one. The Big Boy Medical Kit. That was… somewhere. Please God tell me I didn’t take it out of the car. That worry was unfounded and quickly settled when it turned up at the bottom of my backpacking bag. I pulled out the mini-duffel and tried to clear a space on the backseat until I was just kicking and shoving shit out of the way. I didn’t have time for this bullshit.
I unzipped it and started to get to… work. I had a couple of gallons of water that I had found with my feet and emptied over my hands as I scrubbed them against each other. Then I spilled some more as I took a couple of huge gulps for myself. I didn’t really care about making a mess, afterall, that was future Thomas’ problem, if anyone’s.
I sighed then removed my clothing, easy enough besides a painful cloth not wanting to leave the bloodsoaked, semi-dried skin of my shoulder. Breathing heavy I pushed against the side of the wound, trying to bleed it some more. It didn’t really want to keep doing that. I gasped and flinched. Okay, enough of that.
There was a vast difference between working on an ambulance for a year and trying to fix yourself, blind, in the wild, and with no doctor to pawn someone off to for the serious treatment. Maybe paramedic school would have been more useful. Still, the basics were common sense and I was eternally grateful that no bones had been broken. That would have put me into an entire new tier of screwed.
If this hit everyone, like the message had said, I wondered how many people were having to deal with broken bones while being temporarily blind. I stopped myself from reading the message beyond checking the timer.
Damn, I’ve been at this for a half-hour and haven’t done a damn thing.
I splashed more water over my hands, then dumped some more over my shoulder and where I was feeling cut up on my legs. This was going to suck.
Alright Tom, you don’t need to keep telling yourself that.
I started fumbling in the medical kit, the first things I recognized were two pill bottles. I knew what they were, tylenol and ‘fish-mox’. It was amoxicillin for fish tail-rot or something like that, but it was the exact same dosage and even the same pill and pill-number as regular people-amoxicillin. I took two of each, then carefully put them to the side. I’d put stuff back neatly when I could see. I found another bottle, this one strangely shaped. I felt around it, trying to figure out what it was. Hand sanitizer. Oh good, I nearly started plunging digits into open wounds with barely washed hands. I got a good scrub going with that, nearly emptying the small bottle. I had to stop delaying this. I kept my hands up, like a surgeon, and felt around with my feet for another water jug. One that hadn’t had my filthy hands rubbing all over it.
I felt a container of liquid slosh around, picked it up and leaned it over my shoulder as I started to scrub, first around the wound, then in it. I had to stop almost immediately and scramble for something to put between my teeth, otherwise I felt like I would crack something and I had no idea if dentists were even a thing anymore. Probably.
I scrubbed with my hand and tried to keep a steady stream of water going while I, gently, plunged a finger into the hole in my shoulder. The razor sharp spike of pain that was sent directly into my brain didn’t feel ‘gentle’ as a gasp caught in my throat. I didn’t breathe until I pulled my finger out and rinsed the whole area another time. It felt a lot worse and it was freshly bleeding again. I encouraged the process until I just didn’t want to touch it anymore. Maybe I just didn’t have the heart to touch it anymore.
I took a few moments before I realized that any more delays and I just wouldn’t be able to bring myself to finish it. I lightly brushed my hands across my legs. A few small punctures, it seems like some of the teeth had caught me, though thankfully no matching bites on the other side meant that they didn’t get a full chomp on me. Even with the adrenaline, I was pretty sure that I would have noticed that.
The holes I found were too small to get a finger inside, or maybe I just didn’t have the heart to do it while being completely blind. Still, I pushed and squeezed the area around each one trying to push more blood out of them. I didn’t know if it would help but I’d already done it with my shoulder, so I might as well stay consistent. I checked the rest of my body but didn’t find much else beyond a couple of sensitive spots around my ribs. No stomach wounds thankfully.
Already tired I rummaged and found a tube of antibiotic ointment. Now at the end game I dug deep and pulled out some more willpower from… somewhere and squeezed half the tube into my shoulder then pushed it in with a finger. Damn. It was getting real angry at me poking around it and moving my right hand was getting painful as well. The cold started to settle inside me in a rush and I started to shake. I had to finish this.
I barely felt the ointment slide over my leg cuts and bites. Halfheartedly, I ripped open some gauze and dropped it. It was wet when I picked it up. Sighing, I reached for a new one and felt another strange bottle. Perfectly round and small, I wasn’t quite sure what it was but then I remembered it being some sort of iodine, perhaps. It should be a red color and would stain like crazy, but I’d lifted it from a hospital a couple years ago and it was supposed to be good for wounds. I squirted it into my shoulder and over the parts of my legs that hurt the most. Finally, I tore open a new piece of gauze and gently slapped it on my shoulder.
Damn it was cold, but I really didn’t want to move. I pulled the seat release and it slammed me backward, bringing out a yelp that set off a round of startled yelp-barks from outside. That didn’t sound like any dog I’ve ever heard. Another vote for team wolf being outside. I reached around as best I could to look for a blanket and couldn’t find it.
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Instead my hand brushed against a towel. A glorious, oversized, massive beach towel. I always carried one in my car, ever since reading Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Didn’t much care for the book but that bit of advice had always stuck with me. I felt a brief bit of surreal connection with the protagonist of the book, connected through our towels. Although his trip seemed a lot more whimsical and fun than my own. Though, considering that the Earth was destroyed in the first 5 pages of that story, I was okay with my own opening minutes being just a bit less exciting, a lot more painful, and not quite as fantastical.
I looked at the timer.
Another 40 minutes had just blurred by. What if this message disappeared and never came back? It already said what tomorrow had in store. If this was a ‘system’ thing then going to sleep probably wouldn’t matter. What if it did go away though. What if this message was the last communication I had for the entire apocalypse? I felt my heart-rate spike at that thought, but it quickly burned through me and I settled back down. Guess my adrenals were tapped. Still, I really needed to wring every last clue on what I was going to have to deal with. If I fell asleep I’d be out a lot longer than an hour and then the message would be gone. Or not. I didn’t know and I wasn’t quite ready to depend on the kindness of apocalypse-invoking strangers.
With a groan and on the edge of sleep I focused back on the giant blue screen. Honestly, I was impressed how well I had been tuning it out considering that it was a giant, blue, annoying as shit, and in the middle of my non-existent vision, void-floating box.
Looking at the message gave me anxiety. No wonder I had tuned it out. Okay, take a beat.
Order of operations. My mind felt cold and tired but the familiarity of it didn’t cost me much effort or cost too much brain power. Read through it. See what sticks out. Extract useful information. Read between the lines. Extract useful information. See if there were any other clues about where Duck’s been taken. Damn I missed her.
Once I stopped feeling sorry for myself, the wolves constantly launching themselves against the door and window next to my head really helped with that; I refocused, repeated a mostly similar order of operations, and started to read.
Well, one thing stood out, clear as day. Heavenly Child Care did sound insanely awesome. Second of all, what the hell? Besides the 144,000 ‘lucky ones’, anyone under the age of 20 got a free ride out of here? An Imaginarium? Damn, the AssHoleAngel Gabriel was right, I’d never even heard of that word before and he didn’t bother describing it at all and I still knew exactly what it was.
That was assuming any of it was true. I stopped myself as that thought entered my head. I was still assuming it was all true. I couldn’t handle alien, or interdimensional bullshit at this point, my mind would spiral into a million different directions. I liked conspiracies, but once I allowed my brain to open that particular Pandora’s Box, there’d be no end to the unraveling. It was true.
God was Big Mad at humanity and sent us into the mother of all time-out corners. Gabriel’s analogy seemed to fit a bit better than my own did, but I also didn’t see any aliens. I didn’t see much of anything to be honest, so maybe they were already here. Maybe they had been here all along, infiltrating our… NO. NO. Bad brain. Not doing this, not right now. Not with hungry-hungry wolves right outside and being completely void-blind. Though, I did still take note that he mentioned ‘other kids’. Which meant aliens, at some point in time, would be a problem. The way it was talked about made it seem less like a ‘today-problem’, like the wolves, and more of a ‘tomorrow problem’, probably, and therefore firmly within the domain of future-Thomas. Damn that guy was getting a lot of shit dumped on his plate, that would suck to be him.
Besides God hating us now and Casey being whisked away to some heavenly, endless party ‘fun-land’, the next thing that stood out was the fact that I was personally called out by ‘Gabriel’. That was an unpleasant thought, already being on some unfathomable being’s radar. I knew next to nothing, in fact, just on the other side of nothing, somewhere around ‘jack shit’ about any of this angel crap.
Casey would be extremely helpful to have around right now and not just for her Bible knowledge. I needed to find a Bible. If this was some ‘end times’ shit, and it certainly seemed to be going that way, I needed to know what to expect. I didn’t know where to find one but I knew Casey had one at her apartment. In LA. That was thinking too far ahead though. Focus.
The line about ‘wishing you didn’t have pets’ seemed… odd. Nothing jumped immediately at that so I put it in the back of my head.
I caught the word ‘spoilers’ and instantly refocused back to that section now that most of the other niggling thoughts had been sorted. I re-read the entire paragraph several times.
“That Snap you heard? The one that deafened you and everyone else around the world for exactly 66 minutes?”
Yup, I remember being deaf for a good long time, though I couldn’t say if it was actually ‘66 minutes’. I’d take his word on that.
“A day of darkness”
I was uncomfortably familiar with that, being the primary issue I was dealing with at the moment. The car rocked followed by a yelp of pain. Besides the wolves. At least I would probably get my sight back, I didn’t know if the wolves planned on being a nuisance after their own returned.
“It’s going to rain harder than you can possibly imagine for a day.”
That’s okay, I like rain.
“And it’ll seem like it’s going to flood, but it won’t.”
That was settling in as something significant. Cutting off people’s senses randomly? Maybe some aliens could have seeded nano-machines a thousand years ago that propagated through humanity that could control our senses like that. But if it rained for 24 hours straight and then didn’t flood at all? I had a way to prove that. The road coming into this spot. I remembered it all damned clearly since it had been a bit more of a dicey thing than I had been letting on to Casey. I couldn’t imagine it not being even more of a disaster from a straight day of rain.
“Then you’ll have another day of “fun” before…”
Another day of “fun”. So he considers being blind and a downpour to be “fun.” So the day after the rain is going to be some new bullshit. Hurricanes? Earthquakes?
No, I think that would be covered under the ‘Earth doesn’t want you here anymore, expect adverse conditions’ part. So it means something else. I was operating under a lot of assumptions here, but I needed something approaching a plan. I had to avoid the passive doom spiral.
Now that I was just cold and in pain, my tiredness receded, at least for now. Figuring out what new hell I’d have to deal with would be important, if not on a grand scale, then at least it was to me and my immediate survivability. The guy who’s trapped in his SUV miles from other people, surrounded by shockingly malicious wolves, is cold, blind, wounded, AND has a girlfriend that just got teleported out of a presumed ‘because God is sick of your heathen-shit’ apocalypse. Oh yeah, and I lost my handgun. Yeah, I’d take and scrape out every single, tiny advantage that I could get my hands on.
It could be a ‘plague of locust-type thing. I had just thought of that as a figure of speech, but thinking about it more, it did seem like that was a biblical sounding thing that also wouldn’t fall under Earth-hating-us ‘natural disasters’. What else… It could be super cold for a day and in that same vein of thought, it could also be super hot. That would suck if I was trapped in his car for that. If it was cold, it would suck not having my good sleeping bag that was currently out by my tent, but I could probably figure something out for that. There were enough clothes here, but I’d have to be more careful about my water usage.
I was getting tired again. Sleep was pulling me in, but I fought it off for a few more seconds as I read through the ‘Status updates.’ Seemed a lot like a system. It was even named. “Penitent System.” I don’t know what I had been expecting it to be called, but something that didn’t evoke images of dudes being whipped and burned by inquisitorial agents would have been nice.
“Status. Stats. Screen.”
As expected, nothing.
“For Earth and Beasts.” Oh great so the shitheads outside get one too.
I brushed past the next status changes, yeah, yeah, we were now hated across the universe or the cosmos or whatever.
“Status Lost: Steward of Earth and Beasts, Status Gained: Prey.” That sounded like we might have had some natural, or supernatural, advantages on the pecking order. The thought slipped through my mind as cold and tired started to seep deeper into my bones.
The whole lucky and unlucky thing seemed like a pain to dissect at the moment. A lot of gristle on that particular piece of meat.
Redemptive Potentiality? Another ridiculous set of words I had no chance of processing at this moment.
The last thing that stuck out in my mind was (say “Thank you.”)
Why not? “Thank you.” I heard a series of soothing chimes sound off somewhere, but I was already asleep.
Penitent System Initiated…