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| >mfw editing this monstrosity after writing it in a single 4 hour period |
Chapter 2: The Night Terrors and my unpleasant experience with them.
After reading the information coming out online about what was happening around the world and what was happening in my own area, I went back downstairs to see what everyone else was doing. The place I live in is a dorm building with 4 floors, but only 3 full size ones. The fourth floor is about half the size as the other and also has fewer rooms, but that’s pretty obvious. In total, there are probably over 100 people living in this building alone. The dorm is also coed so there are guys and girls sharing the same floor, but that’s not important.
When I get down stairs I’m met with the same scene I left about 3 or so hours ago. The only difference is that there were even more people crying and more people looking like they had given up hope. There were some people that were actually being useful, mostly just barricading the doors and windows that lead to the outside on the first floor. Our building is set up so that the first floor is a few feet off the ground, so the infected really can’t like break the windows and climb in, but just in case anything were to go even worse, people were going to be staying on the second floor.
Rather than just sit in a corner and feel bad or cry or whatever, I decided that I should help out too. Though by the time I offered to help, they were mostly done with securing the ground floor so there really wasn’t much for me to do. I did however get the job as first watch for when night came. All I’d really be doing is standing by the front doors with some kind of weapon and watch them until my shift was up. As for the weapons we would be using, we fashioned something like a spear from extra beds and desks. It didn’t look all that great, but it would do the job it was made for pretty well. The students here in this building were really getting creative with weapons which made me feel a bit safer with all the weapons they were fabricating from the random materials we had here in the building.
Speaking of the weapons, we had our first chance to use one of them when the guy who was attacked earlier died and came back. When he finally went silent, the people in the room at the time knew he had expired and was about to come back from the land of the dead. Sure enough, after about 5 or 10 minutes, he started to move again. The people who were there at the time said it looked so “odd” at how he was behaving, which what they really meant was that he didn’t seem to have even a sliver of humanity left in him. He was a soulless husk of a person with only one thing on his mind, to try to fill the empty void that was created when his soul left his body. Anyways, once they had made sure he wasn’t the person he had once been, the put him out of his misery with a spear through the skull. (I should also mention that there had been a lot of information on how to deal with turned infected. The one way that kept on popping up was to destroy the brain or sever the head and then burn the body. Sounds like something straight out of a horror movie right?)
So at around 7 PM I went downstairs with my newly made spear after talking to a friend of mine who lives up north. Apparently shit was insane in the cities, military gunning down infected, but getting overrun anyways. Panic in the streets, fires, explosions, ect..ect… My friend was fine for the time being, she said that the people of her building had sealed off themselves from the rest of the city and were in the process of gathering supplies. They also had some military people there too; they were helping direct the civilians and were creating a defense network for their building and the ones around it. It sounded like they are a lot better off than us college students with makeshift spears and low supplies.
Anyways, I started my shift as the sun was going down. I didn’t think anything was going to happen that night since we had sealed ourselves off pretty damn well. If anything, there would be some infected that would try to get in, but get bored and wander away in search of their next meal. One thing that did worry me was the reports of the strange creatures. Even if they were made up by someone, today when the dead are walking and attacking the living, I felt like it could actually be possible.
I took my place at the front door and sat there with one other guy, the RA of my floor, and had a cig just to pass the time. It was around 10 PM or so we heard some strange noises outside. At the time we had thought that it was some infected trying to get in, so we went to the windows and took a look outside. It was pitch black for some reason outside, like there was some sort of mist just blocking off all light that tried to penetrate it. If I were to guess how far I could see, I’d say less than 5 feet. Though the lights from the other buildings were barely visible, everything else was shrouded in the mist. Me and the RA just stared outside, straining our eyes trying to see if anything was moving around. Out of the corner of my eye, I think I see something so I tell the RA about it. We both look in that direction when the thing that looked like it climbed out of my nightmares appeared before us.
It looked exactly as what the internet had described it. Though it was way too dark, we could make out the outline of the creature and worst of all see its eyes. The glowing red eyes were scanning the area, looking around for something. Slow, steady and what looked like intelligently, it looked around the area when it saw us. We locked eyes with it, and it started walking towards the doors. At this point we realize something was really wrong and alerted the other people on watch. The creature took its time to walk over to us, moving in a way that just looked like it didn’t belong or something. All I know is that it just looked like it didn’t belong in this world. Its long legs carried it closer and closer to the front doors and as it came closer, we could make out more of its appearance. It looked… wrong…
It walked up to around where the edge of our light from the front doors would travel and stopped. It then just stared at the doors for a while, just looking at them. Maybe it was trying to find some weakness in the structure and then try to break in and kill us all, or maybe it was just interested in what strange thing this door was. After around 5 minutes of it just standing there, it suddenly looked off to its right as if someone or something had caught its attention. Then, with unimaginable grace, it ran off to one of the other buildings. Since it was so dark, we couldn’t see what was happening, but then the screams started.
We guessed that the other building didn’t barricade well enough, or one of the creatures found a weak point and exploited it. Either way, they were in the building and sounded like they were slaughtering every living thing in it. The sound of people yelling, screaming, and crying went on for a little less than an hour, then complete silence fell. We knew at this moment that the other building had been broken into and everyone inside was killed. We knew this, but didn’t mourn just yet, instead we made sure that everything was locked down and got more people to stand watch. We now had more than half the building taking turns on watch with the other half either sleeping or making weapons. There were even a few still trying to get in contact with the police, but to no avail. If the police were going to come and save us, they would have by now. If anything, they were all dead or held up at their building as well. Either way, we were on our own, and for many of us it was the first time we were actually alone.
Many people were now praying also, since they thought of this as the end days, but I didn’t believe that. I still had too much to do in life for the world to end just now. I went back to my room on the third floor and looked out my window to see if there was anything to see. It was just as black as it was in the front, with maybe a few lights here and there from the lamp posts. For a while, I just stared out into the blackness, and felt something strange… Like it wasn’t the first time I had seen something like this. Of course that’s just impossible and tried to disregard it, but the idea that for some reason I had seen this before kept popping up. Then I remembered why after looking at my computer screen.
A long time ago, before I moved to this area I lived in a place that was old. When I saw old, I mean that people had been living on the land for hundreds of years and that there was a lot of history there. My family too had been living there for generations, being born there, living a full life, and then finally being laid to rest in the family cemetery. Anyways, this was not the life for me. I wanted to expand out and see the world, form my own opinions and live my own life. I got my chance when my father moved us away because of a job he had gotten. Even though I wanted to leave, I had a friend there which I had promised to stay in contact with, but eventually we lost each other. Her name is Alexandria Aice (but she really only likes to be called Alex) and it wasn’t till years later in an online game that I finally met her again. She had also moved away, but only for college. She had spent her whole life growing up in that isolated town and was not used to the big city yet. We started talking, and became best friends again, talking almost every day.
Anyways, the whole reason I bring up my childhood friend is because she is also involved in this memory. It was about a year before I left when I started having these dreams. In them, I was floating in a vast nothingness. There was nothing around me and I couldn’t see a thing. I had this dream almost every night before I left and when I told my parents about it, they said that everyone in the town had those dreams. I asked my friend if she had the same dreams and when I brought it up, she looked surprised with me asking that question. Yes she had been having the dreams and was amazed that we were having the same ones. Though we were young, we asked around about the dreams and eventually found our way to the old library which had been with the town since its founding hundreds of years prior. A kind old man was the librarian and told us about the supposed “origin” of our dreams. He told us that when we sleep, our mind drifts from dimension to dimension, without even realizing it. We, as in the town, eventually lost that ability. We can still sometimes have regular dreams, but most of the time it was just us floating in the nothingness.
He then told us how it was a blessing and a curse. It was a blessing because we then could see things from the outside looking in, but also a curse because it exposed us to the horrors which lurked in the nothingness. At the time we thought that he was just playing around with us, telling us these scary stories to make us be good kids or something. Looking back on it now, I think there was more truth to what he was saying than I had originally thought. Maybe those “horrors” he talked about were these creatures now terrorizing the world… Maybe this infection was something these creatures did to people… I didn’t have any answers.
Tearing myself from the window, I went to the internet to research my home town a bit. After putting the name into a search engine, a bunch of web pages popped up about mysterious occurrences happening the town. No one knew what was causing them, but the main explanation was from the town’s people. They gave some weird explanation which didn’t make any sense at all, but believed in it completely. They said something along the lines of “It was the voids interference in our world, and we took care of it”. No one knew what they meant, but I think it had to do something with the dreams everyone from the town has. Even years later I still have those dreams every so often, but recently I had been having them every night. I thought it was strange, but it had happened before so I wasn’t too concerned about it.
Looking back out over the blackness which is enveloping the view I notice something on the ground near the street. There was still power and the street lamps still somewhat worked even with the black mist. After watching the area around the lamp, I notice movement, and a lot of it. I was like the ground was alive and about a foot off of itself. I watched for another 10 minutes and then decided to head back downstairs to tell everyone about what I had seen. I was just about to turn away and go when suddenly the movement stopped. Thinking this was entirely too strange, I delayed my heading back downstairs to watch for more of the movement. It was only about 10 seconds after I had started watching again when pairs of glowing red eyes, by the hundreds, turned and faced my direction. Of course they were probably looking at the building, but for some reason I felt as though they were all just staring at me.
I felt as though something wasn’t right, like I had forgotten something like locking my car door in a dangerous area or leaving the gas on at home. I just felt like I needed to do something, and soon. I finally made the decision to go and warn everyone downstairs and made a break for the stairs. The second I turned away I heard what sounded like a stampede closing in on the dorm, and with only seconds to spare, I made it downstairs to tell everyone what was coming the second before they started ramming the doors and windows.
It was a good idea that we barricaded the windows too because some of the smaller creatures looked like they were trying to jump into them, trying to break them, but instead hurting themselves in the process. The larger ones, which looked like they were about the same size as some of those bigger dogs were ramming the door with all their might. Fortunately for us they weren’t strong enough to actually break down the reinforced door. So, after about 30 minutes of trying to get in to our building, they left, defeated. Well, I should say that most of them left. Some stayed behind and still tried to get in, but it wasn’t anything we couldn’t handle.
It was about 2 AM at this point and I was exhausted. Having another student take over my shift, I headed back to my room to try and sleep. Sleep right now seems like it is one of the most important things that I could do. I needed it, too much, with all that had happened today I was just mentally exhausted. I decided I’d research into the town more tomorrow and hit the sack for now.
As I drifted off to sleep, I wondered if I’d be dropped into the dark nothingness of that place that seemed to have come to my waking world. As I finally close my eyes to fall asleep, I thought about how my friend was doing, and how I hoped she was okay… but knowing her… she’d be…. Fine……..
...……..Another place, earlier that day, as the sun was setting on the city of chaos………..
“Shit, shit, SHIT!!!” I am not okay right now. After this whole thing started I had been essentially hiding in my room, trying not to make a noise with what is all going on outside. The sun had started setting and the city started to get real dark, like, way more dark than it should have been getting. It was like a fog of darkness had just rolled in and blotted out anything that wasn’t a few feet away from a light source. Since earlier I had been watching the outside of my window with my computer right next to me. I had been looking around on the internet for some kind of explanation of the zombies that were now rampaging across the city, killing and eating everyone. As usual, no one had any clue what was causing it so we were all back to square one.
First of all, zombies had appeared around the world and were wreaking havoc. Secondly, there was no explanation for what was causing them to come back from the dead and attack other people. Thirdly, there had been reports of strange creatures in areas where the sun had gone down. They said that they come with almost black mist or fog and attacked anything that wasn’t their own. Strangely enough, from what I’m reading online, the creatures don’t seem to be attacking the “infected”, and are instead ignoring them completely. This had given birth to a whole bunch of theories about how the zombies were somehow connected with these creatures and that maybe the creatures themselves had set loose this plague on all of us humans.
Even though I’m still hesitant on whether to accept the existence of these “creatures”, the zombies were now a fact and were doing a ton of damage across the city. It seems that the bigger cities are the ones being hit the hardest by the infection, but that only makes sense. If you do think of this as an infection, then the areas with the highest population densities will be the ones that take the brunt of it. At times like this one, and another where I got my bike stolen, I wondered why the hell did I ever want to move out into the “big city” and instead took up a job my parents had offered me back in my hometown. I think the reason why I did move out here for college is because I finally wanted to make my break for freedom, like Will did years ago.
“Hmmm….”, I wondered to myself, “why don’t I remember much about when Will moved away.. All that I could remember is that his dad or something got a job somewhere else where he would make a lot of money, and me being sad about Will moving away, and…. Something else.. What was it?!?!” This was getting frustrating and odd since with what everything that is happening, I’m trying to remember about the events around when my oldest friend moved away.
Annoyed with myself, I took another look out the window to see the nothingness which had engulfed the city. I could still hear gun fire every so often, but there wasn’t much noise except for a random scream here and there where someone had finally ran out of luck and became someone’s dinner. “Hmmm…. Nothingness?”, for some reason that word “nothingness” stuck out to me. I then began to think why it would, when I finally realized where this feeling was coming from. From my window I could see almost nothing, like if the whole city had disappeared before me and that there was only the void right outside. “The dreams…”, I remembered the dreams that I started having when I was a kid. Always the same, me floating in this endless void with nothing else around me, and I would always just float around until I woke up. It seemed that everyone from that town had the same dreams every so often, and that they were used to it.
I then remembered that when I started having the dreams, so did Will too. He told me about his dream and it shocked me, since I had been having the same one. We talked to some older people from around town about it and everyone said that they also had the dreams, but not to worry about them since they were harmless. Not satisfied with that ending, we both headed to the library to do some “investigating”. While there, the old man who was the librarian at that time told us about the legend of the dreams and why we have them. Can’t really remember what he said now, but for some reason we both felt like we had found out what we had wanted to know. My memory is pretty hazy until the day Will moved away, I remember it because I was crying pretty hard. Even though we said we would keep in contact with each other, he was still moving away to some unknown place (or at least to my young mind then) and that I would never see him again.
That was the last time I remember ever thinking about the dreams or the “nothingness” until just now. Looking out the window, I could see next to nothing in the thick, black fog/mist which had covered the city. Not seeing anything exciting outside, I went back to the internet when I saw a blog entry about the fog. It was talking about how the fog was like a physical representation of this extra-dimensional place where these creatures were coming from and that we should stay away from the fog at all costs. It also said that we should stay away from windows that lead to the outside, even in larger buildings. It said something about a “flying type which was extremely vicious…”, the second I read that I felt as though something was wrong..
It felt as though something was watching me and not taking their eyes off of me. Suddenly I felt extremely afraid, like almost to a primal level and took a look outside. Glowing red eyes were there, staring at me. Not looking away or even moving, just keeping still and watching me. The worst thing wasn’t just that there was now a pair of eyes looking at me, but that it was hundreds of eyes. All just staring at me and it felt like they were only looking at me.
I slowly got up from my chair by the window and started walking backwards towards my bathroom which didn’t have a window to the outside. I made it to the door, opened it up and as soon as I closed it I heard an animal-like screech from outside the bathroom door. There was noise, everywhere, just so much noise that it felt like my ears were going to rupture. There was also a large crash which sounded like either my window or another resident’s window had been shattered. I might have been right on both accounts since I started hearing yelling and screaming coming from everywhere around my room. What sounded like the beating of wings was coming from my room, along with the crashing of my furniture and (hopefully not) my computer.
I decided that I would just hang out in the bathroom tonight, you know, just chill’n. I didn’t think I would be leaving till at the earliest morning, so I decided to throw everything heavy that was in my bathroom in front of the door to make a barricade of it. Once I had felt satisfied with my handy work and once all of the sounds outside my door had quieted down, I climbed into my bathtub with all of my towels and made myself comfortable.
I was tired, exhausted, spent. I just wanted to drift off to sleep and forget the insanity which was occurring right outside my door. Remembering my dreams I sometimes have, I wondered if I was going to have them again tonight. Since moving to the city I haven’t had them as often as I used to, but occasionally I would find myself drifting through the nothingness of that place. I wondered what that place was, and what it meant to the people of our hometown. I wondered how Will was doing since I haven’t talked to him for a few hours and with everything that is happening, I can’t say that I’m not worried. He tends to throw himself in harm’s way to protect people and he tends to overdue things too. With everything happening around us, will he make sure to put himself first instead of caring about everyone around him? Probably not, but I can hope can’t I? I mean, he probably thinks I’m doing just fine right now, taking everything in stride and kicking ass while doing it. So much for that idea…
If my computer wasn’t totally destroyed and still working tomorrow I’ll try to get in contact with him. Well, that is of course that we still have power tomorrow morning. So many things to think about, so little time to actually sleep. Even with me feeling dead tired I still have the energy to worry about things… well… I guess that’s why he might think I’m doing fine. I was always the brains of our operations, not saying he wasn’t smart or anything, it was just that I could make better judgment’s in a shorter time than he could. He was just good at fighting and getting hurt. Honestly… that guy better watch himself… he might make a stupid…. Mistake…..
Sleep finally took me to unknown dreams of possibility. What would happen while I’m there? What’s going on in the waking world? Like I said, I think way too much, enough for both of us.
Part 2 will be coming tomorrow some time. For some reason I made chapter 2 really damn long so I decided to shorten it a bit. Hope you all enjoyed it!
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