Lost

A boy was lying in a bed when he woke. His head was pounding and his eyes were surrounded by small, bright stars. He couldn’t remember a thing; his name, where he went to school, how old he was, nothing. He tried to sit up but his head started throbbing tremendously. His back broke out in searing pain when he tried to just lift it up. He laid back down in defeat and resided there for the next couple of hours.

His eyes opened after a while to see a tall, dark, shadowy figure standing over him. It took a few moments for his brain to register what he was looking at. It was a girl with straight brown hair and a slightly slouched demeanor. He sat up right away and scrambled to the back of the bed once he realized what she looked like. She was wearing a black bed gown and her face was distorted: she was missing an eye in which it appeared as a black hole with blood dripping from it. The rest of her face was torn up with bits and pieces of flesh dangling from it.
“Who are you?” The boy asked with a mixture of fear and awe. How someone could still be standing after something like that happened to them?

The girl failed to respond and just stood there staring at him. . . Staring at his face with her raspy breathing rattling, echoing off the walls of the room. He took a closer look and saw that she was holding a small, jagged knife in her hand. He didn’t dare to move so they just sat staring at each other for the next fifteen or so minutes. He didn’t think he could keep this up for much longer. The room smelled horribly and his mouth was parched. He slowly slipped his feet over the side of his bed, the side of the room that had the door. The rest of his body began to slide out when the lady lunged at him and let out a blood curdling screech. He dove for the door and smacked his head on the handle which made him bleed profusely.
The air was knocked out of him and he flipped over to see the girl staring him in the eyes. Her breath smelled horrible as she was missing half her teeth. She brought the knife above her head and brought it down into him as fast as lightning.
He woke up, sweat pouring from all over his body. He looked around and tried to sit up and was successful. His head was still pounding and a wave of dizziness overwhelmed him. He closed his eyes for a few moments then crawled out of bed. He stalked over to the bedside table where he twisted the knob to turn on the lamp. The light flickered and went off. He opened the drawer to find a disassembled hand gun sitting in it. The boy picked up two of the larger pieces and tried to make them fit together. He did so with a few of the other pieces but eventually gave up.
His head was still filled with jumbled up thoughts as the day or night, whichever it was, pressed on. Fatigue was overwhelming the boy and he wanted to go back to sleep but he couldn’t get himself to do it, not after that horrid dream. The exhausted boy walked over to the door in the windowless room. The small round handle was slightly rusted and squeaky as he twisted the cold metal. The door was lighter than he expected as it swung inwards. Ahead was a long hallway that reminded him much of those old horror movies where the walk seemed endless. He took a step out and the temperature changed dramatically. The room had been comfortably warm but this place was freezing. Despite the cold chill that kept running up his spine, he pressed on. He walked up to the first door that came up on his right and tried the handle. This handle was oddly warm with a putrid smell wafting away from the room. He backed off immediately and stared at the door with disgust. He felt that there was something wrong with this whole place. Why couldn’t he remember anything? He started walking for a few minutes then worked his way up to a full out sprint. The hallway wouldn’t end! He dropped to his knees and assumed the fetal position. He didn’t understand why he couldn’t remember anything. All he remembered was his family and those classic horror movies. . .
He stood back up and dizziness overwhelmed him as he walked over to the wall and started pounding on it. He continued this for a few minutes until he heard something. The wall wasn’t making a dull thudding noise as it should be; the wall was hollow! He backed up to the opposite side of the hallway where he mustered all his strength into his fist. He ran forwards with a scream like a barbarian and punched a hole right through the wall. His hand hit something hard and he fell backwards where he cried into his arm while grasping his fist. He couldn’t wiggle his fingers so he just sat up and stared at them. They were all smashed inwards with blood pouring from them in different areas. He got up from the blood coated carpet and went over to the wall where the hole was. He looked inside of it to see what look like a cement wall. He started pulling away all the dry wall. Eventually, he made a five foot large hole. He put his uninjured hand against the hard wall. It was freezing cold. He knew he wouldn’t be able to break it down so he didn’t even bother damaging his uninjured hand.
The boy turned around to the other wall where he found an old fashioned torch. He looked at the end of it and noticed that it was made out of metal. Going back to the cement wall, he started chipping away small pieces of the hard material. A small hole started to develop he pressed his eye up to and saw an old Chevrolet Cameo. He continued to hack away at the wall and eventually was able to climb through. Everything around him appeared as if it had all come out of my nightmare. It was a garage with tool boxes and shelves scattered around the room with screws and bolts randomly tossed on the floor. However, the car was covered in that too-familiar red liquid. He quickly went to the corner and puked and sat there keeled over for a few minutes, letting the acid come out. Turning around, he examined the room with one last sweep of his eyes and stopped halfway because he saw a door. Pressing the plastic button that opens the garage door, he stepped outside after the grinding forced the door to stop with only a small enough crack for him to crawl out through. He stood up in the snow and looked around once more; it looked as if all hell had broken loose and he was in the center of it. The destruction ranged from burning homes to smashed flower pots and rotting bodies in the middle of the suburban street. How long was I out? He wondered.
From the end of the driveway the house looked as normal as any other house on the block: three stories with huge chunks of the roof and siding missing with fires burning in the windows. He stared at the fire, longing for its warmth. He squinted his eyes because it started to hurt but he noticed something. . . No, it was nothing. It was just a figment of his imagination.
A feeling of loneliness finally overwhelmed him as he plopped himself into the snow. Where is my family? Why are all these weird things happening? Am I going insane? All of the questions that ravaged his mind and threatened to break the barricades that separated reality and fiction. He stuck his head between his knees and started counting sheep in his head.
“Nothing makes sense!” He screamed at the top of his lungs and the crying overwhelmed him once more.
He got up and walked back over to the door of the house that he had come out of. He peaked in the window and saw what any modern home holds. An elaborate rug, a living room, a family watching T.V in the living room, a kitch-. . . A family! The boy ran back to the door and knocked furiously on the door. He waited a few minutes. Then another few. And a couple more after that. Something wasn’t right. . . He went back to the garage where he got a hammer and started hacking away at the glass in the door. It broke after a few blows. Once inside he slowly crept towards the family. He walked up behind who he assumed was the head of the family and gently tapped him on the shoulder. “Sir?” The man didn’t respond. “Sir, please answer me. I’ve gone through hell and back in the past few hours and you have no idea how crazy I feel right now. I can’t even beg-,” The boy was cut off as the man turned around and growled at him. This man wasn’t feeling well. His teeth had blood and bits of skin dangling from them and his arm was bent at an odd angle. Before the boy had time to react, the man leapt over the couch and took a huge bite into the boy’s arm. He tripped and started to run down a hallway leading from the living room. He looked to his right and ran into a bathroom where he slammed the door and clicked the small button to lock it. He heard the man walk down the hallway. He examined his surroundings and came to the conclusion that he was trapped. He couldn’t hear the man’s footsteps anymore.
He opened the door and slipped through the little crack that he made. He looked left and right and saw the man staring at the wall at the end of the hallway, as if he were examining it. Creeping quietly, the boy walked up behind him and pulled the hammer from his pocket.
“I’m sorry,” The boy whispered to the man. “Please forgive me, God.” Bringing it down as the man turned, the loud noise that came from the hammer meeting the head was tremendous. The man fell limply to the ground just as the boy turned to see what appeared to be the man’s son and wife. The wife let out a merciless scream and the son joined in, too. Running straight ahead, the boy swung his hammer to the right where the son was standing. He felt it hit the soft tissue and twisted around to bring the hammer back around into the wife. Both of them fell to the ground for a moment but got back up. The boy ran past them to the door where he came in through and climbed back out. As soon as he looked up, he stopped. Ahead of him the street was filled with more people, hundreds upon hundreds. He couldn’t think when the crowd turned one eye onto him. He immediately ran to the right side of the house and to the back. He ran to a play set and climbed up the slide where he stayed.
The people were now slowly making their way around either side of the house to his location, not stopping for anything. A little girl, around the age of eight, was already climbing up the backside of the play set. She looked just like the people he found inside the house. Raising his foot, he kicked her as hard as he could which sent her flying into the hedges. Hammer in hand, he turned around just in time to swing at another person. He let the hammer fall to the ground as the metal vibrated vigorously and jumped over to where the girl had gone. Breaking the dead branches, getting his arms cut up in the process, he stopped suddenly. In front of him was a gigantic hole full of fire with bodies piled upon bodies. His brain became addled as he skirted the hole and made for the back door of the house. He went straight to the kitchen and grabbed the biggest, deadliest knife he could find. He did a quick sweep of all the rooms and made his way to the first floor bathroom. Staring in the mirror, he cleaned his wounds with soap and water and retrieved medical bandages from under the sink.
• • • •
His dreams were filled with suggested themes of blood and gore along with anything else that could ravage a human mind. Waking up early, two hours before the sun usually rises, he made his way to the first floor to cook something up and get out of this hell hole of a town. He pieced together a makeshift sling for his arm along with a holder on it for his massive knife of destruction. He threw some canned foods and bread in the backpack he found in the house and made his way for the front yard. After an hour, a siren started to go off. It sounded much like that of a bomb siren. A dull roaring could be heard then and it grew steadily louder as a pair of planes approached the area. People from all over the place started to come out from homes and other dark areas at the sound of the planes. Running as fast as he could, he made his way up the scattered street. Much of it was destroyed from he assumed were bombs. He jumped into a shallow one and kicked around a few rocks and examined the surrounding walls. They seemed to be crumbling slightly from his touch so he hastily climbed back out. He continued his trek up the street when some distant vehicles came into his view. He started up a sprint and made his way through the streets. He stopped and took a closer look; there was what looked like a mixture of military vehicles and cars.
“Get on the ground!” Someone shouted from behind him. A chill ran up his spine as he slowly turned around. “Get down!” The same person screeched at him again. Dropping to his knees, someone ran up behind him and kicked him on to his chest where his chin hit the asphalt road. He groaned from the excruciating pain. He rolled onto his back to see a man talking into his radio in which he assumed it was the man who was shouting at him. “Stay down,” The man planted a foot on the boy’s chest. “Where’d you get that wound?”
“Some crazy person ran up and bit me while I was trying to kill them,” The boy replied, frightened. Before he could do anything else, he heard a low growling sound as the man was dragged away from on top of him. He sat up to find hundreds of the crazy people staring at him.