REND

I hissed as I went up the stairs, breathing through my teeth, struggling to put one foot in front of the other. The lonely echoes of my steps through the empty stairwell kept me company, at least for a short while. I knew the Adumbrae was coming. He was an Adumbrae...or starting to become one. Getting hit by the car might have stopped him for a short time...or... maybe he was killing the people in the parking area.

Goodbye, Deen, I guess. I seriously tried to save you.

Thanks for inviting me for lunch. NOT.

It looked like I was dying next.

I clutched my stomach tightly with both arms, putting pressure on the wound as I continually cursed in my mind. Reaching the door on the next landing, I grabbed the handle. My hand was red and sticky from the blood.

My blood.

I was too weak to open the heavy door. Too painful. I inhaled and threw my body backwards, using my weight to pull the door. It opened. I jumped in before it swung closed.

There was pounding from below. He was here!

The automatically closing door deadened the sounds of ripping metal. Did the spikes jam the door below? He seemed to be trying to force it open. I had precious little time to hide.

Where the fuck am I? I found myself in a bleak, grey, narrow corridor, with double doors spaced evenly through its length. I thought I would've already reached the first floor of the mall. Was this the storage area? Leaning against the wall with my right hand, I started hobbling; it was too painful to run or just walk normally.

“Help! Help!” I shouted. “Help! Is anyone here?”

Silence.

I spat out blood on the floor. “Okay, no one. Fuck you all,” I muttered to the air.

Reaching the nearest door, I noticed my bloodied handprints on the wall. Drops of red on the floor highlighted where I went. Knowing what I had to do, I inhaled deeply then held my breath, closed my eyes, clenched my jaws tight, and squeezed my abs. With one swift motion, I removed my shirt. My vision went hazy for a couple of seconds because of the intense, searing pain from stretching my arms over my head. It felt like I was tearing my wound wider.

I whimpered, tears forming at the sides of my eyes, as I wiped my hands with my shirt. After that, I bundled it into a ball to hold against my wound to stop my blood from dripping to the floor.

Hopefully, the Adumbrae would go for this door with my blood prints.

A loud bang startled me. Did he break the door below?

The next door was a few steps further on the opposite side of the first one. I turned my back and walked rearwards to open it without leaving any bloodstains. I opened it only a bit so it wouldn’t swing after I entered. Then I gingerly squeezed through the small gap. The door from the stairwell opened just as I got in the room.

I was in a locker room of sorts, maybe for employees.

Further into the room, go!

I shuffled my feet as fast as I could. Again, there were no people inside. I began tugging at the locker doors, praying to find an open one. They were arranged in rows, two lines of lockers back to back for each row. Next row, next row, please, please. It hurts so much. Where was an open one?

The cold breeze from the air conditioning brushed against my exposed skin, making me shiver. I felt more vulnerable now that I was only wearing a bra, not that me having my shirt on could have helped my current predicament.

Finally! An open locker!

I stuffed myself into the tight space, parting the stinky hanging clothes. That asshole hadn't entered this room yet; he probably went in the first room. He’d realize soon enough I wasn’t there.

How do I close this door? There was nothing that could lock it from the inside. I pinched the slits on the locker door and pulled it shut, holding it in place with straining fingers. This would have to do. My left hand remained clutching my abdomen.

What next?

My phone! Right, I could call the police. Why did I only think of this now?

With my free left hand, I reached into my pocket, letting go of the formerly off-white now dark red shirt that was stopping my bleeding. It dangled a bit on my stomach, held on by sticky partially dried blood before it peeled off and fell to the floor of the locker. I winced.

It was awkwardly difficult to get my phone from my pocket while trying to avoid movement that'd make my agony worse.

Am I going to die here?

As if to confirm what I dreaded, a whole new wave of pain radiated from my wound. Something was wriggling inside me! A piece of the spike that broke off?

It felt like pointy butterflies in my stomach, poking and stabbing my internal organs. I wanted to just curl up into a ball and scream from the pain. But there was no space. My fingers held on vigilantly on the locker door.

Barely able to stand, I leaned back for support. The cold steel of the locker caressed my naked back, providing momentary comfort.

I'm going to die...

A black spike burst from inside of me. It drilled through my stomach, making a brand-new hole, piercing the locker door. I could feel it also erupted through my back, pinning me to the back of the locker like a note stuck on a corkboard with a thumbtack.

I opened my mouth to scream, but the pain was too much that I couldn’t make a sound. My hands fell limply to my sides. The locker door remained shut, the black skewer holding it in place. A macabre rotisserie human.

Blood gushed out of the wound on my stomach and back, flowing down to my legs. Its taste filled my mouth. I gagged, trying to stop vomiting blood. It dripped out of the sides of my mouth down my chest, warm streams on my skin that was steadily turning cold.

I didn’t even have the energy to cry for help as I stood in a puddle of my own blood.

Vision was fading...

My head slumped on the locker door...

 

---

 

I opened my eyes.

Nothing.

Total darkness surrounded me.

There was some pressure, a slight throbbing on my ears.

I realized it was because there was nothing to hear. A good representation of the phrase I always used to read in novels, ‘deafening silence’. I flailed around, shaking my arms and legs wildly, hoping to hit anything.

Nothing, no walls, no floor, no ceiling. No gravity pulling me in some direction, I had no idea of my orientation. No breeze on my skin, no smell, no temperature that I could feel.

Absolutely nothing.

I clutched my stomach instinctively, but there was no pain. There was no wound. I felt all over my body and realized I had no clothes on.

There I was, wading through the void…butt-naked.

“Wha—? Where am I?” I said. I could feel I said words, but no sound came out. There was no air, and I wasn’t actually sure that I was breathing anything. But I was alive...or am I? My last memory was dying inside a locker.

Am I dead?

Probably.

Was this the after-life?

Not much of an after-life. One-point-five stars. Sucks ass.

The surprising news was that there was an after-life. With all the Adumbrae and Corebring business, proof of higher-dimensional beings, and all that, one would think that belief of heaven and hell should have vanished. But many people persisted with their beliefs and religions from before World War II and the advent of the Adumbrae invasion.

Maybe I was looking at this the wrong way? Wasn’t it more likely that there was an after-life, heaven and hell what have you, or whatever your religious beliefs were because higher-dimensional beings existed?

Well, I was here. Wherever here was.

I guess there is an afterlife all along.

I sighed. So, this was it…

Twenty-three years on that stupid earth, ending with a very painful death. Really, really sad.

Or an approximation of sadness anyway. My uncaringness started to creep in. It was almost a relief I died because that pain was just insane.

I say almost because my current situation wasn’t an improvement.

What a badass way to die, though. I was truly proud of myself. Still, it would've been a more awesome story if I didn’t die in the end.

That, however, wasn’t exactly true. My story hasn’t ended yet. An eternity of this bullshit nothingness was the continuation of my story, and it wasn't looking good.

Should I just kill myself?

Rule #8: I can kill myself only after I have killed everybody else. Which practically meant I could never ever commit suicide. However, there was no one around me now. With no one else existing in this limbo, I will not break Rule #8 if I killed myself.

The alternative was dreadful to even think about – sensory deprivation for all of time. I'd go insane from boredom. I knew prisoners in solitary confinement sometimes went insane. This was way, way worse than solitary confinement. I closed my eyes because it was so unnerving to look at nothing.

I wrapped my hands around my neck. This was stupid. I couldn’t die by choking myself, I wasn’t even breathing. Stabbing myself or slitting my wrists wasn't an option. I was naked! I didn’t have anything I could use to kill myself.

Could I even die here? Die again?

With nothing to do, I decided to sleep it off. I had an eternity in this void to think about what to do.

 

---

 

You’re here again?

“Who said that?” I tried to say, and again there was no sound.

A small point of light in the distance, a hole in the wall of solid darkness. This distant speck of light called to me, pulling me towards it. Slowly at first, then I surged through the emptiness, my reference point was the light.

Hope filled my heart. Heaven or hell, or some other dimension, I'd be grateful for anything else other than this pit of oblivion.

The light grew brighter and larger, and it shattered into millions of stars as if thick clouds on a stormy night suddenly parted to reveal the starry sky. But it wasn’t just boring twinkling lights punctuating the darkness. All sorts of colors flew through the space like those pictures of nebula I saw in science books. Clouds of unworldly colors, more real than anything I had seen back when I was alive.

This beautiful display was interspersed with tendrils of darkness, threatening to consume the radiant plumage, barely noticeable with the backdrop of black. But when the tendrils snaked through the technicolor fog of space dust and stars, I could clearly see their outlines.

An ancient chair, cracked and broken yet somehow held together by an unseen force, floated in the middle of this swirling insanity of color and darkness.

A man sat on the chair.

He wore a black suit with intricate gold accents, his slender figure was familiar. His right hand sported an imposing clawed gauntlet of gold. Draped over his shoulders was a white fur coat. It matched his long wispy white hair floating around him as if he was underwater.

He wore a mask with a huge smile on its face like the mask of comedy worn by the muse Thalia from Greek myth, the mask used in theater logos nowadays, often paired with its opposing sad face mask. The mask was bisected down the middle, one side colored white and the other black, with gold designs radiating from the eye sockets. Red glowing eyes peered from behind the mask.

Most peculiar of all was the two orbs of light behind him, chasing each other in orbit. I couldn’t make sense of their position; they were both directly behind the chair yet could also be thousands of miles away. I assumed one was the sun, glowing a warm yellow, and the other was the moon, going through its phases as it chased the sun. Curiously, the balls of light orbited the back of the person clockwise. With the sun rising from his right and then setting on his left side.

“Again?” I said. This time, I could speak. “Was I here before?”

Yep, you were just here a few moments ago, of your time. A female voice, so she wasn’t a ‘he’.

She didn’t actually speak with sound. She also wasn’t speaking in my head. It was more like I felt what she had said, a very unsettling feeling as if she was inside my head but I was the one reading her mind. Bizarrely, I could feel she had a female voice if that made any sense.

“My time? Because this is a different dimension, you mean?”

Not really, you were always here. Rather, it was the first time we noticed each other.

Despite the weirdness of the situation, I tried to get closer to her. I swam through the space. It was then I remembered I was naked. I tried to cover myself up.

She chuckled, her laughter like warm Christmas bells. Why the modesty? she asked.

It wasn't because of modesty but more of a feeling of vulnerability.

There’s no need to be concerned. She reached for her mask and started to remove it dramatically.

Oh shit, I thought, finally realizing the meaning of her words and why her outline looked familiar. Please don’t be me, please don’t be me, please don't be me.

Sorry, she said, revealing her face.

She was me.