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I died today.

 

Chapter 1.1: Don't worry, it's not gonna be my last time

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Death’s not the real problem, not here anyway.

It’s the quiet.

Down here at the bottom, deep down in the dark, there's no more screaming—only the silence for company, and the relentless clawing at a hope you can't reach. But you continue anyway, in hope's absence, because it's the only thing keeping the phantoms at bay.

I still remember my own ghost; a strange, contorted thing, tapping on the cold, tempered glass, while humanity writhed in the flames nearby.

Never really got that taste of ash out of my mouth, not since I emerged from the crumbling ruin of broken, smoldering bodies. Along with the bitter ash, that's what haunts me the most.

The silence.

I'm ashamed to admit it, but I was grateful when they finally stopped screaming, though I could feel my humanity slipping away with each shrill whimper I forced myself to ignore. I think it was when those cries for help morphed into pitiable pleas, before the final, silent acceptance, that something within me cracked.

Silence is a horrible thing.

You know what I'm talking about, don't you? 

That terrible quiet, the pause when someone has given up. 

That grim reality is that, even if rescue came, it would no longer matter.

The hollow, bittersweet acceptance that settles in when it's too late for a miracle.

If you're ever unlucky enough to witness what I did, if you ever meet…them, just shut your eyes.

Don't misunderstand; it won't save you. Nothing will.

There's no use in hiding. They'll find you.
If you run, they'll catch you.
But if you close your eyes real tight, you might, might, hold on to some sliver of sanity before you go.

So in this context, death is…mercy?

Sorry if that sounds grim. I ran out of hope to give a long ways back.

Funny, isn't it?
Here I am, worrying about your sanity when mine was lost long ago.

You're lucky. Or maybe not, considering how much you still have left to lose.
I envy you, and sort of hate you, for not having to see what I've seen.

But that isn't fair. None of this is your fault. You simply haven't reached your end yet.

Unfortunately for me, mine came in the form of a simple blink, a careless flutter, and in that moment, the horrors from beyond came pouring through.

I was sitting opposite my father—or was it Dad? He had a name, didn't he?

Forgive me. Time acts funny here. Screws with your head and has you saying all sorts of shit.
Pardon my Spanish.

Dad was, in his usual way, entertaining Sara with one of his infamous jokes.
Still doesn't hit quite right, does it? It was definitely Father.
Fatherly jokes.

Much better.

He was busy telling one of his fatherly jokes to Sara when—what? You want to know who Sara was?

Just a friend.

Or the friend, I guess. You know, the "it’s complicated,” one.

Always complicated. Everything's complicated, now that she’s gone.

Well, not really gone, I guess, though by Earth’s standards she may as well be.

Earth?

Look, if we’re going to make it through this, I’m going to need you to stop asking so many questions. Do you want a story or exposition? I promise none of it is gonna make sense by the end anyway.

But to your inquiry, no, this isn’t Earth. Not now, at least. We, or rather I, started there and ended up in the other place. In the hollow. Where the Dark things are. The ones creeping in the corner of your eye. The silent, lumbering something that flickers when you blink.

You really still don’t know what I’m talking about?
You will.

How did I get here? How the Hell should I kn—

Sorry…again.

Don’t fully remember, to be honest. I think I was eating dinner, celebrating what would hopefully be my long-overdue, sweet release from the American educational system with my family.

Not being one for fancy restaurants, my poor siblings were doing their best to cope with the reality that we weren’t at the usual burger joint. My older brother pressed Sara, trying to figure out why he had an entire set of forks while my little sister rubbed them together, causing a twitch in the eye of the waitress watching us. 

“Stop, honey,” with a dangerous shudder of her own, placing a delicate, but firm hand on the child's arm. “Beha—”

Suddenly, everything froze. The servers stopped moving, birds outside froze in midair, even my dad, who’d been struggling with an acorn-sized morsel of meat, hung suspended, like a pane from a comic book.

A strange, electric tingle pulsed at the corner of my eye, and with it, came a dreadful sound.

Tap.

It came from the window. Scratchy, rough, and deliberate.

Someone stood near the pane of glass, watching me. 

Or better yet, something stood near the window.

I tried to ignore it, but the figure lingered in my peripheral vision, shifting whenever I tried to look directly at it. Eventually, its outline resolved into a gaunt, dead thing with claws instead of nails. A withered, featureless face pressed close to the pane as those claws traced slow, taunting circles in the glass.

“Ryo?” Sara’s voice cut through the static.

I blinked. Once.
The thing vanished.
Earth lurched back into motion.

By the way, my name is Ryo.
I know—odd name for someone with a complexion as dark as mine.
Mom is from Japan; Dad is from Queens. Hope that clears it up.

Sara’s soft hand touched mine, grounding me for a moment. I forced a smile even as panic welled up inside me. Beyond her shoulder, the tall windows showed nothing but sky.

“Hey, you okay?” she asked again, placing her hand more firmly over mine.

Her sharp, inquisitive eyes locked onto mine. Sweat prickled across my brow.
“What’s wrong?”

There was no point lying. Sara always saw straight through me. And pulling away like I’d just touched a hot stove probably didn’t help.

“I—I—”

Another scraping noise at the glass.
This time, only a tree branch brushing against it.

“I just… I need to pee,” I stammered.

Sara blinked. “A bit more information than I needed. Go?”

My siblings snickered at something the server said as I slipped away from the table. Sara watched me go, concern still tightening her features.

I reached the bathroom door and immediately froze.

Static crawled across my skin, a prickling awareness that something was wrong.

The restaurant was still full, still moving this time…but silent…muted.

Worse, servers and patrons would approach my corner, pause, blink, then turn around as if repelled by an invisible force.

Which was strange, considering I was standing in front of the only bathroom in the building.

There were two explanations:

1. Every person here simultaneously developed superhuman bladder control,
   or

2. Something was very wrong behind that bathroom door.

 

 

A connoisseur of horror films, I settled on the second.

That being said, I wasn’t an exorcist.
I wasn’t a paranormal investigator, nor part of a gang of meddling kids with a talking dog.

Whatever lurked in there?
It could stay in there; it was time for me to go.

But I couldn’t pry my hand from the surface of the door.

Instead, it held fast to the bacteria-ridden metal rectangle that any sensible person avoids touching with anything less than a hazmat suit.

You don’t?
…Ew.

You’re one of those.

I tugged. I braced my foot. I yanked so hard the doorframe creaked.

And people kept watching me.

Strangers walked past, glanced at me, and kept walking, eyes lingering as though I were the weird one, and that they did not magically forget their need to pee. For a moment, I considered whether this was a prank. Maybe someone had smeared superglue on the handle. 

But no. I knew better than to believe anything that led up to this moment had been innocent.

Tap tap

I whipped my head toward the door as it creaked open with terrible slowness, all while I struggled, kicked, and pleaded for release. I tried to scream, but the words came out garbled and broken. After a horrid few moments, the gap widened just an inch. Just wide enough so that the lidless, decrepit eye hovering there could stare right back into mine.

I gasped and yanked the door shut, but it caught on something, an old, gnarled hand wedged near the base. Rotten and twisted. With a cry, I tore myself free and bolted back to my family’s table, half expecting whatever was in the bathroom to follow.

But, thankfully, it didn’t.

“Need to stop watching scary movies,” I muttered, sliding into my seat.

“Ugh, finally. I've been telling you that for years,” Sara said. “I’ve got the perfect K-drama to introduce you to.”

I looked up, ready with some snark about her god-awful taste in television—
—but instead of my best friend’s face, I was met with the hollow, decaying leer of a ghoul.

A cold wave of terror washed over me. I tipped backward in my chair, hitting the floor hard.

“What’s wrong?” my father asked.

I blinked again.
The ghoul was gone.
Sara was back to normal, brows creased in confusion.

An awkward silence fell. I forced a smile and climbed back into my seat as my siblings burst into laughter.

“Ry, you fell on your as—” Ashley began, giggling uncontrollably.

“Language!” my mother snapped, throwing my father a dark look as though it was his fault.

Probably was.

“That’s right, “ he said, clearing his throat with the confidence of a man who'd lost every argument that week. “Stop acting like hood ne—nuggets out in public, we’re better than that.”

“Are we though?” mumbled Troy, casting a low, hungry glance at a passing waitress as my mother glared at both of them.

“And they have chicken nuggets?” cried Ashley, viciously stabbing at her risotto as though it had offended her. “Why am I stuck eating—whatever this mess is?”

Sara shot me a questioning look, clearly unfamiliar with the phrase.

I rubbed my temples. “Term for people who don’t know how to act civilized,” I muttered.

“We don’t use expressions like that,” my mother warned, regaining composure, or trying to at least.

Unfortunately for her, Troy had caught our waitress by the hand and was asking her what time she got off that night, and other tables were starting to throw us nasty looks.

“See,” I said, nodding in his direction. “Hood nugget.”

Sarah’s lips formed a soft “O”, and then a larger, “Ohhhhh” with a heavy blush when she finally reached realization.

I was only able to delight in her shyness for a moment before my head throbbed and a fresh wave of pressure built behind my eyes. I turned toward the window, hoping the fresh air and nature might help.

Didn’t work. Mostly because nature was on fire.

At first, I didn’t really understand what I was seeing. Trees burned. People screamed and fled, racing through the flames as best they could as their skin began to blister and bubble. One man, engulfed and howling, slammed against the restaurant’s window, pounding his scorched, smoldering fists against the glass.

Yet inside, no one seemed to notice.

I scanned the room. None of my family, the diners, or the servers reacted. They smiled, chewed dainty portions, and sipped their expensive wines.

But when I turned back around, the Earth still burned outside.

I shut my eyes and took a long breath.

If I stood up to yell a warning, they wouldn’t thank me. They’d likely sedate me.

Besides, if they weren’t alarmed by the infernal carnage taking place behind a thin sheet of glass, then there was likely a simple explanation.

None of this was real.

Good, at least, if I was going mad, I hadn’t passed the critical thinking part.

Sure enough, when I opened my eyes again, everything was normal. I could even hear that one annoying bird croaking outside. Tourists milled about the plaza. Car horns blared with their usual impatience.

But then I blinked again.

The bird dropped from the sky in flames. The horns were gone, replaced by screams as fire ran through the streets.

My father chuckled in the background.

I blinked again. Peace returned.

My breathing quickened as I slammed my eyes shut tight.

“Yo,” I heard Troy’s voice. “What’re you doing?”

I felt eyes on me. So I slowly, against my better judgment, cracked open an eye.

Conflagration.

Panicking, I closed and quickly reopened just my left eye.

Normalcy—life had moved on.

I tried so hard to keep it that way, pressing my hand to my eyelid to keep it from blinking, and saving my left eye for when I grew truly desperate, anything to avoid the hellscape.

Troy kept talking, and a hand briefly brushed my side, though I didn't acknowledge it; my eye was starting to burn from dryness. 

My growing dread manifested as beads of sweat, which, in a cruel twist of fate, dripped into my eye, stinging with agony. I took in deep breaths to remain calm, and slowly opened the eye I’d saved.

Instead of a tranquil break from my paranoia, I was confronted with malice.

Hellfire. Wailing. A nightmare realm. The sky burned with a dark, malignant sun. Buildings collapsed in molten ruin. Stranger still, I could feel the heat in that eye, as if it were touching another world, while my left eye perceived the world as it had been. What followed was a sort of hellish, panoramic combination where skeletal forms of the burning begged unknowing revelers in the streets.

At this point, my mother had caught on to my now visible distress, body covered in sweat and tears streaming from one eye. I sniffed, brushed my face, and the visions swirled into a blurred psychedelic dance.

My mother, with her face half-melted by phantasmal heat, held my face in her hands. “Ryo, what’s—"

A crack, like the sound of breaking glass, a blinding light, and a searing pain in my head.

And finally, that horrid siren, signaling the end of my world.

 

My head was throbbing and matted with blood when I came to in the parking lot. The area was filled with smoke, and a wave of heat swept through the air, carried by the unforgiving wind. As my eyesight returned and the haze dissipated, I froze.

The restaurant was gone.

Not vanished, but reduced to a ashen heap of broken and scorched debris. Bodies from the upper floors clung lifelessly to twisted rafters amidst the blaze, like a grim mimicry of the rotisserie chickens once proudly displayed at the entrance.

A wasteland of ruin lay before me. Carnage lay strewn across the wreckage. Most were dead.

The lucky ones, at least.

The others—worse—wandering with grievous wounds, a leg torn from a hobbling man, and a stunned woman trying to wipe her tears with hands that lay, detached, on the ground before her.

Both barely clung to life as others, in similar, broken states, emerged from the rubble.

There was no sign of my family, but given that just about every person I passed was either on fire or shrugging off madness, that might have been a blessing. At the very least, they weren’t among the sizzle of flesh and mangled bones surrounding me. 

Each breath came like thorns scraping down my throat. I reached out to steady myself, pausing after spotting something in the distance.

It hobbled low at first, breaching the dusty fog with its snout, tracing the ground—a wolf-like creature trotting toward me with an awkward, creepy gait.

But it had a face.

A human face.

Perhaps my eyes were playing tricks, but while the creeping monstrosities looked like wolvish abominations, they writhed like eels across the ground, making their faces, masked with saggy human skin draped over gnashing crimson fangs, quiver and sway.

As the thing shambled closer, its true form came into view: a bloated, sinewed, fleshy mass with exposed, festering parts beneath its animalistic disguise.

The horror forced me into a frozen stupor while it gobbled up the hands of the handless woman. It noticed me, looked over, and grinned with its mouth full of bloody digits.

Thankfully, the woman recovered from her shock just long enough to scream, and the monster lowered its gaping mouth over her entire head.

I should have fled, but my legs weren’t working.

Wanted to scream, but that wasn’t working out so well either.

More creatures entered the apocalyptic square. Some like the monsters on four legs, others, lumbering far above that of any man, whose gaze turned fleeing survivors to dust.

Tap tap

Of everything—the beasts, the fire, the bodies, it was this sound that tiptoed on the last threads of my sanity. That low, deliberate tapping attempting to burrow its way into my skull.

And I saw it.

Off in the distance, shrouded partially in the dust and ash. Eyes that burned with golden light.

My ghost.

The thing, shrouded in rags and dripping with an evil so real it was suffocating.

Not a creature, but a devil, cloaked in death, setting the world ablaze wherever it drew its gaze. That’s the best I could do to describe it, as it did not belong to our world of words, and flickered in and out of reality as though it wasn’t quite there.

I was reminded, when the hellhounds brushed past, gathering pleading survivors and placing them at the feet of the phantom, of something I read about an officer during a war—a paradox about foolish people clinging to unrealistic hope.

These were the fools.

This was the end.

But then, in the grasp of one of them, a cruel sight. 

Sara.

I’ll never forgive myself for that initial bit of hesitation—the fear and shame that paralyzed me from action.

I’ll hate myself forever.

And yet, as I watched the phantom take hold of my friend, holding her neck with the slightest, almost endearing touch, perhaps even forever wouldn’t be long enough.

Something shifted, and Sara twitched.

For better or worse, I reached a point where I became immune to the shame and the hatred. It’s possible I couldn’t be more disgusted with myself, or maybe I just didn’t care anymore.

Or perhaps I’d simply joined the fools.

I used that final, blistering sting of self-loathing to propel me toward a nearby branch and thrust it into the face of my first phantom.

It recoiled and dropped her.

I caught Sara in my arms, limp and unresponsive, but alive. Her chest rose, barely, and I clutched her to me as tightly as I could.

I didn’t care that the world was collapsing around us, or that the phantom had turned its gaze to me. Then the ground exploded beneath our feet, hurling us into the remains of a little bakery I used to frequent as a kid.

The owners were a nice Syrian couple who would always give us free treats during the holidays.

They were such a fond memory of my childhood that, even now, I could recognize their soot-stained silhouettes splashed in ash against the scorched walls.

Huddled in a nearby closet was a small group of survivors, hiding, motioning for me to come, so I dragged Sara’s body toward them as best I could.

We’re getting close to the finale, signalled by a very particular, peculiar scream.

Not from a human, too high in tone, piercing through the sky like an air raid siren.

And the hounds were upon us.

I stopped halfway to the closet, ducking instead behind the register near the store’s front, and silently watched as those who had tried to help us were torn open.

One man, older, I watched as the light left his eyes, a single look splayed on his face.

Pleading.

The sting returned, but unfortunately for them, the shame that called me to foolish, compulsory actions was reserved for the one in my arms.

I could spare none for them.

We crouched there for the longest time before the monsters moved on, and I thought it was safe enough to emerge.

But one had lingered, a scout perhaps, forcing me to sling Sara over my back and take off down the street.

The dogs of hell had set upon those in the buildings above, catching them and sending a downward spray of blood and gore. I ducked through the red rain before using the slick streets to slide toward what seemed to be a sewage entrance not far off.

Using the last of my strength, I shoved Sara through the broken cement and crawled in after. Behind us, the beasts descended.

I pushed into a dark cavern where the air hung heavy with the smell of sulfur, like a forgotten tomb, slinging Sara’s limp form across my shoulders as I began trudging through the thick, clogged filth.

Behind us, the beasts had caught up, splashing through the muck, their teeth on my heels, their claws raking through my skin.

I screamed, lunging forward with a desperate kick, inching ahead, teeth gritted against the sting of bloody tears blurring my vision, until I stumbled and we plunged into a desperate shuffle across the murky black lagoon.

Death approached, whether by mauling or drowning in the muck, as my limbs grew weak, and flesh was ripped from me.

But a spark of light, a crackle of electricity, and their snarling stopped.

A sudden shift in gravity sent us spiraling upward for what felt like an eternity, drifting somewhere between dream and nightmare. The darkness wrapped around me like a cloak, as if to soothe my mind frayed at the edges. Terror and pain caused reality to blur moments before everything became one long, shapeless scream.

The silence was complete as the sounds of the scorched, broken earth faded away, and soon, the suffocating Dark gave way to a new light, marking the end of my world and the beginning of the new.