You can stop biting you fingernails. Here it is, part three!
BTW, if you don't like the clumsy blog format, I've started Scribd-ing "The end".
Go on : http://www.scribd.com/doc/51880020/The-end
to read it in its non-memento-ized form.
*************************************************************************************************
It had been more than twenty years since the accident. Ever since then, I have been getting these hallucinations on nights such as this.
I was standing in front of the narrow mirror in the small room I had at the station. I took off my pants and saw that I was bleeding. Just some scratches, but one had to be careful now that no doctors were around. Must have gotten them when I fell down.
Funny that I should still hallucinate about cars. I hadn’t seen one in years, at least an operational one.
I reached for the bottle of antiseptic on the cluttered table behind me, knocking over a few other things in the process.
I dabbed some of the solution on the wound. The sting made me suck in air through my teeth. My eyes went automatically to the scars as I looked at myself in the mirror. I ran a hand over them. Hardened pits and lumps of mauled skin ran vertically over my abdomen, straight down my side till my knees. They had told me I was lucky. I looked at the cavity on my right leg, where my quadriceps used to be. Parts of my body had been ripped out and scattered on the road, most of which were put back during surgery. But not this. My right leg had been crushed under the wheel of the car and some of it stayed there, condemning me to a life with a walking stick.
I was, of course, unconscious the entire time and woke up several days later in a hospital bed. My mother, whom I hadn’t seen for years, was crying profusely over my disfigured body. I had tried to tell her that I was OK but I guess she couldn’t hear me. The recovery was tough. My right leg debilitated, walking was a task with execution burdened solely on the other leg. Slowly I healed. The muscles never grew back but my left leg got stronger and eventually I was able to discard that awkward four-legged walker in favor of a walking stick. I was anointed a hero for surviving such a horrible, unfortunate accident but life got back to normal pretty quickly and soon I was the freak with a hole in his leg.
The last freak with a hole in his leg. I put the antiseptic back on the table and grabbed a bottle of whiskey on from the table. That was the only thing now that was not hard to come by, alcohol. Liquor shops and drug stores were in abundance and conveniently devoid of their owners. Towards the end, everyone was doing them, drugs, anyways. We humans weren’t evolved to deal with the stresses of a near apocalyptic world. The government wanted to make sure that people were too high to realize how fucked up the world around them really was. So they legalized it. Flooded the streets with easy to use pills, syringes, drops, whatever your preferred mode of ecstasy. In the process, they created a gold mine to fund their perpetual wars. It was a win-win situation. That’s two wins for them. I took a swig of the warm liquid and pulled up my pants. It was really silent. I did not like silence.
I touched a paned to my left and switched off the mirror. This was one of the new age toys that I really enjoyed. We had invented this way before the energy wars. Four strategically placed cameras, a computer, a holographic lens and you had yourself a 3D mirror. Sometimes it felt strange to see another one of me standing around, but flat mirrors must have been annoying as hell. I walked around the clutter to the door to the monitoring room, the largest room in the station. This I kept clean. Very clean.
It didn’t contain much except for the large array of display panels on the far wall and the thick glass slab in front of it. I had dragged in a sofa and put it in place of the chair that used to be in front of the screens. I liked to lie down when I worked.
“Lights,” I said, taking another swig from the bottle and the fluorescent tubes slowly blinked into existence. I walked up to the slab and held my palm to its surface. A green glow around my hand told me that it had accepted my hand print.
“Everything all right then computer?” I said as the panels all lit up with status reports from checkpoints in the mile range.
“Yeah, everything’s great except that there’s no one fucking here,” I replied back in a squeaky robotic voice of movies from the 20th century. A lame joke. To break the silence. I pulled back a virtual dial that was projected up from the slab in blue to increase the range of the monitors.
There. Checkpoints within 500 miles, all green. Like always. I let out a long breath. I hated these status checks. I hated that you had to zoom out and hope that none of the soothing green lights were blinking red. When you are the last person in the world, you don’t want to see blinking red lights. I sank into the sofa and fiddled with the controls of one of the cameras, brought its display to center-screen and aimed it at the night sky. The moon had come out from behind the clouds. I watched it drift across the sky for a while; its light bright, then diffused as a cloud came in front of it, then bright again. I didn’t notice when I fell asleep.
I awoke with a start. Bad dream. Something about explosions in the sky and the night turning to day. Dreams were common too nowadays. I looked at the clock on the top right corner of the large display panel. Three A.M. Three hours since I had dozed off. The moon was still full and bright, no clouds nearby now. I realized that I was still holding the bottle of whiskey, cradling it to my stomach. I looked at it for a second, thought about it, and then took long drink. As I was bringing it down, I saw a blurred line of smoke go across the moon’s image. I choked and bolted up from the chair. Coughing and gasping for breath, I couldn’t take my eyes off the monitor. There, again. Something fast went right across the image of the moon and left another smoke trail.
I had to get up there.
I limped to the stairs. I realized I didn’t have my walking stick with me, but I couldn’t waste time now. I opened the heavy pressure door, leaning on the wall beside it. These doors were designed to seal off, maintaining positive pressure, at the time of an emergency. I took the steps two at a time and was exhausted by the time I reached the top of the stairs. I pushed against the door but it was too heavy.
What the hell was that thing?
I took a deep breath, steadied myself on my strong leg and pushed again. This time the door slowly opened. I wedged through as soon as there was enough space. I looked towards the sky and gasped. I leaned against the now closed door and wondered if I was hallucinating again. It was not just the moon. The whole sky was filled with countless objects, burning as they hurtled downwards from the sky, leaving large, white smoke trails behind them. I slowly slid to the ground, my mouth still open in amazement. This was no hallucination.
Suddenly the air filled with the howling of the dogs. They were near the station. And there were a lot of them. I had to get down and make sure the perimeter was intact. I couldn’t take my eyes off the sky though. The dogs started barking, excitedly, like they had found something. I had to get down.
“Help!” The shriek pierced through the howling and barking of the dogs. I jumped to my feet, immediately regretting it, clutching my thigh as the pain shot up from it.
This couldn’t be. Someone was out there!
I limped to the edge of the roof, still holding my thigh.
“Help me please!” My blood chilled at hearing the voice of another human. Not digitally recorded years ago and played back to me by the computer, but the voice of a real human. I leaned over and peered across the electrified fence that contained the station.
Another human! But it was not allowed!
I looked up to the sky once more. There were only a few falling objects now, but the sky was filled with smoke trails.
“Help!”
I turned and hurried towards the pressure door.
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Friday, March 11, 2011
The end II - The past
Sorry I was a bit late, but this one's a little longer! For new readers (yeah right haha), read the previous post titled 'The end' first.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I was walking down the road, as I often would, my bag slung on my back, alone. It was very cold and I had the hood of my sweatshirt up. I looked behind me when I came to the crossing. Bright yellow lights of a car shone through the fog. The sky was full of white fluffy clouds and the moon peeked out through a gap in them. The moonlight made the road shine with its own ethereal light. I waited for the car to pass. It was a shiny convertible, two guys in the front seats with the volume throttled to the maximum. Some kind of new age fusion music prevalent among the not so intellectually gifted.
They drove past me, making a dull whooshing sound. The loud internal combustion engines of the past could not be found outside of museum displays now. That was because it had been about 50 years since the last drop of petroleum was mined from the ground. Scientists had been after it for years, but the real quest for alternate fuel began when we actually started running out of oil. Nothing drives innovation more than high prices and tanking profits. We had been on the brink of worldwide famine. Economies were collapsing and war was the only means of survival. When it finally came, it was hailed as a milestone in human achievement. Presidents ran to podiums to claim this as a victory for mankind, their nation and their political party. Masses of people came out, to pray, to drink, to fornicate. It was anointed as a symbol of mankind’s ingenuity and resilience. It was called the Particle Engine.
In reality, it was just a dirty way for humanity to continue its easy way of life. Fossil fuels had opened our eyes to a world never seen by any animal on this planet, perhaps any being in the universe. We had a taste of it and inebriated by its power, we were willing to give anything, pay any price, to sustain this drunken stupor. And pay we did.
The sound of the engine revving startled me back to the present. It was an irritating sound. They sped up when they saw a couple of girls on the corner looking at them. The girls squealed with laughter and waived at the guys. They slammed the brakes, said something indistinguishable and the girls jumped in the back, giggling. I wish I had a convertible and listened to new age hip hop fusion.
I pulled up my sagging backpack and crossed the road, glancing back once again to make sure no one was coming. Something fast ran past me to my left. I jumped away instinctively and saw that it was just a dog. Damn strays. I had heard enough stories of near escapes and even nearer bites from these rabies transport units. Apparently there was a territorial war in progress in the middle of the park to my left. I use the term park liberally; it was more of a sand covered area with a few patches of dry yellow grass and an old swing that made loud screeching noises when it was windy. One had to be very careful while treading this ‘park’ as dog faeces were not the worst thing you could step into there.
The silence of the night was punctuated with loud barks of about a dozen dogs. I liked that. Sometimes the silence around me got so dense that it pressed against my ears, like it was ready to rip my eardrums and flow right through my head. It's like when you dive into a really deep swimming pool. At first you hear the phantasmagorical gurgles of air bubbles that rushed into the water with you, like you were inside of a giant beast. Then the silence increases as you go deeper and so does the pressure until it’s so strong that you cannot bear going further. You start hearing sounds in that silence. Sounds that are not really there. Sounds from your past, from your future. Slow, garbled voices leaking into your brain through your eardrums. Your eyes play tricks on you. You start to see patterns, faces even, in the swirling water around your eyes. All the while the water pushes harder and harder to burst open that barrier and fill you with its crushing silence. You look up and you can see the trees and clouds, sunlight filtering through the surface of the water. But for that moment, you were never really part of that world. You belong to the blue, absolute silence, punctuated by the wails of those that came here before you but never left.
I was almost to my apartment. A left at the corner and fifty meters dead ahead. This patch of road was especially dark. One of the streetlights was out and the moonlight was never enough. From the corner of my eyes, I saw a dark shape moving swiftly across the park to my left, racing towards the road. A dog, mouth lined with white, wet foam, eyes shining red like the devil himself, appeared directly beneath the next streetlight. It paused for a second and looked in my direction, unable to decide whether to keep chasing its invisible prey or try some human tonight. I froze. Slowly, the dog, the big dog, turned towards me and emitted a soft, wet growl. As it turned, the light shone on an open wound on its back. The red of the blood contrasted with its black, shiny coat. The wound was lined with maggots, chewing away the dog while it still breathed. It took slow, deliberate steps towards me, the loose gravel making a crunching sound, moisture escaping its nose condensing immediately on the dust in the air.
My heart was beating hard against my chest. I had read somewhere that dogs can smell fear. This one was probably getting a nose full. I threw my bag at it. I missed. I looked around and saw the road deserted, as usual. I tried to scream but nothing came out. Suddenly, it decided to lunge. I turned and ran. All I heard was the loud fusion music before the car slammed into me and I was engulfed in silence.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I was walking down the road, as I often would, my bag slung on my back, alone. It was very cold and I had the hood of my sweatshirt up. I looked behind me when I came to the crossing. Bright yellow lights of a car shone through the fog. The sky was full of white fluffy clouds and the moon peeked out through a gap in them. The moonlight made the road shine with its own ethereal light. I waited for the car to pass. It was a shiny convertible, two guys in the front seats with the volume throttled to the maximum. Some kind of new age fusion music prevalent among the not so intellectually gifted.
They drove past me, making a dull whooshing sound. The loud internal combustion engines of the past could not be found outside of museum displays now. That was because it had been about 50 years since the last drop of petroleum was mined from the ground. Scientists had been after it for years, but the real quest for alternate fuel began when we actually started running out of oil. Nothing drives innovation more than high prices and tanking profits. We had been on the brink of worldwide famine. Economies were collapsing and war was the only means of survival. When it finally came, it was hailed as a milestone in human achievement. Presidents ran to podiums to claim this as a victory for mankind, their nation and their political party. Masses of people came out, to pray, to drink, to fornicate. It was anointed as a symbol of mankind’s ingenuity and resilience. It was called the Particle Engine.
In reality, it was just a dirty way for humanity to continue its easy way of life. Fossil fuels had opened our eyes to a world never seen by any animal on this planet, perhaps any being in the universe. We had a taste of it and inebriated by its power, we were willing to give anything, pay any price, to sustain this drunken stupor. And pay we did.
The sound of the engine revving startled me back to the present. It was an irritating sound. They sped up when they saw a couple of girls on the corner looking at them. The girls squealed with laughter and waived at the guys. They slammed the brakes, said something indistinguishable and the girls jumped in the back, giggling. I wish I had a convertible and listened to new age hip hop fusion.
I pulled up my sagging backpack and crossed the road, glancing back once again to make sure no one was coming. Something fast ran past me to my left. I jumped away instinctively and saw that it was just a dog. Damn strays. I had heard enough stories of near escapes and even nearer bites from these rabies transport units. Apparently there was a territorial war in progress in the middle of the park to my left. I use the term park liberally; it was more of a sand covered area with a few patches of dry yellow grass and an old swing that made loud screeching noises when it was windy. One had to be very careful while treading this ‘park’ as dog faeces were not the worst thing you could step into there.
The silence of the night was punctuated with loud barks of about a dozen dogs. I liked that. Sometimes the silence around me got so dense that it pressed against my ears, like it was ready to rip my eardrums and flow right through my head. It's like when you dive into a really deep swimming pool. At first you hear the phantasmagorical gurgles of air bubbles that rushed into the water with you, like you were inside of a giant beast. Then the silence increases as you go deeper and so does the pressure until it’s so strong that you cannot bear going further. You start hearing sounds in that silence. Sounds that are not really there. Sounds from your past, from your future. Slow, garbled voices leaking into your brain through your eardrums. Your eyes play tricks on you. You start to see patterns, faces even, in the swirling water around your eyes. All the while the water pushes harder and harder to burst open that barrier and fill you with its crushing silence. You look up and you can see the trees and clouds, sunlight filtering through the surface of the water. But for that moment, you were never really part of that world. You belong to the blue, absolute silence, punctuated by the wails of those that came here before you but never left.
I was almost to my apartment. A left at the corner and fifty meters dead ahead. This patch of road was especially dark. One of the streetlights was out and the moonlight was never enough. From the corner of my eyes, I saw a dark shape moving swiftly across the park to my left, racing towards the road. A dog, mouth lined with white, wet foam, eyes shining red like the devil himself, appeared directly beneath the next streetlight. It paused for a second and looked in my direction, unable to decide whether to keep chasing its invisible prey or try some human tonight. I froze. Slowly, the dog, the big dog, turned towards me and emitted a soft, wet growl. As it turned, the light shone on an open wound on its back. The red of the blood contrasted with its black, shiny coat. The wound was lined with maggots, chewing away the dog while it still breathed. It took slow, deliberate steps towards me, the loose gravel making a crunching sound, moisture escaping its nose condensing immediately on the dust in the air.
My heart was beating hard against my chest. I had read somewhere that dogs can smell fear. This one was probably getting a nose full. I threw my bag at it. I missed. I looked around and saw the road deserted, as usual. I tried to scream but nothing came out. Suddenly, it decided to lunge. I turned and ran. All I heard was the loud fusion music before the car slammed into me and I was engulfed in silence.
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
The end
As I attempt to start this up again, hopefully not to slowly sink back into the very tempting and beautiful quagmire of writing-laziness that is so very serene and simply divine wow forget my original train of thought and all of English punctuation writing-laziness sounds pretty awesome.
---2 years later---
Let's try again. I have not been idle in the writing arena for the time I have been gone from here but I have not been able to finish writing a single thing either. So I will post here the beginning of a 'short story' I had begun some time ago, to which I have not penned (typed) the end yet. Each week, I will release another part of the story and hopefully this will keep me motivated to keep writing more. Or I will have to pretend to die, and that will be very costly. Well, without further a dew.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I was walking down the road, as you would often find me doing, alone. The moisture that I breathed out condensed instantly on the dust in the air, obscuring my vision. I came upon a crossing and glanced behind me reflexively. For a moment through the fog I saw a pair of dull yellow lights, lanterns suspended in the white air, growing ever larger like the ravenous eyes of a fiend. Then I remembered that that was a scene from the past. Funny.
It was dark. Without the streetlights, the cars, the coffee shops, the blinking lights of airplanes overhead, it was always dark. There was only the moon but that too was often hid behind a blanket of dark clouds. It was not safe to be out in the dark anymore. I quickened my pace, but this was always a difficult task with my leg.
The gravel made a crunching sound under my feet as I walked. I liked that sound. It reminded me of the past. I pulled my sweatshirt tighter around me to ward off the cold. It could get really cold now that the huge emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere had come to a sudden stop. I guess global warming was not a hoax. It turns out that the world was better off with it though. But of course that was not the only reason it was always cold.
As I looked up at the bright spot between the thick clouds, the moon’s light diffused and spread over its surface, I thought about the world that was. It was fast. And bright. Like your childhood. Nothing like this. There were girls. Girls with bright red lipsticks. Girls on the billboards, on your television screens, on magazines, girls everywhere. Then there were cars, and buildings, and people, lots of them. People walking around on roads like this, getting in their shiny cars, getting out of their shiny cars, girls with bright red lipsticks on their arms, laughing and joking, flicking ash from their cigarettes wherever they went. It was a different world. Especially on nights like this, it seemed so alien. I sometimes thought I had imagined it all.
Something startled me. A dark shape fled by a few meters ahead of me. Something even darker than the black of the night around it. It darted behind an electric pole, an obsolete reminder of a world that perhaps never existed. Was I imagining this? I fumbled with my belt, trying to pry open the cover of my knife. I had to be quick, predators were common now, even in cities. But something told me it was not a predator. Not something I had ever seen at least. It was too big, and too fast. I couldn’t get the button of the leather cover to open. My fingers were numb with the cold. I limped behind another pole for cover. As I struggled with my knife cover, I peeked back out. There. Again. The shadow fled across the road. My breathing quickened.
“Shit,” I breathed out white smoke. Suddenly the yellow lights reappeared. In front of me this time. The button came loose but the knife fell out of my hands. I stood there, rooted, couldn’t take my eyes off those dull yellow lights, like the eyes of a fiend. They came closer. I started hearing the sound as well. The sound of a car engine. The dull whooshing sound of the wheels on the road. How alien that sound is. Like from another world. Like I was imagining it all. I took a step back. My leg gave way and I fell on the loose gravel. Crunch.
I put my hand up to shield my eyes from the light. It was very close now.
---2 years later---
Let's try again. I have not been idle in the writing arena for the time I have been gone from here but I have not been able to finish writing a single thing either. So I will post here the beginning of a 'short story' I had begun some time ago, to which I have not penned (typed) the end yet. Each week, I will release another part of the story and hopefully this will keep me motivated to keep writing more. Or I will have to pretend to die, and that will be very costly. Well, without further a dew.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I was walking down the road, as you would often find me doing, alone. The moisture that I breathed out condensed instantly on the dust in the air, obscuring my vision. I came upon a crossing and glanced behind me reflexively. For a moment through the fog I saw a pair of dull yellow lights, lanterns suspended in the white air, growing ever larger like the ravenous eyes of a fiend. Then I remembered that that was a scene from the past. Funny.
It was dark. Without the streetlights, the cars, the coffee shops, the blinking lights of airplanes overhead, it was always dark. There was only the moon but that too was often hid behind a blanket of dark clouds. It was not safe to be out in the dark anymore. I quickened my pace, but this was always a difficult task with my leg.
The gravel made a crunching sound under my feet as I walked. I liked that sound. It reminded me of the past. I pulled my sweatshirt tighter around me to ward off the cold. It could get really cold now that the huge emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere had come to a sudden stop. I guess global warming was not a hoax. It turns out that the world was better off with it though. But of course that was not the only reason it was always cold.
As I looked up at the bright spot between the thick clouds, the moon’s light diffused and spread over its surface, I thought about the world that was. It was fast. And bright. Like your childhood. Nothing like this. There were girls. Girls with bright red lipsticks. Girls on the billboards, on your television screens, on magazines, girls everywhere. Then there were cars, and buildings, and people, lots of them. People walking around on roads like this, getting in their shiny cars, getting out of their shiny cars, girls with bright red lipsticks on their arms, laughing and joking, flicking ash from their cigarettes wherever they went. It was a different world. Especially on nights like this, it seemed so alien. I sometimes thought I had imagined it all.
Something startled me. A dark shape fled by a few meters ahead of me. Something even darker than the black of the night around it. It darted behind an electric pole, an obsolete reminder of a world that perhaps never existed. Was I imagining this? I fumbled with my belt, trying to pry open the cover of my knife. I had to be quick, predators were common now, even in cities. But something told me it was not a predator. Not something I had ever seen at least. It was too big, and too fast. I couldn’t get the button of the leather cover to open. My fingers were numb with the cold. I limped behind another pole for cover. As I struggled with my knife cover, I peeked back out. There. Again. The shadow fled across the road. My breathing quickened.
“Shit,” I breathed out white smoke. Suddenly the yellow lights reappeared. In front of me this time. The button came loose but the knife fell out of my hands. I stood there, rooted, couldn’t take my eyes off those dull yellow lights, like the eyes of a fiend. They came closer. I started hearing the sound as well. The sound of a car engine. The dull whooshing sound of the wheels on the road. How alien that sound is. Like from another world. Like I was imagining it all. I took a step back. My leg gave way and I fell on the loose gravel. Crunch.
I put my hand up to shield my eyes from the light. It was very close now.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)