Thorne's Super Awesome Complete Guide To Surviving The Apocalypse -- Ch. 1

Thorne was afraid.

Technically speaking, Thorne had been afraid for a very long time. Who wasn’t, with the current state of, well, everything?

The difference, he found, had been that that was more of a dull, impending fear. The knowledge that something very bad was happening and there was nothing that you could do about it, but that wasn’t an immediate problem. A natural reaction to a scary, but distant, situation. Being sheltered in the middle of a hurricane.

No, this fear was something different. Worse. This fear was what came whenever the wind blew that shelter away, leaving you exposed to the storm. This fear hit like a knife to the throat, or a gun to the head.

This fear came with finality.

Thorne tried to ignore the thumping that was currently emanating from behind the door. He ignored the way that his dresser—of which was currently being used as a crude barricade, propped up to lean its full weight against the door—shook with every thud. Thorne did not think about how he was sure today would be the day that he died.

No, he ignored all of this. Instead, he shuffled over to the window on the far side of the room—the one above his bed, complete with the stickers and taped on pages of doodles that adorned the glass—he did not climb onto the bed, however. His mother had raised him better than to do so with shoes on, and despite what people kept trying to tell him, slippers did count, thank you very much.

He leaned over the edge of the bed instead, steadying himself with a knee on the mattress and a hand on the headboard, until he could peer out at the ruined streets beneath his apartment building. Looking down at the blood and debris that coated the concrete, Thorne wondered if the drop would kill him. It wouldn’t be difficult to open the window and just leap out. Maybe if he were lucky, the impact would smash in his skull and subsequently his brain before he even had the chance to process what had happened.

Thorne had never been that lucky.

Three particularly loud thumps echoed from the other side of the door. Thorne was beginning to think that it was meant to be an intimidation technique above anything else, considering he was almost entirely certain that the creature could tear the—quite fragile, actually—wooden door straight off of its hinges at any given moment. If he were a betting man, he’d put his money on it taking no more than the beast’s equivalent of a pinky finger. If it had fingers, that was.

He had the rather sickening feeling that the creature thought of him as nothing more than food to be played with. A piece of meat on a plate that was already filled to the brim. He decided that the train of thought was not worth the bile that had begun to rise in his throat.

His water had turned off a week ago, he couldn’t afford to have vomit sitting in the middle of his apartment.

Another noise, lighter than the last. Thorne had the almost absent thought that perhaps the beast had decided he wasn’t worth the trouble and was moving on. A thought that was almost immediately disregarded as another, harder, impact wracked through the doorframe. He could almost hear it laughing on the other side of the door, and felt oddly like an animal on display in a zoo. Watched and played with, though never touched. Nothing more than entertainment for a higher being.

Which, he supposed, couldn’t be too far off.

There was a sinking moment where the only thought running through Thorne’s head was that this was it. The creature was tired of playing around, or perhaps hunger had finally overpowered its will to toy, and the door would cave in any moment now.

He could hear the phantom sound of the wood cracking and splintering beneath the force of what could only be razor sharp claws, he could imagine the grotesque scene of the beast crawling through the gap, approaching as if it knew he were trapped, that he had no where else to run. He could imagine the creature lunging with its teeth bared, ripping him to shreds with the force of them.

He wondered how much of it he would be alive for. If the beast would deliberately keep him just so, dangling precariously between life and death. Walking the tightrope between the two realms, never quite tipping too far to one side. He imagined that the creature—monster—would keep him just conscious enough to feel every tear in his delicate skin, every snap of bone as blood slowly drained from his body and onto the wood of the floors. He wondered if it would be over quickly, the monster too hungry to toy with him any longer, or if it would find the sadistic energy to drag things out, if it even had the sentience to do so.

He squeezed his eyes shut against the phantom sensations of claws digging into his forearms, of weight throwing him backwards to the ground and knocking all of the air from his lungs, and braced for the agony of those pains becoming a reality.

The agony never came.

When Thorne finally convinced himself that it never would and opened his eyes again, they immediately flew to his door—still intact—and the dresser that was no longer balanced against it, but laying face down on the floorboards.

He took a breath, filling his lungs with the air that he had not noticed the absence of until a burning sensation had started to claw up his throat at the lack of it against the adrenaline that had been coursing through his veins. He felt the pulse of his heartbeat ramming against his neck, far faster than he thought it was probably supposed to be.

Thorne didn’t know what to do. Thousands of questions ran through his head at speeds almost too fast to process, let alone articulate; Had the monster left? Would it return for him? Had something—or someone—distracted it? If so, would it—they?—come for him next?

No further sound came from the other side of the door, not the growls and snarls of the monster that he was so sure just a moment ago would be his end, nor the booming of its heavy footsteps receding. There was no indication if it were still there, at all.

Contrary to the ever so popular opinion of the people he surrounded himself with, Thorne was no idiot. He knew that it would be stupid to stick around any longer to find out, when the beast had so generously given him a perfect opportunity of escape. He knew that it would be stupid to leave the relative safety of his small studio apartment, to brave the outside world and its distinct lack of creature-stopping-walls as if he were some hero from a fairytale.

Though, he was not ignorant to his minimal choice in the matter, if he had any plans on making it to thirty. That was, with the monster's imminent presence and his quickly dwindling stock of supplies. He’d run out of cans of fruit two days before, and had been trying to ration his perishables before the power finally gave out. That had been a few days before the water. He’d been too afraid to open the fridge since, so that he wouldn’t waste what cold air was left trapped inside.

So yeah, Thorne knew that he had to leave. He also knew that leaving meant almost certain death. Despite what some people in his life seemed to think, he wasn’t exactly keen on dying. And if nothing else, he reasoned, he’d have better chances in the streets, where he could hide, than trapped in the limited area of his apartment. Even if the monster was gone, this was only one occurrence of what he was sure would turn out to be many. And if the beasts didn’t get him first, starvation or dehydration would.

Thorne would have clapped his hands together, as if a show of signifying the finality of his decision, if he were not so afraid of the noise drawing the monster back. Instead, he let out a breath that was shakier than he would have liked it to be, and began to think. If he was forcing himself into the semi-unknown of the newly ruined world outside of the four walls he’d been staring at for the past two weeks, he wasn’t going to go running in blind.

He’d always been the planner of their little band.

Supplies. That was something he’d probably—definitely—need. Thorne tore his eyes away from the dresser to look around the room for anything that he could stuff things in, along with carry around with little difficulty.

His gaze landed a backpack hanging off of his desk chair. It was widely unassuming, plain black fabric paired with dozens of patches that he had messily sewn on sometime in high school. There was a small tear on the front pocket, but nothing large enough that he feared it would cause any problems. He doubted a stick of chapstick would be small enough to fall out of it. Besides, he could take the time to mend it whenever he had a break from fearing for his life. If he was ever not fearing for his life, that was.

He grabbed the bag, assessing how much he would be able to stuff into it before the zippers gave out. He’d used it all throughout high school and freshman year of college before finally retiring it, and even that wasn’t because it had broken. There were plenty of pockets, two large ones meant for things like textbooks and a laptop, along with three smaller pockets, which Thorne had always used to store stationary and little candies. There were also two non-zipping pockets on either side of the bag, meant for a water bottle. There were candy wrappers and pens stuffed into them.

Once he was sure that the bag would serve the purpose he required of it, Thorne began making a mental list of what all he was going to need. Food and water was the immediate thought, before remembering that he did not have any, nor the means to get any.

Alright, so that was out.

Clothes would be an issue as well, considering the majority of the ones he owned were in his dresser. The same dresser that was still lying face down in front of his door. The same door that may or may not have had a monster behind it.

Thorne wasn’t feeling too keen on making that gamble, so clothes were out too.

Instead, he carefully stood back up, leaning off of his bed and taking extra care to lift his knee from the mattress slowly so that it wouldn’t creak. He scuttled over to his desk, on the opposite wall from the bedframe, and slowly opened the top drawer. He winced quietly when it squeaked.

Inside, he found an old lighter that he was not sure had any gas left in it, a couple of pens thrown precariously inside, buttons, a small sewing kit—nothing compared to the larger one that he had stored under his bed, but good for when he needed to fix something and did not feel like digging the box out—along with some loose (probably dead) batteries, a flashlight, several screwdrivers of different types and sizes, along with several other knick knacks that he thought may have once been a part of a craft.

He felt a wave of nostalgia wash over him, total and unwanted. He remembered late nights sitting at this desk, Meris and Sam in a group call, working on adding some new addition to his bag in a bout of insomnia. He’d been grateful at the time that his two friends were so willing to put up with his seemingly irregular bursts of restlessness, staying on the line even after they’d both fallen asleep. He was more grateful for them now that he’d gone without the additional help for two weeks. There had been several times he’d caught himself reaching for his phone on these nights with the intention to dial them, before remembering with a pang of longing that the device was dead and would likely never turn on again.

The fact that he didn’t know if either of them were alive wasn’t exactly helpful, either.

He grabbed the lighter, pens, sewing kit, flashlight, and two of the screwdrivers—a flathead and a phillips—before closing the drawer back, careful so that it would not squeak this time. He would have time to find out after he made it out of this alive. There was no point in dwelling on what could be, when he had no way of confirming anything.

He opened the second drawer, next. This one had less things that Thorne thought would be useful, mostly just sentimental items that he had not wanted to risk losing. Two things did catch his eye however, a pocket knife and portable charger. He debated whether it was worth grabbing the charger when he was sure that he had run its battery dead long before. But then, what if?

He grabbed both items.

There wasn’t much else on the desk that he thought would be useful, so he closed the drawer back with the same care one might apply to cradling an infant and grabbed the bag from the back of his chair. He quickly dumped out what had been left in the pockets and stuffed the supplies into an array of the newly freed space, except for the pocket knife which he instead hooked onto the waistband of his jeans, before closing the zipper back.

He felt something inside of him die at the echoing noise it made.

Thorne thought about the cold weather, next. It was July currently, but he knew how easily the dropping temperatures would sneak up on him in a few months. He couldn’t rely on having the free time to sew something up between doing things to survive. So, a jacket would probably be good to grab. He wasn’t exactly planning to die because of hypothermia of all things.

There were a few strewn carelessly across the floor. He grabbed one, a highly nondescript black zip up hoodie, and tied it around his waist. He was careful to make sure that it did not relinquish his access to the pocket knife before moving on. Otherwise, his outfit consisted of the band tee that he had been sleeping in for the past several days, some loose jeans that he had quickly thrown on whenever the thumping had initially started that morning, and the string tied around his waist that he had been using to hold up said jeans, on account of them being a size too large.

A part of him wanted to bring sentimental items along, as well. His eyes drifted to the notebook back on his desk, containing all of the poems, letters, story ideas, and doodles that he had done over the years. Then, to the polaroid propped up on the cardboard box he’d been using as a nightstand, a picture that he had taken of himself, Sam, and Meris after their first show. They were all high on the excitement of getting a gig at all, his two friends didn’t even notice the snap and flash of the camera until he showed them the photo later that night.

The larger part of him, however, was too nervous that the items would weigh him down in a life or death situation, or worse, get lost or stolen. He didn’t think he could handle losing the location of the last mementos of his old life.

And wasn’t that something to say? His old life. Thorne flinched back at the realization that things would not go back to how they were again. Couldn’t go back. He would have to grow to this new normal, living in a world where survival meant running for his life every day.

He settled for grabbing a chain necklace with a star charm hanging off of it, the very same necklace that Sam had given to him four years prior, and threading onto the metal a silver ring that Meris had gifted him for his birthday a year ago and tying it gingerly around his neck. He cherished both of the items selfishly, along with the memories attached to them. He doubted that either of his friends even remembered the gifts, but Thorne thought that they may have been his most prized possessions. Not to mention the only thing he had left of his friends.

Impulsively, recklessly, and admittedly selfishly, he also pocketed the polaroid off of his “nightstand” before pulling his hand out of the pocket and pretending that the paper didn’t burn through the fabric against his skin.

God, he hoped that they were both still alive. He didn’t think that he’d be able to go on if they weren’t.

With no other ideas, Thorne grabbed his phone from where it had been uselessly plugged into a charger and sitting on his “nightstand”. He flipped the device over in his hands a couple of times, debating whether or not it would be worth bringing along the extra weight.

With a sigh, he stuffed the item into his back pocket. He did not think about the comfort of familiarity that it brought with it. He threw one strap of the bag over his shoulder before deciding better of it and throwing the other strap on as well. It’d do him no good to lose his supplies before he’d even gotten the chance to get out.

Speaking of which, now for the hard part. How to get out.

The door was out, for obvious reasons. If the monster was still there, waiting for him after successfully luring him out of the safety of his small apartment and still managed to tear him to pieces after all of the effort he’d put into dragging his wardrobe over to the door, Thorne didn’t think he would ever forgive himself for his own stupidity.

Not that he’d get the chance, considering he would be dead in such a scenario.

He wondered briefly if he would even notice he was dying before the beast ripped out his heart, or brain, or neck, or stomach. He wondered if it would be over before he had the chance to process what was happening at all, or if he wouldn’t even have the time to hear the sound of his own choked off scream before he succumbed to the pain.

A shudder wracked through his body. Alright then, door was out. The window, maybe?

His apartment was on the fifth floor of a twelve floor building, so not by any means the worst case scenario for his particular situation. The window did not open easily, but he was certain that if he shoved it hard enough then he could maneuver the pane up high enough for his body to slip through.

He thought about the drop and remembered reading somewhere that the fifth floor of buildings was somewhere like forty feet above the ground. Thorne didn’t fancy himself any kind of scientist or mathematiologist—he’d barely passed high school algebra—but he was fairly certain that that was far enough of a drop to kill a person.

He wondered if the fall would kill him before any monsters even got the chance to. Cynically, he wondered if they would feast on his corpse anyway, paying no mind to the concrete that was sure to me mixed in among his brain matter that would no doubt splatter across the concrete.

He headed for the window anyway.

Willing away the nausea that had begun to resurface and make itself known in the back of his throat, Thorne jammed the tips of his fingers beneath the latch of the window. He wiggled it side to side a couple of times before trying to lift it, and was met with much resistance. Despite this, he was able to lift the pane a foot or so above the seal, which he thought would be just enough room to slip his body through.

Leaning his head out, Thorne was quickly assaulted with both the raging winds pounding against his face and a sinking feeling of dread deep in the pits of his soul. He knew, somewhere deep inside of him, that something was going to go wrong.

He yanked his head back inside as if the outer air burned his skin. Shoes. He would need shoes if he was going to do this. He swivelled his head around a couple of times, looking for something he could wear on his feet that was more reliable than backless slippers shaped like raccoons.

His eyes landed on a pair of combat boots that had been forgotten under his bed. He’d gotten them from his mother for his sixteenth birthday and had been forcing himself to make them work ever since. Now, the leather that made them up was torn and embellished with small embroidery projects where he’d had to fix particularly large gaps. There was a thick layer of duct tape around the toe box that he’d added desperately when the seams had begun to rip. On one, the zipper had been permanently stuck midway and Thorne had sewn a shoddy button on to keep the two sides together. He’d done the same on the other as a precaution, and had been pleasantly prepared—albeit not happy—whenever that zipper too had given out.

He gently stepped out of the slippers, donning the boots instead and taking great care to make sure they were properly laced up.

Thorne took one final look at his dingy studio apartment.

The couch positioned against the wall to the left of his front door. Not a fancy thing by any means, but he felt tears stinging in the back of his eyes at the thought of leaving it behind. He remembered dozens of nights with himself, Sam, and Meris all curled up on those very cushions, watching whatever the bad rom com of the week happened to be. The messily sewn on patches of color where they’d managed to rip into the backing. He wondered how many beloved knick knacks rest between the square seats.

The small circular table between his bed and kitchen area on the right side of the room where they had all once sat down together and played board games through the night. Monopoly had been a fan favorite, although banned once Meris had decided to go to school for finance—Sam had deemed it an unfair advantage.

The door beside the kitchen that led to his shoddy bathroom, painted with a mural of the mountains that their dungeons and dragon campaign had taken place in. They’d worked for days on it, Meris coming over after her classes and Sam whenever he could find the time between shifts.

Thorne treasured the memories. Could hardly imagine being able to bear parting with the place that he had last seen the two people he loved most. Giving up ever seeing them walk through that door again.

He brought a hand up and fisted it in the fabric of his shirt above where the cold metal of his chain bit into his skin. All reservations were forgotten as distant yet booming footsteps echoed from the other side of the wood.

Thorne spun back around towards the window faster than he thought he was capable of, steadying himself with a hand on the sill and not allowing himself the time to think about the decision before he quickly eased himself through the gap.

For a moment, he felt as though he was freefalling. His stomach dropped and a strange sort of acceptance clouded through his mind as his feet failed to meet the solid ground that he had not noticed he’d been expecting.

Though, it receded in a way not dissimilar to one’s face being smashed against a concrete wall as his shoes found purchase on the small ledge that sat a couple of feet below the window.

It hit Thorne suddenly that he was afraid, more so than he thought he’d ever been before. He’d been ignoring the dread until that moment, pushing it away with the promise to himself that he’d deal with it later.

There was no longer any later.

A small, wounded noise threatened to crawl its way out of his throat. Thorne willed it away, as if the beast would hear him and come running to attack. He found that he was unable to convince himself that would not be the case.

The wind whipped at his face as he stood helplessly, his arms stretched high above him clinging onto the outer ledge of the windowsill, and his feet struggling to maintain their precarious stance on the limited protrusion in the building.

Thorne wished belatedly that he had thought to bring a face mask with him, to keep at bay the stinging gusts of air from attacking his skin, if nothing else.

He finally understood why protagonists were always told not to look down. The knowledge that he was high enough off of the ground to at any moment be his death in itself nearly made him so dizzy that he lost his balance completely. And Christ, had the movies not accurately displayed the stress that came with struggling to keep his footing with the threat of a forty foot drop looming beneath him.

He looked at the wall, instead. Focused on the grooves in the bricks, all of the minute cracks in the concrete that held them together. For a moment, he worried that one would fall out and he’d go toppling down.

Wait a second.

Thorne looked at the bricks again, focusing on the cracks and chips in both them and the cement gluing them together. Once he’d found one that looked broken enough to suit his needs, he tightened his hold on the windowsill with one hand and used the other to grab the pocket knife he’d attached to his waistband.

He flipped open the blade with less difficulty than he’d been expecting, and stabbed it as hard as he could into the cracks of the brick. Of course, it did not crumble away immediately. But little by little, flakes of clay cracked off and fell to the concrete below.

For once, he praised rather than cursed the poor infrastructure of his building.

It was a slow process, and his footing slipped slightly on several heart stopping occasions, but eventually Thorne had expanded and deepened the break enough so that he could use it as a handhold. He allowed himself a brief mental cheer.

He dug his fingers into the gap, testing that it was secure enough before biting down on the hilt of his knife and crouching down as far as his reach would allow. Then, he repeated the process. Stabbing and digging away at the cracks and chips in the outer wall of the building, expanding them widely enough that his hand could fit into them and then lowering himself far enough to do it again.

The process was agonizingly slow, and at some point his fingers had started to bleed in his desperation to make any sort of progress. The adrenaline that was coursing through his veins helped to ignore the ache, though it did not do away with it completely.

Eventually, he found himself nearly sitting on the ledge completely, unable to lower himself any further. He kept his hands braced on the wall that he continued to face, repeating the words “Don’t look down” in his head like a mantra. The words stopped sounding real around the tenth time.

So instead, he stored his knife between his teeth and began meticulously unhooking his feet from where they were kind-of-safely-ish sat on the ledge, and prayed that he had not misjudged the distance. His hands remained hooked onto the cement protrusion like a lifeline—which they kind of were—While the rest of his body hung limply in the air. Thorne very notably did not allow himself to think about what he was doing, or the way that his body would crack against the concrete if he so much as lost his grip.

He was beginning to find out that was the easiest way to get things done.

The wind continued to ram into him with all the force of a train at top speeds. He could hardly see past his overgrown hair relentlessly whipping in his face, and was not for the first time regretting his choice of outfit when the loose t-shirt and jeans he sported did him no favors, either.

Thorne braced his feet on the brick below the ledge, steadying himself with both that and one hand continuing to keep hold on the cement, while the other took the blade back from where it was kept in his mouth and began repeating the ever so familiar process of jabbing out a deep enough hole in the wall that he could hold onto it. Once he had done that, thinking better of it, he started on a second one as well, level with the first.

It was times like these that Thorne regretted not taking his friends up on their offer to accompany them to the gym.

Meris had not even had any interest in increasing her strength, though she found it hilarious to watch Sam fumble every time he tried to add another couple of pounds to his routine.

Thorne was once again reminded how much he missed the two of them.

Once he had dug out two handholds, then came the difficult part. Thorne had little faith in his own strength on a good day, let alone one where he had the constant threat of being eaten by whatever monster happened to wander by looming over him. He wasn’t sure that he’d be able to support holding up his own weight with the limited grip that the admittedly shallow dips in the brick would allow for, let alone the weight of both that and his supplies.

But truly, what other option did he have?

Thorne stuffed the blade back between his jaw and with an unprecedented burst of confidence—and truly, probably an inhumane amount of adrenaline—and swung himself down, attaching his free hand to one of the makeshift grips that he’d dug out. Once he was as confident as he could be about his security, which was not very, he let go of the ledge with his other hand as well and fully attached himself to the wall.

He felt his heart sink to the bottom of his stomach when his foot slipped a couple of inches. A small noise escaped his throat and he held on with a desperation that would have put a wounded animal to shame. Thorne squeezed his eyes shut as if the wall would give out beneath him, just so that he wouldn’t have to watch as the ground got closer to his face.

Of course, it didn’t. Thorne spent the next couple of seconds convincing himself that it would not happen, that even his poorly maintained cinderblock of an apartment building was not so badly structured that it would give out at a moment’s notice. Then, he spent a couple more seconds convincing himself that none of that logic would be proven flawed if he opened his eyes.

Once he had finally worked up the courage to do just that, Thorne went against all of his instincts screaming at him and, like all protagonists ended up doing, he looked down.

The first thing that caught his eye was the distance. In theory, he’d known how high in the air he was. Had a crisis or two about it, even. He was also able, however, to pretend that there was ground beneath him. That if he dropped his boots from their perch on the wall, he would feel familiar wooden floorboards beneath his feet and hear the clack of the rubber meeting the synthetic planks.

In practice, all that he could think about was that if he let go, there was no chance he would bounce back from a fall at this scale.

The next thing he noticed however, and couldn’t help but want to laugh at how irrelevant of an observation it was, was a mysterious red stain on the cement beneath him. Of course, the sidewalks and roads were littered with the liquid, dried or otherwise. The same way that they were littered with abandoned cars and discarded debris.

But something about this particular spot caught Thorne’s attention. The placement felt too deliberate, the space surrounding it too barren.

He wondered if it was a sign from whatever higher being had cursed their world, a sign that he would not make it out of there. That he should give up while the option was still available, and go resign himself to dying in a cold and empty apartment, alone.

Not like that was an option anymore, he mused.

Tearing his eyes away from the splotch, Thorne went back to doing what he had looked down for in the first place, that being to see how much space sat between him and the next ledge that he had to meet.

He was pleasantly surprised to find that his feet were hovering no more than a foot above the windowsill for the apartment below his. He allowed them to sink to it, so that he was once again standing awkwardly on the side of the building.

Great. Back where he started, just a little further down.

Well, little progress was still progress he supposed.

With a long-suffering sigh, he bit down harder against the metal of the pocket knife’s handle and started the process over again.