Hodgepodge 2: Continuation of the Hodge

http://www.youngwriterssociety.com/work.php?id=93201=Hodgepodge One.

AN:OK, so I didn't do a lot of proofreading, and I wrote half of this a couple months ago, and the other half a couple days ago, so...any correlation is purely miraculous and not to be taken seriously.

The first night out in the wilderness is all right until about midnight when I realize I simply cannot get to sleep. This happens pretty much every night, but the difference is tonight I’m outdoors lying on the cold hard ground. It’s bumpy and just when part of me gets comfortable, some other part starts to lose circulation and I have to shift again. To add to it, there are strange sounds in the night; screams from wildlife, odd gurgling sounds that may or may not be a growling predator, and the ever-ominous yet innocent-seeming rustle.

To top it off, Nightmarie isn’t around when I wake up and now I have to carry my wooly blanket on my own. It takes an inordinately and embarrassingly long time to get the blanket rolled properly so I can carry it. I realize that I never actually used it in the night and consider pitching it, briefly. I decide not to, since blankets do, on occasion, come in handy.

The road is cold when I begin, and my feet feel like bricks before my blood begins beating down there. The sun is not actually visible yet. I had considered sleeping in until visibility improved, but I couldn’t get back to sleep and would make better progress if I got going.

I’m in the outskirts of town when I first hear the eerie wail of a siren. Emergency vehicles are the only things still on the road these days. Well, almost. Some people still drive cars, but only the wealthy or the criminal.

The siren’s call bounces through the spaces between the buildings and washes over me, enveloping my thoughts and arresting my motion for a few seconds.

There is smoke in the city. Black smoke so thick it appears to be solid.

I continue walking. After all, by the time I make it to wherever the fire is, it will probably already be put out and cleaned up. Still, I keep an eye on the column of smoke. I swear it’s getting disproportionately larger.

Someone screams, distracting me momentarily from my thoughts. I cannot see who screamed; there is no one on the streets and no one in the yards nearby.

A man runs to the corner of the block, about half a block away from me. He looks around, notices me and runs away further into town. I reach the corner of the block a little while later and stare at the space the man vacated a short time ago. He seemed scared rather than in a hurry. Scared of what, though? I’m not that scary; I hide my knives pretty well, normally.

There’s a crack in the distance and something flies past my ear. It takes a couple seconds for the realization to penetrate: someone just shot at me. I duck as another bullet parts the air above my head.

I am unfamiliar with being shot at. Normally, I do the shooting. Surely the rabbits aren’t revolting?

By the time I realize I’ve been running, I’m a couple blocks away. I stupidly decided to go further into town. At first I think perhaps I should run back the other way, but when I turn to assess the feasibility of this course of action, I catch a muzzle flare out of the corner of my eye and hear something nearby meet its bullet-shaped demise.

I stop for a minute to consider. Perhaps I’m still dreaming. I can hear myself narrating this, and, wait, did I seriously say, “bullet-shaped demise”? A bullet hit it and it went floompf. Besides, I couldn’t see what shape the -

Something painful rips through my right arm. I don’t bother wasting time thinking I’m dreaming; I don’t think that way in dreams anyway. I resume running and take the first right I can.

I’m in a residential area. The whole place looks deserted; some doors are open even. Some doors have actually been ripped off the houses and left on the lawns. Sometimes with assorted large bits of house still attached. Lawns are ripped up here and there, but I don’t notice much of it until I’m deep into the twisty avenues of the housing development. At some point, all the destruction begins to get to me and I wonder what could have caused it.

I don’t really care, actually. I’m probably still asleep anyway. Well, how I could still be asleep is a mystery, because it was really cold last night and it is really warm today.

I start scratching at my arm absently. It itches and aches a little. I try to think back to why it might be aching. Did I do anything strenuous? No. Did my arm undergo some sort of trauma? No...wait...

Oh crap.

The dude got me right below the elbow. I can’t move my middle or ring fingers and there’s a lot of blood. I try not to look at it, because I don’t do well with blood. It’s too late, though. It looks horrible and when my fingers touch it a stinging pain runs up my nerves. My vision darkens and I see little white spots like static. My ears start buzzing and I can’t feel my body. I figure I’ll just wait until...

I hate the fainting, but it’s over with pretty quickly and soon the buzzing subsides. After a little longer I can see again and it registers that I am somewhere else, not on the street. I’m in the grass. Well, partly in the grass. Someone’s dragging me and my feet are still in the street.

“Can you hear me?” a voice calls. I can hear it, but there’s still a buzzing and it sounds like the voice is coming from the other end of a tunnel.

I grunt something.

“Are you OK?” This time the voice is too loud, like the person thinks I’m deaf. I can’t quite tell if the speaker is a male or female. Either way the inanity of the question in light of my appearance makes me start laughing.

A face comes into view. I still can’t tell if it’s a dude or a gal, mainly because whoever it is has a bandana wrapped around their head and a hood covering most of their forehead so all I can see is eyes, which look at me skeptically. The question is repeated. It’s a guy.

“Ahbihshod.” I say. Fainting shortly after waking up has done nothing to improve my morning vocabulary.

“You what?”

“Mah ahahaha...”

I scream. I’m not sure what happened. Maybe I got my arm under me, maybe it just brushed against a rock, I don’t know. All I know is it hurts like fire and I wear out my esophagus with a strange yodelling noise I didn’t know my vocal cords were capable of producing.

“Shut up!” The guy hisses, clapping a hand over my mouth, “If they’re hungry, we’re done for!”

I grit my teeth and shut my eyes tightly as the pain washes over me. For a while I am not aware of my surroundings, as all I can feel is heat and all I can see is the insides of my eyelids. When I finally open my eyes, I am being dragged through a hole in a house. I flop awkwardly inside and try to sit up. My arm still feels like it’s on fire, but the shock is setting in and my system is getting flooded with numbing endorphins.

“Are you going to scream again?” The Guy asks.

“Nah,” I grunt, “I’ll just make repressed yelping noises if I hurt myself again. Who are you? What happened here?”

The Guy doesn’t answer, but motions for me to crawl deeper into the house.

The house seems like it was once a pretty nice place; there’s a curving staircase in the living room going up to the second floor, the floor is made from black mahogany hardwood, the chairs were overstuffed. Now, however, there’s a humongous pit in the middle of the floor, the staircase ends in splintered wood halfway up and the chairs’ stuffing pervades the room. I stop crawling to gape.

The Guy pokes me and I start crawling again in a daze. I am motioned to go to the stairs, where I curl up into a whimpering mess, cradling my hurt arm and attempting to not pass out.

The Guy scuttles around the room, placing open cans of mushrooms at all the openings. I wonder why he’s doing that, but I know better than to ask. Something is purportedly listening and I don’t want to know what.

Suddenly the Guy is grabbing my arm and wrapping it up in bandages. I hadn’t realized that I fell asleep, but the last I recall, he was across the room, then I closed my eyes. I feel very sleepy, so it is not particularly unlikely I dozed off.

I hear the guy protesting my falling asleep, but I ignore him and drift off anyway.

I dream I am in a hallway in a building that looks like a laboratory. It plays out sort of like a videogame where I have an infinite number of bullets with which to shoot at brutish beasts of some sort. Somewhere in the dream, I find some girl who is not shooting monsters. She tells me she’s wounded and doesn’t particularly want to play any more. She seems pretty nice, so I take her to an exit and she leaves.

I wake just as the exit door closes.

I feel better than I usually do when I wake, and a thought surfaces that perhaps I could get up and make coffee. This crazy thought doesn’t last very long, perishing in the flood of pervasive happy thoughts at being in a nice warm bed with fuzzy blankets. The happy thoughts continue for a little while before my brain catches up with the rational thoughts spinning through it. In all probable likelihood, I am not home, which means I am out and about in the wild.

Last I recall, I was a pitiful mess on the floor of someone’s house. I’m probably still in that house, though I can’t see anything presently because it is so dark, which would mean I’m probably in a bed whose owner perished at the hands of an unknown terror.

Fun thought, that.

My eyes hurt, and it feels like there's something covering them. My arm doesn’t hurt. It could be that my eyes simply hurt more than my arm, so I feel up my arm to see how the bullet wound is doing. To my surprise, both of my arms are just fine. Perplexed, I do a more careful investigation and eventually find a little knot right in the middle of my forearm, and a matching knot on the other side of my arm.

How long have I been out? More pressing, why do my eyes hurt?

I feel on my face and find that there are bandages tightly wound around my head. With a sinking feeling and much frenzied clawing, I tear at the bandages until they are loosened up enough that I can unwind the bandaging. The bandage falls away and I hesitantly feel around my eye sockets. My fingers meet limp, unresponsive flesh. My eyes are gone.