Love Sucks

Love Sucks - 40

I could see them now. Oh, I could see them.

And it wasn’t the first time.

Deeply burned, scarred, frayed skin that was so tight it was translucent…

Eyes sewn shut, forever at a miserable, painful peace…

Mouths wide as they belt out a deafening screech, revealing their razor-sharp teeth…

They were everything I feared. They were in my nightmares, and they were constantly present at the back of my mind, if not the centre of it.

The Others.

Snapping out of a daze, I screamed, but I was glued to the floor, stuck in place.

“Hey, you!” Someone shouted at me, choking. I looked around, and through the smoke I could see someone running towards me. “Run!”

Didn’t they understand that I couldn’t run?

“Damn it!” The man growled, and in the blink of an eye I had been swept up and into his arms, and he was running through the smoke, past the fires, away from the Others. A few blocks later, I was set down on my feet, the smoke still so thick my vision was blurred, and not to mention the fact my aching head was spinning.

“I can’t carry you and lose their trail. You’ll have to run.” The man gasped as he gulped in the dirty air.

“Where to?” My voice was frantic. Could you blame me, though?

“Make your way back towards Shirley way… you know where the common is?”

“Of course.”

“Wait for me at the dead tree past the second wooden bridge.” Before I could ask who he was or try and see his identity, he was running again, this time in the opposite way to Shirley. My heart was racing, but within seconds I forced my feet to pound against the burning pavements, down the empty, burning highways towards the common. Fires were ablaze here and there, and it took me a long time just to find the safest path down an empty duel carriageway. When I was away from the town and running through the streets, my heart began to throb at the sight of houses burning to the ground and children running down the roads, tears staining their smoke-covered faces as they screamed for their loved ones.

I didn’t know if they were real people or not, and that was what really messed my mind up. Were they illusions? Hallucinations? Were they Damned, too? Or were they just a figure of my imagination coming to life to try and portray my burning hometown to what it once was – or what it would be if this was on the Earth plane?

Question after question sped through my mind as I ran down the streets, avoiding potholes, fires and burned monsters – yes, monsters, not people – at all and any cost. What really played on my mind was Alex, and how for those short minutes I’d slammed back into my body, back on the Earth plane, he’d held me and even tried to hide his tears. How he begged me to stay awake, when I just couldn’t – my brain was frying, my skull felt like it had just shattered into a thousand million little pieces inside my head. My eyelids were too heavy, and the darkness that had succumbed me was more than just unconsciousness, and all too soon I was standing on a burning pavement in the centre of Hell’s replica. Before I’d gone back to my own body on Earth, I was just in… nothingness. It was just black, but I could smell the smoke and burning flesh of the fires here, I could hear the screams and I could feel my surroundings. As if I had just been blind, and yet I still managed to be in the centre of Hell’s replica.

I had to stop when I got to Southampton Cemetery. As I came to a halt at the large black iron gates, I leaned over and tried to cough up the smoke that was spreading like cancer in my lungs. My chest hurt, as if there was a vice pushing against my ribs and digging into my heart.