Turning twice to see the darkness and the light, Keeley lost track of the zombie that had been running along behind her at surprising speed. Somehow he slipped in to the shadows as her light-blinded eyes took too long to adjust. No matter. Keep moving. She had to keep moving. She'd learned that early on. They were too slow to give chase. Except this one. Something about they way he moved led her to think that he was different. Faster, yes. But also more precise.
The bridge ahead of her looked empty. Still, she approached it warily, knowing that appearances...
I'm dead. Really dead. Not in the "There'll be a twist at the end and I'll be saved" kind of way. Just dead. I am out of food, out of electricity power for the radio, and abandonded in the middle of the Alaskan wilderness. I do not know how or what happened that led up to the plane crash all I know is that I managed to survive two weeks on the scraps I found in the plane and a nearby pond. This is my last statement to the world if anyone finds this, I am going to travel north...
She found the key on the internet.
It seemed silly, a little, to buy a physical and tangible thing like that to open up a locked trunk in a dream. But it was necessary, she was sure. She'd been trying to get into the trunk in the bedroom of the house of doors - the house she returned to over and over again in her lucid dreams - for years. For as long as she could remember.
The trunk, solid and wooden, banded with brass and locked. It was impenetrable. She'd tried peering through the keyhole, picking the lock, everything....
You can count me out. I'm over it. Through with you, done with everything....That's a lie. Count me in, it's about time, right? Six years is long enough to be apart. I've waited for this; you, maybe not. Either way, the date's approaching. Count me out, though, it might be a bad decision. No...count me in, I can't wait to see you. Remember that summer? Remember that WINTER? No, no, I can't see you, count me out. Count me in, count me out, I can't decide one way or the other. No, for sure, count me in, what am I...
There was blood on my pillow. A lot of blood. A ton of blood. Where did it come from? It seemed to be dripping from somewhere. I looked up. The celing was dry. I looked around, I felt my own face, hair, ears, nose...all dry. What the h*ll was going on? Then, I heard something. A step. Two steps. Steps moving across the wood floor near the staircase downstairs. Was this the source of the blood? Was it the cause of the blood? Am I next? I was not injured, but I was still terrifyed. Suddenly, something came bounding around...
Det kom en dag i hodet på meg. Og jeg så det aldri før enn da. Det var noe som hadde hengt over meg i lengre tid. Jeg visste det var på tide å snu. Jeg visste at jeg en dag ville jeg angre og en dag ville det hele virke meningsløst. Jeg så aldri tilbake. Men nå skulle jeg endelig snu. Det skulle bli min tur å være den gode, jeg er lei av å være den som alltid må gi - jeg trenger å få noe jeg også. Jeg trenger nærhet. Jeg trenger varme. Jeg trenger en som...
She'd have preferred the electric chair, at least that one bloody moved. She could get up a good speed on that one, maybe she could get out of it, escape their sympathetic looks. It was bad enough losing the power in your legs without their condescending looks. Idiots.
Apparently it was a "power chair", but, frankly, bollocks to that. Jokingt that she was living out a death sentence was one of her few pleasures left - that terror in their eyes, the "oh god how do we respond to that" was what she was living for right now.
Actually, that...
It was cold. Freezing, really. There at the stoop, on the street, glowing in red. Dark, straight hair raking her face. She shivered, stood and walked down the street. To me, this place is foreign. To her, she knows the environment like the stories her mother told her. She walks down the road away from the doorway. Where they threw her out. Spit on her. But now she walks down the road trying to keep warm. She coughs. The shivers shake her again. The cold day drops her onto the street, rejecting her and the brightness of her clothes. The...
Once, in Beijing, a young girl in a red gown huddled in a doorway.
She was crouched over an open laptop, her scowl lit up by the screen as she stabbed cmd+R repeatedly. The browser blinked frantically as it reloaded the same white text area on the same light blue background over and over and over again.
"It's past midnight in the U.S.," she muttered. "Why hasn't the prompt been updated yet?"
She scrolled down the rest of the page, cmd-clicking every link until the Twitter page popped up.
"GODDAMMIT," she cried, 'THEY'RE ON THE WEST COAST."
"Can you believe it?" she breathed, eyes wide enough to take in the whole panorama.
Venice was empty. The sun hazed behind a gauze of clouds, glinting off the bows of the gondolas that knocked rhythmically against their moors. As we walked across the worn cobbles, I pointed out the bridge of sorrows. Years ago, prisoners were taken from some sort of religious court to their plight, and their wails left echoes that hadn't quite dispersed yet.
The plaza was magnificent, rid of all people - and the pigeons were scarce too. The bell tower was mighty and the palace...