Haze - 5/15

“Hel… lp” I choke out. The strained words barely escaping my sandpaper throat.

“Stay with me,” the blurry figure says again. He’s dragging me someplace. Someplace light, yet impossible to see. My body doesn’t respond as I try to move it. Only my eyes and mouth respond instinctively, as they try to clear themselves of the endless dust coating that forms on them.

Painfully, excruciatingly slowly, he brings me further and further through the abyss.

This must be hell.

“Come on, stay awake,” he says again, somehow both right next to me and far away all at once. I’m spinning in the void as we go.

“Dead?” I ask weakly. There was no other explanation.

Just let me be dead.

“You’re alive. Stay with me,” the figure continued, the voice seeming to pick its way through the fog that was filling my brain, enticing me in the direction I was being dragged.

Everything begins to fade away once more.

This time, though, the darkness isn’t completely empty. A voice echoes a galaxy away, sending ripples around me. It said nothing. It said everything. I could only listen. I had nothing to say.

Peace.

All I had ever hoped for in death was the tranquility, the comfort. Was this it? I had finally found it. Suspended in the blanket around me, a small light twinkles in the distance. A friend, maybe? Nothing about it frightened me at first. I could tell the light had no ill will, but my concern grew along with the light, the raging inferno at its core being unmasked as it came ever closer.

Just as the light was too close, threatening to burn me alive, that voice called out once more, still unintelligible. It was joined by others, then grunting and panting. My senses started to return to me. I could smell dust. Tasted the metallic tinge of blood. What voices I heard grew and morphed violently into a choir of screams in my ears. The burning from the light grew ever stronger, until I was forced to open my eyes back into the opaque air of reality.

Raw and torn, that familiar voice screamed out, “Come on, you useless old man, pull!”

“Just… Let… Let… me die,” I wheezed, my lungs were severely devoid of the air needed to speak. Death had graced me already, and she was already calling me back into her comforting embrace.

“Like hell,” the figure continues through labored breathing, following it up with a few choice expletives, “I won’t leave you, even if it kills me,” they say, followed by a savage “Pull!”

“Let. Me. Die,” I utter as I’m dragged. I expect pain to take over, but my body remains eerily silent.

“Say that again and I will kill you myself.”

I only groan in response, more out of exhaustion than anything. Even if I could figure out where I was, I most definitely did not know how I got here. All I remember was the shaking, the sound of screams and cracking, followed by silent darkness. Whatever had happened to me between then and now couldn’t have been good.

This had to be hell. For someone like me, there wasn’t another option. Another voice crackles through my head that I couldn’t understand.

“Assisting near the lobby, two survivors,” a third voice said.

More crackling, and then my progression along the ground became much quicker.

Whatever sequence followed this conversation was too much for me to internalize. The sounds and lights were changing quickly. Sunlight, darkness, reds, whites, and all sorts of movement happened around me, only to stop as I was placed somewhere along a street I did not recognize. I festered in my forced stillness, stuck alive within an invisible coffin as onlookers raced by.

Unable to move, all I could do was listen as the chaos I had been separated from a lifetime ago raced around me. The ants were now a grotesque mockery of humans, so dirty that I could barely make them out against the dust-filled background. Car horns, sirens, and screams controlled the air, only dwarfed momentarily by the odd, deafening waves of sound that crashed on occasion nearby. Some much closer than others, their accompanying debris saturating the already thick air.

A voice tried to talk to me, but nothing registered as words. He was frantic, getting in my face, showing me something I didn’t understand. He wiped my face occasionally with a dirty rag, attempting to clean my eyes and mouth for me to little effect. While others sprinted by, even occasionally slamming into him, the man barely moved, protectively keeping watch over me. Streaks formed along his cheeks as tears cleaned off the layers caked against his skin.

We sat together in silence until the sky started to become visible again. Clear, blue, it sat mocking above us, lingering safely out of danger, untouchable.

Hours passed with small tremors. My protector sat next to me, no longer saying a word as he wept quietly to himself until finally the earth beneath us calmed down. I dared once more to try and move my head to the side, finally succeeding, and cautiously surveying the area.

The city we once lived in was ruined.

Those who could were running aimlessly in every direction, grey coats of filth adorned with crimson streaks. The injured were writhing in pain or being carried by those who were able. Others stood stock still, staring in shock along with me at the wreckage. Most, however, were completely still.

Turning my head the other direction, pain coursed through my neck. I winced, eyes closing briefly, only to open them into a lifeless pair next to me. I’d never looked into the eyes of a corpse before. Listless, unblinking, and void. Behind that pair, another was open. The row continued onward, with person after person lying next to each other, many of whom wore black tags around some part of their bodies.

“You’re still here?” a first responder asks, addressing the man next to me. She didn’t look much better than he did, her uniform dirty and disheveled. I couldn’t even make out if she was wearing a hat or had her hair up from all the dirt. Only her face was slightly clean.

“Uh, yeah. Waiting is all.” He replied, the tears from earlier already dry against his cracked skin.

“From a glance, it seems you are intact, despite what the blood on you would indicate,” the responder says, now looking at me.

Had I been bleeding?

My face must have given my confusion away.

“Well, don’t look in the mirror. Let me find someone and get them moved,” she says, no longer addressing me.

“Can’t you move them with me?” my caretaker asks.

“Need more, else we might make it worse. Board, collar if I can, whatever we've got left until backup arrives,” the medic says, starting to walk away.

“Aren’t you gonna look at him more?”

“Nothing I can do right now. Keep his head still until I’m back,” she concludes before disappearing from my field of view.

The man places his hands gently around my head, holding it still. He muttered to me a couple of times not to move as I tried to look around, the pain igniting as if to remind me as well.

Why is he still helping me?

I finally took a second to truly look at my rescuer. He seemed much older than I would have expected. The amount of dust and ash in his hair made it grey, no matter the original color. ‘Frail’ was the first word I could think of.

I was pretty confident the voice was the same one I had heard in my blurry state, the person who had saved me. Looking at him, however, made me doubt for a minute. It is hard to believe that he’s the same person. He does not look strong enough to move someone. Doubts aside, it felt unfair to even tell him thank you when I didn’t feel like I was going to live through the rest of the afternoon. I could simply give up on living at any second, and my body would most likely follow suit. They could put a cover on my face like they had done to some of those around me, and at worst, someone would have to move my corpse off the road and into the incinerator.

You should just let me die.

More time passed, and slowly, unfortunately, I began to have feeling back in the lower parts of my body. What started as a light tingling grew as pain radiated through me like electricity, lighting up parts of my body I didn’t even know existed. I lay in silent, still agony, trying my best to hold my breath in and let death take its course.

Once more, the darkness took me as the pain became overwhelming.