He fell to the cold floor with a wet plop as his lifeblood spilled around his head. His feet gave a small twitch before glowing limp. His glasses shattered when his face met the floor, shards lying around his head with his eyes closed, a small, black hole at the base of his neck where the bullet entered through. The others around you ran out screaming towards the door. One of them tried to quickly phone the police, dialing it on the phone before she looked up to see you and ran off to do so outside in fear.
You looked down at the murdered body of your best friend, the gun shaking in your hand at the action of it before it slipped off altogether. You backed into the wall behind you, crawling into a fetal position. You reminded yourself that this wasn’t real, this was all a lie. He wasn’t real, nothing was. It was all an illusion, a game that you were not willing to play anymore.
After calming yourself down, you finally looked up at the exit. Some stray, morbid thought somewhere in that gone-mad brain of yours made a wise crack about taking the day off that you’ve been waiting for. Your body wasn’t getting any younger even in this world, as you slowly arose yourself to walk over towards the door, and opened them.
And you were met with nothing.
The blinding light of grey, almost white covered your eyes. Gone were the neighborhood, the people, your car and even the building itself. Nothing remained but an endless, colorless plain. And with little option, you chose to walk through it. After all, you were expecting that you made a mistake and would have to go through this again. But today seemed to be different and you invited that in comfortably. The air was chilling, and large particles of dust moved along the ground as though a mist. Not that there was much to see anyways. You fold yourself in a bit at the cool yet silent winds to provide yourself with at least some warmth, which your worker’s outfit did not provide much of.
It felt as if the walk was an eternity. You were afraid that this is how you would now continue existing: just walking without a path. But, soon enough, you could make out a shadowy object in hindsight. You tried to squint your eyes to see what it was, and you could make out a bed with an IV stand next to it. You sat on the side of it. You saw her, your dead wife, lying on the bed with you beside her. She was always the optimistic one in your relationship, you recalled. Her eyes weakly fluttered open, and she gave you a smile. Just give it a few days, she told you when you asked her what you should do, but you knew that those days would never come. Her heart rate monitor grew weaker as you held her hand into yours, and you could feel it slowly wither away… and stop altogether.
You slowly got up from the hospital bed, picking up the family picture you always carried around in your wallet on the desk next to it before stuffing it into your pocket. There is something philosophical about this, you thought crudely to yourself. You tried to think of that ancient proverb, and it depressed you further as it came to you. You walked on.
In the misty distance, you could make out another object as you walked towards it. It was the water dispenser from your job. A dark spot of blackened blood was still on it when you killed your companion earlier today, and a sudden sense of grief and coldness washed over you as you heard his voice in your head.
Are you going to be okay, Stanley asked you like he did this every hour, on every day.
I’ll be fine, you responded as you slowly pulled the gun out and started to align it where the head meets the spinal cord when his back was turned and nobody else was looking. Just give it a few days, you assured him as you pulled the trigger and watched him slump over as he died.
You stared at the water cooler for a long time before you flipped it onto its side in a fit of rage with a scream, falling to your knees as you cried bitterly to yourself. You sacrificed your life for this, you realized; to escape and refuse to accept your reality. The emptiness that you so selfishly tried to escape from was catching up to you again, filling your mood. The nonexistent walls of this open, grey path felt as though they were closing in on you. Slowly you die – die alone on the inside. To pass from this hell is all you wished.
When you gathered enough willpower to continue, you nearly tripped on something dark. You look down at your feet and saw the body of yourself. Your mouth was locked open with opened, glazed eyes staring blankly at the monochrome sky. There was a large hole in the back of your throat, bleeding out from your lips. Turning yourself over, you could see that the wound exited from the back of your head.
You looked ahead of you and found that there were more of these bodies around, all similar to each other, if not exactly alike. Each of them represented each day passed by, and you can make out entire weeks of this seemingly endless torture. You hesitated for several minutes before slowly walking over them. You tripped on the dark liquid, getting blood on your palms as you panicked before getting up to go again.
In the distance, you make out the last stop of the journey up ahead: your office desk. The chair was placed invitingly behind it, your lunch bag sitting on top of it. You picked it up and slowly opened it as you sat down. You tossed the sandwich aside, watching it fall and spill its contents on the ground as though a murder victim. From the bag you pulled the gun, looking it over. You checked to see that it only had one bullet inside of it; just one more death to go. Only one more person has to die… right?
You squeezed your tired eyes shut, along with the trigger of the stuffed gun in your mouth, seeing a flash of bright light before all existence faded to the familiar dark you have come to know all so well.
And you woke in a cold sweat from your dream, looking around the dim bedroom with a fright. You tried to recall, but found that you could not remember anything, so you passed it off as just a nightmare.
Written by FlakyPorcupine
Those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it - George Santayana