Recovered Entry A-1

I've always hated my last name. Eldrin. I don't know why that crossed my mind in what I thought were my last hours on this planet, but it did.

"The government has deployed the National Guard in various states,” the anchor on the news confirmed.

“Fuck.”

I hit the remote off the coffee table and went to the window. Bare feet on cold wood. I held the curtain in one fist. Barely peaked through the gap.

Red light over the tree line. Cicadas buzzing, searching for one last mate before whatever this was took them too. Birds sang behind them. Wind moving through a haze the color of something already engulfed in flame. The world looked like it had been lit from the hells underneath.

I let go of the curtain before I tripped over my own shoes. Hours left, maybe. I should have felt something closer to peace about that. What I felt instead was the old paranoia, awake again and telling a different story than the one on the news.

My phone buzzed on the counter, that ringtone—the one tone in the world built to undo me in four notes, upbeat drum, a cheerful trumpet, and a flute to complement the ensemble. I only set it to one specific person's number. I loved my sister, but I couldn't pick up.

I clicked the phone silent instead. Tossed to the bin and let the crinkle of the trash bag fill the space where the chime had been. I wouldn't be reaching out to anyone. Paranoid, maybe, but something biblical was happening outside and I wasn't going to risk what I had left by opening a line to it.

Chains across my front door. A few drill holes, ring clamps, two locks. Nobody in, nobody out. I'd wait out the fire or the bombs or whatever exactly was rising—on my side of the door.

Static from the television snapped me off the counter I didn't remember gripping. I was sure I'd turned it off—the remote was on the floor now, not on the coffee table. A cold draft came off the ceiling fan and crossed my face. The hair on my arms stood up off the carpet's static before I understood why.

I sat down cross-legged in front of the television screen. White noise has a pull to it if you let it. I turned the remote over in my hand, felt every ridge on it before I pressed the power button. Once. Twice. A third time. I hit it against my palm to check the batteries. Nothing changed. The screen kept its static and I gave up and stood to turn it off by hand.

The hard plastic button of the television under my thumb didn't have the same give as the remote's rubber, but the click of it was its own small satisfaction. I sat back down hoping to see my own face in the dead black of the glass.

“What the fuck.”

I hit the power button again and again. The static held. I grabbed the cord instead and a spark jumped when I pulled it loose, hard enough that I went down on my tailbone against the floor. My heart dropped somewhere below where it usually sits. My eyes wouldn't stop going wide.

Pain ran up my spine off the coffee table shaking behind me. My shirt went cold and wet down the back—a glass of water I must have knocked over. I didn't care. I sat frozen, eyes drawn into the static, watching every pixel swirl until my eyes dried out from not blinking.

"What a time to be alive, am I right?" the radio, on the end table, cutting through the rooms pressure, "Who would've thought the world was going to end so soon? I hope everyone's staying safe and not worrying too much—"

My name was the last word on the host's tongue.

Their voice dropped out of its own register on the word, gone dark, gone wrong in a way that moved through my whole body at once. The radio's backlight stuttered blue. I couldn't look away from it, waiting for whatever came next.

A click from the television pulled my attention back. Startling me back to view my reflection on the unpowered device.

The microwave beeped, too loud, and I jumped this time. The kitchen light flickered in time with my shock. I stood, let my heart reduce a few beats per minute, and entered the kitchen. I unplugged the microwave, then stood at the sink with both hands on the counter, the smell of a week's dishes and sour milk filling my nasal cavity. Sweat ran off my brow into small drops on the tile.

I stood still, head draped to the floor. I practiced my breath work. Five seconds in. Hold three. Five out. A few rounds of it and my mind calmed back into some kind of recognizable shape.

You're okay. Breathe. You aren't losing it. Not this time.

A dog barked outside, something scraping metal on concrete. “I hate those dogs,” I said to no one, and crossed the apartment to throw the curtains. They opened to a full moon coming through weeks of caked dust on the glass.

A fence, half standing, separated my building from an old church behind a stand of willows. Rundown shopfronts filled the gaps down the block. Some nights a beggar, sometimes someone dealing something out of a doorway. That night: a light wind through the willows, crickets, the low hum of mosquitoes doing their own version of the same thing the cicadas were doing. I pressed my face to the cold glass, looking for the dogs.

“Wait. What the hell?”

I stepped back. The drapes fell out of my hand and swung shut over a narrow slice of window.

No. Where's the red. Where's the fire.

A voice behind me said my name.

My thoughts frozen in fear.

No, no. This isn't happening. They healed you. Get it together.

That was enough to get my body moving. I turned from the window and fell straight to the floor.

By the sink she stood. Black lace, radiant fair skin, a gown you could see straight through. Long dark hair moving on its own rhythm as her legs carried her from the sink, past the wall, and into the only hallway of my apartment.

I got up wanting to run the opposite direction yet my body carried me to the hallway instead. I held the edge of the wall as the hallway came into better focus. Two breaths before I let myself cross the threshold further. The lights cracked and flickered, keeping time with my own pulse loud in my chest. I swallowed and shook my head clear.

The hallway lit in stutters, enough to show the woman standing at the end of it.

I stood square, arms at my sides, staring at her. She swayed out of time with the flickering, not looking at me at all. Iron in the air. Warmth on my lip—blood, running from my nose, dropping to the floor.

My blood pooled under me and ran down the hall, and hers ran to meet it—wrists open, held close to her side, a red current mixing with mine somewhere in the middle of that hallway. The lights sped up their flicker. My vision went darker at the edges.

“We found you,” something said, in a register no human throat makes. 

The woman turned. Blood ran from where her eyes should have been. Her chest was bare under torn fabric. I stood there, stuck inside my own loop of looking and not understanding.

"We have found you."

My ringtone somewhere far off, growing louder, closer, distorted and then suddenly clear. It made me dizzy, my head pounding along with it, feeling coming back into my fingers a piece at a time. I closed my eyes. One tear made it out before the ring broke whatever had been holding me still.

I was back. Here. Now.

I opened my eyes. No blood on the floor. I checked my own hand—clean, no red. The woman, gone with no evidence of her anywhere to be found.

I knew it. I knew none of that was real.

The ringing stopped. I stood there a second, letting the calm settle in behind it the way it always does after an intense episode. A deep breath of stale air, and I didn't mind the staleness—it was familiar, and familiar was the same as safe in an apartment like mine.

The breath turned into a yawn. I couldn't remember my last real sleep. I thought about trying and the thought came with its own weight of worry attached.

What if they find me again.

"No. They couldn't. Not with everything going on out there."

You saw them.

"Shut up. Shut up."

My stomach dropped when the phone rang again—from the living room this time, though I could have sworn I'd already thrown it in the trash and killed the power myself.

I threw it away. I turned it off. I know I did.

On the floor, flipped over, buzzing in a circle. I crossed the room fast, some mix of anger and fear and guilt moving my legs for me.

You're okay.

The buzz ran up through my palm and the tone filled both ears at once. My hands, too wet to hold onto anything, dropped it and the screen cracked against the floor. The ring kept going anyway, glass and all.

Stop.

I clasped both hands over my ears. The sound only grew, a pressure strong enough to put me on my knees, then flat on the floor, waiting for my own eardrums to explode to give me back my silence.

"Why are you doing this!"

"We have found you," the voice said, and the ringing cut out at once, "We will return you."

"I don't want to go."

Quiet, after that. Birds outside, picking up where the silence left off. I stood, unsteady, and felt sun on my back through the window—early, warm, the kind of thing that's supposed to prove you are intact.

No. It can't be. You're sane. You were cured.

I fully believed that once—that the doctors had done what they said they'd done, that whatever had been wrong in me was closed for good. Under the fear now was something sadder, a wish for help I didn't know how to ask for anymore. I understood, somewhere past reasoning with it, that I didn't have a choice left to make.

I looked down for my phone. No phone. No glass on the floor. Nothing.

We have arrived.

The chains on the door rattled—one hit, then faster, more, until they came off the wall one link at a time, nails giving up their grip. A final crash and then only white.

"We have arrived," the voice said again, from everywhere at once.

I watched through the gaps in my own fingers as the white didn't fade so much as narrow—pulling in from every edge of the doorway until it held one shape instead of a room's worth of light. Tall. Edges blurry like it didn't render properly.

The figure came through the doorway without stepping. The floor didn't register weight the way a footstep should have moved dust or caught the light differently. It simply arrived closer each time I blinked, the distance between us shortening without any interval I could account for. 

I kept my eyes wide and open for as long as my will allowed. It stood frozen in place until the moment I blinked. 

I couldn't find a face on it at first, and then I understood why. There was one—human enough in its proportions to register as one—but the skin ran too smooth across it, too uniform, the texture of something artificial. Pores present, correct, evenly spaced. The features held a joyous reaction no living being keeps for long. The kind of stillness only death allows.

Their eyes, the wrong proportion for the rest of it. Too large for the sockets holding them, the black of the pupils fixed wide no matter how the light in the room shifted, like they'd been set once and left that way on purpose.

"I don't want to go. Please. Not again."

It didn't answer. It didn't need to. Something came off it the way heat comes off a road in summer, and I felt it reach the floor under me before I understood the floor had become a chair.

Vines found my wrists first. Made of moist exposed flesh. Wrapping once and drawing even without drawing tight. Then my chest. Then my thighs.

The room around me thinned at the edges. Not dark—absent. I turned my head as far as the vines allowed and found the same absence stretching out in every direction past the chair, no wall to stop it, no floor under any of it that I could find. The vines ran out into that nothing and kept going, thinning to threads, then to a suggestion of themselves, gone before they ever reached an end I could point to.

In front of me, something held still enough to look at directly. Not a wall. Not quite a screen. A window would be the honest word for it—clear enough that I could have reached through if my arms had still answered to me.

My apartment.

Not a memory of it. The apartment, right now, this moment. And in it: me. Standing at the chains, working the first lock free with a patience my hands had never once managed in this life, unhurried, exact, like a man who had already done this a hundred times with perfection.

I understood, watching my own hands find the second lock, that I wasn't the one operating them.

I felt what was wearing me the way you feel weather change before you see the sky do it—a warmth spreading through wherever it was that I still existed, unhurried and complete, the specific ease of something that has finally gotten exactly what it came for. Not my relief. Not my calm. Something else's, borrowing the feeling of it.

The second lock gave. The chain dropped.

I watched myself reach for the third.