My Story- Part One

"Our time is running out
You can't push it underground
You can't stop it screaming out,
How did it come to this?"-Muse, Time Is Running Out

"The lucky ones die first."- Tag line for 'The Hills Have Eyes'

PART ONE
Because fate has a sense of humour the beginning of the end started on Friday 13th March at almost one in the morning. I was working the graveyard shift at the hospital (which is never as quiet as the nickname suggests) when the building began to shake. At first I thought I was going crazy as the walls began to vibrate and a chair moved from one side of the room to another, but when I popped my head out into the corridor everybody else had that dazed look of confusion on their faces so I knew I wasn’t alone. I waited to see if any alarms would go off but they didn’t, so I took it that meant that the hospital wasn’t going to fall down or anything. I guessed it was a little earthquake or tremor or something like that, either way I knew it’d be the topic of conversation for the next couple of days, or at least until my shift finished.

At half four I said my goodbyes to hospital and got in my car to head for home. As soon as the car came to life the radio switched on, but I didn’t pay any attention to it- I just plugged my iPod in and drove on. I wish I’d listened to the radio now, it had been the news that was on. I have often wondered if I knew beforehand what was going on things might have been different. Then again, if I’d heard what was happening I probably wouldn’t have believed it.

So, there I was just- driving back to my home on the other side of town, quite tired and not really paying much attention to anything. Then I caught a glimpse of something in the road and my mind came back to planet earth when I realized it was a person. I swerved the car and just missed knocking the guy over. I stopped the car and looked out the window and the guy was still standing in the middle of a road, like a deer.

I opened the door, got out and the guy turned to face me. He was large, balding and wearing a dirty red dressing gown. “Hey,” I said, “What the hell were you doing in the road?”
He took a step towards me and opened his mouth, blood trickled out of its corners. “Please…” He murmured through the blood “Help me…” He shuffled forward towards me and as he did the dressing gown began to open and I could see his chest. There was a hole in the middle of it as if someone had shot him.

I remained still as he shuffled towards me, and in the orange glow of a streetlight I could see there was something moving inside the hole in his chest. “Christ…” It was sickening. I turned to get back into my car but I froze when I saw something on the roof of it. It was like a bug, well more like a children’s interpretation of a bug- a thin body with many spindly legs jutting out of it. It had two large black eyes on its head, like a dolls eyes and a mouth that was a rounded ‘O’. The thing could have been no bigger than a Coke bottle.


It leaned back on its legs and I realized it meant to leap at me. It moved so damn fast I was lucky just to step out of the way of it. I turned around to see where it had landed but the large guy was centimetres away from me with hands outstretched. His eyes looked a shade of grey. His fingers brushed my neck, so I flung my arm to knock his aside, and it knocked him back a bit.

I leapt into my car and slammed the door too. I turned the ignition on when the bug thing crashed into the side window leaving a rather large crack on the glass. Not wanting to see if it were alive or not I drove on as fast as I could.