Join the Dead

Cris watched with gloom as her planet swirled around her in an ever agitated mass of lightning and volcanoes. The storm drowned out the audible screams, sobbing, and thrum of the gibbering mad, but Cris could feel them. A sickly flash of electricity lit up above her and Cris tore off the headset before she joined the fallen.

Lined eyes looked down at her. A set of hands gently adjusted the needle and tubes entering the groove of her arm. Another gingerly took the headset before she could break the intricate Psy equipment. “What did you see?” A voice asked.

Cris’ head lolled. Crimson echoes churned when she let her eyes unfocus. The white room, the acidic smell of disinfectant, and murmur of the research team kept the pulse at bay, but barely. The storm waited for her. “It’s grown. More people are there, trapped. I could hear them, so many of them.”

“Those who succumbed to the mental disruption.” A researcher clarified. Cris nodded, but they both knew those people were gone. The storm’s fire and chaos call beat in all their heads, begging to be listened to.

They got her up and out of the white room. Cris kicked the vision into the corners of her mind, to the spaces behind her eyelids, as she showered and put on civilian clothes. Her training allowed her to hold on to her sanity, to the mundane world she was supposed to live in.

Cris left the compound. She went grocery shopping, stood in lines, and huffed at red lights. She turned on music when she entered her empty apartment, not willing to tempt the storm with silence.

She watched the street from her bedroom window.  When the storm fell on those outside the white rooms and halls, on the people driving to work and picking up their children from daycare, regular people at dog parks and laundromats, those praying, laughing, eating dinner, something very different happened.  Cris could pretend the end wasn’t coming, once they saw it, they could not. It would sand them all down.

Cris closed the blinds.

CC threw a curve ball at me and the rest of the thieves this week with the first line. Check out her original here and tune in each week for the Legal Theft Project.