Chapter
1 – Miserable Fate
It’s been another long, hard day of
work, and my wife is yelling at me, and my baby daughter is uncontrollably
crying in the back of the car again while I drive us home. I should be used to
it, yet today, it annoys me more than ever. Every regret I have, and everything
that aggravates me is all in my head at once and feels like they touch every
nerve. The words of my wife and the cries of my daughter are muffled as my thoughts
overtake my head. I can’t handle it like I used to as if my strength fell out
from under me.
Something has to change, but then
again, what would be the use of it? I can’t live like this anymore. I can’t
live anymore. I don’t want to. There’s no purpose or happiness in it worth
looking forward to. It’s time to end it all. Just in the nick of time, I use
what looks to be an oil truck ahead of me at a T-intersection in the road, so I
speed my car towards it, ramming it into the side, hoping that the impact or
subsequent explosion kills me, however, mud and dirt spew from it. I blackout
from embracing the mud, allowing it to suffocate me to death so that it kills
me quicker.
Unfortunately, I wake up in a haze,
in a hospital with no windows. For some reason, my legs, arms, and neck have
metal clamps around them, and there are many machines with needles and tubes
around me.
“What is this?” I wonder out loud.
“Hello? Is anyone there? Hello!”
No response. How am I even alive?
Why am I alive? Where’s my wife and daughter? Did they survive too? I have to
get out of here. I don’t want to be part of some experiment, but the metal
clamps are too hard to break. If only my arms were…thinner. Huh? What’s happening
to my arms? My legs?! They’re shrinking and turning into mud! Go back to
normal! Go back!
Okay! Okay…They’re back to normal,
and my arms and legs are out of the clamps. Now, how do I get out of here?
There’s no window, and the door doesn’t have a handle. I see a vent in the
room, but…maybe if I can make my arms and legs shrink, I can do the same with
the rest of my body. It didn’t hurt when I changed, so there’s no reason not to
try. Alright, it’s working. Somehow, I’m able to compress my body, limbs, and
even face into a liquid and enter into the vents. This ability both scares and
amazes me at the same time, and still, I don’t want to live.
The sound of the door opening makes
me turn back to see who is coming through it. To my surprise, it’s my older
brother, Salvatore, and younger brother, Renzo. What are they doing here?
“I thought the silent alarms were
supposed to trip as soon as he escaped?” Renzo asks.
“Yeah, but we don’t know what
powers he could’ve gotten from the mud,” Salvatore admits.
“It’s mud from your company, so
your people should know.”
“Let’s just find him. He couldn’t
have gotten far and probably doesn’t know what he’s doing.”
Salvatore and Renzo rush out of the
room, leaving me alone with my thoughts. Salvatore works for Coronamento, and
that means that the truck was theirs, and this must be one of their facilities
where they hold superhumans. They also must know what happened and that I had
caused the accident. Not too many years ago, my daughter’s face was disfigured
by my dog, and my wife and I punished our daughter rather than the dog because
we told her time and again to stop messing with it, and yet, she didn’t listen.
Knowing that my mom would figure out sooner or later since she always wants to
see her in person or via webcam, I told her what happened and not to tell my
brothers, but she did, and they came over, shot the dog, and beat me and my
wife while yelling at us about how we were bad parents.
They’ll do worse than beat me to
death. Since I’m in this facility, they probably brought me here so I can be
experimented on for the rest of my life! No! I won’t allow it! If this is a
facility where they hold superhumans, they must have an armory with weapons
that kill them. I wander the vents of the facility, looking at the different
tests they do on people who are either prisoners or willing subjects. Much of
the tech they use has weird runes etched into them, and they appear to be
praying or chanting something in a language I don’t understand to use the tech
or experiment on people through rituals. I heard Coronamento was up to some
shady alegal business, but this looks more terrifying than I thought it would,
and it’s also strange to me that a by-the-books cop like Renzo would be okay
with bringing me here.
Eventually, I stumble upon a
security room with a single guard inside. There’s a map of the facility on the
monitor and access to the internet. He’s listening to cooking videos of all
things and doesn’t seem to be too aware of me dripping into the room and
reforming myself. Since I’m already a bastard who is going to Hell, and he’s in
between me and getting a good look at the map, I kill him by crushing his head
with my hands. Huh? What’s this? I’m seeing and hearing…flashes of the man’s
memories.
He was a normal guy with a family
and kids who took this job because he struggled to get by as a warehouse
worker. I relate to that. As an office worker, I struggled to make ends meet
because my company had to focus on paying insurance for superhuman and villain attacks
and paying guards to counter them specifically. It doesn’t pay to work as a
normal person, especially since you can approach a hero or vigilante agency and
instantly become a superhuman or be enhanced with superhuman-like abilities after
some injections and intensive training. Meanwhile, normal people haven’t
received a pay raise in years, and college and trade school enrollment is at an
all-time low. Maybe things will change when the fad of becoming superhuman
through a needle, but that probably won’t be anytime soon.
It's why I don’t want to go back to
living as if I could now that I’m a monster. Let’s see now where that armory
is. Looking at the map, it’s on the fourth lowest floor. I’m on the fifth lowest
floor, so it’s not too far away. Since I’m here, I look through the internet to
see if my car crash is on the news. Surely enough it is, it’s been a week since
it happened, and my daughter and wife died in it while I’m reported to have
been taken in alive by Coronamento. So…they did die while I somehow survived. I
really am a heartless bastard who deserves to die. Well, there’s no reason to
hold it off any longer.
When I get to the armory, I find
every kind of weapon, such as guns, swords, shields, laser weaponry, and more,
along with different kinds of bullets. However, none of them work on me. They
don’t even hurt me, and even though my body breaks apart, it always reforms.
“Why? Why can’t it die?!” I say out
loud.
If there was a silent alarm like my
room, it surely would’ve gone off by now, so I leave the armory just in time as
security and my brothers arrive. Going through the vents, I search the facility
for an archive or research center of some sort to see if Coronamento knows of a
way to kill me. Because of my form, I see if I can change into whoever I want
to, and sure enough, I can change my face and body into whatever I want it to,
so I change into a security guard with a helmet on. Inside the facility’s archives,
I find that Coronamento doesn’t know how to kill me either. It turns out they
were trying to make a new kind of superhuman or substance that reforms flesh
inspired by how God first made man.
This mud and dirt I’m made of now is
not meant to be killed, and no kind of disease, frost, flame, electricity, or
anything can completely dispel it. The researchers haven’t had successful
results with any subject yet, and they’ve noted that they don’t expect to.
“So, I can’t die no matter what I do,
can I?” I say to myself.
A researcher in the archives asks
why a security guard like me is here, but I don’t answer them and slip away
into the vents once I walk out of her sight. I traverse the vents, uncaring
what fans, blades, and electricity I push myself through until I eventually
find a way out of the building. Now, outside of it, I go back to my house and reform
myself into my normal form. Looking into the mirror, I see something different about
myself. It’s not the same image of me that I see in my pictures, so it’s just
an image of me that I have of myself, which turns into a grey monster made of
slug with red and blue eyes. I smash the mirror along with every picture of
myself and my family that I see in my house before I throw myself on the floor
and think about what to do with my life now. Of all the things in my life that I
wanted, why can’t death be the one that’s denied to me? Why do I have to suffer
like this? I guess it's because I’m nothing more than a useless piece of garbage,
and I got what I deserve. Yeah…that’s probably why.
No comments:
Post a Comment