Reality, you define it.

this is a first draft of the story, I have not had time to correct all typos or mistakes, and it is not quite finished. I have some detail to add, but feel free to read it and give me an opinion please. As always, I am looking for constructive criticism.




I wake up to jolts, angry and persistent vibrations that send a palatable wave of fear through me from the back of my neck and down my spine. The problem is, is that I am asleep, with my muscles contorting I snap awake quickly choking back the urge to shout only because I can’t think of anything to yell. All I know is that something is very wrong. Desperately fighting my drowsy senses, I attempt to define the chaos of the waking world around me.
And again, as I sit up in bed confused and trembling the house shakes once more as a violent percussion sends a shockwave through what must have been the entire neighborhood if not town. A few of my books fall noisily to the floor off of the bookshelf, only the first of more to go. Some cd’s tumble with a noisy plastic clatter, and I can hear other things crashing in and around the house. My mind tries to process what my senses tell it, but for the life of me I can not form a coherent thought. It’s almost as If I am still asleep.

My heart starts pounding a deafening beat into my ears and circulating pure adrenaline into my muscles through the blood it’s savagely pumping like a thing possessed. I jump out of bed and put on a random assortment of clothes with more haste than I ever thought humanly possible. I do all of this in light far to dim too clearly see the outline of my own form.
I rush to the door still silhouetted in the dim, murky green light cast by my alarm clock. And all of a sudden the floor beneath me, despite it being a cement slab in the basement of the house trembles violently. Simultaneously a deafening boom claps against the house, just like the commotion that woke me.

I fling the bedroom door open, and pause stupidly for a moment as my adrenaline continues to surge threw my veins making it harder and harder to even think. I wonder, “is it safe ? Can I run out side to safety, or should I stay inside the house ?” I wonder, sluggishly and stupidly, “what should I do ?”
As soon as I manage to pose the question too my racing mind, three angry and successive blasts rock the house one right after another. The last one is close to enough to leave my ears ringing painfully, and completely set any remaining order in the house into disarray.

Fleeing the collapse of shelves and the shattering of glass I run up the stairs, and practically kick the front door open. I stop dead in the murky light, taking instant notice of smoke lingering in an already overcast sky. I can smell fire, and sulfur in the air.
As soon as my ears recover from the previous blasts the door flies open and along with the sights and scent, the clapping sound of machine gun fire and the distant reports of larger explosions leaves my already ringing ears with a dull throbbing ache.
My friend and roommate Silas runs out the front door with his girl friend Tracey running just as quickly behind him. They take off down main street at a dead run both pale and panicked, with the glazed stare of of fear signaling one step away from going comatose and paralyzed with it. I bolt as well as soon as the sonic boom of a jet racing over head crashes into the house and washes over me.
I run, and run pushing myself harder with every stride, within moments I am passing people who have already tired themselves and tried to press on in spite of being winded. But as soon as I pass, people renew their efforts. Deciding I suppose, to follow sense I and my roommates are running faster than every one and must have appeared to have a destination in mind.
I don’t know where to go, and to my torment the animal urge to flee is all that I can feel. My mind still responds sluggishly and refuses to function in my current situation.
The explosions of what could only be bombs and artillery shatter with alien menace the world I have known from childhood. A childhood where war was a detached, foreign from daily life. The fact that I was exposed to it, that it was happening right now in my life... Well that simply leaves my mind and body numb. I keeping pumping my legs, running harder still, and every one follows me. They strugel to breathe, and can hardly keep up while I am strugeling to comprehend whats happening.

Then not even thirty feet away from me a shell explodes in a nearby drive way next to a burning house. The shockwave spreads out so fast that the mind can’t even fully recognize it for what it is before it hits me. I still know it’s coming though, even if I have no time to react.
And when it does hit me, it instantly knocks all of the air out of my lungs and throws me into a chain link fence across the street. The impact is hard, but not solid enough to kill or injure me. I am back on my feet in a few seconds fighting for breath after the wind was knocked clean out of me.
Out of the crater left by the blast, with a slow subtle menace pours a thick white vapor. I do not know what it is, but I immediately feel an overwhelming sense of alarm. Images of men in biohazard suits, breathing oxygen out of tanks runs through my mind. The words biological warfare, and poisonous gas flit threw my minds eye. Instant terror strikes as the people caught in the vapor scratch at their eyes and throats screaming inhumanly even as they lose their voices.
The scene looks that much more like hell.
The fires dotting the town quickly blot out the sun and leave an eerie haze of near blindness and suffocating confusion.
I swallow hard as I try to breath and see through the black smoke of burning homes, and then I push myself that much harder. I feel like I will explode, my mind’s racing so fast I figure that at least I will either feint, or have my heart explode before I am shot or explode entirely. With acid in my veins and my mouth dry as an old bone from the smoke in the air, I almost wish for it.

My wild dash brings me an entire half mile down the street to a super market, which I immediately run towards as it‘s mammoth silhouette looms before me in the haze . It’s the only solid building around that does not have any windows, being of cinder block construction.
It could also afford a certain safety sense it was not really an obvious military target. Structurally speaking, it seems a little blackened from exploding cars outside it but otherwise undamaged. The parking lot is dotted with burning and exploding cars, as the fires spread from vehicle to vehicle. It makes an impossibly hellish maze to travel through that leaves me a little singed if not burnt in some places from the searing heat.
Inside people are already hiding. It’s filled with angry and frightened shouts alike.
With crying, screams, and even frantic prayers the noise is overwhelming, and it is constant.
Inside I see at least seven members of my family and two friends which I immediately run too. I collapse beside them, unable to breathe, and soaked in my own sweat I nearly pass out again. It’s not long before a mass of people pour into the single set of doors and crowd the place. After a massive explosion in the parking lot out side followed by the smaller successive blasts of exploding vehicles we rush to the door. Me and several others quickly build a massive blockade in the doors out of shelving, shopping carts and crates to reinforce the small one already in place.
It’s only moments after the work is done that I find myself slipping into a state of numbed shock. It is at that most desperate and fateful of moments, that the power gives out and burys me in darkness.
A fresh wave of terror washes of over the crowd, people push and shove, jostling around violently as they panic. All I can do is stay in physical contact with my family as best I can for fear of losing them. Because of the noise, I can’t speak to them, too comfort them or even find out if they are ok. I have never been surrounded by so many people, packed so close, and yet still felt so alone.
It felt like hell
I do not fear death any more as I realize my world will never be the same.

What ever was in those shells out side had affected half of the people present badly enough for them to be crying out in pain. It was not long before the weak die, then all I can hear is various tones and pitches of suffering.

Huddled by the knot my friends and family made, I feel the weight of every ones fear pressing against me like a submarine buckling under at an extreme depth.
People yell, occasionally a dispute of violence breaks out in the darkness, but the shouts of the angry are always drowned out by the cries of pain.
I struggle to think. Holding my head between my open palms I try to think of a plan, a way out… Of anything.
But in my silence while trying to focus, I can tell even in the dark and noisy store that some of my family and friends are coughing, or crying in pain. Plagued by what ever chemical was in the air. I wondered why I am not suffering… I wonder why I feel unharmed. Then I assume I have gone past shock, and straight into delirium. But I do not feel crazy. I feel only an increasing sense of calm and focus caused by my adrenaline.
Some one sets some card board on fire, and other people quickly make fires from it.

Maybe hours pass, for all I know days could have passed in this hell.
I hear a different element of noise in the helish chorus around me, and upon investigation realize some one has started dismantling our barrier from the out side. Instinctively we arm ourselves with what ever is at hand and rush to doors. We strengthen and reinforce it with sheleving and anything at hand. We pile things on, fighting the pace of those removing it outside. But after five minutes an arm followed by a body pushes it’self desperately in between the gap between the barrier and the ceiling. We don’t even hesitate, like a pack of wolves we immediately bludgeon, pound, stab and pummel the man to death. We put his body back in place, to block the hole he made.
We kill eleven more people attempting to get in before we hear a gun fight break out. From the sounds of it, and the occasional bullets whistling dangerously threw weak spots in the barricade, I assume soldiers are gunning down the crowd trying to get in.
To our relief, either they did not want to try and force entry or they had a different plan. Either way, we hear nothing more for hours from them, or any one else. We only have our own noise, and the occasional explosion to accompany us inside.
The price they pay for light is heavy, it takes people far to long too notice that the fires are filling the store with a thick black smoke. They stamp them out, but not before filling the entire store with smoke. There are dozens of flashlights on now though, and some people are calming down. I leave my family behind and go out searching for any of my friends that may have made it in.
I have to search for a while, being as traveling around over wounded, scared, angry and sometimes violent people takes a lot of care.
In the hellish light I see Silas laying on the tile floor. He is completely white and pale, little beads of sweat stand on his forehead. And Tracey is laying extremely still and silent on the ground beside him, I can see blood on the ground by where her head face lay in shadow against the floor.
As I watched, holding my t shirt over my mouth to breathe, Silas wakes up with a start. His pupils are completely dilated and there is foam at the edges of his mouth, he says something but I can not make it out over the noise. He immediately grabs our mutual friend Helen by the wrist, jerking her to the floor. He grabs a can off of the shelf and starts pounding in her face with it. I want to help, I start foreword but immediately the violence spreads and two people fly at each other in front of me, right after that another pair rolls by on the floor. Growling animalistic and clawing at each others faces.

Already dizzy from the smoke, the new spread of violence turns a nightmarish moment into something that much darker. People turn into animals. Beating each other, biting, scratching, stabbing each other in a frenzy. With dialated pupils, and the paleness from their fevers, they truely look like they are possessed.
Blood floods the scene, but in the dim light it simply looks as if the place is being painted in black. With fresh panic gripping my stomach I run to the back of the store to where I had left my family. Some how, the fighting and killing gets there before me.
I shout uselessly over the clamor, and fight my way savagely threw a crowd of people. In my fear, my strength is revolting and hideous to me. I am almost sickend when my training from years of martial arts classes takes over and turns the maniac energy of fear into focused strength and precision.

I throw the weak and dying people out of my way like they are nothing. I even kick a man in the face hard enough to break his jaw. I punch a woman as she tries to club me with a bottle, under the circumstances, I do not even feel bad.
After a savage all out struggle, I herd most of my family to the back of the store. Where with a little luck, I will break open a door and push them out of this hell.
Behind me I hear a sudden cry, my cousin goes down as a man stands over him with a broken broom handle, clubbing him. Again and again, I hear is cry of pain followed my a plee for help always cut short but another cruel blow.
Other people, like rats in a sewer start joining in.
It rips my heart in half to leave my cousin, pinned under three people pummeling him with glass jars, fists sticks and feet. But I can hear his bones breaking, and I can hear him dying, I know that it’s to late.
The man with the broom stick turns to me in the eerie light with eyes glowing and he advances quickly. I jump out of the door way with lighting speed as his arm comes down in a savage over head strike. But I leap out the door and slam it on his arm, cleanly breaking it . I open it wide enough to kick him back into the store and slam the door shut. I try to take a breath and steady my racing heart, taking stock of my family and the situation.
Most of them are badly sick, my aunt and niece are already dying from what ever was in the gas, judging by their looks. They seem far more dazed than me, they stutter and stare blankly, always frightened and pale.
It’s all I can do to get them running down the street. Now the fires cast out a red light out into the night. The explosion have mostly died down, but are by no means ceased completely.
The machine gun fire is also seemingly more distant. Dead bodies and craters, burning cars and broken buildings are all that is left. Only the occasional building or house appears to be unscathed by the chaos.
At least two thirds of the town is destroyed.
We see people running occasionally but they are very few and far between. It makes even me that much more terrifying, to see how much more crazed the people outside are.
As they pass by us occassion, I can not help but notice that every survivor we passed wore some form of resperitory device.
One person ran by on a single leg, still trying to use what was left of the other. It was held on below the knee by little more than a few strands of muscle, sinew and skin. At first thoughts of zombies flash through my mind, and I wonder if it's possible. But when he is within ten feet of me, I can see that his leg was cauterized by what ever damaged it. All of the flesh is blackened and severely burnt.
When the man passes right by me, he does not even know I am there. His eyes were looking at something that was not in this world.
With our progress marked by little more than the increased fatigue of the sick and wounded we finally made contact. We had slowed to a jog, and in front of me on the road, between an abandoned semi truck and a burning line of cars came a patrol running across the road ahead of us. They were government troops in biohazard uniforms.
They opened fire with their M’16’s on my family and friends strafing as the ran through the bottleneck created by the vehicles. My best friend who was leading the party fell first, then my older sister, and then four more right after.
I don’t know why but they never stopped running, they continued down the side street with out finishing us off. With my grandfather wounded, I ran beside him supporting him as we ran a bit farther to take sanctuary in a church.
To my surprise it was empty, or so I thought. As soon as I went into the chapel I saw the bodies, of at least fourteen people executed on the their knees in a line.
I would have puked had their been anything in my stomach. Kids and elderly alike were all gunned down with a bullet to the back of the head.
As I stood there in horror, a spray of machine gun fire rips thought the building. My mother panics, so we all run to the basement for safety.
The remaining members of my family are at deaths door now. It’s so dark, and they can’t help but cry in pain. Blood is seeping slowly out of their eyes, ears, and they are coughing it up. Their skin is red hot to the touch, and they tremble, convulsing violently.
And then out of the dark my grandfather calls me to him. I kneel slowly beside him, taking his hand in my own. He tells me to kill him. He does not even pause to let me protest “I want You to kill me, don’t argue, don’t ask questions. Were suffering, you can see it. It’s inevitable that we die any way, don't let me and your family suffer.”
His words leave me empty. His words make the speeding rhythm of my mind come to a jarring halt.
I walk into the church kitchen and grab a large, sharp knife.
I hold each of them close in turn, I tell them all how much I love them, and I tell them I will see them soon.
When it comes down to it, my point of view changes. And all of a sudden I am atching myself, and the knife in my hand.
The feeling is so intense and clear that I even feel anxeity in not knowing what I will do. And when it happens something in my mind shuts off, permamnently after one last heart percing cry.

When it’s done and with my mothers blood dripping off of my hands, I am finally overwhelmed. My mind is reeling from it’s reality so fast that I finally feint.
I don’t know how long I am out. All I remember is pain, and fear and loss. I try to puke when I sit up, but I can’t. I get up and realize that all in an instant that I want to die.
I find my way to the stairs in the dark church, and feel my way up and out.
When I kick the doors open I pray for a stray bullet, or explosion to free me from my life and set my free of the unreality and pain.
But no such thing occurs. In fact, the world is perfect, sunny and warm. It is a wonderful summer day complete in every blessed detail. I can even smell the lilacs from the bush beside me. There are no explosions, no destruction or violence any where. Children are laughing and playing some where off in the distance. The world is fine…
Below me at the bottom of the steps stand a barrier of police. All I can do is stare.
Something hits me hard in the back of the head, and I black out just as I would have feinted any way.

As I begin to wake, the first thing I take notice of is the public restroom smell of my environment. The feint but steady noise is accompanied by a cold room and an uncomfortable bed. I hear a key slide into a lock.

When I sit up and open my eyes I see the clean shaven face of the bailiff holding the door open as extra security takes it's position.
I feel the cold steel of handcuffs already in place around my hands and ankles. I can tell he is trying to be professional, that he is striving desperatly to supress the urge to spit in my face for what ever I have seemingly done.
But it’s the fear in the back of his eyes that tells me he would kill me on the spot if he thought he could get away with it.
I roll off of the jail cell bed and onto my feet, then they start shackeling me like a rabid dog.

It’s not long before I am in court.

What occurs there is unimportant. What matters is that I am being tried for more counts of murder, arson, kidnapping and quote, inhuman conduct than my mind is ready to grasp.
What matters is that what seemed like moments ago I felt like the worlds most wretched victim, and now I am being tried as a psychotic predator.
I honestly can not tell if this is real. I feel all the misery and terror still, I feel my pain and loss, to top off my sense of unreality I now have to cope with the fear that I may not even have control over my own mind.
They think I am insane any way.
What they don't know is that I am afraid, not of all of this being real. No, that is not my fear at all. I am afraid that nothing will ever be real again. I am afraid that I will never be reunited with the world of solidity I had known.

Of course, they find me guilty. I can not say anything in my own defense, all I can do is stare. I stare at the lawyers, the jury and judge, and wonder if they are even real.

It’s not long before I am strapped to a metal gurney bed, and I am being prepped for lethal injection.
I am staring at an over head light, I don’t know what to think, or feel. In all honesty, I want that needle in me. I want to die. I want to know where the dream ended, where the nightmare began, and what is reality.
Finally after all the steps are taken, the doctor sticks the needle into my arm just above the inside of my elbow an- I hear three hard successive raps of some ones knuckles on wood.
“I said, open the door !”

I choke, I sputter and struggle, lashing out at blankets that don’t fight back. Something sick and cold is still sitting in my stomach I feel wretched, and I am laying in my bed. I touch my face in the inky black to see if I can feel it…
Two more loud knocks shake the door to my bedroom, and my mind is racing again. I run my hand over the fabric of the sheets and try to discern if it is real. I notice I’m covered in something wet.
I pray it’s a cold sweat. Every muscle in me tenses as I jolt violently when there is another heavy knock at my door. “Get up, and open the door !”
Then I feel it beside me close to my thigh, and my fingers wrap around it in disbelief. Cold, hard and metallic, everything clicks.
It’s in my hand when the door opens, and I am already coiled for the pounce, ready to strike with a smile on my face.