Stranded in Limbo
No matter how turned around the world became there were certain expectations a person could keep. The presence of gravity for example. His teacher had taught him that these were called universal truths. His that he had held close these last two years was that people died. Some argued that it was not death if their bodies could continue to function without a consciousness but in his eyes even as walking corpses the dead were still dead. It was one of the definitions he used to make the world as he knew it stable whether he was conscious of that or not. In this way he had something even when the ground beneath his feet fell out. Simpler truths were harder to debase -- it was why he preferred these -- but that meant when these were taken from him it was not only the ground but the sky that fell as well.
His ground and his sky were burning to ashes. He stared hand trembling at the man -- the creature -- his gun was pointed at and as he did bile rose in his throat. Rithisak thought back on those he had killed. The living were scars on his flesh. He could not forget them but the dead -- the dead had begun to blur after the first months. There had been far too many to even try to remember their faces in the first place and besides that the detachment between his and theirs had made it easier to kill them with less than the blink of an eye. Had he been wrong? The thing that stared at him -- that spoke to him -- told him he was. How many had he killed like him? Even the hint of that answer barely thought ran a shudder down his spine. This couldn’t be happening. Not here, not now after all they’d been through.
“What are you?” It surprised Rithisak how steady his voice sounded when he spoke. Nothing of it reflected how shaken he felt. The only place the dead should be able to speak was in dreams but he hadn’t. He had spoken in the waking world his mouth stained red with blood of his fresh kill. Beneath that gut-wrenching fear his mind was overclocking itself trying to come up with a far more rational explanation than the conclusion his instincts had leapt to. Hallucinations that came of trying to survive for so long. A cannibal dressed in the dead skin of another human body but still very much alive himself. Waking dreams that blurred the line between reality and fantasy. Anything but what his mind was trying to tell him. He couldn’t do this whatever this was. The tone of his voice angered he questioned a second time, “What are you?!”
From behind him the soft lilt of a barely present French accent chirped an inquisitive, “Papa?” He felt his squirming stomach drop even further than it had when the thing had slowly risen over its kill and spoke to him. Heart in throat Rithisak answered his five-year-old son, “Aiden, stay back there.” He couldn’t tell from sound alone if his son was where he had left him in the front hallway or if he’d moved further into the house. The thought of the latter stirred an anger in him but children were going to be children. They didn’t always listen. He would deal with it later. His finger twitched against the trigger of his gun but a need to know the extent of all that he had done kept him in place much like the shock had. But he was ready to pull it if he had to. His need to be a father was stronger than his need to know he was sane.
