The Door

Awaking another day in this disgusting, sleeping bag on the ground of an empty warehouse, I wipe the gunk from my eyes. It's been 2 weeks since I have heard anything outside. The silence is worse than the noise.

I know that sounds a bit crazy, but, who knows, I may be going crazy at this point. Although I'm not alone, I may as well be. I stumbled upon this small group of people as confused as I was at the beginning. Yea, the beginning...when everything went sideways. How? I still don't know.

When I woke up that first morning I thought it was a normal day. I grabbed some coffee at the local bakery and headed to my job at the law firm. I know it's not glamorous but it pays the bills. I was walking the 2 blocks from the bakery to the firm. I was a block away when I heard the deafening noise. Nothing I've ever heard before, a high-pitched, screeching that caused me and everyone around me to fall to their knees in agony. It seemed to go on for hours when in reality it was only a few minutes. The people who could, gathered themselves and picked up their fallen belongings, me included. I looked around trying to find out what was happening but the people who couldn't pick themselves up were bleeding from their ears. I raced to the closest one, turned the old man over and saw his skin was bluish. I shook him, screaming tirelessly to revive him; however, no response. It seemed everyone who did the same found there was no response. They were dead.

I shook my head to make sense of things but I just couldn't. I didn't understand what just happened. I saw that the old man was clutching a locket in his hand so I grabbed it and ran to work. I figured something online could explain what had just happened.

I ran to my desk and searched the news. Everywhere seemed to be experiencing the same thing but with no explanation. I googled the symptoms of what I saw and I discovered that a noise that loud could cause Pneumothorax. I delved deeper into what that meant, as I'm not a doctor, and found that a sound, whether heard or not, could cause the lungs to collapse and ears to bleed. In my hurry, I didn't see all of those around me, dead.

Once I took stock of everything around me I realized there was something big going on. I stood up out of my cubicle and looked around. Everyone was dead. Laying on their desk, still holding a cup of coffee and even worse cowering under a glass table at a meeting as if it would protect them.

It wasn't long before looting became a new thing. I kept my head down and headed to my place. I regret not buying more groceries. Luckily, I'm a big fan of water, so at least I wouldn't go thirsty.

Within 24hours everything went black and megaphones outside were telling us to evacuate. Where? I don't know. They just wanted us out. No evacuation vehicles, they just wanted us to go on foot. I grabbed as much water and rice cakes as I could fit in a backpack and started running towards the National Guard.

I fell to the ground. The deafening noise happened again. It was harder this time to get up. I felt dizzy and my eyesight was blurry but somehow I managed to get up. The National Guard was not so lucky. I tried to wake a few but to no avail. Dead. Will this be my life from now on, stumbling on the dead?

I ran 2, 5, 10 miles away from my home, which I missed tremendously. There were only about 5 of us left running. We decided to shack up in an empty warehouse that closed a few years ago.

There were 3 women and 2 men. They seem nice enough. I just kept to myself. I remembered that I grabbed the locket the old man was clutching and went to the corner of the warehouse. When I opened it I couldn't understand it. It seemed like coordinates. Why would this man keep coordinates in a locket? It took a while before I decided to share it with the group. I didn't trust them but they couldn't trust me so it was all fair game.

One woman took out a map she had brought in the chaos, another man took out a compass. I thought to myself that with these tools we can make it to wherever this man thought was so precious in his final minutes of life. Within an hour we had a place but we needed a car to take us to the closest airport.

Another blast of sound took out 3 of our group so we rushed to the airport which was 1 day away. Hoping that another blast wouldn’t happen we slept outside that night huddled together. We were lucky we made it to the airport and were able to get onto a plane. Luckily, one of our group was a pilot. He entered the coordinates in and we were off. I finally took a deep breath out. We had a plan. No one knew if this was a global issues or if it was just the U.S. Televisions and wireless networks were down within a few hours of the first event.

The pilot turned to us and asked if the coordinates were correct. I assured him they were and he said, “So, we’re landing in Turkey?”. I said yes. The man was clutching his locket for a reason and we are going to find out what that reason is.

The landing was rough and completely off the grid. I took the locket in my hand and saw a tiny map behind the coordinates. We stepped off the plane into a desert. The pilot assured us this was the place. I gazed at the locket and the area we were in and noticed the moon’s reflection on the locket that lit up a particular star. We followed that star until we found it. What we were looking for this whole time.

We walked towards the star and descended a stairway. At the bottom of the stairway there was a door in which we couldn’t open. There seemed to be no doorknob or keyhole. Angered and distraught we all tried to kick the door down but nothing seemed to work. With disbelief I looked at the locket again and then at the door, back to the locket and then the door and I found it, the heart of the locket was at the heart of the door. I placed the locket in and heard the clacking sound of the door opening. Holding hands, we all stepped together into the unknown and what was yet to come.