The Last Window

The outside world was unknown to her, but she could see a glimpse of it through the window in his room. That small and lonely window was the only view of the free world remaining, which is why he hid it behind a painting. Kaiden and Elise couldn’t afford to let the last remnant of an abandoned hope die out with their ancestors. Kaiden made sure to hide the portal to the outside world from the authorities every chance he had for that reason.

The boy and girl were best friends, but Kaiden wanted something more. He loved Elise with all his heart but he was sure that she only saw him as a friend. She was a junior at the same high school as him and had long and flowing dark hair. She was thin, light skinned, and shy.

The boy on the other hand was a senior at the school and a little braver than her. He was taller than most of the other boys in his class and stronger than all of them. This strength came from him living on his own for many years, which also caused his hatred for the leaders. Elise never reciprocated flirts with him, but he loved her company and friendship all the same. She always seemed rather hesitant to look out of the window.

“It’s because they made you afraid, right?” Kaiden asked.

“No”, she said, “I’m afraid they are right. What if they kept us within the walls for our own protection?”

“Oh don’t be like that. You know as well as I do that the government is only interested in oppressing us. They’re afraid that we would all rise against them if we knew the truth of the outside”.

“Probably, but Kaiden, what if they’re right? What if the outside is full of nightmares and death?”

Kaiden paused for a moment, realizing that she likely fully believed in the propaganda. He didn’t think she would rat him out to the authorities, because she at least respected their friendship. He was worried however that she wouldn’t follow him to the free world when he finally left.

He didn’t want to leave her behind, but if he had to forsake their friendship for freedom, he would do it. He couldn’t stand one more second of being under the control of Devorah.

“Ever since they took power in 2048, they’ve been making things worse.” Kaiden said, “Everything was okay before they showed up and built the concrete dome to keep us in this hell”.

“I know it’s hard living here, but at least we know we’re safe from the dangers outside. It’s better to live with no liberty than no security!”.

“Come look out the window, Elise.”

Elise obliged.

“It’s a beautiful world of fields of tall, uncut grass, wildlife, fruit, and trees taller than we could possibly imagine. You remember what trees were, don’t you? Or grass? I stole the encyclopedia before they burned them all, if you need to remind yourself, it’s over there in the chest under the floorboards. Come live there with me. We can be free…we can be away from Devorah and their goons. We can be happy.”

“I am happy! I have my family here! This is everything I know!” Elise replied, clearly frustrated.

“I’m sorry. I just wanted to try again is all”, Kaiden said.

“Well, stop trying! And get rid of this damn window! It’s too small to escape out of anyway, why even fantasize about it?”

Elise gripped her hair in a tightened fist and stormed out of the apartment. Kaiden was alone with his treasonous thoughts. The eighteen by twenty four inch window was his only comfort, so he stared outside through that beautiful inter-dimensional portal. It was everything he ever wanted out there, freedom, solitude, and sunlight. It wasn’t that artificial bullshit that they created.

That was a lie designed to make the people feel like they weren’t trapped. They did the same thing with the green screen on the dome, but every now and then the screen went out and everyone was reminded that their life was fiction. The window in Kaiden’s room however was the real deal. He had put his hands through it many times, even against Elise’s wishes. ‘One day’, he thought, ‘I’ll leave this behind and be the first to explore the new universe’.

He only had a few more minutes with the window. The authorities would be doing their routine inspections and Kaiden didn’t want to be caught with this forbidden knowledge of the beyond. The curfew they set up in 2040 made impoverished life even worse, because then you’d be reminded of how stuck you really were. If you were caught even looking out of your door past 10pm, the automated police would force you to inhale a sedative gas that paralyzed your nerves for at least 9 hours.

It had only happened to Kaiden once, but it was more than enough to make him not want to try again. No one told him that the sedative still keeps you aware that you’re paralyzed and that was a horror he would not dare repeat. He hid the window behind the painting. The cop came by and gave the daily scan before curfew, approved him, and left his cubicle apartment. Kaiden breathed a sigh of relief before laying down and going to sleep.

***

The following morning, Kaiden prepared to go to school alongside Elise on their daily walk. He knocked on her door, but she wouldn’t answer. Thinking this was strange, he went inside the apartment. He was expecting to find her parents there at the least, but the apartment was completely void.

He called out her name but she wouldn’t come, neither would her parents or little brother. Kaiden thought at first that they must be at work, but that still didn’t explain why she wasn’t there waiting for him. After frantically searching the house for his love, he realized that all of their pictures were gone. With this, he realized why they weren’t home.

Elise no longer existed. Every record would have been wiped, showing her picture would be a death sentence, and saying her name out loud would get you beaten. She or someone in her family must have been caught breaking the rules for the last time. Here, they don’t care about individuality, they only care about the family unit as a group. When one commits a crime, they all do. ‘Oh please…no…’ Kaiden thought, ‘not her’.

Holding back the gut-wrenching pain and the tears, Kaiden had decided that today would be the day. He would escape Devorah and be free from the monsters who killed his best friend. He had this planned out and with no time to grieve between now and his mandatory school time, he had to act quickly. He rushed back to his solitary apartment and threw the door open.

He knew that he’d be alone there, but sometimes he still expected to see his parents’ faces when he came home. It had been 5 years since their deaths, and Devorah deemed him fit to live alone at 12. It was hard, but he made it work with what he had. Thankfully, he was trained in survival and scouting by his father. ‘This was another reason why’, he thought, ‘I’ll do just fine out there’.

He had gathered all of the explosives he could create using various tools over the years. It was enough to fit in the window sill and that’s what mattered. He removed the painting from the wall and looked at the window one last time before desecrating its wondrous beauty with homemade c4, dynamite, and pipe bombs.

He placed the explosives on the window sill, lit the fuse with the match, and stepped far enough away to avoid the blast. The wall where the window used to be exploded upward, completely destroying the illusory screen wall. That would be the last time he would ever see that fake nature again. This time he was going to see the real thing.

He was so excited that his plan worked that he nearly fainted. His adrenaline was going through the roof. Then he heard the loud bang of gunshots nearby and sprinting robots. The automated cops were coming to stop him and take him out.

He jumped through the blasted wall as quickly as he could and stepped on real grass. He ran away and reached about 50 feet before he turned around. He looked straight at 4 agents of Devorah who didn’t chase him through the portal. They were instead horrified at the hole in their fortress and ran away in terror.

Confused at their reaction, yet overjoyed that he made it out of their prison, Kaiden turned back around and began to walk. He saw fields of tall grass as far as the eye can see, trees higher than any building he’s ever seen, and wildlife that he didn’t quite understand. Like the little brown hairy thing with a bushy tail that scurried up the tree carrying some round brown thing in its hands. He was finally able to be happy and free from their control. He could be his own man here.

He then heard a sound that was so loud and piercing that it made his ears fill with blood. He had no clue what that was, nor if he was deaf. He covered his ears from the painful sound that reminded him of a flute, a very loud and incessant flute.

The next thing Kaiden felt was the ground shaking as he stood there, he thought it must be the earthquakes he had read about in the banned book. The quakes weren’t rhythmic, however, it was random. There was no pattern to the quake at all, which led him to believe this wasn’t an earthquake. If anything, it more so matched the pattern of footsteps.

Then the tall trees began falling down in the distance in the cadence of the trembling ground. Finally able to remove his hands from his ears, now that the flute stopped, he heard a low gurgling noise. It sounded like a beast was drowning or talking underwater as he kept staring at the falling trees to see if he could spot the unnamed beast.

At first glance, he didn’t think he saw anything, but at second glance, he saw it to his horror. The entity was a massive behemoth of tendrils. Standing at least 200 feet tall, it was a gelatinous black ooze with mouths where its eyes should be. Arch-backed, claws protruded from each mouth, the beast was a shapeless monstrosity of terror. The thing looked like a nightmare that was made manifest and walked on a thousand goat-shaped legs.The beast’s red goat-like eyes were surrounding its entire body as if in rebellion against nature.With every breath it took, faceless goats flew out of the pustules, carried by their large black wings. As it laid there, a substance like milk oozed out of the bubbling pus-filled breasts covering the thing’s ‘body’. It was impossible to accurately describe or depict this unthinkable monstrosity.

‘Devorah was right!’ he thought as he attempted to flee to safety from this horror. He sprinted away from it as fast as he could toward the blasted wall. To his utter terror, he noticed that they had already patched up the hole and he was locked here with this creature forever. He turned around and spotted the grotesque leviathan looking straight at him with thousands of eyes.

He ran and hid in what appeared to be an ancient bomb shelter. He crawled in there and closed the lid. He hugged himself with epileptic hands, his bladder threatening to empty itself. The shelter was a tight fit, but nothing that he wasn’t already used to. No sunlight leaked into the vault and it reminded him of the safety of his old home. There were cans of non-perishable food in plenty and enough bottled water to last a lifetime.

Kaiden made them last a whole lifetime. He never came out of the bomb shelter again out of fear of being caught by the cosmic horror on the surface. He couldn’t go back to the dome, he couldn’t live out his days with his love, and he couldn’t live in the outside world. He chose to live the rest of his days in isolation and in the safety of the dark. In the end, it is a mercy that human brains often choose ignorant safety, for the truth would drive us mad.