The Scream

It startled me awake. My hands automatically gripped the beam beneath me, even though I could not remember where I was. How had I allowed myself to close my eyes? Thankfully, some part of me had remembered. It would have been ridiculous to have survived so long, only to have met my end so carelessly. What would it have all been for?

More importantly, what had awoken me? I scanned my current surroundings. The warehouse below my perch remained mostly in shadow, the sunlight barely filtering through its broken windows. I stilled my breath and watched the shadows, hoping they would remain stagnant.

Had it been a scream?

It had to have been?

My thoughts stumbled around in a foggy confusion.

I could not remember how long it had been since I had heard the sound of another human being. Quiet now reigned where the chaos of the early days had filled the air nonstop with the scream after scream of lives being extinguished.

I could not allow the memories to filter in. It wouldn’t do me any good. It wouldn’t help me survive.

When I had discovered the warehouse the previous night, it appeared to be an ideal place to become just one of the shadows. But now, if a scream was so close, I wondered if I had stumbled into the wrong place.

The scream could have echoed from far off. A thought attempted to console me.

Followed by another one with a differing opinion: Is staying put a good plan?

My thoughts had fractured quite quickly from the getgo of the purge, but I hadn't been too shocked by it, as hours upon hours of screaming while trying to survive would make any person lose what little sanity they had to begin with. I had forced myself to believe this fracturing was why I had survived so far.

But as a fresh scream rippled through the air, it brought them all out to collide with one another. The synapses in my brain firing wildly, my one arm pulsating to lift me from where I sat aloft while my legs itched, demanding we remain frozen.

My hand found the talisman I used as a way to calm myself, a heart-shaped locket that had never been mine. A trinket I had discovered that somehow reminded me of the past. Of before. The photos in it, so grainy, the identities almost completely obscured. I had made up many a story in my mind about who they were, who they could be, how I could be related to them. Perhaps the thoughts I heard in my head were actually their voices guiding me, advising me on how to survive. Maybe, if they had known me, they would have cared.

I counted the strokes my thumb made over the tarnished metal. One, two, three. Before I could reach four, the screeching of metal upon metal quieted every nerve in my body. My lungs shrivelled, halting my ability to breathe. My sudden grip on the locket nearly tore it from my neck.

The metallic sound stirred the shadows below me, the dust motes frantically scurrying. All I could do was wait. Hope wildly beating in my chest that whoever made the screeching sound was someone just like me.

A door opened, the sun illuminating a rectangle upon the floor. My thoughts remained deadly silent as a silhouette etched itself within the light, like someone stepping onto a golden carpet.

A shadow could be anything, anyone. But it was the loping gate it made forward, which brought my nightmares to life.

My thoughts could no longer keep silent as they pinged off of one another within the blackness of my mind, a sudden consensus between them:

What will it do when it finds out?

Can it kill you if you can't scream?

Will it?