April 9th
16 Days After Quarantine

He’d been walking the streets outside. They were everywhere; lining the pavements, strewn across the road. But they weren’t even the victims of the Plague, they’d done it to themselves. Through madness, through delirium brought on by the nightmares, something he hadn’t understood at all; but they were all there. He’d looked back up to his apartment; he couldn’t go back there, not after what had happened. He just knew he had to keep moving. The bodies all just stayed there but he could have sworn he caught movement from the corner of his eye, rats maybe. But it had been further down the road when he saw it; their forms changing, the black liquid spewing out, sucked back in as he now saw the movements from within. Tendrils, black like that of some kind of toxic octopus. He’d frozen, the terror of an unaccounted for movement in his midst. Then he saw it, a disgusting wing of flesh rise up as if trying to find its way out from the rotten bio mass. Not a form he’d seen before, not a thing known to science, not a thing that had existed until now. But it had been when he’d seen that that he saw the movement of them all; banks of flesh suddenly writhing like maggots in a festering corpse. Everywhere, whatever it had been, it had been everywhere. His involuntary reaction had taken him to just running; he had to get there, not matter what. He’d just ran for the subway ahead, gone straight down out from the sunlights reach. Then once inside he’d seen it; the matter, the corruption spread across the entire interior. A purple reddish matter, pulpy and throbbing as if alive; a disgusting fleshy material that couldn’t have come from anything in the natural world. The stuff had grown somehow to consume everything in its path. The floor a wet, fleshy mush under his feet as he went on; his nerves shaky, heartbeat throbbing a hurried rhythm. He’d heard movement around him, something in the hive knew he was there. Up above a horrid fleshy banging, back and forward it went; he couldn’t see anything but something was there alright. A thing he couldn’t imagine, an image of dread all too real. He’d seen the walls moving, its pulse quickening; a sloppy movement somewhere behind him as if some heresy of the human form rose from the sludge. He’d just ran, he went on, his nerves, his every fibre of being now a frantic mess of sporadic movement; the thing getting closer and closer with every passing second. Sounds erupted from all around as he sprinted as fast as he could through the fetid hive of flesh. His sloshing through the water echoing through the chambers of pulp as if beckoning to whatever nightmare it was that resided down there. There was something in front, a thing of the unknown emerging from the foul sludge; a form, an arm but not that of a human; then beside him something else, what looked like a face but it had been a thing far too horrendous to be that of a human. Screaming, inhuman and unintelligible, its meaning unreadable. He just ran, he couldn’t help but scream at the same time as he went as fast as he could in hopes of leaving it all behind. Light emerged at the end reflecting from the set of steps leading back up; their surface watery, sludgy and covered in a thin film of the pulpy wet flesh of the hive. He’d come back out to the surface but he’d kept running to get himself as far from the hive as possible. The sun had become dim but not for any reason he understood. The sky dark but still enough that he could see what was ahead well enough. The park hadn’t been as empty as he’d have thought it would have, in fact there were dozens of people on the hill as he approached; all of them still as if watching some kind of spectacle he still couldn’t yet see. Cresting the hill, not a single person took the slightest notice of him; they just stood there, staring at it right there where the football pitch used to be.
It had sat there in a newly made hole in the ground; thick and gelatinous, stringy and wet; a construct of pulsating meat that looked as insidious outdoors as it had in. Its texture the same pulpy pink white mottle that he’d seen in the hive; a mass of organic matter, the pus of humanity. He’d almost felt in that terrible moment of dread as though he were being sucked in; brought into the disgusting pulsing mass, dissected and assimilated into the stuff as it slowly grew through Earth consuming all in its path. He’d only at that point remembered a terrible sense of dread, an incomprehensibly intense terror at realising it was the end of the world; that all things went back to where they’d come from.

He knew it would get to him sooner or later, and that had been the point when he realised no one could or would escape from it. For the last two nights he’d been having the nightmares, it had changed everything. Now there was no escape, no respite; the whole situation no longer something he could escape from. It was always there, and he, it would seem, was well within its clutches. The first night had been just a nightmare on its own; but last night had been as if it had evolved into something so real that if he hadn’t known better, he would have taken to be actual events. The clarity, the lucidity of the whole ordeal had been both the most wondrous and terrifying aspect of it right next to the matter of the nightmare itself. Even as he sat there in the morning light, he could still recall all those bodies mulched together along the streets; the fetid smell of the hive in the subway, the screams of things unknown that had been down there. But the strangest and most disturbing fact had been that when recalled the nightmare, he saw them as actual events; as genuine memories as if they were something he’d actually experienced in real life the day before. Even the locations he’d seen in the nightmare had been nearby locations he recognised. They’d been just like he’d remembered them aside from being consumed by that unnameable terror. The realisation of that had made him weak, confused, straining himself to make sense of what was real, of what had actually happened because none of it could possibly have been real. Suddenly he was questioning what was real, what had actually happened. Had it been real life or just a very lucid, frightfully real nightmare?
He’d sat there by the window in direct sunlight for most of the morning. Somewhere where he felt safe at last; away from the darkness, somewhere where he couldn’t fall asleep, couldn’t have a nightmare. He’d looked to his watch, 9am; the sun would set at about 8pm, he’d made himself acutely aware of that. Only about another eleven hours of light but it was plenty of time for the moment. He’d gone on, tried to do things, tried to forget it but it had been as if he were attached to the memories by a bungee rope; that it was impossible to get too far away before the rope went taught and pulled him back. He’d been looking out the window, forgetting for a moment as he observed the town outside; then suddenly seeing the grim nightmare overlaid onto reality he found himself back with the nightmare once again. He’d tried playing video games but it hadn’t taken long at all until he saw parts of the nightmare in the game. The games creators wouldn’t have ever intended for anything so macabre, so blisteringly real to be there in the final version; but he’d just kept coming back to it, kept seeing it until he had to switch it off.
He’d sat there still, his gaze on the horizon, his skin cold to the touch and he’d felt cold but the April morning hadn’t even been chilly, it was 18℃ outside.

By 6pm the sun was well on its way down; the shadows had grown long and Charlie had felt that unending, ceaseless uneasiness rising to the surface after it had somewhat laid low through the day. For the first time that day he actually felt as though he’d wanted to eat; he still had some things in the refrigerator that were good to eat so he went ahead to see if he could find something. Tomatoes, onion, garlic and he had plenty of olive oil and herbs in the kitchen; but it had been when went back to the fridge that it struck him again. A pack of mince beef had sat there just waiting to be eaten. He pulled it out and set it on the work top in the kitchen. The texture of ground meat, the red white mottle of organic tissue, most likely from different animals and not just a single one. All of it mixed, amalgamated, assimilated into one. He couldn’t, he just couldn’t. He’d looked at the stuff for what must have been several minutes but there was no way he could have brought himself to actually cook and eat it. No matter how he looked at it, all he saw was that stuff; the pus of humanity that he’d seen in the nightmare. Its texture, its pale reddish colour the same as the mass of it he’d seen in the park. It disgusted and horrified him enough that he’d actually gagged while just looking at it. In spite of what little comfort he’d actually started to feel, he hadn’t got away from it after all. That had been the point when it had been as if he’d fallen back into the pit, into the abyss, the material of the nightmare that had been there all along.
Every waking minute had been another moment the sun had descended further and further out from sight. He could feel it, closer and closer, its grasp near, infecting him, changing him, as if it had already somehow managed to get inside him; perhaps through the dream. He wasn’t sure but he still wasn’t manifesting symptoms of the Plague. But he couldn’t shake the feeling it was already inside him; pieces of it in his bloodstream, slowly but steadily multiplying, replicating. The ill mood had even taken him enough that he’d even gone to the sink, a kitchen knife in hand and cut his hand before catching a decent sample of blood on a small plate; surely he’d be able to see it. He’d moved the blood around with the tip of his finger, dabbed a little tissue into it, then he saw it. Tiny flecks of what looked like grit or soot littered the sample. He’d looked closer, then closer again and it had been there alright. He hadn’t seen it at first but the damn stuff was already inside him, in his bloodstream; he didn’t know, perhaps couldn’t know how it had come to be there to start with but it was there now. He still had no symptoms though; aside from the off feeling brought on by the nightmares he still felt fine; and yet it had found its way inside him. Whether he’d really seen it or it’d been some kind of delirious vision he couldn’t tell; either possibility frightened the wits out of him.
He’d tried to distract himself with the TV. He’d had it on for at least 10 minutes, its sound filling the room; the sound of another persons voice relieving, relaxing as if realising he wasn’t alone in the world after all. He’d then realised after a time there was nothing on the TV, only the fuzz of static and the hiss of white noise coming through the speakers. He’d gone through the channels, nothing. One after another, nothing; they’d stopped broadcasting but he still heard people, voices coming through the speaker. Images had appeared on screen, within the black and white fuzz he saw symbols, wording but not that of any human language. They’d flashed up then disappeared but had stayed long enough for him to register they were there. The subway, the dark hive of the vile fleshy matter came into view. The images passed across the screen in between intervals of symbols, things he’d seen, places and things he felt he’d actually been to in reality. The unmistakable pulpy red of the hive; flesh splitting open, birthing some new entity so alien it couldn’t even conceive itself as a parody of the human form.
It had been enough that he felt he was already falling through the turbulent, nightmarish tempest that had been laying in wait all along. His phone ringing on the table then brought him away from it; someone was trying to contact him, he wasn’t alone after all. Perhaps it really had all been in his head all along. The ringing had had a certain kind of freshness about it like a cool, fresh breeze blowing through a room of stale air. He’d looked at the screen, Stacy, she was ringing him. How he’d wanted to talk to her, how he’d wanted her to tell him about what she’d been doing, asking of how he was.
“Charlie.” He heard after answering the call.
“Charlie where are you? Come and find me.”
It had been followed by an eerie silence on the other end; the slight static hum of the line, the sound of gentle breathing near the microphone then nothing, nothing for several seconds. He brought the phone from his ear to look at the screen, no call; there was no one there. It had been as if his heart had dropped right through him; the weight, its absence leaving him feeling like an empty husk of a person. But placing the phone back to his ear, he still heard it; soft breathing, the hum of the line; yet the phone said there was no call, that he was talking to no one. His name had then been spoken through the TV; he brought the phone down from his ear as he heard it again. A female voice coming through the static; he stared at the screen, the horrifying and gruelling images still there as they had been and the alien voice had continued. He’d sat there and listened; his name, he heard it several times over as if someone was beckoning to him through the static. He’d felt as though he were being invited into the abyss once more, into the hive, into the pus that now comprised of what remained of humanity until he switched the TV off. The light and the sound then disappearing in a single panicked second.

For the entire night he’d felt he was being watched, eyes were on him from some unseen vantage. The sense of something watching him, something he couldn’t account for, something that hadn’t been there before yet its presence had been all too real for Charlie. A thud suddenly came from somewhere outside in the corridor. The single, dull noise puncturing the silence before another, more metallic sound went off at what sounded like something at the end of the corridor. Charlie had frozen solid in the chair where he sat; too aware, too terrified to move even a muscle. The din of the metallic noise echoed through the corridor; an ongoing drone as if a metal pipe or the like were rolling down the corridor toward his room. With each passing second his grip on the arm of the chair tightened, his pulse raising, beads of sweat now coursing down his face. Then more banging came from somewhere above; a series of violent, irregular thrashing movements that had gone directly overhead and into the general direction of the corridor to meet the other noise.
The bouts of hideous noises had been punctuated by a far more perplexing series of sounds. An unsettling whispering, alien voices speaking words too quiet he couldn’t quite make out what they were saying. He’d sworn they’d been coming from one side of the room; but carefully and quietly getting up, it had been as though the ethereal voices had then been coming from where he’d just been a moment ago. Their sound an uneasy chorus of barely recognisable words riding through the already dreadfully tense air in the room.
He’d heard sounds from outside; a deep metallic groaning as if some titanic metal structure had been protesting against a strain. Its echoing groan reaching far and wide through the darkness. The unsettling creaking, each point of noise like a hail of sand paper and razors against his nerves. Then he heard more; something he had to stop and listen to carefully to verify, but upon doing so he realised it hadn’t been just his mind as he thought. Screaming, outside and somewhere in the distance he heard people screaming. Not a constant din but instead one or two coming through every twenty seconds or so as the haunting groaning went on all the while. Each pained scream; violent and disturbed, lost and terrified somewhere out there cutting through the darkness of the hellish night. He hadn’t been able to tell which had scared him more, that the noises were all in his mind, or that they were indeed real and happening out there somewhere. Each one had sent him further into a subdued frenzy; his mind writhing in the terror, the frightful agony of it all; yet his body had remained completely still in fear of the thing that had been outside his door somewhere.

The entire night had been an inconceivable vortex of dark, lost souls screaming out; of presences shuffling and banging somewhere just out of sight; of unseen eyes and whisperings monitoring him as the terror of it pushed him further and further from the frail edges of sanity. He’d gone through several rounds of the banging outside, of some nightmarish thing flapping and thrashing up and down the corridor in between bouts of hellish screaming before he realised something. He knew at that point, that if he were to stay there, he was going to die there. Mustering what little concentration he could he’d decided to himself at first light he was going to leave; to get out of there and find Stacy. The fear, the tension of everything had been enough that it, on its own might have been enough to finish him right there before the sun even rose on the horizon. But in between the horrors impacting their dreadful forces onto his unprepared mind, he set his mind as best he could on his goal.

Wait for first light, get out, find Stacy.

Continues in episode 4