Üksi - Home (4)

This is a continuing fiction story written using your comments and feedback to shape it.

Previous installments: 1 | 2 | 3

---

I’m hungry.

Solomon is talking to me. He looks concerned. He’s shaking me by the shoulder and shouting into my face, but I can’t understand him. The words he’s saying don’t sound like English. They don’t even sound like words. They’re just guttural barks and grunts. There’s no syntax I can detect.

My forearm is on the ground to my right. At least I think it’s my forearm. In my haze of shock it looks oddly like just a piece of meat. Flies circle the stump. My eyes drift back to Solomon. I think it’s Solomon. He’s fading in and out of my understanding, and he’s surrounded by an expanding blur of faces as others join him to stare at me in concern. My ears are ringing and I can’t understand any of the things they’re telling me.

I keep telling them I’m hungry, but they don’t acknowledge me. Maybe because they don’t have any food to offer anyway, and we moved past the “empty promises” phase of reassuring one another long ago. I try to resist, but my arm - the one I still have - moves in slow motion and doesn’t seem to respond to my brain ordering it to push everyone away. Everyone looks very scared.

I keep trying to tell them I’m okay, I’m just hungry. They don’t seem to understand me any better than I understand them. Kaja’s eyes are wild when I turn towards her, and she flinches at my words. My mind is addled by the same fog slowing my muscles. I’m screaming for a drink of water but no one listens as they hurry me through a door and slam it shut behind me.

The room is pitch black, and my eyes don’t seem to adjust. I can smell bodies here - living and dead - in the fetid dark. The shouting, gibbering voices on the other side of the door ebb away as the crowd recedes, and I’m suddenly aware I can hear voices inside.

“Can you hear me?” The voice, ragged and dry, coughs out at me from the darkness. I zero in on it, my head turning towards the source while my eyes water from the strain of searching the black.

“Yes? Who are you? What is happening?”

“It’s Jacob,” the voice barks back, revealing that it’s slowly moving closer to me. The hair on my neck stands on end.

“You don’t sound like Jacob,” I try to put an edge to my voice, but it comes out more scared than I’d like. Silently I move toward the ground, my hand groping for a rock or board or anything I can use to defend myself. A gentle laugh chides me from behind and I turn to face it.

“Who’s there?” I shout.

“My name is Kerry, but I don’t think we met before. Welcome.”

“Welcome? Welcome to what? Where am I? What is going on?”

“We’re still trying to figure it out ourselves,” Jacob responds, “but at this point it’s safe to say that you’re in your new home for the foreseeable future.”

“I need help. My arm-” I hold up the stump of my arm before realizing they probably aren’t able to see any better than I can. “I need a doctor.” A small chorus of laughs bounces back to me from every angle and I suddenly realize this room is much larger than I thought - and full of people.

“You’ll be okay,” Jacob says as he stumbles toward me in the dark, his rancid breath stinging my nostrils as he draws near, “The dead don’t need doctors.”