CHAPTER I: A GHOST TOWN - Part 1

"Long ago, at the beginnings of this Age, the saved children woke up. The Thanato had just wiped-out humanity, and now the little ones were lost in an empty world. " - The Beginnings of the Empty World – Folktale _ By: anonymous

The bright light made her close her eyes as soon as she opened them, and she knew she forgot something the moment she woke up, but she forgot that as well.

The girl didn't know where she was. Her surroundings still blinded by the white light that burned from a nearby roof.

With a growl she tries to move on what looks like a badly padded stretcher, using only her numb and weak limbs. It doesn't take long to notice the smallness of the stretcher when she exceeds its edge and falls painfully on the ground, which was farther away than it should be.

Her dry throat doesn't let her scream when her senses react to the pain and opening her mouth seems to cost more than it should. The girl feels her head spin after the fall. She has the urge to touch her face, her head, but her limbs seem to scream from the pain with every movement. A tear leaves one of her brown-wood eyes silently.

Her heart beats as hard as it can. She closes her eyes in the hope that it will mitigate the pain. But it doesn't help much that silence allows her to hear her desperate heartbeat and her uncontrolled breathing.

The girl opens her eyes to realizing how futile it is to try to calm down, and tries to see where she is from her position.

The stretcher, high and imposing, stands next to her. It's a hospital bed, but it doesn't seem like the kind of beds you're hospitalized in. She looks to the other side and finds a wall. She isn´t in a hospital room, she's in a hallway.

The hallway is in complete silence. There is not a single indication that someone is nearby, that there is anyone willing to explain to her what is happening.

In an pitiful effort to sit down, the girl tries to bring her hand to the stretcher to help herself. The pain continues to burn in every part of her body, but the idea of lying on the ground by who knows how long in who knows what place isn't very appealing either. So, she grabs one of the legs of the stretcher tightly and swallows' saliva, mentally preparing for the pain that the movement will cause her. So, she counts mentally:

~Three. ~ She tightens her grip on the leg.

~Two. ~ She inhales deeply once again.

~One. ~ And in a matter of seconds, she sits down.

This time her throat opens into a shrill scream. The girl tries to calm down, suppress the pain, but what she sees does not allow her to do any and simply grows the list of questions.

On the floor, scattered around the stretcher, there are uniforms. Small piles of clothes so eerily out of place. It's not just the uniforms, there are dress accessories and shoes stand out from the piles, as well as underwear. But there is not a single person to claim the disaster.

Silence seems to weigh more for every second that passes. The hallway has several doors, all closed. There are no maps or guides, but she can see a double door that says exit in the distance, at the bottom of the hallway. It probably leads to some emergency stairs.

When the girl notices it, she starts looking for something that isn't there. And that's when she realizes something she had seemed to forget up to that point.

The girl is myopic. Or she should be. The sign is not nearby. She should not be able to discern distant letters, and distant objects should not be anything but stains.

Still, her view is perfect.

~What's going on? ~ Her instincts beg her to move and walk. Get out of that place, find someone, ask for help. She wants to breathe the air from outside; she needs to be outside. But her body seems unable to reciprocate, the pain making a torture of every movement.

Then, carefully, the girl makes use of her hands to bring her legs closer to herself and support the soles of her feet on the ground. She grabs a railing that's just under the mattress, recounts from three and gets up with a growl.

Finally on her feet, a slight headache clouds her eyesight because of changing her position so suddenly. She releases the railing and touches her forehead with a frown. And it's only a matter of seconds when her weak legs give way to her weight, and impossible to stay balanced she falls flat outright.

The girl manages to cushion the fall with her hands, but her knees also take much of the blow. She sits quickly before her arms also stop supporting her, this time with her back resting on the wall.

Nausea begins to take over her body. Bile rises burning her throat, she tries not to vomit, but the yellowish fluid leaves her faster than she can prevent it. The clothes she is wearing get dirty, what was once a simple white cloth tied with a knot behind her back, now has a yellowish disgusting stain.

Too weak to move the girl resigns herself from cleaning her mouth.

The girl closes her eyes and starts breathing slowly. She tries to remember the last thing that happened before waking up in that place.

She remembers walking somewhere, then out of nowhere, everything disappeared, darkness took over her mind. Her next memory is waking up on that stretcher. Had she fainted?

While trying to clarify her blurry memories, a noise attracts her attention. She immediately turns to the direction it comes from and silence takes over the place again. It was far away, if it weren't for the total silence she wouldn't have heard it. It sounded like something fell off. Will anyone else be there?

The girl swallows strongly, re-arranges her legs to look to the exit, and leaning against the wall next to her she slowly begins to rise. The pain is still present but she doesn't feel as weak as before. Before her hand gives way and slips on the smooth wall, she puts her other hand on the stretcher and throws the weight of her body over it.

Taking advantage of the stretcher as a treadmill, she rests most of her weight on it to push herself slowly towards the end of the aisle. Half pushing, half dragging her feet, the girl hopes that some other sound will indicate that she is not alone, some movement, anything that assures her that she did not imagine what she had before. But she reached the gray doors under the exit sign at the end of the hallway and silence seemed to be the only present.

With trembling legs the girl approaches the doors, one hand stretched out and the other resting on the stretcher. A plate crosses the middle of each of the doors, and when she presses the one closest to her the door opens silently.

The girl tries to open the other door also to be able to pass the stretcher, but this one is in the middle, making it harder than it should to press the plate on the other door, and she feels too weak to make the extra effort of rearranging and moving the stretcher. And there are likely to be stairs further on, she would have to leave the stretcher in any case.

She finishes opening the door and as expected this leads to the landing of some stairs. Staggering, the girl moves a little faster to reach the railing of the stairs before she falls. Leaning on this one, she takes a breather and straightens out a bit with her gaze on the stairs in front of her leading down. After a moment of thinking about it she looks at the ones that lead up, the two poorly lit. Should she go down or up? So far she has not seen any windows, it is possible that she is underground.

As if answering her, something seems to hit the ground in the distance, upstairs. The girl doubts if she should go up, but the idea that she will find someone if she goes up seems more tempting than the silence that awaits her if she descends those stairs. So, she re-arranges in front of the ascending stairs.

Taking air, she puts one foot on the first step, then the next and releases the air in a sigh. She does it again a few times until she reaches the next break and stops to breathe for a moment before continuing.

The girl rests one of her hands on her knee and with the other she holds off the railing. She does not sit, fearing not being able to get up again. She looks up, gazing at the stairs that seem to be longer than they are, and with a growl she straightens out and begins to climb the stairs.

As she climbs up, with her gaze on her feet making sure she doesn't trip, she wonders if she should go into that door, or keep climbing. It doesn't look like a mezzanine, and she hasn't really made sure where it is. She should check, maybe find a window and have a look outside.

When she finally climbs the last step with a sigh, the girl raises her gaze and finds something that makes her feel a little stupid. Next to the door there is a sign with a number and a word that she can't understand, there was probably another one on the door below, it has to be the floor number.

The number is negative, she's probably on an underground floor. The girl settles back in front of the next steps, and begins to ascend surer than before, though not faster.

But as she climbs the silent stairs, she starts asking the questions she hadn't wanted to ask herself since she woke up. ~Have they really evacuated? If they did, where and why? Why would I be left in the middle of a hallway? Is this even a hospital? It doesn't seem like it~ The girl machines her thoughts faster and faster and without realizing it she is already turning around at the break to climb the last flight of stairs. ~What if there's no one up here and the sounds were from some animal? ~ She leaves the idea at the moment it crosses her mind and tries to think of something else. It does not help her to be pessimistic now.

She finally arrives in front of the door, it has no number, only a word and a letter under it. At that moment she also realizes that she shouldn't have worried about how much to climb, there are no more stairs. She takes a deep breath as she brings her hand closer to the lever on the door, noticing that she no longer feels so weak that she can stand by herself.

She presses her weight on the lever, relieved that she will finally be able to get out of there. As she walks through the door, a strong white light welcomes her. The girl closes her eyes immediately and slowly reopens them letting them get used to the change in lighting.

When her eyes finally adjust to the light, the girl manages to see the hallway that stretches in front of her. But she takes no more than two steps when the door closes behind her, so an impulse makes her turn.

She tries to open each of the doors, but none move an inch. They could only be opened from within. But when she decides to try to open them once again "in another way", she notices a small screen with numbers on the wall next door. The door needs a password to open it, and she doesn't know what it is, so she gives up before spending more energy on something that's not really worth it.

Why would the door leading to the floors below be locked? The girl turns around as she tries to get the idea out of her head, while trying not to imagine what she was supposed to be doing down there, because it's impossible to know. Right now she needs to focus on what she's doing and get out of there. One step at a time.

When she reaches the next door, she opens it and leaves behind the short hallway. On the other side is a huge room. The sun shines brightly and the girl raises her hand to her eyes. Immediately next to her there is a long table with two chairs and some computers in front of each one, it must be the reception, then the room must be the entrance.

She slowly lets her hand down and the first thing she can discern on the other side of the living room are huge floor-to-ceiling windows that clearly show the streets outside. It doesn't take long to find the pair of glass doors in the center of the wall, but the girl stops thinking about the exit when she realizes what is missing from the streets and buildings later on.

There are no people. Not a single soul walks through the silent city outside. :–

The girl walks as fast as she can through the white tiles. Her breathing starts to cut off more with each step, and she could swear that her head is about to explode with the increasing pulse of her blood.

She opens the doors weakly and steps outside. Looks at each side. She goes into the empty streets. She approaches a row of cars farther and checks as many as she can, but finds no one in any.

She is walking away from a car when she becomes aware of her reflection and immediately flips into the mirror next to her. She doesn't really look any different, though she didn't know what she expected. Her hair has been cut and is nothing more than two fingers long, her complexion is a little pale and she notices that she is thinner than she had noticed at first, but what catches her attention are her eyes. Her irises that were before a brown so dark that it was usually confused with black now seem tinted with a white that clarifies them until they seem light brown.

She looks desperately around and turns her gaze to the building she just left. It's not a hospital, that's definitive. Her head spins on every possibility of why she's there, in the vague explanations that come to mind, but her thoughts are still too blurred for her to settle for one. The problem is not only the lack of people, and the change in her, but she also has no idea where she is.

The girl drops on the ground. And simply looks at the building under which she woke up as if it could give her some answer at any moment.