strange house

It was a war.

The bunker was battered, chips of concrete in the walls falling away from repeated hammering from the outside (and in, actually). The back wall has caved in at one point, exposing the loose soil behind it. Dirt, powder, and spent casings litter the 15' x 20' floor. Flashes of artillery explosions and lightning come through a six foot wide, two- or three-inch tall opening that I crouch under, casting erie flashes and silhouettes against the back wall. Through that opening that looks down on a wide valley, other sounds of war come through all too clearly.

"Oh God! Make it stop! Can anyone hear me? HELP ME!"

To my left, the S-entry going out the front (flawed design I'm sure, but this isn't an "accurate depiction of warfare architecture" dream). The back wall of that shows the flashes as well.

"No! Get away! NOOOOOO!" The lightning flashes, throwing the flickering shadow of him on the back wall, held in the air by the throat. What holds him up is a definitely non-human arm. The voice goes silent, replaced by thunderously grinding bones of what used to be his neck.

The others in the bunker with me eye the entrance apprehensively. Some have an oddly accepting, relieved look on their faces; Whatever it was will no doubt come into what has become our little hiding place. Relief that the end is finally here.

Nothing enters. A moment, an hour, an eternity goes by. Nobody has blinked. I pull my eyes from the entrance and focus on the back wall's breach. I move to that opening as quick as I can over the course of a day. Nobody notices. The soil is brittle, easily flaking away as I scrape at it with my helmet at first (some World War One looking thing) and then my hands. The artillery continues in the night outside. The faint screams. The inhuman growls and howls. I continue digging.

Head-first, I seem to make quick progress, but nobody follows. The dirt I loosen in front of me, I push back with my feet. Eventually, the opening behind is closed up with the dirt I move, so there's no light. Dig. Dig Dug. Digging farther in darkness. I have no concept of how much time has passed, but I decide to start up. Diagonally I continue, maybe 30 degrees, maybe 45, but definitely up. The dirt begins to get moist. Or maybe my fingers are bleeding. I neither know nor care. Dig. Scrape. "Get away from there," is my only thought. So much so that I don't realize that the moisture has grown. Each scoop is mud now, and it drips down on my face. I realize now. I realize it's far too wet. No option now, as clog after falling clog starts the inevitable cave-in. I push up with my fists as the mud pours down intent on encasing me.

Only the air moves up. My legs are already pinned as I move my left arm out of the path of more earth. My right arm reaches up in vain, as now my waist is pinned. My scream isn't wholly voluntary once the earth compresses my torso and breaks my left arm. The fingers on my right hand extend the last inch, breaking through to a cold wind.

POP

That's the sound I hear as the earth and water slam in on my skull. Now I can only wait. Wait the eternity as I struggle to move unsuccessfully. In the darkness, spots of light come. My mouth tries to open involuntarily to gasp air where only earth exists. The lights grow brighter. Flashing. Pulsating. I feel. Every muscle at once groans its last contraction with all it has. My body almost moves at that point, and the lights explode.

The earth I'm encased in draws apart in my view, showing a cross-section of the dirt holding me in my grave, and the boulder I was digging under that ultimately foiled me. My body's fingers feel the air, but that is not mine any longer. The image melts away.

How to describe death? Nobody's been back from it, so there is no description. I know what I perceived. Probably it would be more accurate to describe what I didn't perceive. Life.

Okay, I'll elabrate as that says nothing, really. To describe requires a benchmark. A frame of reference. Take a certain hue of the color "Blue". Take the scent of "Campfire". Take the feeling of "Love". Represent each with an atom. The "Success" from your past. The "Noise" of your favorite fraction of a second of music. The "Feel" of a nine volt battery on your tongue. Continue this compilation of atoms and you will build an atmosphere of "Life".

Death is a complete vacuum of that. It's not dark. "Dark" is an atom, and in Death is absent. Even the word "nothing" is far more than the sum of Death. No "Cold". Not even a sense of "Self" is here. Not physical; I don't look with eyes. I don't know how it is that I perceive this vast emptiness. I don't even know how (or with what) I perceive "I". And fear starts to creep in. Yeah, this late in the game I finally get fear. And it builds; The uncertainty (what's next), the paranoia (how long will I be here), the NEED to just move (where/how/what is this), or even feel a sense of movement (oh God). Straining to move here just as I strained under the boulder. Then a tear opens.

I feel again the earth holding me as my arm pulls my torso from the dust and I look up at a brightly brown sky. It's so dry now, so barren. The boulder is gone. The landscape is a vast flat desert now, dry and cracked soil at my fingertips (what is wrong with my fingers?) and stretches on as far as I can see. Finally my feet break free from my former grave. Standing up, I start walking (I'm limping badly... why can't my left foot work right?).

Left, right, left... The next fall my right foot makes, everything changes. What was cracked soil is now drenched grass. The rain falls in buckets as I step onto the sidewalk from someone's front yard. Finding myself on a nice little Leave It To Beaver neighborhood street that curves to the left, I walk (what IS it with my left foot?) along the street. Illumination from a set of headlights reaches from just around the corner, and I hear an engine droning on as the tires splash through the rainy surface of the road. The illumination comes around the corner, but there are no headlights. There is no car, no tires, nothing. Just the sounds that a car would make as driving along in the rain, and the light that would come from a set of headlights. But no car.

To the right is a hospital. I move closer towards the emergency entrance doors that open for an orderly pushing a wheelchair through. Nobody is in the chair, but the orderly talks to it making assurances that they're going to take care of the problem. I follow, but as the orderly goes in through the automatic motion-sensing doors, they close behind him. As they close, I see my reflection... no, I see A reflection, but this is not me. This is a corpse. The scalp has peeled away from the skull, the clothes disintegrate in places revealing bone and gore. The left arm is twisted in an odd way, and both hands show fingers with the tips ground away to the first knuckle. There is no left foot, just a tibia grinding into the concrete walkway, and I realize this IS me. I begin to scream, but my jaw falls away. Before it shatters on the ground, I wake.

Sitting bolt upright in bed to a crack of lightning and its snapping thunder half a second later, nothing is familiar. At the foot of the bed, where the bathroom should be, is a wall. To the right, where I leave the bedroom door ajar, is a window. FUCK. ... memories fade from corpses to favors. Like the favor I'm doing for a friend, house-sitting while he's away for a week. Clock check: 2:00am. The alarm is set for 4:00am (I work the early shift).

FUCK. So I get up to write all this down. On paper, no less, since the friend has no computer here.