Night Stories

The Quarantine

I spent two years in quarantine great the Great Coronavirus as the media decided to call it. However, people had another name for it. A name that made everyone to freeze in fear when they heard it. COVID was its true name. Something unexplainable. Like a fog during the sunny day it began killing people in the outside world. More and more every single say.
* * *
Human corpses, horses and other big and small animals lied dead on the sides of the roadways. Black deformed birds circulated above our heads. We took turns to leave our houses to get some food for survival.. it was always the youngest that had to go as the virus mostly attacked the elders..

I still remember those mad, insane eyes of the woman who stood across the road when it was my turn to leave.. She started into emptiness searching the speck of blue old skies and a little sun light in that bloody red space. She seemed like she still hasn't give up hopes for a better future. But I'm sure we lost it all by that time.

I had to return by the sunset.

If not... the doors would never open for me, welcoming me inside, ever again.. I walked on the dark streets full of sorrow and agony. Dead birds covered the ground as I stepped deeper into the city. Giant skyscrapers started hiding the skies from the human eye, and it's not like I wanted to look at then.
The more often I raised my eyes up there the more I was dragged back into heart ripping memories of the previous years.

When everything seemed normal and felt like nothing can take that life away from me. But You never knew where to go where to look to find those supplies. However, I knew one thing...I had to get home before that sun sets..
No one could explain why that time, but you would not want to know, not even a slightest bit, if you were there.

Suddenly .. I felt cold running down my spine. I felt eyes watching me. One pair, no, two, maybe thousands. From every corner, every window of the abandoned buildings-titans, surrounding me, pressing on me, and destroing. I lost the sense of reality. Voices in my head, eyes digging holes in my back. Maybe, I was alone on that street on September 22nd. Maybe I went crazy, at least that's what I still tend to believe. After some time I calmed down. I was laying on the ground, in a pose of embryo. I held my head with my two hands until I felt my own nails piercing my skull.

I slowly got up with a fear of not getting back on time as it was already getting dark. I rushed back home. I wasn't hearing my steps nor where I was going I HAD to return. Only those thought held my legs and didn't let them collapse.

I walked thought the streets and blocks until my eyes didn't meet the same eyes, full of madness,  swollen read veins from endless crying. It was the same woman from that street. "I am home " I thought with ease. "I made it on time"..

I turned ..

And ..

Saw myself ..

Standing at the doors of my house ...

The doors opened ..

And my family welcomed "ME"(?) in ...

And the real me was left alone ...
In darkness..

For e ver..

And

I

Took her place.

Because the fittest always survives.