Head Full of Ghosts

Chapter 30 - Love Like This

He woke with a start, in a pitch black room, to the feeling that he was being watched. His heart was in his throat, he could barely breathe, and he hardly dared to even move. For a moment stretching into eternity he lay there frozen, expecting doom to come crashing down on him from any and every angle at once. But as the minutes crawled by nothing happened, and his breathing slowly returned to normal.

Reaching out a single hand, he tentatively probed the top of the coffin, his hand brushing the wood and then worming its way around. The lid was still in place, and, as far as he could tell, was also still intact.

And then the coffin started to move.

Eli drew back as something - Amber - pounded at the box from the inside, hard enough to rattle the entire thing. The room filled with the thunderous racket of the blows and the wooden box bouncing against the concrete of the floor. Suddenly afraid that the box would simply burst apart he threw himself on top of the casket, hugging it as tightly as he could, as if that would somehow help it stay together any better. He could feel the continued blows in his chest, and even his added weight wasn't enough to stop the box from rattling altogether.

The onslaught continued for what felt like an hour, though time passed in obscurity in the gloom of the building, but surprisingly the box held together and eventually the figure trapped inside relented to their fate.

"Eli?"

The word was so soft and weak that Eli wasn't entirely convinced he had heard it. His breath caught in his throat, his body freezing up, and he was unable to respond.

"Eli? Please. I... I think it's gone. I think it was... it was burned out of me. I'm... I'm so weak. Help me, Eli. Help me, please. I think I'm dying."

Eli rose from the box and took a couple steps away, staring back in the darkness to the spot he was sure the coffin lay, though he still couldn't see it in the gloom.

"Eli?" the voice called again after a moment. "Eli? Are you still there? Help me, please! Please!"

The voice sounded on the verge of tears. It quivered and quavered and broke, like it was too weak to exist, and then there was just silence again. Silence and darkness, like Eli had been dropped into an endless, empty void, punished into an eternity of limbo for his sins. For a moment he wasn't entirely sure he hadn't been.

Then the rage returned, and the box rattled more, and screams of rage filled the air. "I'll kill you! I'll get out of here and I'll rip your heart out of your chest! I'll tear you limb from limb. I will drain every last drop of blood! Do you hear me, Eli? You're mine. I'll kill you! Let me out!"

Eli dropped to his backside, pulled his legs up to his chest, wrapped his arms around them, and waited.

By the time morning sunlight stretched its long limbs in through the cracks in the window and the still open doorway the onslaught had abated. When he could again see the full shape of the coffin it lay still on the floor, fully intact. He rose, gathered up his supplies, and lifted the box onto a wheeled pallet he had found at the abandoned grocery store in town, then chained it to the pallet with chains and rope he had gathered from the hardware store. He placed what little other supplies he had on the space remaining next to the box, and then began to walk.

Once he was outside he took a long moment to get his bearings. To the east was the direction he had come. The camp, his abandoned friends, and the new group of survivors that had nursed him back to health and trained him to fight. He had no idea if they managed to get out after he left them there, but he could only hope that they had. There was nothing he could really do to help them now, and nothing they could do to help him. And they wouldn't understand what he was doing with Amber. They would only take her away from him if they found out, and he couldn't have that.