The Journey to Home

The Wayward Beginnings

The morning after an exhausting night was always a hard one to wake up to, to our motley crew of friends. As the excitement of the night would always keep their minds active as the thoughts of the topics and memories would wave through their mindscapes and be made known to their dreams. Many thoughts kept Joseph's mind occupied but the main course tonight on his dreamscape was his memories.

He felt his utter feeling of helplessness in a cruel unchanging world. The bodies and gore of the scene of the caravan filled his vision, the cold dead eyes of the corpses staring off into the distance whispering Prayer. The blood and smell nauseating his sense, the corpses crawled closer and closer their words of prayer becoming louder and louder overwhelming the senses of the Boy, fear gripping his movements frozen like a statue, his eyes wide but unseeing stuck on a figure unlike the many surrounding him, the body of the figure shrunken, shrivelled almost like a mummified corpse sticking amongst the mass of corpses and their mutterings turned to shouts. Then the figure's mouth moved into a sickening grin and uttered one line that struck through the cacophony of prayers, The tone was twisted, sickeningly sweet but the voice spoken was one he only sought redemption, "Why didn't you help us??".

The Figure moved its body, its joints unstiffening after what seemed to be years of atrophy and inactivity and it crawled slowly to the Boy, its hand reaching for more distance with each movement and it spoke again in that sickeningly sweet tone and like some twisted request for knowledge it asked again "wHy DidN't yOU HeLp uS??" the voice seemed more strained than before. The Boy stared in fear at the figure, the distance between it and Him was closing and it was getting faster with each moment that passed. He wanted to move, He wanted to scream, He wanted to run as far as possible but his body did not comply with each thought, he was frozen, unmoving, his fear controlling his body with an iron grip. The figure stopped in front of the Boy before his feet and it crawled up the Boy and it rested its hand on the Boy's cheek and its mouth seemingly splitting into a frown, the voice coming out of the figure was twisted, monstrous, and almost eldritch, the voice seemingly layered upon many other voices and it screeched "W..h...Y d...I...D...n..t y...O...U h...E...l...p u...S"

Joseph jolted awake, sweat sticking to his skin, his blanket almost flying off at the abrupt awakening. He looked at his surroundings, it was the bombed-out café that they took refuge in, he saw his friends sleeping, twitches and murmurings coming from their slumbering forms. He was the first one awake, the sound of the wind accompanied by his breath were the only things accompanying him on this lonely morning and so, he stood up to reheat the campfire in the centre of the room to heat himself some breakfast.

A few moments passed by in silence, his breakfast of heated can of beans filled him up sufficiently enough for what he was going to do for the rest of the day after discarding the tin can in a nearby street corner, he grabbed the pistol that he appropriated from the corpse yesterday, the thoughts of the nightmare from last night flashing before his eyes. He surveyed his surrounding in a daze but alas there was nothing, it was just him and the pistol in his hands, he walked a few blocks down to the nearby lot that he and his friends had walked past through the day prior. Joseph started to stretch his body, sleeping in the Ripps always left him a little bit stiff in his joints after stretching for a few minutes he let the sounds of the breath accompanied by the sounds of the wind, and environment. The creaks of buildings, the groaning of metal long ago made, the sound of scattered debris and trash picked by the wind helped him relax as he straightened his arm and moved his arm in front of himself with his hand gripping the pistol, he allowed himself to use his other hand to stabilize his grip on the pistol like the many times he saw the old action movies of his childhood. He aimed the pistol at a random rusted car in his vision, he was shaking, the gun felt heavy in his hands, he closed his eyes to focus but then voices started to creep into his thoughts, he was trembling the thoughts and voices coming into his head with one goal in mind to make him remem...