GUNSHOT ➪ Zayn

ғɪғᴛʏ-ғɪғᴛʜ✅

Chapter 55: Nightmare or reality (corrected)

Zayn slowly opened his eyes. He was now facing his childhood house.
'Is there anyone?' He yelled.
Unsurprisingly, no one replied;
'Hey, you!' he called a young girl that was passing by.
She turned in his direction. She looked left and right but didn't seem to see him. He tried to pat her on the shoulder, but his hand went through the girl.

'What the fuck?' he whispered. He looked down. His hand was transparent as water.
His entire self was.
Only God knew just how much he feared that: being invisible, unnoticed.
As he realized it, a terrible migraine coupled with tinnitus seized him. His vision was gradually starting to be blurred.
Was he going crazy? Hallucinating? Or was he tired?

Everything goes black again, a horrible sizzling sound in the whole room; it appeared to last for hours. He tried to move forward as if there was a way out, but everything is black, too black.
He was like in the void, the nothingness.
A blurred image appeared, like a pop-up in a computer, but it wasn't a website he was seeing, but one of his memories: his parents yelling at his brother because he had just been fighting.
He will never forget that.

Then another memory appeared behind him. He turned and looked at it. This time it was him fighting in high school. Then the memories, more and more negative, started to appear all around him.
He now saw his brother on the day he died. Well, this time, the memory did not appear on a small screen, like the first one, but in the whole room - at least across the entire space where he was - it was as if he was there a second time. He felt everything: the same coldness and the same hatred, the same bullet.

Chic was holding his gun very close---too close--to marc.
'C'mon, man; you'll never shoot. You don't have the balls.' Marc laughed, too confident.
'Cut the crap, bro.' Logan said behind the rifle holder.
'Oh really?' Chic creepily smiled, too focused on his enemy to pay attention to Logan's comment.
The sound of the gun loading gave Zayn goosebumps, just like 12 years ago.
'You're never gonna do that.' Marc repeated. From the moment Marc shut his mouth, Chic pulled the trigger, and Marc's body hit the ground. The sound of his weight on the concrete floor echoed throughout the room wherever Zayn was watching the worst day of his entire existence. He couldn't take his eyes off the nightmare. He was totally paralyzed.
He watched his younger self scream and run. Finally, Logan stopped him, grabbing his grey shirt to stop him from doing something he would regret.
'Which is what I did.' He whispered.
He felt transported, yet he had not moved. He was still in that same room, surrounded by his most excruciating memories.

He was now observing himself about to shoot Chic the same way this guy shot his brother. He had stuck it in the neighborhood corner where nobody went; the lights were almost all broken.
It was the perfect place for the perfect revenge.
'You should be dead.' Young Zayn clenched his jaw, trying as hard as possible not to cry.
'What are you gonna do kid, shoot me in the head?' 'For fuck's sake, Chic, what the fuck did he do, huh? You don't kill a fucking innocent man in cold blood for 1000 bucks!' Zayn screamed.
'Zayn, come on, we both know it was more than 1000 bucks. He knew too much. Our families would've exploded if I didn't blow on it before it burned out.'
'Bullshit.' Zayn laughed.
'When you'll know the whole story, you'll understand.'

At this time, young Zayn couldn't get the image of his brother shot at close range, like a dog, out of his mind.
He pulled the trigger, and it was like all his pain, anger, and frustration disappeared for a second, only to get worse and worse years afterward.

The crackling sound that had not left his ears for hours ---or days, he couldn't remember--- got intensified crescendo. The film of his memories slowly faded.
Everything was going so fast; his biggest fears came up to life before his eyes. He sees his mother kissing Logan -if not more-.
It was worse than a nightmare. The tinnitus was getting stronger and stronger.

He stared at Alyssa, in the club Deluxe, draped in her beautiful black dress:
'Zayn, help me, please,' she shouted.
'Aly!'
She put her hands over her ears, screamed again, and fell to the ground; Zayn could not run, but he could not move.
Her blood invaded the land. I see her being emptied of it without being able to do anything.

The tinnitus came back with a vengeance. He now saw his father tied to an electric chair. He had a scar on his left cheek. His nose was bleeding, his suit was dirty, covered with dust.
'You must discover it... you must discover it...' The injured man spotted
'Discover what?' He asked, but his sobs absorbed his words.
The tinnitus and the echo of his voice kept repeating, 'You have to know Zayn...'

It was too much. It was all so real. His suspicions were all confirmed, but now, what did he need to know? What were all these secrets?
He saw all his loved ones suffering and could do nothing. He was invisible, powerless.
Everyone, his father, mother, brother, Alyssa, James, Selena, and Anna?
---Why was Anna Martinez even there?---
They all approached him; blood flowed between their eyes, they all repeated:
'You must discover the truth.'
'Stop it!' he whispered.
'You must discover the truth, Zayn.'
'Fucking stop that!' he yelled.
They kept coming towards him and repeating the same sentence over and over again, all at the same time. It made the scene satanic. Their voices echoed in his head, even louder than the tinnitus.
'I said stop!' he whimpered.
They continue to repeat over and over again, their blood flowing between their eyes, then to their hearts,
'This is horrible. Get me out of here!' Zayn though
'Stop... stop... stop...' he spoke, out of strength.

Little by little, their voices became distant, the tinnitus diminished, but he could not open his eyes.
'Hey, Zayn. Wake up!' Freddy said.
'What the hell fucking happened to me? Where are we?' He asked, confused.
'You joined the virtual torture training drunk. We couldn't get you out of the program for two fucking days.' Aly blamed him, with a big sarcastic smile on her face.
'The program had a technical problem within special.'
'It's supposed to last for twenty minutes, you fucking dumbass! You unconsciously got yourself stuck in it because you felt threatened for absolutely no reason and decided to prove how manly you were by drinking at 8 am.'
'How manly I am? Are you kidding me? It was... Yeah, no, I'm not having this conversation with you now.'
Alyssa nervously chuckled and left the room after saying:
'You're right; we'll talk about your immaturity when you'll realize that you're 28 and not 6.'