The Remaining

Chapter 1

My eyes shot open and I sat up in my bed breathing fast, cold sweat rolling down my forehead. Another nightmare. Sometimes the memories are as clear as day, and it feels like I'm alive in my dream, but then sometimes they're hazy, like I've just drank 10 bottles of vodka. I wipe the sweat off my face with the back of my hand, grab a hair tie from my bedside table and tie my long, thick brown hair into a ponytail. As I'm about to crawl off my bed, it lets out a creaky scream. I freeze, hoping that my irritatingly ancient metal bed didn't disturb Ms Tubbington, the owner and evil bitchy carer for all of the children at the Smalltown Orphanage. Holding my breath and heart pounding, I slowly manoeuvre my self off my bed, dodging all of the squeaky floorboards that I had memorised. Opening my wardrobe, I pull out my black skinny jeans, loose white t-shirt and grey woolly hoodie. I throw them on and I slip on my trashed black converse. My clothes are extremely out-dated, and I don't earn any money to buy myself any new clothes so I have to live with what little I have, unfortunately. Sit on the ledge of my tiny windowsill and fill my lungs with the fresh night-time air. I look back at my box bedroom. It's such a depressing room. Yellow stained walls, dusty wooden floorboards and a metal rickety bed. Out of all of the rooms in the orphanage, I got the smallest just because I didn't own anything when I had arrived, so Ms Tubbington threw me into the smallest room she had, which I'm pretty sure used to be the broom cupboard. The place ain't much, but it's home.

Landing on my feet, I put my hands on the gravelly floor in the ally to balance myself. The only thing I like about my room is that it's not that high up, so my window is easy to jump out of. Suddenly I hear a loud crash, like a bin falling over. I look around to see what it is and I see a small black shadow slither out of the ally and into the orange lit street. It takes me a few moments to realize that it was just the homeless black cat that I see around sometimes and I had nick-named him Lucky, because that's what black cats are. All of a sudden, I realised that I had totally forgot that Ms Tubbington's room had a window looking out at the ally, so I raced to hide behind a large rubbish bin. I peeked a look at her window and saw her light flash on and she poked her large head out of the window, her weary, beady eyes scanning the pitch black space of nothingness. She shook her head and closed the window and the light went out. I hadn't realised it until after her light went out that I was holding my breath, so I let out a large sigh and breathed deeply. I got up and carefully tip-toed my way into the street.

When I got to the park, I sat on my favourite bench. Behind the bench was a large rose bush, the only plant in the whole park that hadn't rotted away, and it wasn't surrounded by any trees so I could see the stars clearly. Night-time is the best time of the day because you can see things that people haven't explored yet, and see new born stars, and ancient stars. I would so love to explore space. I know that I've already been to space, when the things stole me and kept me for years up there. But that's different. Way different to what I want now. Resting my back on the bench, I start to ponder about the nightmare I just had. They're getting worse. Each and every night I wake up more breathless, more sweaty and I remember more and more about what they did to me. I remember the dream quite well. Lying down, I tilted my head from side to side and looked around the room. Bright white lights stung my eyes and everything seemed clouded and blurry, like I was on drugs. I tried to get up, but something was restraining me, and then I realised, I was tightly strapped down to a table,naked. Wriggling and thrashing about, I desperately tried to worm my way out of the straps until my muscles ached and my head hurt. Then, I resorted to screaming. Screaming so loud that I felt my whole face turn into fire, my ears aching from the noise coming from my mouth. All of a sudden, something hand-like covered my mouth and pressed down with so much force that my jaw nearly broke. Because everything was so hazy, I couldn't make out any faces, but a tonne of blurry figures started surrounding me. Tears escaped my eyes as I was terrified of what was going to happen to me and there was an immense pain coming from my jaw. Suddenly I felt a twang of pain coming from my stomach, and I had a feeling that they were cutting my stomach open. As I couldn't scream from the pain, I squeezed my eyes shut so tight that my forehead stung. The figures started talking and I could slightly hear some of the words they were saying, and they were speaking english. I picked out words from what they were saying: 'destroy', 'humans', 'weaknesses', 'torture', 'slavery' and 'heart'. My eyes started to droop down slowly, and I started drifting off as the pain was unbearable. I thought I was dying. Death would be better than what I was experiencing at that moment. Once my eyes had closed, I woke up. I couldn't bear having another one of them nightmares again, so that's why I came to the park, to clear my head of numbing pains from my 'dreams'. I could slightly see the pale orange sun rays start to poke out from the distant buildings, so I decided to head back to the orphanage, just in case Ms Tubbington decides to wake me up early this morning, even though I'm already awake. But she doesn't know that. She doesn't know what I get up to.