- Kasper -
When Kasper awoke, it was like being born again.
Everything was new.
His body ached with a sense of life that he hadn't chosen to live. A veil of red clouded his vision and turned everything into a murk of blurring color. His eyes adjusted slowly. Taking it all in. The pale walls, the smell of gun smoke, sweat, and blood. Musty carpet and pine, old clothes and knitted blankets... all of it. He felt the matted carpet press into him and leave its prints on his bare skin. Still he laid there. Groaning as his bones twisted and reshaped beneath his muscle. His body thrummed. Lightning ripped through his nerves, deadening their ends- and then he had no end. He was the floor, the dirt, the sky, the air. This very breath, this small moment...
He was.
When he knew he shouldn't be.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Syrupy phlegm made burbles in his breathing and he coughed to clear them.
He'd been here before. Feet numbly drawing him towards the stairs. Head full of nothing.
He'd felt this before. The bruising ache that came from everywhere all at once. The feeling of numbly holding yourself together when not even your own body could. His bones bore the brunt of his growing muscle. His tendons held the strain of a slow self knitting.
He'd seen this all before.
He knew what it was...
Who brought me back?
Blood.
Blood everywhere.
"Wake up."
These were his hands, even though they didn't look like they belonged to him. This was his shadow, fleeing from the light of a window at his back and even though horns sat at its crown, he knew it was his. This was his tongue, desperately lapping the blood off the wall like a dying dog fiending for fresh water. Moaning into each gasping pass. He'd drink up the old paint it sat on if he could. He dragged his teeth across the trim. He knew the taste. That familiar whisky tang.
"KASPER."
That voice...
That wasn't his.
Go...
He couldn't remember the last time he had been so hungry in his life and when he felt at his stomach, nothing stopped his hand from pressing through to the bone. He felt the bitter warmth of his mucky guts slip against his fingers. His insides were on the outside again and someone was yelling for him.
Focus.
One foot over the other.
He was seeing things.
Trees, faces, walls, flashes, flashes of times long ago.
He was hearing things.
Voices, birdcalls, and shouting.
Gunfire.
The booms of heavy gunfire.
Something like water lapped at his back. Pushing him on. A shore tugging him into it, begging to hold him within it. A hand, he felt the ghost of it graze his cheek...
He knew that hand...
Wake up...
Kasper's walls opened up and finally he saw Him.
YOU ARE READING
The Eden Projects (FINAL EDITING)
Aksi"This story has no hero." Set in the distant future, where the government has been overthrown, and a new world power has risen, known only by the Moniker "ARK Corporation." We follow Kasper as he fights to survive in a nightmare where wrong is made...
