Reborn

Chapter Three

Chapter 3

Aftermath

I shut the door and looked at the living room. The lamp next to the TV was on, making the room a yellowish tint. The TV was on the news channel. The reporter looked stern and serious. But I couldn't hear what he was saying due to my mother vacuuming the gray carpet floor. She looks over at me. That drunken, tired look I always see on her face is gone

"Hi, hun! How was your class today?" She shouts

"It was good Mom. Can we talk?"

Charlotte turns off the vacuum, turning to me. Her long brown hair was in a bun.

"So did you hang out with Ethan today?"

I must have not told her about our break up.

"Mom...we broke up months ago."

"Oh, I'm sorry to hear that dear." She says sincerely

"Look, Mom, we have to talk about Dad. I get you don't want to bring him up to me and I also get that he might have done something bad to you, but I think that I deserve to know what happened to him."

"Emma, how many times do I have to tell you that I don't want you to ever mention him."

"But I-"

"No Emma, You don't have to know everything in the goddamn world half the time. Don't make me ground you!"

"You know what Mom? I'm tired of you always treating me like a fucking child. I'm twenty fucking years old. That's twenty years without a father figure in my life, Mom. Twenty years of you not telling me shit about him. I'm not fifteen anymore Mom. You can't just threaten to send me to my room or take my phone away because I'm not doing as you ask." I sigh. "So please just tell me about him...just once. So I just know what happened."

"Emma, I am sick of this shit. I tell you one thing, then you do the other. Why can't you for once just listen to me? Why for once can you just say, oh if she doesn't want to tell me then I won't bother her about it?"

"No, because this is something big to me, Mom. This is about someone who was supposed to be in my life but was never there!"

Charlotte walks away to sit back down on the old brown couch.

"Get back here Charlotte!" I shout at her

She turns around looking dead at me. I glance at the TV, seeing the reporter now looking panicked as the screen cuts to black. Showing a warning that nukes were dropping.

"Excuse the–"

All of a sudden, I saw nothing but white. My body slams against something hard, lying against a pile of some sort. I tried getting up but the pain in my body made me lay back and slowly pass out.

I wake up still feeling pain and still seeing nothing but white. As I feel my body get cold, I realize that I'm now outside. My hearing was muffled as if I was covering my ears but I could faintly hear the sounds of people. It sounded like they were screaming and running, but one sound was very clear to me. It was the sound of gunshots firing.

"M– Mom!" I shout

I'm met with no response, only the sounds of screaming. Rolling my body over, flat on the rocky ground, I grunt as I try to crawl around. Feeling a sharp pain near my torso as I crawl around. Stopping in place, feeling something squishy. I immediately start to feel the mess trying to find out what it is and fearing the worst. All of a sudden, I freeze as my hands feel long hair and a face. Tears run down my face as I slump back to the cold rocky ground. Deep down, I know it's my mom. Looking up at the white fog, tears still ran down my cold face. I slowly start to pass out. My eyes open but this time the white fog is gone. It's darker outside and I can still hear gunshots being fired in the far distance. I look to my right seeing a messy trashed road. Cars are left abandoned, bodies lay still on the debris-filled ground next to empty bullet shells. As I continue to look at the road, someone emerges from the light fog. I see the silhouette of a man walk up to me. I heard him speaking to me but his voice sounded muffled. He walked up to me, picked up my frail body, and took me away. I wanted to fight back, but I was in so much pain which made me weak. The man placed me inside the back of a truck sitting me next to another man whom I did not remember knowing.