Faith Will Save You (Dolores O'Riordan fanfic)

TWO

Spinning, that was what was happening. Sophie, although sound asleep, felt sickeningly dizzy, even though there was absolutely no such reason to be so. All of her limbs were on fire and felt agonisingly dislocated in unnatural, opposing directions. She didn't understand how she was both asleep and simultaneously conscious of this strange and rather alarming sensation.

She was forever looped in the thought process of this painful sensation, until a couple of minutes later. Sophie found herself waking up - or maybe it was a few hours, she was not entirely certain. Upon feeling a breeze slap against the hair follicles on her neck, the first thing she discovered was that she, in fact, wasn't in her tiny boxed room at all, but rather in what appeared to be some sort of back-alley... somewhere. How she got there, she had no idea, as from what she could see with her squinted eyes, she had no recollection of this place. This alley, near what appeared to be some grassy green parkland, was in no way familiar to Sophie at all. She remembered last closing her eyes while she was in her room, then experiencing that sickening dizzy spell while she was apparently asleep... Maybe feeling dizzy had something to do with it? Perhaps she was hallucinating? She couldn't tell in that moment whether she had a greater desire to panic or to breath a sigh of relief, because whether this place was real or not, it was better than seeing the four walls of her bedroom - or 'prison cell' as she bitterly preferred to call it.

What the hell...? Sophie thought, utterly baffled and in some ways, fearful. This place, wherever it was, was new and  unfamiliar to her. She did not know what to do, where to go for help and navigation purposes, who to ask... she glanced around, the utterly lost lamb that she was, still very disorientated from her sleep. Blinking hard, Sophie prepared to open her eyes again, expecting the weird location to be an addition to the dream she had about feeling dizzy and spiralling into the omnipotent clutches of time and space. Nothing disappeared, much to her astonishment. Sophie was then met with the crazy realisation that this was not a dream, but real - and not only real, but serious. She needed to find some way out of the situation. The worst part about it was that she had virtually no money on her, save from a few scrunched up twenty-pound notes in her trouser pocket. Instinctively feeling around in her pocket for her money, earphones and phone, she froze as she realised she was fully clothed; the blood flowing through her body felt slightly chilled. Where did these clothes come from??? Last time she checked, she was definitely wearing pyjamas.

Standing up groggily after a few minutes of just sitting there in pure contemplation, she took a small yet feeble walk around to see if there was anywhere local or anybody she knew in sight. Her unfortunate results were nothing and nobody. People were walking around in pairs or groups, chatting, and if someone was walking near her by themselves, they would nearly always have their eyes glued to their phone. If they weren't doing that, then they were walking their dog. This was all too strange. An immediate query struck her; what happened to the social-distancing? The two-metre rule? The masks? Why were they all breaking the rules? Why could she hear heavy traffic blasting on a motorway in the distance when the roads were supposed to be practically desolate? Everywhere was supposed to be a ghostown but it wasn't at all. At this point, Sophie was becoming more and more freaked out with each second that passed.

As all the noise and motion happening around her started to thicken, Sophie started to become too overwhelmed and overstimulated. She also realised she hadn't had anything to drink for about eighteen hours. Gradually, due to dehydration, she began to feel nauseous and faint as she stumbled through the nearby park. The next thing she knew, her sight was beginning to blur as her body shut down again. The sound of the motorway, the people, the screaming kids, everything that Sophie was hearing, drowned out very slowly. She allowed her body to give in and succumb to the nausea, and before she knew it, her limp form had collapsed rather ungracefully onto the grass. Fortunately for her, however, it was broad daylight, at half-nine in the morning, therefore, people were bound to notice. Drifting in and out of consciousness for quite a number of minutes, she eventually heard vague voices approach her. The voices still sounded very distant and indistinct, like they were conversing from miles away. Their voices seemed unintelligible to Sophie during her momentary conscious spells every few seconds, and if she thought she was being honest, she felt too tired and dehydrated to care.