Average or Worse

Chapter Two

“Buzz.”

I turned the knob to the left a bit more.

“Buzz.”

Now to the right, “Buzz”, the sign of the radio’s signal failure showed up once again.

“New studies about Redden have just come in…”

No, I started shaking, no. My hands were twitching; I felt a tickle on my back. Like ivy’s growing speed tripled and was going up my spine. Until it halted when it wrapped around my neck, choking me.

“…saying that a new symptom is bleeding through the scalp. Remember if you have any of the many signs of Redden to go straight to a study clinic. Every ten miles one of these clinics should be set up. Remember do not, I repeat do not go to a hospital.”

Just to be safe I scratched my scalp, trying to see if it would bleed. Of course it didn’t. It came as almost a disappointment. I almost wished I would pass, that it could be my time. I just wanted to be near my family, or at least somebody I recognized.

No, what am I saying? 

I want to impress my family, I want them to look down on this Earth and think; that is my son, I am so proud. I want to make a name for my family. To do something, something special so that everybody well now me. If there is anybody left.

But, really, what are the chances I, the seventeen year old man who is scared of everyday sounds, can do anything? If people who try hard all there life to accomplish something but never do is there a purpose for me to try, not even having a talent, to do something memorable. For god’s sake, I panic when I hear a car start.

I’m nothing, and that is all I’ll ever be.

                                                                                ~            

My brain is in a daze, a want to go back outside, but the fear over taking me. Once I into open-air and I was almost shot, should I risk that again?                

Glancing at the cracked window it seemed to be a nice day. The sunny hopefulness seemed like it tried to hide the ugly ruined streets full of the homeless and hopeless. The killers and the wanting to be killed. The people who can’t handle the pain anymore. The ones who seek death but somehow can’t find it even in this brutal existence. Others who hide from death, consume all their time trying to stay away from the cruelty of demise yet it seems like it seeks them. Life is a never ending game of hide and seek between death and survival.

But I can’t seem to figure out whom I want to be, the hider, or give up to the seeker.

I guess I’m a hider, hiding from the world. Staying cooped up in my home, not my home, my parents’ home. ­­I don’t have anything.

                                                                            ~

My hands rubbed my eyes, I was almost crying from the thought. The Repo man, did he really have time to be here? Did he have to take me home always? From all the other terrible killers running around on the street, he had to pick me. The guy who never did anything wrong but somehow everything always got taken away from him.

The Repo man had said that the mortgage had never been paid off and that I had to take a few of my things and get out.

This man, he obviously didn’t understand anything. He seemed a bit unaffected by the fact that there is a declared second Great Depression in the country, the whole world really, unaffected by the epidemic raging throughout the planet, unaffected by the risk you take going outside, knowing there is a greater chance you won’t come back once you’re out. Completely unaffected; completely unattached.

This man, this man I don’t even know, he didn’t get it. The pain he caused by going to work every day. This man, he didn’t know it, well maybe he did, but I’m sure he didn’t intend on it, had just made my life crumble.

Where would I go now? I don’t have any living relatives, my sister refuses to see me, and I know none of my friends from school even live around here. That is, if they’re alive.

So where shall I go?

I’ll end up like every other worthless person on the street trying to make a living by making emotional signs and standing on boulevards begging strangers for their money when they people who they are begging can’t pay their own bills. Yet I expect to survive like this.

I took a small duffel bag and dumped random things inside. It didn’t matter what I took. Besides my corn, what would I do without my corn? Tossing in a thick jacket,  a can of corn, and a can opener and looked at the door.

“Son, could you…son?”

Was that the Repo man behind me? Did it matter? I just needed to get out. Just leave, the first time it seemed almost easier the first time I had to go outside. Now I can never come back. Never…