From the Ashes, You Crawl

Chapter Ten; Flashback

When Gerard awoke on the bathroom floor, there was a strange noise going on around him, and he had a splitting headache. He lay on the tiles, now soaked in crimson blood, eyes spotted with black dots as he slowly pulled himself onto his back. Lifting his head slightly, he could see his leg was no longer bleeding, fortunately. Mentally, he was thankful Mikey had hemophilia, otherwise, it appeared he would not have made it.

Gerard did not know how long it had been. Very, very gingerly, he sat up on the tiled floor, clothes crusty with blood, and sighed. There was a slight ringing in his ears, but Gerard decided to ignore that, and his tired, concussion ridden brain attempted to decipher the sound in the distance. It was familiar, that was sure, but what was it? Gerard stained his ears as he sat on the floor, unwillingly recalling the hours or however long it had been before. His mind wandered away from the sound, and he began to remember.

He had pressed a gun to his brother's head and shot him dead, and now, Mikey now lay on the singed soil, burnt and with a hole in the back of his head. He remembered how he pushed the pillow over his mother's face, cutting off her air and snuffing her dead. Oh, he remembered that well. However, there was a new aspect to this memory. Something that Gerard had not yet felt. As he sat there, recalling how he shoved the gun into his brother's mouth, how he held the pillow over her face, he realized something that made him sick to the very depths of his being, something that made his skin crawl, his body shake, his stomach turn.

The memory made him feel good.

Not in just a superficial way either. When he remembered the power he had over those two humans, a sense of pride enveloped the man. When he thought of how limp the bodies had gone both times, a sense of pleasure had filled his veins. It was sick, sick, sick and wrong, but, oh, it was there.

And as Gerard sat on the bathroom floor and remembered he noticed a bulge on the crotch of his pants.

No.

Gerard cried out, clenching his eyes shut and screaming. No. No. This couldn't be. There was no way. He began to gag, pulling himself onto his knees and threw up for the third or forth time that day. There was nothing left in his stomach to throw up, so Gerard gagged his stomach wrenching as tears ran down his face.

He sat there for a moment, saliva running from his mouth onto the tiled floor, when he noticed the noise. It was all too familiar, a noise he had heard that very day. Gerard took a shallow breath, pressing a hand over his sore leg and stepped towards the open bathroom door leading to the rest of the dark house. The noise was clearer, but after all that and happened, how could Gerard be sure it was real? No. He was determined not to believe it was real. Not again. Limping terribly, he hobbled to the front door and pushed it open, sticking his head outside, and the sound annihilated his ears.

It was an air raid alarm.

Gerard began to panic again. The noise was piercing and utterly painful to his sensitive ears. Gerard glanced over his shoulder once into the dark and dead house. "Mikey..." He spoke to himself, remembering his brother's corpse laying on the dirt. No. There was no time to bury Mikey. Gerard knew he would not survive another bomb. He needed to move. Now.

So, Gerard set off, his new found limp drastically slowing him down as he hobbled down the street as quickly as he could. In his mind's eye, he recalled a large home and the outer ring of the suburb only a few blocks away. Gerard could recall from his days spent in this neighborhood how he had always loved that house, despite the protests his mother provided due to the overgrown lawn. It was so large and alone in the verdant yard, almost like an estate that didn't belong in the scroungy suburb.

Gerard cried to himself as he limped down the street, his eyes stuck to the ground. He stepped out puddles of people. His eyes sometimes caught fringes of burnt jackets or shoes, melted rubber sticking the asphalt, or limbs or body parts blown clean off, ears, fingers and legs. Occasionally, Gerard would limp over a full, bleeding body, and he'd meet their eyes, faces like wax, and in a moment of terror, he'd realize they were still alive, barely clinging to life. They weren't crying, begging or pleading. They only lay on the ground, staring at the man.

Gerard didn't offer help. He continued on, crying almost hysterically as the air raid siren resounded around him. There was nothing Gerard could do for the dying and dead. He realized he would much rather be one of them than how he was now clinging to life in a world destroyed and in despair, bodies covering the grounds. He would much rather be dead like his mother and brother and everybody else he had ever known.

He would much rather be dead.