Systematic Hearts

{ 25 }

My boots clunking on the cement, my vision blurring. I have no more than one street to go, but it feels like an eternity away with two toddlers embraced in my arms, clinging to my hips. One step after another. The fog still closing the city down. The fog, like a blanket, has covered the city into a dark world. No one that was in the fog will survive, and that blankets me into an even darker world.

As if someone flipped the switch the fog moves in on me even faster. Faster than I can move. It gets faster and faster. I break into a run. As good a run as I can get. Somewhere between ten and fifteen people remain on the side, the rest must have fled the limits not knowing the fogs would stop there. Not only is the fog feet from me, I still have kids on my hips. I have lives on my hips. I stare at the hazy images standing on the limits screaming at me. I scream back. I scream until I see one, Alice I think, hear the words I scream. She holds her arms, I think she nods. I swallow, chuck the young boy as far as I can throw it. The boy doesn't make it to her arms but she scurries to him. Someone else takes him outside the limit lines. The girl still on my shoulder. She refuses to let go. "Please," my voice, I plead with her.

"Protect me, you said so." She whines. She wants me to. She already lost so much. She lost her parents. She watched them die. I stare at her in the eyes.

"I know, I know, this is how." I rasp out. "This is how I protect you." She nods but won't let go.

Now I have to make it. I run as fast as I can, I run like I no one can stop me. My head pounding with each step. The lack of water clawing its way through my throat. I am within five steps I can feel myself falling, tripping. I fling the girl away from my shoulder and twist her dirty body around to my back just in time to hear the crash of my body on the cement, the impact of the girl into the padding of my back, instead of the cement. Relief floods over me even though I feel the crushed bones in my body.

I have no idea if I made it over the limits as the pain overwhelms what's left of my vision and I fade into black.

...

I feel awake, but all I see is white, like a crisp page of a book I never had. I sit there trying to actually wake up, move even, but I can't. Am I dead? It slaps me in the face bringing tears to my eyes, am I dead? No, no, I'm not dead. I didn't die. Maybe passed out, but not dead. The white surrounding is bringing back the haunted screams of the horrid city. No one in the fogs survived.

No one in the fogs survived.

No one in the fogs survived.

Was I beyond the limits or was I stuck there, my crushed bones, with the girl that clung to me. I can see my limp body. As if it is hovering above me, waiting for me to grab it. But I can't move. I can't lift a single finger. All I want is to grab my own hand and get out of the paralyzingly white that keeps me hostage.

My body from the street disappears altogether, the whit swallowing me once again. I try squirming, I try lifting just a toe. But nothing works. I try kicking. I even try screaming, but no sound comes out. I am helpless, I am stuck in this oblivious white world. Three tears trickle down my face, falling and falling, never hitting a surface. One more year slips out until it is all black again.

Maybe I am dying.

White to black. And I can't think...
No more...
My brain is bubbles...
Being popped.

I am being lost, once again, by my own self.

...

The pain thrashing within me rips its way through my body. The bones that were broken, crushed by the blonde haired girl, that I don't know the name of, poking at the thin skin sitting on my back. The world is still black. It is more comforting then white, although I can feel the brutal pain running under my fingers.

...

The world is showing itself to me again. Showing the gray blanket of sky folding over me. At first, I panic and scream of fogs, but calmed down by the people before me. No one in the fogs can survive, no one in the fogs can survive.

The blonde girl sits at my feet. It looks as though she hasn't left me, her hair still matted to her face with new fresh tears, but the same dirt, the same memory. I try to sit up and reach to comfort her, but screams of agony come instead. My screams. I hadn't even moved and the fire burning within my cracked bones engulfed my body. The blonde girl runs away to a shadow. A girl is coming back with her, over to me. It is Alice, "Shhh. Shhh. You're okay, you are going to be fine, just don't move okay? Many of your bones are crushed." She smiles a sympathy smile at me. Her brown read hair blowing in the wind thy chills my crushed bones.

She tells me once again to be still, as the little blonde girl gives her a bowl. She feeds me, the warm liquid warming my insides, but giving the pain even more fire. Tears spring to my eyes. As they do to Alice's.

Tears from true pain. My head pounding, the tears coming silently, too tired to make a sound. Once again I fade into the white and black worlds, no longer feeling the pain in my body, but in my heart. The image of my my sister with tears for me is more painful than the pain within me. I don't want to leave her. I don't want to let the little blonde girl go. I don't want to die without seeing my mother and father, and making sure they made it across the city limits. I do not want to leave my little rebellion, or the boy I fell in love with. The boy I was supposed to fall in love with. I do not want to leave my life behind for this terrible white world, in which I cannot move.

The thought occurs to me; this is the in between. Not death. Not life. Maybe I would like the after world. If there even is one.

But right now, I would prefer life.

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Thanks for 500 views! And for reading!
I am thinking about going back to those really short chapters in the beginning and through out the book and adding stuff to them to make them longer, I feel like the past two chapters have been a better length. And if I can't think of anything to add, then I might just combine them with another chapter. What do you think?
Thanks

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