the Troubled

Chapter Two: A Burglar in my Bedroom (Not Like That)

The electricity went out. We sat there for a moment in silence, and I, for one, was dumb struck. I looked over at Sean from the corner of my eye, I had sat down on the couch, though I didn't remember doing it.

''Did that just happen?'' He asked.

I nodded slowly, starting to process. Slowly. Did I mention that already?

''Shit.'' He said, and I nodded again. ''Well, say something Nick!'' Oh yeah, that's me by the way, Nicoletta MacAulay, should have mentioned that before.

''Okay,'' I said, and let out a long breath, ''we should try calling someone.''

''Right. Okay. Yeah, I'll go phone your mouse. Mom - house! I'll go phone your house.'' He seemed steadier now that he had a purpose, but still a little freaked out. Then again, I would be worried if he wasn't. He got up and grabbed his cell phone from the other room, following after him, I saw that he was holding it in his hand, just staring at it. ''Give me that,'' I snapped, (I've never been the most patient of souls) grabbing it from his hand and started to dial my home number, but is phone was dead. Must be out of battery, I thought. ''Maybe it was just a prank.'' I didn't say anything, we both knew that what we had seen on TV hadn't been a prank, so I didn't see much point in saying it aloud.

Another lair of nerves was added to my gut with each second that we stood around doing nothing, so I ran into the kitchen to get his house phone, and repeated the process. But there wasn't a dial tone. I turned to see that he had followed behind me. ''Crap,'' he mumbled, ''I guess it's the apocalypse.''

He was right in a way; the actual definition of 'apocalypse' is any revelation, or disclosure. And we sure had had a revelation. Or those of us that survived anyway. I'm getting too far ahead of myself. Okay, now I'm back on topic, so what had apparently happened was this: the satellites had stopped working. And the internet. And the phones. Like, all of them. Or, that is to say, all the ones that I was aware of. Because there was no means of long distance communication (other than the ancient art of letter writing), I didn't know that for sure. About three weeks later we learned officially what had happened. It was, well, it was what I said, all the satellites were out, no one really knew what was wrong with them, since there was no sure fire way of checking on them without sending a probe out there, but that was impossible (I don't actually know if probe is the correct word to use in this situation) for obvious reasons. I mean, shit, there was this kid who lived on my street who had a remote controlled car, and we couldn't even make that thing work. But alas, the world went on, stumbling at first, but picking up speed after a while, even though it really only took a few months, we grew accustomed to this strange, and seemingly unexplainable change. Life goes on, it always does, for some. The monsters became more prevalent, it got to a point where one couldn't go a week without seeing one, but still I had never heard of someone speaking to them, they stayed relatively apart from society, always something that you would see out of the corner of your eye, or when you were walking to work, or sometimes, when you were alone at home one would appear , but when you backed out of the room, when you came back in it would be gone. Of course there were the cases of someone trying to shoot a monster, or going at one with a baseball bat, stuff like that. Funny thing is, the shot always went wide, and if you were to try to hit one with something, a baseball bat, a chair, or cat, it always ended up embedded in a wall or something. It goes without saying that people basically started an unofficial buddy program, no one ever walked anywhere alone, and it wasn't considered wise to be out past dark, even though I had never heard of a monster attacking somebody, or making any kind of threatening move towards someone at all, people were still scared. Why wouldn't they be? Simply because something hadn't happened yet didn't mean that nothing would happen in the future, an idea that humans have just started to grasp.

When I woke up I had no idea of why I had. I'm usually a very deep sleeper, so this was somewhat of a personal cataclysm.

Breath on my face,

I opened my mouth to scream but a hand descended over it before I could. I tried to bite the hand, but a voice stopped me.

''Shh, I'm not going to hurt you now.''

I didn't miss the now, but there was something about the tone that stilled me. The voice was on the deep side, and definitively male, but there was something off about it. I started to struggle, my hands tangled in the covers, but once again that voice stopped me, ''Hey, you're safe, safe now.'' and I understood what was weird about it. It was in my head.