Darkness Englulfing

Chapter Five

Katherine

Her eyes opened again, and for a brief moment she closed them. She didn't want to open them to find herself in prison or something after what she had just experiences. Katherine prayed, saying to herself over and over that what she had just been through had been a second dream. A terrible, super realistic dream. That she would open her eyes in just a few moments and she would see Lilly laying her bed across the room. The younger girl's eyes would be closed and her mouth would be open slightly, breathing softly. Lilly would stretch and her eyes would open. She would get an offended look on her face when the sun got into her eyes and she would sigh before getting up and going downstairs to go and get some breakfast.

Katherine hoped that is what she would open her eyes to.

Prayed.

But of course, that is not what she saw when her eyes focused on her surroundings a second or two after she opened them.

She was laying in a bed, the stench of the room around her pushing into her nose. She retched as she sat up, covering her nose with her hand to try and block the terrible smell from invading her senses. It was dulled but still noticeable and Katherine didn't take a good look at the room she was sleeping in, she just went through the door to get out as soon as possible.

The hallway that she moved into was dangerously made. The walls seemed to be on the verge of falling down. The area where the walls met was covered in mold, and there were more than a few loose wood panels on the ceiling. The smell was less noticeable out here, but she was still able to sense it. It disgusted her and she made her way out of the small hallway and out into what she thought would be fresh air.

The smell was worse outside of the house. Finally admitting that she wouldn't be able to escape from it, she cursed to herself before getting another close look at her surroundings.

She was still wearing the clothing that she had put on at the hospital, which was surprising considering she was definitely nowhere in the same vicinity as that hospital. The clothes were covered in grime, considering where she had awaken, and it sort of gave her a sense of happiness that she had managed to destroy the pristineness of the clothing from that hospital. The amount that the hospital had been clean, this place was disgusting. Katherine knew enough about missions to guess that these two things were from completely different universes. She didn't know how or why this was happening, but if she really was travelling between universes there would be nothing that she could do to stop it.

The sky seemed normal. That was a weird observation for Katherine to make but she had heard stories of officials waking up in worlds with bright purple skies year-round. It was something that really intrigued Katherine, but the blue of the sky comforted her in that moment. It was an inch of similarity in a mile of uncertainty.

The houses that lined the dirt street seemed just as likely to crumble as the building she had just came out of. One of them even didn't have a roof, just a small metal plate that was rusted and definitely didn't stop water from getting into the small house. Though Katherine was confused and was suffering from the constant odor that she couldn't escape from, she felt bad for the people who lived in these houses. She didn't know if they were slaves or workers, but she knew that having to live in this environment would be terrible, and her heart clenched at the thought of having to go through that.

That is when she saw the exact people she was thinking about. They were standing in a field about half a mile away. They were farming, or at least some version of it, but stabbing these wooden sticks into the ground and bringing up food and then placing it into a basket. She watches for a while as they stab the food, and thinks about GenU. She had never seen any sort of farming, as it was all done in factories. She had always wondered how they had gotten their food, but it never occurred to her that at one point in time everyone in a town had to work together to survive, to eat.