Our Extinction

Chapter Nine

I stood up, the reality sinking in of what I did. I had really killed a man.

Everything was focused in one small spot, like my vision was folding in. The spot where the president died was slowly filling in with more blood, clashing with the darker stains around him.

I still had the glass weapon in my hand, couldn't let go of it. It just shook, almost as bad as the dead people on the floor had. What else was I going to do with it? Who else would I hurt? 

I looked fearfully around, and saw the blond guy slowly come near me. I remembered him from somewhere... I remembered seeing him around the city, maybe. 

What was his name? Migel? Miles? No. Michael. I turned away from him, and started sobbing. There were four little girls in the corner. Wait, two of them were boys. One of them pointed at me, and they quickly walked away from me.

Michael kept following me, and tried to grab me, but I screamed at him to go away, that I was a monster. He didn't seem to understand. He said something, but I couldn't make out the words. 

What monster had I become?

My chest started to hurt, and my breathing was ragged and shallow as hot tears spilled over my cheeks. I knelt down, everything swirling around me. I covered my face with my hands. Nothing mattered anymore. The blood on my hands, the corpses of dead people, their ashen faces right below my own body. None of it mattered. Only the fact that I was a monster, that I shouldn't be here. That I should be dead.

I held up the glass piece, and put it to my own throat. I pushed down, ever so slightly, and a few drops of dark red blood hit my knee. A sharp pain that cut into me, and I sucked in my breath and screamed. 

The haze cleared around me, and I jerked my neck back and fell to the floor. I was able to drop the knife. My hands were cut and bloody, scrapped from the glass.

I stood up, and kicked a dead body away from my knee. Its grey face flipped up, and my blood curdled. It was a little boy, no more than seven. I had seen him around town, laughing. He was always smiling. And now he was dead. My heart hammered, my head pounded, and I threw up on his face. 

I turned away and walked toward a body-less section, where Michael and two of the kids were working to move bodies. The other kids, two boys maybe ten and twelve, were crying on the floor. The two girls, probably five and seven, were asking questions, but were too young to cry. Michael himself had tears on his face, but he was otherwise quiet.

There were piles of three to ten people, with single bodies scattered.

"Hey." I said, my voice shaking.

"Hey." He said back.

"Why aren't the piles even?"

"We sort them into families, if we can place them." He pointed to a pile of bodies almost five times as large as the others. "That pile is for the people we can't recognize, or people who didn't have family still alive." His face as he said it was sad, as if he personally knew and loved every single person in the piles. 

My gut twisted. What if I died? Would I be in that pile?

"What... What will we do with them?" Leaving them here just didn't sit right with me.

"Burn them, and bury the ashes." he said simply. "At least, when we get out."

"Umm.. About that. How are we supposed to get out?" I asked him.

"I don't know." he said, his eyebrows bunching up. The absolute absurdity of the situation was laughable. We had come this far to only be defeated by a wall less than a foot thick.