Nightwood.

Chapter 1.

# nightwood #

            

I ran through the empty hallways, gasping for air, as the oxygen in the building dropped to an all time low. They were after me again. The Marked. The universe's most evil and cruel creatures. I needed to get out of the building into something airier, but the Marked behind me ensured I wouldn't. A bolt of pain rushed through my body as I felt the electified spear rebound from my skin. Thank God for In-penetrable  jackets, I thought. But a skeletal hand caught me and I knew it was all over. The creature poked my face with a syringe and it stung like a bee. And as my eyes closed quietly, I heard someone else scream too. Jake, I thought, and collapsed onto the floor.

I woke up on the ice cold floor  of something which resembled an execution  cell. It was the ugliest room I had been in all my life. There was a leaking drainage in the room and I had been next to it all the while. And then it struck me. After 15 years of running away from the Marked, I was finally captured. This was just the gateway to suicide.

My thoughts turned to Jake as I remembered his scream echoing through the halls of the old hospital. We had hidden seperately, but secretly I was happy we were going to die together. Jake is my stronghold, and I have the power. We are a two man team and we are inseparable. but the oxygen level dropping in the hospital was no accident. The Marked clearly knew about my power, the secret that had helped us survive through the years. All our lives really.

I can't explain the power in simple words, but I'll try . It revolves mainly around the ability to transfer energy from one source of power to another, just by thought. It always worked, ever since I burnt the glass window of my foster home at the age of five. I was staring at the tubelight, eager to find a way to escape and shifted my gaze to a window which shattered into a thousand pieces. I fainted immediately. But ever since, Ive successfully used my power to escape and almost for everything, but after all the power was drained out of me, I would either collapse or have a series of terrible convulsions. The latter stopped occuring, thankfully. but i'd still collapse and therefore I never worked alone. Jake is my strength, and the moment he knew I was drained out , he'd lift me up with one hand and leave the other hand ready for battle.

I fervently wished he was alive.

there was no one in the room, but there were no means of escaping either. There were no windows. There was absolutely no furniture and all I could actually infer from the room was that someone had definitely died there, judging by the blood stained walls.

There was no electrical appliance around , which made my power non-existant. so I sat and waited, knowing that whatever lay in my future would have a great part to do with  the Marked.

The Marked are the reason for everything. They don't even originate from Earth. They are ugly aliens who found the disintegrity amongst humanity intriguing and fascinating and targeted us. we were weak so it wasn't much of a surprise that we wouldn't last long. Wars were raging , people were dying , and everyday the only thing you'd hear was bad news . People lived in fear and there was a sharp cut between the rich and the common poor. The rich got richer in wealth and poorer in stability and the economy of the whole world collapsed before we knew it. the world was filled with misery and terrorism was nowhere near stopping. People killed people , religions killed other religions, they fought for land, money, food, water, weapons practically everything. who would not target a race that was so divided amongst themselves? As the aliens took over, every human, rich or poor had to bow down to their superiority. Some humans were even given jobs as 'maters' and had to bear the alien - human child. It disgusted everyone but nobody had the right to object or speak against it . If you were chosen, you had to abide. The rest of the humans usually worked in strange factories, ones that produced this strange toxic gas called Surcion that the Marked live on. surcion destroyed every plant and tree that ever existed. but realising that torturing our race was fun,  the aliens gave us oxygen cylinders to live on. Nothing could grow outside , so they started growing crops in factories. We were tortured and the torture will never stop. There was no difference between the rich and the poor, and every city of every country , was taken over by the Marked. Nothing of humanity remained. The Marked took advantage of our advancements, used our own technology against us and added variety of their own. Televisions broadcasted Marked serials everyday, and they even had their own newspapers. The cities were rebuilt according to their convenience and everything looked ugly. People say the earth was beauutiful once and had a deep blue sky and was a lush of green and blue, but the marked certainly changed everything. Trees didnt exist . all animals were killed for feeding the ravenous marked children. And the sky was yellow.

The Marked have a way of looking different. The usually pure bred marked look like humans, except that there is something wrong with the alignment of their features. Their eyes are too wide apart , their lips are like slits and their noses don't exist at all. And on one side of their face, they have a strange black mark which oozes goo when they're angry.

It sickens me. everything does . But that was all I have ever known. Nobody speaks of humanity before the Marked, it's like clinging to an impossible dream.

  And after so many years of living secretly, of stealing food from factories,  of surviving in an underground tunnel, Jake and I were overthrown by the demons. It was such a mistake, such a twist of fate when we decided to start living in the abandoned hospital.

At first it was quite the place. 

With all those wretched creatures walking around on their disfigured legs holding

Weapons of murder , nothing felt more like home. We stacked up food into every room,  which was all stolen from factories owned by the enemy.  It wasn't bad at all. Until the marked got desperate to fluctuate . That's how we got captured.

It was the longest night of my life. I could hear nothing and I was beginning to wonder how i was breathing in the room. There were no windows . It depressed me and  it was as if all the sadness had just been born there. And then i heard noises. The familiar thud of footsteps seemed to draw nearer and nearer to me. I was terrified. I didnt even try ti eacape becausr i knew there was no simple way to . After all those years of surviving I gave in to this?  I closes my eyes and looked at the blank ceiling praying that they wouldn't enter. And then the door opened.