I Woke Up...

After crashing the car into the guardrail, after losing control in the rain, you come to with your face pressed against the steering wheel. There is a blinking noise in the car, and the sound of the wipers. You watch rain hit the window that you are facing. You are alive, you can breathe—you breathe hard… You try to sit up, and you can—the car is smashed up—the left side of the front end is mangled and there is no way you can drive it. You look into the rear-view mirror—the thing that is after you is not back there, yet. You slide over to the passenger-side door and get out of the car, run across the highway, over the rail, and into the woods. You pulled a muscle in your right thigh—you can ignore it, but you are aware of the pain, and that you will need to hide this sign of weakness from the thing.

You eventually come upon the house. It is no longer raining. You must have walked for an hour. You look behind you. You can’t see it, but you can feel it approaching. The house looks condemned. You stare it at like that is what’s going to save your life, like someone told you to stare at it. You run towards it—no matter what’s inside, you should just get there fast. Walls might help you hide better, get away better. You find an open doorway at the opposite side of the house—meaning, it’s not boarded up like the others. You take out your dying cell phone and use it as a light, then you step into the black room before you. It smells mildew-y. You immediately bump into something. It is a couch. Moving your light around, adjusting to the darkness, you realize it is some huge living room that is now some huge storage room, full of tables, boxes, furniture, gadgets, shiny things, weird-looking things. You notice a dark, open doorway several feet across the room, straight ahead, but blocked, sometimes up to your neck, in debris. You have to get over there. You look back, at the doorway you just came through, and, hitting its mark, you hear the thing yell. It is like a bragging sound mixed with an angry sound, like an animal mixed with something you’ve never heard of before. Something that isn’t supposed to exist, not in the way that you do, the real-life way.You start  to climb over the debris in a hurry, disregarding any splinters, banging your shins into things, not as quiet as you could be, panting, probably as terrified someone could be without actually being insane, trying to hold the cell phone. You trip over a pipe of some kind, cry out, bash your head against an end-table, fall to the ground, just as the open doorway, the one you were struggling toward, slams shut. A door, out of nowhere, banging hard into place, someone on the other side of it keeping you out. Something on the other side of it keeping you in here.

When it steps into the doorway, the one you came in, your head is dizzy and you can barely move. You are still panting, but you know that this is it. You aren’t going anywhere else after this. You’ve done as much alive as you are going to ever do.

As it barrels toward you, you do the oddest thing. You check your cell phone to see if he ever texted you back. The thing is upon you, tearing into you, before you even get the chance to discover that he hasn’t.