Prompt: A story with a countdown
10 He opened his eyes, dazed. His surroundings seemed foreign to him, his head ached like he’d hit it before ending up on the cold floor, and he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was forgetting something very important as he shook the dust from his hair and stood. He brushed off his clothes, wondering how they had become stained with fine, white dust that stained his black jeans when he tried to brush it off. His attempts left him with big white stains on his jeans, and he shrugged. He didn’t know what he was doing here anyway, and frankly he didn’t care. So why bother looking like he cared? He looked around him. He realized that it looked like an abandoned warehouse, with the doors that must have once been painted grey, the small tiles on the floor and the large windows at one side. He walked over to them, but as his eyes adjusted to the lack of light, he realized that looking through the windows wouldn’t bring him anywhere. In fact, the windows were even more stained than his jeans, and no matter how hard he wiped them with his hand, even with his blouse, they wouldn’t clean. Then he remembered that he wasn’t supposed to care, and he turned his back to the window, searching his memories. The only thing he knew was that he didn't care about where he was. No, that wasn’t true. He wasn’t supposed to care. He was aware that he had a goal, and he knew that he would recognize the goal when he saw it. He didn’t ponder on that knowledge, didn’t wonder on what the goal could be. He realized that maybe, that was why they had chosen him to do this; he didn’t follow the usual thinking patterns. He knew enough. Yet he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was forgetting something, something important. 9 The man without memory, the man with a goal, wandered through the building. He tried to open every door he saw; sometimes with success, sometimes he had to leave them alone. One he managed to kick open, and he hadn’t been able to suppress the victorious feeling, that quickly had been replaced with disappointment as he looked into another empty room. He felt like kicking the door again, just to get rid of his frustration, but something told him that it wouldn’t help at all, and he refrained from it. Instead, he just returned to the previous room, knowing that he had to keep going. He opened another door, entering something that obviously had once been an office. It contained two desks, filled with cracked laptops, the remains of a stack of paper, and he could even see a small notepad that had once been yellow. There was a phone that had long stopped working, chairs that looked like they would fall apart if you even touched them, but something was missing. He wasn’t sure what, but it tied in with this nagging feeling that he was forgetting something. 8 The discovery to a staircase was his biggest yet, and it made him slightly excited, wondering if he was closer to discovering his goal. Filled with adrenaline, but also wary of whatever could come, he’d gone up, feeling like that was the way to go. He had no idea what floor he was on; unlike he had expected, there had been no signs whatsoever. He did, however, notice a slightly discoloured spot on the wall as he went up; obviously, there had once been a sign with the floor number. He shrugged. If it wasn’t there, it couldn’t be important. He wanted to go up all the way, but realized that going floor by floor would be the more sensible thing to do. He encountered more offices on the next floor, each one the same as the previous one, like offices usually were. But still he felt like every office missed something. It wasn’t the fact that the entire building was abandoned; he didn’t mind and he enjoyed the peace. Besides, the building would have been even stranger if it had been filled with businessmen and ringing phones, since everything inside was broken. But even like this, the building missed something; something each office should have, something he expected even in the hallways. But he couldn’t place it. It just left him worried. 7 He’d covered four floors right now, and hadn’t discovered anything. He didn’t feel like he was making progress, although in the strict sense of the word, he was. Instead, he felt like the opposite; like with every step, he was further away from his goal. But he didn’t have an alternative, and for the first time since waking up on that floor, he felt the slightest annoyance at his circumstances, at his lack of memories. The nagging feeling that he was forgetting something important didn’t help at all. Constantly, he felt like he was ignoring something, an aspect of his mission, and it didn’t make him the confident man he was at the first floor. But he kept going, since he didn’t have an alternative, couldn’t think of anything else, and because he knew that he could only achieve his goal if he kept going. 6 At the sixth floor, he felt a little more confident again. He felt like he was getting closer to his goal, like he was making progress again. Shortly, he wondered if it would have been more sensible to have skipped all those floors and go up immediately, and he wondered if his instinct had been right. The nagging feeling arose again, as he wondered, and so he pushed the thought aside, focussing instead on the next floor. It was different from the others. It seemed more luxury, with softer chairs, larger desks, more coffee machines, and even something that once could have been a fridge. The windows were larger but still didn’t give anything away. He thought of throwing something, of breaking the windows, but he knew his goal was inside this building, or he would have woken up outside. 5 The eighth floor didn’t contain offices, but conference rooms. The rooms were large, filled with long tables, something he guessed once had been microphones, the floor was covered in tapestry and there were paintings on some walls. In the front of each room stood a high desk, something that he associated with important people and speeches. He associated with a life he would never want to have, which made him leave the floor quickly. Whatever his goal was, it wasn’t here. 4 The floor above that didn’t get much attention from the man, either. It had once been a cafeteria, he assumed; and whatever had happened here, the food had been left behind. He regretted opening the door as soon as he did, and slammed it shut immediately. The smell was terrible. 3 He went up another floor, resisting the urge to try and see how many floors there were left; he knew he couldn’t see it anyway. He approached the door more carefully this time, the stench of the floor below him still apparent in his nose. But to his surprise, the door refused to open, no matter how hard he tried or how many kicks he threw at the door. He didn’t even stop to wonder if the goal could lie behind closed doors, but turned his back and went up the stairs again. The nagging feeling was gone, had been replaced by the need to keep going, keep going higher until he found his goal. For the first time since waking up, he felt like something was pushing him forward, but he couldn’t identify it. All he knew was that he had to keep going before he found out what the nagging feeling was about. 2 The stairs had more steps this time; opposed to the earlier thirty, he had now already had sixty steps and he was still going. Excitement grew, adrenaline joined the game; the man now knew three things. He had a goal, he would recognize the goal if he was there, and he was close to the goal. He knew a fourth thing, too, as he kept going on the seemingly endless stairs: he was forgetting something. He could only hope it wasn’t vital. 1 He reached the end of the stairs, after 171 steps. His breathing was slightly ragged, but that was the only thing that betrayed the long stairs that now lay behind him. He wasn’t really surprised to find that this was the end of the stairs, that he had reached the top floor. He knew that he had been right all this time; his goal lay at the top floor. He’d been wasting time with checking out every floor below him. He opened the last door, a blue one this time, the first colour he’d seen here, to reveal a blinding light. He stood for a moment as his eyes adjusted, when he realized what he had just been thinking. He had been wasting time. Time. And just like that, he knew what had been missing in the offices. There were no clocks, nowhere. That was what the nagging feeling was about; time. He’d been running out of time- 0
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Prompt: A story that starts with a gunshot
A loud bang echoed through the empty warehouse and the bright haired girl dove for cover, ignoring the impact on her body as she crashed on the ground. She quickly sat up, hiding behind a cart filled with boxes, her gun out, knowing she needed better cover. She looked around, saw a car, ran towards it while shooting at her attacker. She hadn’t been alone her, but everyone else seemed to have cleared out in the last few minutes before everything went to hell. She reached the car safely, her constant shots making her attacker unable to fire at her. She pulled more ammo from her backpack, easily accessing the pocket at the side, quickly reloading. She really, really needed to stop doing this. She was getting too old for this bullshit. She was twenty-five for fuck’s sake! She fell on her stomach, eyeing the floor from underneath the car. There. Feet, moving rapidly but silently towards her. She aimed, pulled the trigger, hitting the foot. At the same time, she caught movement towards her right, but it didn’t worry her. She knew only one person here was aiming to kill her, the rest were just enjoying the show. She got up, straightened up, aimed and shot her attacker in his shoulder, and then, as he went down, in the other hand. She never killed anyone; but it wasn’t her fault if they weren’t able to get help soon enough. If he was smart, he’d stop the bleeding and call 911; maybe he even had some friends around to do that for him. If he couldn’t do any of that, well, too bad then, it wasn’t her fault. Well, not directly. And it wasn’t as if she’d shot him in cold blood; he’d been shooting at her too, the bastard. She walked towards the man, kicking his cap off and meeting surprisingly dark eyes, filled with hate. She kicked his gun away, and then saw something grabbed tightly in his hand. A trigger. Her eyes widened and the man grinned, as he pushed the button. Nothing happened. Not yet. Delay. A few seconds maybe. She yelled: “BOMB”, nobody else needed to die because of this. Then she took off, counting the seconds, unsure of how many she had but sure it were too little. From her right, someone took off too and somewhere she realized that she had indeed not been alone. But she was mostly focused on running. She skidded through the hallway, and at nineteen seconds jumped at a window. The figure running behind her did so too, slightly earlier than she, as she heard class shatter at eighteen seconds. At nineteen, she jumped and more glass shattered. At twenty, before she even hit the ground, she could feel the air thrusting her further into the sky, she felt the warmth behind her, getting too hot to be comfortable. She kept counting as she curled into a ball in the sky, seeing the other figure already in a ball hiding behind a car. At twenty-two, she hit the ground. Hard. At twenty-four she couldn’t see a hand before her eyes. She held her breath and didn’t dare to move as bricks, glass and all other sorts of stuff fell around her, sometimes on her. At thirty-five she opened her eyes again, not realizing she’d closed them. It didn’t make a difference, the world was black with smoke around her. She could hear the fire, and knew she needed to get out of here. At forty, she stood again, falling down when a piece of wood or stone hit her in the back. At forty-two she put her arms over her head protectively as another bomb exploded, in another part of the building. At forty-nine, she felt something. Someone was tugging at her arm. She opened her eyes, saw a man standing there, pointing to something, his mouth moving. At fifty-one she realized she couldn’t hear a thing except a beep. At fifty-three, the man helped her up and she ignored the pain as she followed him through the smoke. At one minute and three seconds, they reached the parking lot and the smoke was slightly less. She breathed. The man pointed to a car and his mouth moved again. She just shook her head and pointed to her ears. He nodded, understandingly, and used his finger to write something in the dust that was now everywhere. “Got a car. Let’s get out of here before the cops show.” She nodded and got into said car. At two minutes and thirty-two seconds, they were out of the smoke, on the driveway, and slowly her hearing returned. At three minutes exactly, the man spoke. “Can you hear me now?” She nodded. “Not great, but yeah. Thanks.” He shrugged, keeping his eyes on the road. “If you hadn’t called out I would have been in pieces now. So thank you.” “Hadn’t expected that one. Was kinda surprising. I should have seen it though.” He glanced at her quickly but waited for an explanation. She didn’t give one. Instead, she repeated herself. “I’m getting too old for this bullshit.” The man beside her laughed. “Cheers to that, mate. Let me buy you a drink. To celebrate that we survived. After we get those nasty cuts cleaned up.” She pulled a mirror from the battered backpack and realized that indeed, she had some nasty cuts. The throbbing in her back returned and she suddenly regretted that his car interior was now smeared with blood, apologizing to him. “Don’t worry, it’s not the first time,” he said, as he parked at a small gas station and reached behind his chair to reveal two bottles of whiskey and a first aid box. She accepted a bottle and took a big swig, and he copied her movements. “Time to get a real job, huh? Some desk work, settling down, leaving the gun behind. Not jumping from exploding buildings anymore.” She laughed, and took another swig. “I’d never leave this behind.” The man nodded in agreement. “Me neither. Cheers to gunshots and explosions.” |
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February 2017
About meWelcome to my blog! This is where I post my stories, occasionally accompanied by personal thoughts. I always post short stories, as I keep the longer ones for myself. My stories are often based on songs. I listen to music a lot (mostly pop punk / punk rock), and often get inspired by melodies, lyrics, or music videos. |