Excerpt: Fractured

When his breathing slowed and his lungs heaved only as fast as they might after an afternoon jog cut short in time, but not in distance, and for fear of impending rain, he looked up and tried to take in his surroundings. The first thing he saw was that nothing looked like it had been taken care of at any point in recent history. For starters, he realized that was truly in what could only be part of a room of what might have once been only a half constructed building. He couldn’t tell if it was supposed to have been a bedroom, a bathroom, or a storage closet, but it was certainly an incomplete husk, a fragment of a destitute structure that now housed only a poor excuse for a mattress, some junk, and an unshaven man in jeans that had seen better days and a badly fitted tank top that could have been some shade of white when it was still in the package however many years ago.

He got to his feet, standing with some hesitation in shoes that fit in a way that made him think that they were either purchased at a thrift store or not his shoes at all. They were tight and loose in all of the wrong places and he noticed it immediately, probably because his socks were worn paper thin in the heels and toes and he could almost feel the insoles on his skin for it. His jeans cracked as he moved, caked in a dark, dried substance that could have been dirt, blood, or a number of other mysterious things that he didn’t care to consider or investigate further at the moment. Pants and shoes of any kind would have to suffice for the moment and he figured that if they were still his prime concern at a later time he could try to exchange them for more sanitary and practical clothing when the opportunity arose.

The disheveled boards of the shattered room creaked under his first footstep and it was only then that he realized there had been no other sounds besides his own up until that point. In the presence of one noise, he noticed the absence of all others. There was no wind blowing idly across the land, there were no voices arguing, ordering food, or discussing the weather and last night’s featured sports teams, and there was no sound of traffic nearby or in the distance. He found that if he listened hard enough, he could almost hear his bile beginning to sizzle under the hot sun between the boards at his feet. He could feel the sound of sweat fighting against dehydration, trying to escape from every pore on his skin. The world was silent except for only the sounds that his existence was responsible for.

It was then that he realized, not through what he saw but instead through some twisted mix of intuition and innate, unconscious perception, that everyone here was dead. Through that same sense, he understood that he was somehow involved. He didn’t know if he had been responsible or not, but he was the only one left alive, so his actual guilt or innocence would not have mattered to anyone else; it would have been a great stretch of imagination to consider that someone besides him had done it. His heart raced, but he didn’t know what to do.

He barely had time to notice the first agonizingly posed corpse before a hard bulge in the right front pocket of his jeans began to vibrate and scream. Against the prior and relative silence, the ring tore the air in two and split his eardrums, though it would have hardly been louder than a speaking voice on public transportation in the rest of the world. Instinctively, he quickly reached his hands into his pocket and drew the object out. Reading the word, “Restricted” in illuminated letters on one side, he eyed the cell phone skeptically as he opened it.