Death's Awakening

Chapter Ten: Crash

The microwave dinged and Crash rolled his chair across the cement floor, barely taking his eyes off his monitors. He threw the pizza onto a paper plate, grabbed a Sprite from the mini-fridge and rolled back to his desk.

Each of his six large computer monitors showed something different, but everywhere he looked, the news was the same. The chatter amongst other doomsday preppers was that cases of this new super-flu had been reported from coast-to-coast and everywhere in between.

The prepper forums and underground news sites claimed absurd numbers of hospitalizations in big cities like New York and Houston and Chicago, but the major news networks and health organizations were denying it.

Even social sites like Twitter and YouTube had started blowing up with hits for this virus. Those who knew about it were scared as hell.

Crash opened a new browser and entered a ten-digit password. A second password box popped up, but instead of entering a new one, he clicked on the tiny icon of a bomb hidden in the bottom left corner. He needed to talk to his buddy Atomic. If anyone would know something that was more off-the-grid, it would be him.

He entered a message on the secret forum and waited for his friend to appear. It could be minutes or it could be hours. He never really knew.

Crash leaned back, putting his hands behind his head and stretching. He hadn't left his apartment in a couple days. Not since that grocery store fiasco. But that wasn't really all that different from normal. He had enough food and water and other essentials stocked up to last him and four others nearly six months if it came down to that.

He grabbed the TV remote and flipped on the big-screen on the other side of the small basement apartment. He scanned the headlines running across CNN's ticker, but there was no mention of a deadly virus or a super-flu that had hospitals backlogged. Why were they keeping this shut down so tight?

He ran a nervous hand through his already-messy black hair. It was probably about time for a haircut, but he didn't care. He'd been out on his own for two years already, which meant no mom to nag him about getting his hair cut or tying his shoes or getting out in the sunshine every once in a while. That last one had been his favorite. His mom had always been nagging him about getting outside. She said it wasn't good for an Asian boy to be so pale.

Crash laughed at the memory, but then shook it off. Now was not the time to get sad about his mom's death. He really needed to figure out what was really going on out there. He opened his favorite forum again and started reading through the latest thread about the virus.

Some people were convinced this was a government conspiracy, like something out of some low-budget movie about the end of the world. A deadly government experiment-gone-wrong or some shit.

Others seemed to think it was the next Black Death and that a third of the population was already screwed. That's why the news wasn't reporting it. The virus spread so fast that by the time anyone knew what was happening, it was already too late to really prevent anyone else from getting sick. If they came out now and told the truth about it, riots might break out and people would be too scared to go to work. Society would shut down faster than a church on judgment day.

So far, no one had really come up with any real evidence. As usual, these forums were all about speculation and wild-ass guesses.

He spun around in his chair. His mind was spinning just as fast.

This was exactly the kind of thing that had been haunting his dreams for the last two years. When his mom died, the state sent him to live with a foster family because there was no one else he could stay with. He was first generation Japanese-American and almost all of his family was still in Japan. So, even though he was already fifteen when his mom died and even though he'd been basically taking care of himself since he was five and his mom started working two jobs because his piece-of-crap dad skipped out on them, the state made him go live with a foster family.

That's when the dreams started.

It wasn't like he dreamed the exact same thing every night. They were more like variations on a theme. The end of the world brought on by a deadly virus.

But sometimes, they felt like more than just dreams. They felt like warnings.

After a few weeks of screaming his head off in the middle of the night, his foster family had forced him to go see a therapist. A total quack who claimed his dreams were nothing more than a manifestation of his fear of being abandoned. It made sense, sure. His dad had abandoned him as a child and now his mother had done the same thing. Even if it was cancer that took his mom away, it still sort of felt like abandonment.

But Crash knew there was more to it than that. The dreams were too real. Too terrifying. Then there was the matter of the others. Four others who would somehow find their way to him.

And now it was all coming true.

Crash took one bite of his food, then set it aside. He needed answers about what was really going on out there.

He slid his chair back up to his desk and started a new message.

The clock in the corner of the screen read two-fifteen a.m.

Thank you for reading! Next week's chapters are the most intense so far, so I hope you'll come back Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for updates!