The evening sun melted into the dark horizon of the city. The sticky air in the apartment like a damp cloth held over your face. Dirty clothes and half-eaten bags of chips strewn along the floor in a spiderweb of filth. The cat that wasn’t yours turned in circles, being eaten by the creaky, too-soft bed. You stood at the doorway to the bathroom, face dripping with water. Sick to your stomach from the taste of mint in your mouth. Kicking an empty box of caramels out of the way, you sat at your scratched desk. Patting your face dry, you squeezed on moisturizer, but got some in your mouth. It tasted terrible. You trudged to the light switch, watching the sky darken, no stars. The city lights were not lightning bugs, twinkling and fluttering from one end of the sky to the next. They were a wildfire, a nightly inferno, warm and blinding. You put your finger on the switch, glancing at the light fixture on your peeling ceiling. But you took your finger off the switch, leaving the bulb radiating in the corner. You flopped onto the sinking, creaky, too-soft bed, frightening the cat that wasn’t yours. You didn’t tuck yourself in. The cat kneaded your side, claws lovingly pricking the soft skin on your stomach. A sting crawled up your throat, and you snatched the metal bowl on your nightstand, vomiting up whatever you had eaten in the last few hours. The taste laid a film on your teeth. Sour and sick. The cat’s rough tongue rinsed your hair, you hugged her as she purred. But she wasn’t yours. Eyes open, lights on. You stared for hours until you slipped into a restless sleep.

Sweat dripped off your back when you jolted awake. Your mouth, still bitter. The cat, still by your side. Still untucked from the heavy covers. The digital clock that screamed sat resting next to the metal bowl. It woke you too early again. Smacking the top to silence it, you heard a crack, and you tucked yourself in, and you pulled the cat close. You woke in the morning, and the lights were on. The sun returning, the fire of the city journeying back to its home in the sky. You were soaked in sweat, the too-soft bed an overnight ocean you’d nearly drowned in. Peeling away the blankets, opening your stuck eyes and feeling your sticky mouth, you wobbled out of bed. Toes knocking into miscellaneous trash. Collecting dust. You called for the cat, but she was gone. The sunken indent in the sheets serving as a ghost of her presence. A pit churned in your stomach; she shouldn’t have been there anyway. After all, she wasn’t yours.

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He closed the book, placed it on the table, and finally, decided to walk through the door. His father lay in a coma on the other side. His pale face flushed from all color, and deep closed eyes that signify the trance state he's been trapped in for years, desperately wanting to get out, crying. 

“How’s he been doing?” The same nurse has been watching over my father for years. Her soft expression makes me feel lighter but she is not being genuine. He is not well, she knows this. Those words, that tone, it's an illusion, something trying to comfort me, cradle me. It doesn't. 

“He's been crying. Like he's having a bad dream.” My father never cried but he is a mere shell of the person he used to be. His yellow complexion, dark circles under his sunken eyes, and his thin figure makes him nearly unrecognizable. I'm still clinging to the person he used to be, the person in the pictures. The one who taught me how to tie a tie, and shave my stubble, the person who held me when I cried from scraping my knee; I don't want to let go. 

“He hasn't had much activity. The lines are looking flat.” I freeze. My throat tightens, I can feel my heart beating in my chest like a train pounding down the tracks. She looks at me with a concerned look, I know that look. It wasn't just any look, it's not the look you normally would give someone on any given day but today is different.

 “You might want to consider pulling the plug. I think it’s time.” I knew this day would come, the earth shattering day where I would hear those words and my life would fall apart. The day I would feel the earth crumble from beneath me. My eyes swell and I feel a tear drip down my face like a faucet that was never turned off drips slowly in the sink. 

“Give us some time alone.” My voice breaks. I've never been in such a vulnerable state in front of my father. As I walk over to the hospital bed I feel myself getting weaker, almost as if my legs would give out at any given point. I whispered a few words, and stroked his cold pale face, tears streaming from my eyes onto his chest.

 He grabs his phone, puts his tangled headphones in his ears and finally decides to walk out the door, a video playing of his father on repeat, tears still fresh in his eyes but he feels a sense of relief and comfort as crosses the busy road, reminiscing the person he used to be, without his father to tell him to look both ways, without anyone to hold him back.

Honorable Mentions

Content Warning: (fear and mild, graphic violence)

The grimy glass doors had slid shut, the painful noise of it shrieking as they met. Seconds later, blood had been splattered across the dirty glass. All of us in this place had held the injured once, but now it's the place of suffering. When we came here we hoped that it would heal us instead of leaving more dead than alive. The hospital once was run by humans but once the outbreak had occurred a few years back, their attendance had slipped as more had become the bloodthirsty monsters all of us had feared. I had been running for hours now, this hospital was a maze, 3 large floors with endless rooms in each one. I wasn't the only one who had been trapped within this upside down sanctuary, there had been multiple patients wrapped up in the horrid plan humanity had decided to come up with. 

Lets back things up a bit, my name is Evlynn Rogers, I have black shoulder length flat hair that is currently tangled more than a child's plastic slinky toy. When I first arrived I was hoping that I could get treatment for all of the burns that had coated parts of my hips, wrists and arms. But instead I was left helpless. My best friend Aria Smith, she had been with me since childhood, she had long curly brown locks that were usually beautiful but now all disheveled, a dried dark substance covering some parts of her scalp. She was Catholic, but I guess God really screwed her over in this situation. I had never seen Aria so scared in her life, tears flowing down her face as we ran together for what seemed like forever, the dark bruises painting her porcelain white skin and of course the prosthetic leg that somewhat slowed her down. Early on Aria had been in an accident, she refused to tell me anything but instead blamed it on her mother. 

As we reached a flickering hallway we could hear the faint screaming of others behind us but we knew we couldn’t fix what was already occurring. All of the lost patients, our world losing all hope for what was to come. 2 years ago - August 16, 2384 we had “them” come to our world. It was like they had unlocked and crawled from the gates of hell into our world. These creatures were monsters, their green twisted rough bodies covered in thorns while their distorted faces had lacked eyes. Their empty eye sockets were dark voids, the only thing that seemed to be of detail was the thin black fluid flowing out onto their face and the bloody strings that hung loosely on the inside. 

As we finally opened the steel doors of the hallway with the bent and bloodstained keycard, we cringed at the loud scraping noise the doors had made when coming in contact with the floors. Making a sharp right we had run into what was going to cause us more nightmares than we were already having. Aria and I looked at each other for a split second before looking back at the male who was raised into the air with a silver pipe of some sort plunged through his back. Thick blood dripped onto the floor in a rhythmic pattern. “Hopefully he’s in a better place than this..” Aria spoke quite softly as her words had trailed off; “I hope so, it would kind of suck if he was put in hell after going through all this shit.” That got a small laugh out of Aria, it was all I ever needed, just to make her happy and hear her laugh even at the darkest of jokes. As disgusting as it is, both of us had seen far worse in the past few days. As the week kept dragging on, everyone in the hospital knew that at one point we were all going to suffer deaths worse than the Devil himself could possibly think of. 

Aria and I looked at the corpse sympathetically. The two of us left the room with the male left to be eaten, the guilt quickly disappearing. As we neared the rusty basement stairs, we looked at each other for a brief moment before exhaling and started to trudge downwards. This part of the hospital was the most dangerous but it ensured the quickest way of escaping. Or so we thought. What we didn’t know was that we were going to go through our own living hells, personally created just for us.

 I put my hand upon the peeling rail as we made our way down, the chipping paint nipping at my fragile fingers as it left small cuts within the skin, droplets of blood moving outwards from the slightly cut flesh. I was looking around the dark basement, a muffled alarm going off along with bright flashing red lights. Those only went off when the hospital was under attack which is fitting for our situation. Those alarms can only be turned off with a card that few of the staff members have. Unfortunately all of them are dead, or at least we think that's the case.