Apocalypse Present

The doorbell rang with an eerie GONG at four in the morning. I had become an incredibly light sleeper over the last several years, so the instant I had woken up I had already rolled off the bed and was looking for something to defend myself with. I had to be prepared for when whatever rang the doorbell decided to force its way in.

“Wait a second,” I thought, realizing that didn’t make any sense. Nothing trying to break in would’ve rung the doorbell. That just made me more worried. I’ve never heard this house’s doorbell ring before, I didn’t even know it still worked. I for sure never used it, not to mention this place had been abandoned for ages, probably around the time everything initially went downhill. This house was part of a really nice neighborhood, so I just assumed it got left behind when the wealthy left for their bomb shelters before everyone realized that constantly moving was the only way to survive. These houses were left in pristine condition, and that was why I loved using these as rest stops; the neighborhood exodus meant that this nice, multi-million dollar collection of almost-mansions had avoided the chaos that hit all the poorer neighborhoods in the area. They just died in the bomb shelters. 

I liked sleeping here, but someone was ringing the doorbells this early in the morning meant I had something to worry about. Whoever it was, I probably couldn’t stay here another night, which was a bummer. Slinking low to the ground, I snatched my pack from underneath the king-size four-poster bed and retrieved a kitchen knife. I snatched it from one of the first times I passed through this neighborhood because of the quality of the blade. Not only did it look sharp, but it was also a Satoshi brand, Japanese steel. I never could have afforded one of those before the world ended, but now it was ripe for the taking. I admired my blade for a bit longer, then slung my backpack over my shoulder. I waited in the dark, listening for movement around the house as my eyes adjusted to the dark. Luckily, I heard nothing wandering around the house, so I went to investigate the door.

Typically, every instinct in my body would tell me to go towards the back door, to get out, to run into the night and leave this place, but the doorbell piqued my interest. That GONG just wouldn’t leave me alone, its ringing stuck in my head long after the house went silent. It called to me. So I brandished the kitchen knife and stayed close to the ground, below the window and away from any stray beam of moonlight, as I prowled towards the front of the house. I quickly reached the door and placed my hand on the handle, knife at the ready. Whoever was there, I was going to make sure I got the first strike in. Make this expensive knife pay for its keep in blood. 

I waited a moment.

Two. 

Three. 

I could feel my heart beating in my ears, the sound nearly as loud as the GONG that still echoed in my head. It was all so loud, surely whoever was stupid enough to ring the doorbell could hear it. I had to strike now. 

Strike first. 

Worry later.

Speed was essential to survival. 

I gripped the knife even tighter, its blade glinting in the dark. I knew how sharp it was, I made sure to sharpen it regularly and had used it more than once. I knew how much damage it could do. I took a deep breath, felt the muscles in my arm clench, and threw the door open in one swift twist.

An empty doorway greeted me, the silvery moonlight giving the entire neighborhood a somewhat ethereal quality. There wasn't anyone to stab on the other side of the door, not even a trace that someone had even been there. Nothing but a box placed carefully on the center of the faded “WELCOME” mat directly in front of me. Covered in black wrapping paper and tied off with a bright pink bow, it looked like something I would’ve been given at my tenth birthday party. Ages ago, really.

A present, no bigger than the size of my head, placed in the first place I would look. It was as if someone had delivered it just for me. I hadn't ordered anything in years, and even if I wanted to, it wasn't like there were any functioning delivery services. All those businesses collapsed soon after the wealthy in their got slaughtered in their bomb shelters by the monsters that roam the wastes.

I stared at the package for a moment longer. It didn’t take me that long to reach the front door, someone must have left a trace after dropping this package here. The main road cutting through this gated community was perfectly illuminated in the moonlight, a perfect replacement for the now-defunct streetlights that would’ve originally lit this community at night. Despite the clear view, I didn’t see anything, and despite the quiet night, I could hear nothing but my heartbeat pounding in my ears. 

Someone was surely messing with me, but I still grabbed the box and shut the door behind me, rolling over to the kitchen two rooms over. My curiosity had gotten the better of me. Pressed against the underside of the bar, I laid the package between my legs. My mind quickly raced as I tried to figure out the who, how, what, and why of this whole scenario. 

Those monsters couldn’t have made something like this, they’re too unwieldy. More prone to smash and break things if they knew someone was inside. No subtlety whatsoever. Besides, they hadn’t been near this community in a while. Even during a full moon like tonight, when they are at their most active, there’s never been enough people to draw attention, and again, no way one of them could have made this.

I hadn’t talked to anyone in months, either. Groups were dangerous, staying in one for a long time made it worse, and sleeping in groups was practically a death sentence. Isolation was the best protection. It had been so long since I’d even seen another person, sometimes I forgot the sound of my voice. There wasn’t anyone alive who would’ve made me a present. Also, wrapping paper? Where in the world would anyone have found wrapping paper this pristine? Same with the bow, it was as if it was wrapped professionally. It was mesmerizing, I just couldn’t stop staring at it, a knife still tightly gripped in my hand. A force of habit, always being ready to slice or stab someone, but it was one that kept me alive. 

I scrutinized it even more. I was unsure if I was tired or going crazy, but I kept expecting it to do something. It didn’t make sense. I shot a quick glance at my wristwatch, a dull “5:30” visible on its face. It felt like no time had passed at all, but here I was, just looking at this package for an hour, and nothing happened. 

Absolutely nothing.

My hand jerked suddenly, my knife sliding effortlessly into the package’s black wrapping paper.

A riveting GONG blared inside my head, its ringing hitting back with a vengeance. My vision began to shake as my entire body jerked uncontrollably, the knife jittering in the wound I just made. I opened my mouth to gasp, but I couldn’t hear a thing. The ringing in my ears was so loud I could’ve been screaming my lungs out and wouldn’t have felt a thing, the pain in my ears and the clenching of my heart threatening to knock me to the ground. My hand was still firmly locked in place around the knife, trying to hold the thing down as its blade writhed in the package. It was as though the knife wanted to escape, my knee-jerk reaction to just clench like a vice barely holding it in place. The knife refused to give up, however, and its violent motions grew even jerkier, just like my body, and even my death grip had its limits.

The knife shot out like a bolt of lightning the instant my fingers loosened, the blade slicing them as it flew upwards and the terrible GONG finally stopped ringing. Finally, I could finally hear myself think and scream as I clutched my now bleeding hand. I made sure to quickly kick the cursed package away as I finally collapsed to the floor. I needed to cut off my screams before I made any more noise, so I slammed my face into my shirt sleeve, muffling the last few screams of pain.

My ears were no longer ringing, but my heart felt like it was about to burst out of my chest, their solid thumping ever-present in my ears. I wheezed a few more times into my sleeve a few more times, my lungs begging for larger breaths that I refused to give. I couldn’t afford to make more noise. I closed my eyes tight, let my legs go limp, and just focused on what I could hear. 

I knew what my screams could have possibly attracted, and I wasn’t going to let one of those things get the jump on me. I’d seen what they’d done to those slower than me, right the world turned into a hellscape. I saw men, women, and children caught by those things, their heads melted for all to see, screams filling the air as I kept running.

I refused to ever find out what that felt like, I refused to ever die, I refused to ever get caught, and I would never start now. Human or animal or monster, two legs or four legs or twelve, nothing would ever get close to me again.

Finally getting my breathing under control, I plucked up the courage to check out my fingers. I slowly removed pressure from them, sliding the fingers of my good hand away and immediately digging through my pack for some gauze. I hoped that the cuts weren’t too deep, but nothing could have prepared me for what I saw.

My fingers were oozing a sickening dark blue fluid. It felt like blood, it looked like blood, but it was nowhere close to the color of blood. I quickly tore the gauze from my pack and began wrapping them. I could deal with that later because regardless of what color was leaking out of my hand, I was still getting lightheaded. I couldn’t afford to lose consciousness here. Another GONG shot through my head, my eyes immediately snapping towards where I kicked the box.

The package was now floating in a puddle of the same dark blue fluid, the hole in the packaging actively oozing out the stuff. The sound coming from the box only grew louder and louder as fluid continued to bubble out. It wasn’t the doorbell that woke me up, I realized.

It was the box.

Ear-splitting screeches soon joined the GONG of the box from seemingly all around the house, turning my blood to ice. Windows all around the house then shattered simultaneously, the shadows of these creatures blocking the moonlight as their wailing and chittering began coming out of every single room, the loudest coming from one that seemed to curl over the windowsill directly above my head.

The ringing in my skull only grew louder and louder as I watched the nearest one slide across the floor to tower over the box. Just looking at it made my head hurt, so while it seemed distracted I turned my head away, gripped the bartop with my good hand, and pulled myself to my feet. The house had grown dark with those things blocking every window, the noise in my head spiking in intensity every time one of those things came into view. There were so many in the house now, I had to get out of here or die. There was also no time to grab my knife, wherever it had flown off to.

So I ran.

I ran out of the kitchen and saw with horror the writhing, screeching monsters all over the house. Some were above me and crawling on the ceiling, some were behind me and swirling all across the floor, and some were slithering up the walls right in front of me. No matter where I looked I felt the GONG in my mind, its wailing scream within my head as the abominations in the house soon began to notice me. 

I didn’t care anymore how much pain it would cost to get out of here, the monsters were upon me, but I wasn’t going to just give up like that. I charged towards the broken window directly in front of me, the ringing growing louder and louder as I bumped past a couple of the monsters sloshing on the floor, their screeches following me as I threw myself outside. The jump through was easy enough, save a few shards of flash that slashed me as I went through. Regardless of the pain I was now in, I was out of the house, and the ringing grew quieter with every step I took from the house. 

I quickly looked down at where the glass had cut my, breathing a sigh of relief at the sight of red slashes on my flesh. Whatever happened to my hand, it wasn’t spreading through the rest of my body. Even a shard stuck in my leg couldn’t bring me down. I would eventually have to remove it, but not now. Currently, I had to get out of here.

I ran again.

I ran so far despite the large shard of glass in my leg. I ran until my lungs burned and then kept pushing them, I ran until the ringing in my head had finally stopped, and I ran until the monsters’ screeching disappeared into the distance. I finally stopped at the underpass of a nearby bridge, just something in the park a short walk from the gated community, and finally collapsed to the ground. I drew out some ragged breaths as I let all my limbs rest, unafraid of what may be lurking in the dark. Nothing could be scarier than what I had just escaped. The largest number of monsters I had ever seen in one place, and I had somehow survived. My eyelids grew heavy, sleep slowly taking me as exhaustion overcame my body, but one thought wouldn’t leave my mind:

Those monsters weren’t looking for me. Some of them attempted to take a bite out of me, sure, but I had seen those things pursue their prey before. There’s no way I could have escaped them if they were truly going after me. I would’ve been a dead man if they were actually trying to eat me. Then I remembered the one that just passed me by in the kitchen. It was staring at that strange present.

The present. They were looking for the present. 

But that only brought up more questions. Who left it there, why did it attract them, what in the world was it leaking, and how long had they been tracking it?

A damp feeling on my knee further broke me out of my stupor, and as I looked down to the source of it, I realized I had forgotten something in all the chaos. My bandaged hand, struck by the knife, was still actively leaking the blue ooze. I thought I had covered it up with gauze, but the liquid was now leading through the wrapping and dripping on the ground around me. I tried to push myself up from the group, to open my pack and add some more gauze, but my legs wouldn’t move as a similar puddle of dark blue fluid grew around me. I was frozen in my fear as I continued to watch my bandage drip and drip and drip and drip and the puddle began to grow bigger and bigger with every passing second.

The red blood coming from my leg soon mixed with the liquid below, and I watched in horror as the blue sludge climbed up my leg and into my wound, my blood soon replaced with that cerulean slime. I tried to stand again but found myself weighed down as every open wound on my body continued oozing and increasing the size of my puddle. I couldn’t do anything, and the more I struggled the more tired I became. My heaviness in my eyelids returned, my arms lost their strength, and with only a breath more I was asleep.

I closed my eyes, let my body relax, and allowed my thoughts to drift to somewhere else. Somewhere away from all this chaos. Somewhere I didn’t have to worry about where I was going to sleep each night, somewhere where I didn’t have to think about whether I was going to eat that night, and somewhere far away from the monsters I heard coming closer and closer.