"For a girl who spent most of her life in a hospital you sure are lively." "Says the dead guy who's just thrown himself out the 19th-floor window." || 2018, svmmerborn
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THE BOY SHUDDERED AWAKE, hands stained crimson.
Not that he was aware of it, save for a warm, uncomfortable sticky feeling; the sickening sensation dripping off his fingertips like rotten honey.
He wiped them off hastily, scanning his surroundings. Darkness enveloped all except pulses of red and orange, fading fast across his peripherals like dying embers. Some moved. Others didn't.
He strained to remember the word. Heat signatures. That was what his vision resemble. The red, orange, green and blue before him were temperature. Not colors reflected by light.
There was no light in the barrens; the sacrificial fire was long dead.
Everything that did not have heat was a steely blue. And there were an awful lot of blue heaps, strewn haphazardly around.
One lied directly beneath his feet, in the shape of a man, or at least humanoid. It was still warm, its center glowing a bleak yellow. From the body leaked a liquid that seeped into his shoes, gluing his heels to the ground, corroding his guts like acid.
It made him physically sick.
The boy took a rattled step back, ears ringing with rabid sounds.
No, he thought, this can't be real. This has to be a dream, all of it, he hoped with every fiber of his being, bringing his hands up to his face.
That was when he saw his palms for the first time.
Spread open, fingers splayed, they were a shade of blue so dark it was almost black. The same color swathed smoothly across his arms and naked torso, as dead and heatless as the body underneath his feet.
Realization hit him like a twisting knife at which point.
Choking back a cry, the boy clenched a hand over his mouth. The skin on his face was coarse and dry, lifeless. The kind of skin you find on a morgue corpse.
Clawing upward, his trembling fingers slipped.
They slid, knuckle-deep, into empty sockets where his eyes once were. Strange liquids flowed from the hollows, coating the tip of his fingers in a viscous, gelatinous substance that dripped and dripped nonstop.
Dazed, he ran a hand down his stomach and felt it sank, sickeningly, into his flesh.
A depthless pit stood in place of his abdomen, its exterior dried out and devoid of vital organs as he dug his hand inside of it, fingers squirming around a pulsing cave of flesh and bones.
If he ever needed more proof that he was dead, this was it.
Outside the cavity, bits of intestines hung like decoration strips. They wriggled with maggot behavior as the wind blew. Moving as if in a lucid dream, the boy curled his fingers around the bits, squeezing down on them as if they belonged to a foreign specimen, not himself.
In one swift tug, he ripped out the remainders. They fell off, one by one, with fetid ease.
He lifted them to his face and smelled his own death on his hands.
He felt nothing, and that - that scared him the most.
