Amnesia

X.

Jeongguk awoke to the sound of birds singing. His eyelids felt like they had lead stuck to them, however, and he stayed there for a moment longer. But he could also tell from the orange color behind his eyes that it was bright out. It was daytime already.

Finally, he managed to blink and groaned due to the brightness metaphorically slapping him in the face. It was definitely a sunny day. How had the whole night gone by? What had happened the night before?

Those thoughts were almost immediately dashed away though when he realized:

He was alone.

He wasn't in the farmhouse any longer. He was in some sort of room filled top to bottom with weird, rusty items.

There were songbirds in the middle of the desert?

He sat up, wide awake now. A bird made a chittering noise very near the room that he was in.

"Hyung?" he croaked out before clearing his throat and repeating it louder and clearer. There was no answer. A trickle of fear went down his spine. His hyungs left him alone. Why would they do that? Was Taehyung feeling a lot better? The thought of Taehyung made him groan internally. He'd passed out, hadn't he? Meanwhile, Taehyung had been shot. The hyungs ought to be worrying about Tae, not him. God, he was such a pain, always needing someone to rescue him.

But that was something to think about later. First things first: Where was he?

"Jin-hyung?" he yelled this time, and a few of the birds went quiet for a few seconds. There was still no answer. Weird. Then again, weird was nothing new for them at this point. Hell, the night before he thought he had been knocked down by a freaking bolt of lightning and as it turned out, nothing had happened.

Maybe he was just going crazy.

Curiosity drew him to look at all the strange objects around him. The room was just filled with odd and old looking tools, keys, rusty teakettles, farm tools, discolored dresses and sun hats, bent horseshoes, and tarnished jewelry in dirty glass cases. The walls were covered in dusty paintings of Victorian and Elizabethan women and men flirting, or Greek goddesses playing with nymphs in forests. An old gramophone sat lonely on a table.

Something told Jeongguk that he was in an antique shop, despite the fact he had ever been in one before. The question was, why? And how had they gotten there?

He continued walking and looking at the strange items. A metal sign with a woman on it told him to "drink delicious Coca-Cola". The birds kept chirping and a breeze made the trees outside rustle.

Wait, there were trees too? How far away from the farmhouse must they have gotten? And how had they gotten so far?

A loud ringing sound made him jump. Suddenly, everything but that shrill metallic yell went quiet. The birds stopped singing. The trees stopped moving.

By the second ring, Jeongguk realized that it was a phone that was ringing. A phone that they could use to get the hell out of this mess. He ran towards the noise, past rows and rows of old antiques that seemed more intimidating than welcoming. Finally, he turned a corner and saw an old phone that was shaking with each ring. It was something right out of a history textbook: black, with a rotary dial stuck on the number 0. He picked up the receiver and in his panic he forgot where he was and answered in Korean.

What he heard was not what he expected to hear back.

"Lacie?" a woman said, sounding near hysterics.

"What?" he asked back, but it seemed the woman on the other end of the line didn't hear him.

"Lacie, are you there? Are you okay? Please, I need to know you're okay."