Novel ideas
Tokyo was in front of the four friends, everything was dark and deserted. No sound was heard. There was no light anywhere. "What happened here?" whispered Sebastian. He looked at his friends. They stood on top of a cliff from which you could see the whole city. No one else was to be seen. Many high-rise buildings had collapsed, the windows of some houses had broken and in some places only the steel framework of a burned-down building stood. Lana scratched her chin.
Also it was written in another language and translated, so it doesn’t sound that good :/
Henry had been lying there for maybe half an hour. The howling had become unbearably loud. Then it suddenly broke off. Instead, a voice echoed over the snowy landscape. The voice sounded friendly and warm. Heat, it shot through Henry's head. He didn't know the origin of the voice, but someone carried him to a car and put him in the back seat. Through half-closed songs he saw light. Where there is light, there is often warmth, his father had said. Then he finally fell asleep. He dreamed of Ludo and his faithful, dear Husky eyes.
"He was half frozen to death when we found him," said the voice. She was the one who woke him up. He was in a large round room with a fireplace and many softly upholstered chairs and armchairs. About 20 people sat and stood around a large table. They talked muffled.
3 months later
Henry had quickly settled in with the people who had saved him. No one knew what happened the night they found him. Henry could only remember a few things. He knew about his father and the coastal village where he had used to live. But he could no longer remember specific names. Only his own and that of his husky, Ludo. He knew how the world worked, he knew he could only remember nothing from his personal life. No Friends, No Places, Nothing. However, since then he dreamed every night of Ludo and his faithful, dear Husky eyes.
A pained exhale came in reply.
“Alright, man. We got 911 coming. You got a...” Panting. “got a name, man?” An inhale. Some slight hesitation. “Oh, uh… alright. Just hang in there. We’ve got help on the way…” He looked behind him for a moment. “Christie?” He shouted loudly. The noise hurt.
“Jack? Yeah, they’re coming. Uh.. with an ambulance. Is he,” she paused. “… Is he okay?”
Jack fumbled for something to say. His mind was in a tug of war between the truth and what the lump of flesh would feel if he said it. Jack swallowed hard. “He’s hurt, but I’m sure everything’ll work out. You know, uhm, the ambulance is gonna help him.”
Out of the peripheral vision of the man with no name, he saw what must’ve been Christie, standing, dazed and worried all at the same time. As if she was carrying a burden of information, yet completely depleted of any sense of what was going on. It was a look of sympathy and bewilderment. You didn’t need to hear her speak to understand. The crumpled lump might not make it. It was both hours and seconds until the red lights drowned out the white ones, before the sirens shrouded the sound of the groaning engine. The people in blue uniforms came. They wore purple gloves and asked him questions he didn’t remember answering. A stretcher. Different lights. A machine that beeped. Clear bags, red bags, all hooked up to the man’s veins as the paramedics discerned between caked blood and dirt. Small spots of battery acid dotted the man’s skin. He felt burning. He felt that one of his legs wasn’t quite right. Like it was lumpier than normal. His hand felt as if the cartilage had been ripped out of it. His wrist was locked in place. His right shoulder felt unnaturally loose and droopy. What surprised him was that they didn’t put an oxygen mask on him. They always did that in the movies. His thoughts began to muddle as one of the blue-uniformed women told him when to anticipate turns. “There’s gonna be a left here. Just keep looking at me…”. The splotches of inverse colored light burned there from the beginning still danced idly under his eyelids. “You’re gonna be fine…” Fine? Fine wasn’t something the man with no name was looking for. He just wanted to remember. To perhaps return to the life he lived before whatever happened happened. Before those people found him. What were their names again? It was a question that he pondered for a few seconds before the confines of his shaken memory sluggishly opened and allowed a couple of syllables to escape his lips. Jack… and Christie… He was satisfied now. The paramedic looked slightly confused. Only slivers of the past escaped the abyssal depths of trauma. The existence of consciousness oscillated back and forth in a nauseating fashion. The vehicle stopped after a series of turns and bumps. The doors were opened and the crouched woman in the back helped a few men on the outside to move the stretcher. More bumps. “What do we got?” The voice of a doctor.
“From the looks of it... broken collar bone, broken femur, maybe a dislocated wrist...”
“He broke his femur? What happened?”
“Car crash. From the state of the car I’d consider this guy lucky.”
“Anyone else involved?”
“No. He hit a tree or something.”
“How’s his heart?”
“Stable. He’s losing some blood though. He picked up quite a few nasty gashes from the windshield.”
“Ejected?”
A nod.
The doctor looked at the man on the stretcher. “Next time, buddy, wear your seatbelt…”
They were in a different room now. The ambulance people were replaced by strange figures that smelled like hand-sanitizer. The conversed quietly as the doctor documented the condition of the crumpled man.
“Do you know if he was drinking?” He glanced over at on of the nurses, scribbling on his chart, filling the room with the scratchy sound of a ball-point pen against paper.
A sigh. “No. I didn’t check. He’s got somethin’ on his breath, though.”
A nod from the doctor.
“Hey, Simone, come here...” He set down the chart. “Get me prepped.” He sounded surprisingly calm amongst the chaos.
“Yes, Doctor Collins.”
What the man now knew as Doctor Collins and Simone walked into a different room. He was transferred onto something much harder than the gurney. His back hurt. A few discernable words made their way from his damaged face. “...My back…,” he groaned. The people who transferred him exchanged confused looks.
“Crap. Roll him over.”
“No, don’t touch him.” The doctor reappeared from the room, half scrubbed. That was quick. “Get me an X-ray.”
“How are we gonna get one if we can’t touch him?”
“Just get an X-ray on him. Now.” He said that last part with a frustrated glance towards one of the nurses. Seconds passed. Perhaps more than sixty. One-hundred and twenty. Maybe a handful more. The nurse came back wheeling a large machine over to the table. She flipped a few switches and positioned it. “We’ve gotta get him on his stomach.” An awkward silence filled with confusion enveloped the room. The doctor stood looking at his staff, overwhelmed by their lack of competence. He was stressed. It was starting to show. “Move him.” It was a stern sentence.
“But, Doctor Collins… We need to keep him stable.”
“We need to know what we’re dealing with. If you could get him on a stretcher, into the room, and onto an operating table…” A sigh escaped his lips. “You can turn him on his belly.” He said it with a hand gesture towards the man on the table.
The nurses grabbed the man’s side and turned him, slowly. Carefully. The man could feel his ribcage’s shattered groan as he was positioned upside down on the cold, metal surface. The doctor approached him. “That’s broken, alright. Forget the portable X-ray. We need to get him up to radiology.” The man was transferred to another stretcher and wheeled down a series of corridors and into an elevator. There were a few seconds of quiet standing. The doors opened and they all rushed out.
“Jenks.” Doctor Collins spoke. A tall man in a white coat turned around.
“Collins. You didn’t tell me you were coming.” He looked down at the man on the stretcher. “Oof. Whatta we got here? Is he awake?”
“Yeah. He is.”
“Barely.” It was one of the nurses. “This guy was in and out for a few minutes there. We need to get an X-ray. His back’s busted.”
“What happened?” Dr. Jenks’ leaning posterior flooded the man’s face with shadow as he loomed over the stretcher.
“Doesn’t matter. Can you get the machine ready?”
“Yeah. Get him in there, will you?”
The man was transferred to another room and wheeled under a large machine. There were a few clicking noises. A light turned on somewhere. The man imagined he could feel the radiation shooting through his body. The thought of it sent a tingling across his cheeks and into his fingertips. With every breath he could feel his ribs creak and shift in his abdominal cavity. He could guess what they would see when the images came back.
He was taken out of the room and was being told something he couldn’t understand. It was as if his brain had lost the ability to focus on words. He was wheeled through corridors. He felt the sensation of weightlessness as they descended in the elevator. All of the sudden, they were back in the strange room. The people around him were now wearing masks. Then someone put a mask on him. So the movies aren’t totally wrong… It wasn’t an oxygen mask. He suddenly felt his eyelids go limp. A blanket was placed over him. Something cold was slathered on his back. Ouch. Each blink was a painful process. He remembered three of them before it stopped. His main source of feeling now came from his ears as his optic nerve fed nothingness to the back of his head. He could hear a machine as a nurse reached under his chest and attached cold, wire-like instruments to his skin. The doctors and nurses conversed. He could hear the metallic sound of surgical tools clinking together. The noises began to drown as a sense of calm came about him. He even lost the sound of his heartbeat as he was pulled to some faraway place. Not feeling your blood pumping through you was strange, but his mind was on other things. Nothingness. This was it. In its purest form. His pain was gone, and he didn’t care whether or not he woke up, just as long as there wouldn’t be pain.
The water ran down the windows of the café, pulled streaks behind him and made everything blur behind it. It was raining. Elizabeth stared at the cold, foggy world, lost in thought through the windows. Her uncle's cafe was full as always. The buzzing of the conversations and the loud sound of the heavy rain merged into a pleasant background noise. Outside, people were rushing by, wet to the skin. They cast longing glances into the warm and dry café before rushing further. Elizabeth sighed. She was disappointed because today was a tennis tournament, but it was canceled because of the heavy rain. She was so looking forward to the tournament. Her uncle Sam came to her seat on the windowsill and asked kindly, "Liz, would you like a cup of tea?" Elizabeth looked up. She nodded and replied, “Gladly. Mint with a dash of lemon, please.”
"Of course, as always!" said Uncle Sam mischievously and smiled. Then he disappeared behind the counter. She turned her head back to the window and was startled. Two eyes flashed in the rain and looked her straight in the face. Elizabeth was shocked. Had she just imagined that, or had the silhouette's eyes really lit up? The figure pulled her hood deep into her face. Elizabeth was sure, her eyes had glowed unnaturally in the dark twilight. They had been green and big. And... sad. The figure's face didn't want to leave her head. When her uncle came to her with the tea, she didn't tell him anything about the figure for the time being. She thanked her uncle, sipped her hot drink and thought about it for a long time.
When the rain stopped in the early evening, Elizabeth went upstairs to her room and opened the window to let fresh air in. She sat down at her desk, took a piece of paper and began to draw. As if by themselves, her fingers flew over the sheet until she brought a sketchy image of the boy's face on the paper. It had been a beautiful face. It had been a boy about her age. He had a narrow mouth and a small nose. His eyes were perfectly almond-shaped and of an unnaturally bright green. It looked like a green fire behind his dilated pupils. Elizabeth was strangely intrigued and wanted to know more about this boy. She couldn't just forget him. He saw me too, Elizabeth thought before she fell asleep. When she woke up in the middle of the night, it was pitch black in her room. This made her suspicious, because otherwise the faint glow of the street lamp in front of her window always illuminated the room.
Elizabeth stood up, walked to the window and looked down. They lived on the second floor of the three-story building. The street lamp flickered, but immediately went out again. Elizabeth went to her desk and snapped the lamp that was on it. The next moment, Elizabeth was so scared that she almost screamed loudly. A lie sat on the desk and looked at her with a bowed head. Then she put the letter she had held in her beak on the table and flew gracefully through the open window into the night. Trembling, Elizabeth opened the letter. It had apparently been written very hastily. Only seven words were written there in messy writing:
You have to trust me. Follow the light.
Henry
Two days had passed since she had received Henry's letter. Elizabeth strolled through a side alley, a shortcut on her way to school. Suddenly she stopped as if rooted. Three people stood in front of her on the curb. A thin, tall and slim-looking man; a slightly smaller, average-built woman and a boy, about her age. The boy turned to her and a growl escaped his throat. His parents, as Elizabeth suspected, were bent over something she couldn't recognize. They hadn't noticed them yet. The boy growled again, pointing his head in the opposite direction. Elizabeth understood. She backed away and when she was far enough away, she started running. Ben. She looked over her shoulder into the dark alley; just before turning the corner, she saw three pairs of eyes lit up in the darkness.
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Idk I’m bored.
So, in the wise words of Snoopy,
“Bleahhhh”