rockynottheboxer-blog - Tumblr blog

rockynottheboxer-blog · 7 years ago

Text

Chapter 2

He awoke in a hospital room, his various body parts bandaged and in casts. His eyes burnt, his memory fuzzy, but still there. He remembered the horrifying vision that he saw when he was… unconscious? Or was he dead as he so thought? He had no real way of telling if at that point he was alive or dead, or rather, if the thing he saw was real. His vision finally sharpened the objects around the room. He looked to his left at the visitor’s chair. Currently it was empty, however it appeared that people had come and gone. A woman’s glasses on the small metal table, his bedside creased as though someone was recently sitting there. He shifted his vision to right in front of him, to the door. He remembered being young and having a family member that was in this part of the hospital. Then he saw a sign above another door, some distance behind the nurses’ desk, “Intensive Care Unit”. Huh. He didn’t feel too terribly bad, only occasional piercing feelings where his arm and legs had broken. He lifted his un-broken arm to his face. He felt more bandaged covering one half of his face. The weird thing is, when he applied pressure to feel how bad it was, it felt… normal. It was strange, because even if he was on pain medicine he would at least have felt some pain. He tried to speak but his throat was raspy. He swallowed in a raspy voice called out, “Nurse”. The woman at the desk lifted her head and looked around, not sure where the voice came from, so again he called out “Ma’am.” Her eyes drifted to his room and met his eyes. Her eyes widened and she stood and hurried over to him. She entered her room and asked, “Sir, are you okay?” He tried to speak again but his throat had a sharp pain, he managed to squeeze out “Water?” Before he could stop himself, the pain was immense, but the nurse went out of his line of sight, then returned with a small cup and raised it to his lips and dribbled it in. The water was heaven on his dry throat, he asked for a second cup, which he received, but when he asked for a third, the nurse simply said, “Don’t strain yourself, first questions, then more water, okay?”

“Yeah. Yeah okay.”

“Can you remember your name?”

“My name is Jesse, but a lot of my friends call me Jess.”

The nurse appeared to be surprised at something. “And your last name?”

“Cotilla. Why do you ask? Is there something wrong?”

“Well no but considering that you just woke up from a coma, it’s a bit strange you could remember so fast.”

“Wait hold up…” He didn’t even thing about how long he would have been out, so he asked, “How long have I been out?”

“14 months, you’ve been unresponsive for pretty much all of that time, we’d tried so many things... we… well your family was ready to pull the plug.”

“Oh my god... Jaz! My fiancé? How is she?”

The nurse had a pained expression, “We... well it was a miracle you had survived. I’m sorry sir... we couldn’t save her.”

A pained sound came from his throat, he couldn’t form words. Everything that had happened, somehow, he knew, at the bottom his gut, the back of his soul. No. He was brought back, that meant that she could be brought back too. The nurse recognized his expression. “Sir I know it can be hard to lose someone you love, but I strongly advise you not do anything rash.”

The soft yet heavy feeling of sadness compressed into a hard-compacted ball of anger. He thought it best to hide that, he immediately changed his face. “I won’t ma’am. May I have more water?” As she turned to get the cup, he sat up and slid out of the bed and stood up and stretched, and, man did it feel good. She turned around with the cup and looked shocked. He saw the look on her face, “Uhh... you okay?”

“You... you shouldn’t be able to walk...”

He just looked at her. “Why not? Even with broken legs they’d have healed by now?”

“Your spine was damaged in the crash... You should be paralyzed. Waking up was one miracle, but I can’t see how you aren’t paralyzed.”

“Well since I’m not, can I take off all these bandages and go home?”

“Let me call your doctor first... something isn’t adding up”

He agreed and when she left, he walked to the mirror. He saw only himself, he didn’t know what he should expect. He huffed. It was probably a dream, the thing in the mirror. The silver candle, the room, and …it. He realized something as he recalled the moment when the beast placed its hand on him, the searing pain; A burn that bad wouldn’t have healed. He pulled the hospital gown away from his shoulder and saw a bandage. His heart raced as he pulled away it and a scar the shape of a hand. His breathing grew heavy as he brought up his own hand to the burn. the sizes matched as if he had seared himself. With his heart thudding against his ribcage, he breathed out, “Fuck.”

“Mr.…. Cotilla, is it? Yes, Jesse Cotilla.”

He whirled around and saw the doctor and the nurse standing at the door, “Uh yeah that’s me.”

“Sooo, I guess I should get right to the point here. In short: You should be dead or paralyzed.”

He huffed, “Gee thanks Doc, big boat of confidence.”

“Sorry about that, I’m a fairly straightforward person- “

“I can tell”

“-but with that also comes from the fact that against all odds you escaped paralysis and as you seem to have noticed, your wounds have healed without any evidence of scarring.”

The doctor narrowed his eyes slightly, an almost hungry glare in his eyes. Ugh, if he for whatever reason did get super powers or that stuff, this doctor was acting unnecessarily antagonistic.

“Look... Doc, I don’t know how the hell this happened or why, but if I’m all well and good, can I get out of here? Like yeah if you gotta do quick checkup I’m down obviously, but I just learned my Fiancée is dead so if you don’t mind I would like to get the hell out of here.” His voice progressively rose until he was nearly shouting at the end of the sentence, both staff members looking startled. He took a deep breath and said, “So is there anything else you need to do?”

“Well we need to do some paper work and yes a final checkup before we can check you out,” The doctor said, his pompous nature having returned.

After being checked out and got home, apparently his family had paid off his car, which he would pay them a visit and let them know that he wasn’t dead or any of that fun stuff. He got into his old and now even more beat up sedan, and on the dash in a black envelope had a somehow even more black envelope, which in (thank goodness) white text said:

It seems you faired well in the hospital, I am a human agent of the Umbra group which you so gracefully joined, if you think this shabby vehicle would do you well as one of our ‘agents’ you are poorly mistaken, go to the address posted at the bottom of this envelope and tell them your first and last name, and you are ready for your pickup

-T

Huh. This was either about to be really cool or really weird. He was about to back out of his apartment parking space when in his rearview mirror he saw his reflection but dressed in different clothes and otherwise different style. He was about to look down at himself to be sure he wasn’t just forgetting things when his reflection spoke in the same bone-chilling voice as his first dream. “So, you dealt with your first challenge accordingly”

He shivered and replied, “What challenge?”

“The doctor of course, my followers and I needed to be sure you weren’t too timid to deal with a slight push in the wrong direction.”

“How was he pushing in the wrong direction?”

“All will be revealed; your training has already begun. First get used to the connections between the physical world and my realm, then you will learn how to travel between dimensions, where our training begins.”

“Can’t you just like zap the training into me or something?”

“That would defeat the reason I chose you, you’re unique, strange even- “

“Gee thanks.”

“-but above all, you have the free will of an artist, which is not common with people who have as many physical benefits as you do. But enough conversation, go to the address, I’m certain they’ve picked out something you’ll like”

1 note · View note

rockynottheboxer-blog · 7 years ago

Text

Chapter One

His final heartbeat. He dwindled into the void, yet he felt... not dead? Everything was an inky darkness like some corner at the darkest edge of a black hole. Was this what death felt like? He was gonna be seriously peeved if this was what came after life. He could barely stand ten minutes in this darkness much less eternity. Then he realized; He was still breathing, yet when he felt for a pulse or a heartbeat he had none. Weird. After getting a feel of his surroundings, he saw a glow of silver in the.. distance? Still weird. He.. walked? No. He felt less stable than he would feel on the ground, this was as if there was a balanced air pressure under his feet. As he moved toward the moonlit glow, it began to get brighter, so bright that even as he shielded his eyes the light pierced through, making a feeling like having his retinas removed. He didn’t even think that was possible, but if it was, this was surely what it would feel like. He tried to stop, to turn, but when he tried to step back, his body and his mind seemed to separate and he took a step forward, and another, and another. He couldn’t control his actions but as he took the final step he could, the light brightened one final time, and everything became pitch black once more. As his eyes tried to adjust to the sudden darkness, he tried to shake off that remaining after image of the searing light, he realized that the glow that remained was from one single candle lighting a small cozy room. As he examined his surroundings, two things occurred to him: The ground felt completely solid, no longer the balanced air pressure. Also, the candle burnt with a silver flame. Again, weird. He moved closer to the candle until he heard a slight rustle behind him. He whipped his body around, only to see a mirror. He stood straight and slowly moved toward it. He was half expecting the reflective glass to reveal a portal to another dimension, or some otherworldly being, but all he saw was the reflection of himself and the room behind his as it should have been. He continued to move toward it, as he came close enough he reached out and tapped the glass. It was solid, surprisingly enough, he’d slightly expected there to be some rip in the space time continuum or something along those lines. With a start he realized.. he should be dead. In the reflection he saw the effects of the last thing he remembered, a gash in his chest, the skin on his arm half corroded from road rash and bent in three different places, his other arm dislocated and bleeding heavily. His stomach region was scratched up but otherwise fine, his legs were scraped and bleeding, one twisted almost completely around. He looked back up to his face.. no… this wasn’t here before… his face was a desolate wasteland of something that once was.. half grinded and completely skinless, ragged flesh hanging off, his cheekbone appeared to have been partially ground off, his scalp bleeding on one half on his skull, the hair on the other side matted down with blood. He reached up tentatively, and found smooth skin, where his reflection showed the destroyed side of his face. He looked down at his arms, where the mirror showed the breaks and rips, they were his regular arms, the same for his legs and chest region. Just as he began to wonder if he was in hell or some nightmarish afterlife that would’ve made him regret not praying more in life, his reflection spoke. Weird. Terrifyingly and nightmarishly weird. “This is how your body appears, or rather what is left of it, appears to be in the physical realm,” The… thing... in the mirror spoke in a ragged and torn version of his own voice. “You have perished, and as we speak, others from the living try their final measures to bring back your torn form, and they will fail, and you will never walk another day amongst them... unless you accept my proposal…” Everything that had just happened... it was insane... this was a nightmare… a really screwed up nightmare. He was going to wake up next to his fiancé, they were going to eat breakfast, he would go to work. He would come home and talk to her about his day. He would fall back to sleep. Everything would be okay.. but something inside told him he was wrong. This was all somehow real.. the thing in the mirror, the weird silvery candle, the fact that he was indeed dead. He took a deep, shaky breath and managed to speak, “What proposal?” His voice was his regular old voice, not the terrible ruined one in which the beast spoke. The thing responded “You will be my elite soldier, you will have enhanced speed, strength and healing.. you will have power over darkness and the entity of the Umbra Gladius itself. A great evil is soon to arise, one like your world has ever seen and it will destroy all that you know and love if you do not choose to fight it.” He pondered this.. this was something that would change his life.. an offer he could not refuse, he would survive and emerge with powers he could only ever dream of possessing and yet he hesitated. Maybe it was because something that looked like it had been dragged through hell had offered him it. The wretched figure spoke again and said, “Perhaps a glimpse of the future would aid your decision? The outcome if you do not choose to accept” What the creature did next was truly horrifying: it reached up, gripping the upper side of its mouth and the lower jaw, and began to pull them apart, tearing the skin and sinewy muscle of his cheeks until the two inner sections of its mouth were completely vertical. All he could do was watch horrified as this desolated reflection of himself pulled itself apart. and even worse, at the center of the red body matter an image flickered and he saw fire, heard screams, the smell of fear in the air. Suddenly he was there, he saw his family running in terror, his father ready to defend as some demon like creature approached at the speed of lightning, he tried to intercept but the demon passed through him as if he were an illusion. He turned and could only watch, helpless as he saw the people he loved were ravaged by a creature from hell. Then, the ragged voice of the thing in the mirror “This is what will happen if you do not choose to accept. Your loved ones ripped to pieces, your enemies torn to shreds, those you never spoke to... all slaughtered because of you.” He couldn’t stand to think of this. But he had to, he spoke only two words: “I accept.” The glimpse of the future swirled away into some center point, making him dizzy until everything went black, then clarified and he was back in the room, the mirror creature now showing as a perfect copy of him, no longer desolated by the crash, stepped out of the mirror into the room, causing him to take a nervous step back. “I will call upon you when the time is right”, its voice was the same when it spoke however, “We will meet again, Shadow,” And the thing grasped its hand on his shoulder, causing a painful, burning sensation in his shoulder, then it released its steaming hand and stepped back into the mirror. The entire room appeared to be vortexed into the silver candle flame, and after a second, even that flickered out. Suddenly he felt a searing pain in his heart, and he realized it was painfully beating again and his eyes flashed open, everything around him fuzzy and bright in comparison to what he just experience, the beat of his own heart feeling strange and painful in his own chest, he lifted his head, everything clarifying a little, but still out of focus. He looked down at his body, a huge gash in his chest, flowing with fresh red crimson, when he tried to reach up and attempt to stop the flow, he couldn’t move his arms, he shifted his broken gaze towards his them, seeing what he saw in the hellish vision shown in the mirror. As he began to try and find his voice to cry out, a concerned face loomed above him saying words he could not make out. He began to make out other details at the sides of his vision, the lights flashing red and blue, the yellow flashes from the tow truck that arrived on scene, the lights catching in the shattered glass, sprinkled on the floor. He zeroed in on an ambulance, and saw a body being raised into the vehicle. Then he finally began to take in everything, and who that very well could be. No, he wouldn’t begin to think like that, not now. His mind flashed to before the crash, him and his fiancé driving, on their way to the store for groceries, something they did every two weeks. He was in the driver’s seat, his anger and frustration building up. Now, after everything in that strange place, seeing his mangled body, he couldn’t even remember what they were arguing about. All he remembered her saying was: “Why the hell did I even accept your sorry ass.” Everything that had happened and now this. He opened his mouth to speak but never got the chance, a large truck ran the light at the intersection and slammed into the driver side of their car, everything became a blur. All he remembered was the sound of glass shattering, metal tearing, sharp pain in his chest, his leg, the side of his head, and the darkness that followed. His mind returned to the present situation. Someone was trying to tell him something, asking him a question? He saw the woman’s lips moving but all he heard was muffled sound. He parted his lips and in a shaky, barely audible voice, said “Where...?” But that was all he could manage, everything fading to black.

#writer #writingcommunity #story #Shadow #hopefullynottrash

2 notes · View notes