THE EXCEPTION
Summary: They had prayed, the preachers had preached, begged to God...but no one was exempt. Yet Uchiha Sasuke awakes a survivor of The Sickness, an exception, taken in by a group of survivors trying to find others who may be alive in this dystopian world.
Rating: T
Pairings: SasuSaku; ShikaIno
Notes: Inspired by the idea of a post-apocalyptic world, the movie 28 Days Later, and the Stephen King book The Stand. I plan to include pairings but romance isn't going to be extremely heavy in a horror/scifi-drama story like this one. Reviews are greatly appreciated.
CHAPTER 1
When he awoke, Sasuke felt lost.
The place beneath his ribs - hollow. It felt hollow. But his heart belied this sinking feeling, pulsing slowly, rhythmically, dreamily...
It was the hospital. He was in the hospital. Knocked out for a while. Days, maybe. It felt like days. Because he couldn't remember what had come before the days of being in a restless place, a deep yet troubled sleep, a state of absence, of being lost...
It was twelve oh three. Twelve oh three in the afternoon but nobody was around, no nurse, no doctor. No patients, either. And he had a double room. Sasuke frowned. He felt pain in his shoulder, neck, back, body, tiny tingling itching pains he could not place. Dull pains, the pain that lingers.
But he got up - had to get up - couldn't very well just sit in this bed all day; ripped out the IV, which hurt, and moved, which hurt worse, but Sasuke had to get out of this bed and put on his clothing.
He found the clothing - some clothing. Nice clothing, compared to that thin gown. A pair of sweatpants. A shirt. No coat. And it was January. He was cold. Had to admit that.
Sasuke rubbed his hands together and thought about where he could get a drink.
The tap water would suffice. He took a dixie cup filled with pills, tossed the pills, and drank the tap. But the water on his tongue was surprisingly nauseating. His head felt light, and he felt rather ill. He knew he was not dead, not asleep - but still was ill.
But Sasuke heard no one. No sound. Everything was too still.
So he opened the door -
And around him there was chaos, the remnants of a fight, an evacuation, a struggle? Overturned carts and scattered papers and trays everywhere, abandoned.
He had been abandoned.
It rang out, clear and strangely calm in his thoughts. Abandoned. Left to sleep and lie there for however long, until he regained some senses and happened to wake up (which, for whatever reason, had been now, today, whatever day it was). And clearly, no one was left. Perhaps no one remained, for it seemed desolate, absolutely void of another person, which he could almost feel.
Sasuke walked as best as he possibly could. It was a very slow and awkward sort of walk, which displeased him because he wasn't used to this feeling, almost like helplessness. But he was so tired still, which he hardly saw possible after all of that sleep.
No one here, no one here, all alone. It was all he could think. And he was uncertain of where to walk to, or if he should try to search for anyone else, because if there was no one else -
This nagged him to a point of feeling hollow again. There was such disarray around him, and Sasuke was unsure of what to make of the destruction, and why was he so alone?
But Sasuke couldn't stand here all day, now - so he walked to the stairs and he found that there were no thrown chairs, no trash or debris, only a clean stairwell to reach the ground floor, and perhaps go home.
He began his descend from Floor 14, and was sure he would find someone to have help from below, surely, because this was very hard to figure out, and he could barely focus through the shadows and the fog cast across his line of sight, this tiredness, the pain, but he did want to go back to sleep again...
On this ordinary day he happened to awake from a long and deep state of being lost - the coma, a long and endless sickness, the never ending period of rest, they'd said there'd been no hope, how were they wrong? - to walk into another world, this other realm, and again find himself lost, and perhaps dead.
Floor 1. The haze wearing off. The hunger starting to gnaw.
It was ragged - unexplainable, the desire to consume something edible, because what did food taste like, solid and rich food, something true and whole?
But Floor 1. Was completely. Desolate.
And it was worse than Floor 14, had to be worse - papers all over, upturned desks and chairs and the snack machines raided, broken glass everywhere, he could barely even walk...
Blood, on the windows. Smudges of blood, handprints of blood, whirls of blood staining the glass from bleeding fingertips, hands dirtied with it, the blood. Everywhere.
It marked the front entrance, the translucent glass doors that opened with your step, the windows. All stained with smears of tacky liquid dried to a dark hue. Blood from someone, dead, alive? Where did this blood come from?
His voice was lost. Sasuke opened his mouth and realized he had not spoken since awakening. He almost forgot what his own voice sounded like. It felt foreign, so strange to talk. It ground his throat apart.
"Hello..." Too soft for anybody to hear. Louder, this time. "Hello."
No one. Nothing. Only that same strange silence that spoke clearly of the eerie abandon of this hospital. This unsettling quiet was slowly building on him. Sasuke felt he needed to leave, yet he could not move.
Because something was quite strange about this town. Sasuke forgot the name of the town - lived here forever, what is the name, what is it? - and could not remember, no matter how hard he tried. Some town. Some place, on the corner of the earth, all ragged and strewn apart, without any order.
He took steps over the broken glass, towards the windows -
- and saw the car on fire, and the two flipped over completely still, the buildings across the street broken and raided, everything frozen with Death's touch, but no one anywhere, no one even left for dead.
Where was a TV to watch, a newspaper to read, anything, something? How long had it been since he'd last been awake, fully awake, alert? A month, a year, longer? When had this destruction come? Had he been left in that hospital bed, IV still attached - to die, they were going to let you die - for days?
All alone, entirely alone, nobody to answer his endless questions, like the planet was now barren of human life, and he had been the accidental exception.
This thought - it overwhelmed him, loomed over him, consumed him, to a point of oblivion.
No one's coming, all alone, left for dead, no one's coming, no one at all.
