Awakening
Akihiko's health was shot. Ever since the world went to hell every midnight, he barely slept. His athletic build shriveled from slender to skinny and dark circles formed around his eyes like a boy caving in to a chemical habit. His old life as an ordinary student felt like a distant memory, his days now spent in dread of the howling madness each night would bring. Every midnight, during the hour that should have spanned from 12:00 to 1:00 a.m., sanity ceased and the chaos began.
He didn't remember the date of when it first started, but every other detail of that evening was still etched in his brain. After going to bed as usual, he woke up to the sound of a heart-piercing scream outside his window. He thought it was human at first—God! A woman being stabbed?—but as he rushed through the darkened room to his window, the scream tapered into a growling gurgle. Some kind of animal?
He shoved aside the curtain and stared out into the street, only to find the city transformed into a shifting black purgatory. The buildings looked centuries old, deep cracks gouged the sidewalks, and every streetlight glowed a hellish red. Shifting shadows curled along the walls, defying all logic of their light source, restless and flickering like heatless black flames.
And there were the monsters. Outside he saw what made the scream—a mutant crawling along its belly that looked half-human and half-feline, its limbs gnarled with ropy muscle. The distorted rubbery face gaped open to one side, snarling and gurgling. He staggered back from the window in disbelief and the monster jerked its head up at the sight of motion in the window. Had it seen him? The mutant beast yowled again and motion skittered out from the curling shadows all down the street. More monsters—each one a warped fusion between beast and man and inanimate object—prowled out of the alleyways and looked up to his window where the lion-beast had raised the alarm.
Akihiko stumbled away from the window, catching his bare heel on a stack of textbooks and sprawling to the floor, cracking his elbow on the hardwood when he landed. There was silence for a moment, then a wood-splintering SLAM on the front door. The slam was joined by more pounding on the door, fists and claws thundering to be let inside.
He spent the night cowering in his closet with his hands over his head, convinced he was witnessing the end of the world. Hell had arrived on earth, and it was only a matter of time before death found him. But ages later—he later found this time was a mere hour—the slamming and howling stopped. The stillness of the night returned, broken only by the shrilling of cicadas in the trees outside his window.
A dream? Could any nightmare be that realistic? The events felt so real, he thought it must have been some kind of psychotic episode. Schizophrenia could surface at any time in life, even the tender years of middle school. Had the stress of academic overachieving and the survivor's guilt over his sister's death finally made him crack? Was it because of some horrible chemical imbalance? He went to his tiny washroom, took the bottle of antidepressants from the medicine cabinet and flushed all the cheery yellow pills down the toilet. He could call the doctor in the morning, but if those pills were possibly what caused the episode, he was damned if he was taking them again. Exhausted and soaked with sweat, he fell onto his futon and sleep finally claimed him.
The next morning began like any other with twittering birds and a long walk to school. The other students made no comment about strange events in the night, sticking instead to their usual gossip about teachers they hated and the TV shows they'd watched the night before. As the day dragged on, he thought more and more that it must have been a dream, but he remembered the empty pill bottle and the lion-thing's rubbery face dripping open into a mouth, letting out a scream… His skin prickled into a cold sweat every time he thought of it, but by the time school was over, he decided against telling anyone what he'd seen. He could let it go if things just returned to normal.
But they didn't. Night after night, exactly at midnight, the suburban streets became Hell. Demons and hungry gaki crawled the streets, suffering under the weight of their negative karma, hunting for more victims to make feel their pain. He slept in his closet for the first few nights. The monsters didn't seem to find him as long as he stayed indoors and did nothing to attract attention. When he was bold enough to venture out of his room, he tried to find other humans during the hell hour. Surely if he could find someone sane, they could explain away the phantoms he was seeing. If someone could stand there blandly in the face of the prowling shadows like they weren't there, he could finally be convinced he was having some kind of psychotic episode, that it was all in his head and the monsters couldn't hurt him. But he could find no other humans during the hell hour. Everyone turned into black-lacquered coffins during that time—his foster parents, drivers in their cars, even the homeless wino on the street corner. He was the only living thing in this psychotic world. Besides the monsters, of course. And he'd found no evidence that they couldn't tear him apart at the joints like a training dummy.
His health rapidly deteriorated for lack of sleep. Every night before midnight, he stared wide-eyed at his ceiling, dreading the inevitable moment when the clock struck twelve and the screaming and skittering began. When it was over, he would collapse into sleep, but the few hours of rest could barely counteract the exhaustion and stress that the one hour of horror had caused. Adding his boxing practice, physical training, and academic studies, it was all he could do to stay awake during class. What little social life he had dried up to nothing as his classmates found him twitchy and anxious like never before. He would leap to a defensive stance at the slightest screech from someone pushing their chair back. He could only snort in annoyance at the other middle school students who claimed that their life was hell because they had homework or their parents withheld their allowance for a week. His reputation as a stuff-shirt overachiever transformed into that of a boy on the edge, prone to fist fights and delinquent behavior. It wasn't true, but that never stopped the rumor mill from churning. He didn't have time for a social life in any case, so if people left him alone, he didn't care. He was going mad, nothing could stop it, and it wasn't getting better with time.
He kept his sightings of the midnight hell to himself like a perverted secret, knowing full well that his life would only get worse if he opened his mouth and shared the madness of his visions with someone else.
Fortunately, that Someone Else came to him.