Buying the groceries for mum had made my day a lot more mundane. Apparently, not a single person heard or seen the gunfire, shouts or explosions I heard running away from the scene. With groceries in hand, I headed my way home.
Mum had just finished fixing the turkey when I came home. It's a little too late for thanksgiving turkey but this was my family's tradition and who am I to say that it's better if it was stake instead of turkey? I hand her the groceries and the change and pretended not to hear her when she asked about my clothes being grimy and dirt caked. I run upstairs and take my clothes off, the smell of earth still wafting through my nose. I jump into the shower and try to lessen my stress over what happened. I'm still not convinced that I exactly knew what happened earlier. Apparently, the D.U.P has something from stopping anyone to notice their chaotic capture of that wretched Bioterrorist.
Anger bubbled up inside me. I curled my hand into fists and punched the wall. The moment my knuckles hit the tile, I braced for the pain to shoot from my hand, I was shocked that I had made a dent on the wall, cracking a few tiles and didn't even felt a thing. I yank my arm back examining it for cuts, there wasn't a single one. My mind starts to find a valid explanation when it arrives at… a memory? No, it hadn't happened yet, somehow I know it hadn't happened yet, it was tonight's family dinner. My cousins from New York have arrived; Stacey, Mike and their parents are greeted by mum and dad at the front door, I try my best to socialize with them but I fail and instead head back to my room until dinner. I'm by myself in my room, watching the window for any D.U.P to arrive. My mind jumps to the scene of the dinner, when the D.U.P knocked on our door. I'm the one who answers it and is surprised to find a large man with his partner behind him standing in front of me. They yank me from where I stood and cuffs me—
My mother's knocking at the door stops my mind from reeling the images. They disappear and I'm back in my bathroom, the cold water running down and somehow relaxing me. I watch the cracks on the tile I made, mother's going to be angry about that. As if on cue, the crack suddenly starts to mend and disappear, the tile suddenly becomes what it looked like a few seconds ago. Was I going crazy? Was this just some imagination world I'm conjuring up because I'm dying in the forest where the man had tried to kill me? Mother's constant knocking on the door keeps me from thinking into it deeper. I wrap a towel around my waist and opened the door. "What is it?" I asked.
She's taken aback by how much force I had used on my voice. I must've sounded annoyed because there was a faint gleam of hurt in her eyes.
"I'm sorry, mum. I was just… a little tired, I guess" I say trying to lower my voice. "What do you need me for?" I asked again, this time trying my best not to be a douche to my own mother.
"Your father called, he's on the airport" she says. "They're going to arrive a little early, so you best get dressed"
"Okay, I will"
I close the door after mother left and walked back into the shower. I finish up and picked out a polo shirt and some black jeans. It wasn't like we were going out to eat, so I figured I didn't need to be dressed all fancy and the likes. I comb my hair and look one more time in the mirror. The bags under my eyes were dark, I wished they would just… disappear… and they just did. I step back and walk back closer to the mirror, trying to shake my imaginations off. They were gone. I should probably get scared about what has been happening since earlier. I should probably contact the D.U—And what was I going to say? I'm starting to hallucinate that I'm one of them? I don't think so, probably this is just the cause of post-traumatic stress. And since when did I have P.T.S?
I sit down in front of my drawing board and take out a sheet of paper and started to draw. My hands moved on their own, my mind suddenly referencing thing I might do turning them into a mistakes, my hand registers these thoughts—images—and try to avoid them as much, creating new routes for my hand to finish the drawing. When I finish, it's just ten minutes since I began, I could have sworn it felt longer than an hour. I take a look down at my drawing, more like a prophecy. It was a drawing of me, atop a mountain of rubble, armed D.U.P Soldiers line the bottom of the pile, their bodies oozing out blood as they collapse on the floor, dead. My hand is raised to a fist, above me are three other individuals—Bioterrorists—and what seems a motion of cheering. It was like I was one of them. This was a war scene, a victorious one but nonetheless.
I feel a sudden feeling of content that I was successful at whatever fantasy I had just drawn. Something tugged in my head that this was going to happen but as if. I'm not a Bioterrorist nor would I ever want to be. They're freaks of nature whose only purpose is to be a medical lab rat so that we could cure incurable diseases like cancer and HIV. I try to think that even though they're monsters they still have a role to play out in society. That role's the only thing that's holding on to my view of them as humans.
I fly down the stairs and into the living room where I spent the rest of the day surfing the channels on the TV about the recent Bioterrorist escapes, if there was one, and come out defeated. Not a single report of Bioterrorists in Oakley. I feel exhausted but at the same time I want to do something productive until my cousins come over. I try to help with the kitchen work but mum pushes me away saying I have 'better' things to do. I give her a questioning look but she just smiles and carry on cooking. I walk back up stairs and pop open my computer and try to find anyone I could chat or waste time with… waste time. A thought entered my mind and for some unexplainable reason, I followed it through. I face the small clock on the side of my bed. It read 3:22 P.M. my cousins would arrive around 5 or 5:30. I close my eyes and imagine the hands of the clock moving faster, along with them, the time of the day. I stop the hands at exactly 5:00 P.M. I know this was stupid but with the self-fixing tile and my near-death experience, I'm probably open to the thought that this was the afterlife. I open my eyes and I'm speechless to what I see, it was 5:00 P.M. I look outside my window and see the sun was about setting.
My mind races back to the images of me standing near my window, looking out for D.U.P trucks or the likes. My stomach suddenly starts to spin, then a horrific thought entered my mind: I wasn't dead, this wasn't the afterlife. I'm a Bioterrorist. I was one of them.