Thanks for the reviews, everyone! They make me smile. Although, any review will make me smile these days (hint hint). And I do not own Oreos. Actually, I own a packet, but I don't own the company or anything. I wish I did...

Another boring chapter, I guess. If you like mysteries and explanations, then this one might be a bit interesting. If you like mindless violence, then you will have to wait a little longer...

NOTE: I never put 'romance' in the genre, so don't expect any. Possibly in the sequel (Yes, there will be a sequel), but not here. Not yet. And probably not between these two. But my mind can always change. As can my eyes. They change colour because I'm special.

Chapter 3: It'll Only Get Worse From Here

'Told you so.' Shmee's voice was smug and worried. Todd tried once again to turn on the light, but was unsuccessful. No matter how many times he flicked the switch, the small hanging globe in his room wouldn't glow.

He sighed and ripped part of the bear's arm at the seam, taking a small piece of stuffing.

'What the HELL was that for!?' Shmee asked angrily.

Todd just laughed and pocketed the stuffing. "I'm going for a walk, and I need you to tell me if anything happens here. I'll fix you back up... eventually."

'Well, that still wasn't very nice. I already have too many stitches!' Shmee said, mock-hurt.

Todd opened his mouth to say something, but a light and irritating noise began buzzing in the back of his head. The temperature in the room dropped suddenly, and Todd shivered. More than he could hear it, he could feel the walls whisper.

He fled the room then, before the sounds could get any louder, scooping up an old backpack that held some water, the diary, a bunch of useless junk and possibly a packet of week-old Oreos. Shmee just sat on the desk, unnaturally silent in the chill.

As he was opening the front door, Todd heard his father muttering, "I hope the kid gets eaten by a bear." He groaned and tried violently to rip the video out of the player without destroying any of it, but eventually tore the metal roof off and began to pull the tape out of the small box. The video's cover was kicked his way, and Todd saw that it was his birth. His father watched it on a daily basis now... backwards. He shuddered and turned away, the disturbing thought of himself being put back into his mother being too much for him to handle without getting sick. Along with the sight of it, the thought of his parents wanting it to happen sent him out the door in rage.

It slammed behind him, rattling the old windows. There was a incoherent mumble from inside, and, not wanting to know what ugly words were coming out of his father's mouth, Todd sprinted around the house and into the bushland that bordered it.

-X-

He had been walking aimlessly for an hour, and Todd was starting to get hungry. Sitting down at the trunk of a spindly tree, he opened his backpack hopefully. Sure enough, a half-eaten packet of Oreos was there. He dug in happily, savouring the flavour. Todd's parents never really gave him anything this good, even considering it was stale.

Mouth full, he scanned his surroundings for possible trails he could take home. Instead, his eyes settled on three figures standing close together further in. Todd saw nothing else, so he turned back to his snack, uninterested, though he kept them in his sights from the corner of his eye in case they decided to try something stupid with Todd.

One of them started towards him, the others seeming to tail a video camera behind them. Odd... but, since when was everyone completely sane? Todd ignored the three.

'Shove a tree branch through her face!' Shmee urged, but the boy tuned it out.

As the approaching figure got closer, Todd saw that it was a girl of about his age. Her expression was oddly scared. Not nervous, like when one might meet someone new, but fully terrified. Like she were approaching a hideous monster with many tentacles. She looked back to the other two, but they just waved her on, yelling something he couldn't hear.

Curiosity got the best of him, and Todd watched as she put a hand out, and a shocked expression instantly wiped away the fear. The air seemed to ripple around her outstretched arm. She looked back, as did Todd, to see the other two had dropped the camera. One scrambled to pick it back up while the other held their arm anxiously.

The girl took a deep breath and stepped once, the air moving once again like ripples in a pond. They moved upwards in a soft arc, and to either side, until they disappeared completely. Todd stood up, dropping his snack, and tried to figure out what he had just seen. The girl didn't even glance in his direction; she just stared back at the other two blankly. She grinned and waved to them, but they didn't respond. They just stared, the video camera fixed on the spot that the air had shaken. The girl's grin faded and alarm flashed in her eyes.

"Yvonne! Derek! C'mon guys, stop playing around!" She shouted. There was still no response. Her voice echoed some as if she were shouting at a wall. The girl went to take a step towards them, but her foot collided with what looked like solid air. The waves spread out again, and she started to panic. She shouted again, and tried to push against what seemed to be nothing.

By now, Todd was too freaked out to move. He just watched as the girl became more and more violent towards the barrier point. Finally, she headbutted it repeatedly, arms hanging limply beside her. The girl seemed to have given up on trying to get through... whatever it was. Her face was terrified, but tired at the same time. She sank to her knees, one hand on the wall of solid air.

Todd got a good look at her then. She was very pale, with dark, sunken eyes that looked too old and wise for her delicate, child-like face. Her clothes were invisible under an ugly, too-large brown jacket, and her boots of the same shade were scratched to the point of coming apart. Her hair was a darker brown, almost black, and it was held above her head in two messy pigtails. The girl looked like she had been chewed up and spat out by a mountain, then seen the most horrific sight imaginable, before she turned up on the horizon. Those eyes had seen too much...

Finally Todd had recovered enough to do something. "Hey!" He shouted. The girl flinched and stared at him like he was from another planet.

"W-who are you? Wait, that's not important. What's happened in here?" She asked shakily, balancing herself with her arms as she stood up.

"What do you mean? What the hell going on?" He asked back.

The girl just stared at him blankly. Then her eye twitched. "You can't be serious..." She saw Todd's confused expression and barked a sarcastic laugh. "Oh, great. This is just perfect."

Todd growled. "Will you tell me what's going on, already?" He asked, approaching the place she had just tried to get through. It felt like a brick wall coated in a few millimeters of gel. He pushed on it, not sure why he wanted to get through, but to no avail. The barrier stood solid. He sighed and turned to the girl.

"Now that you seem convinced that it's real... I guess I have to start at the beginning. I can't believe this!" She muttered, taking a deep breath. "This may sound a little insane, but you can feel the thing, so don't go thinking I'm a psycho lunatic or anything. Last night a... gigantic grey dome appeared over the city. No one knows why, or even what it is. So far nobody could get through. Not vehicles, not foot soldiers... I guess my friends wanted to say they saw the dome for real, and I tagged along. I don't know how..." The girl trailed off, staring at the two in the distance.

"How you got through. And now you can't get back, for some odd reason." Todd finished her sentence, and the girl nodded. Movement in the distance caught their attention, and they both saw the other two, the girl's 'friends', get up an leave. Todd snorted in disgust, knowing that they were all the same. Selfish bastards, using those weaker than themselves as playthings to manipulate and push around.

The girl sniffed and turned away from them, trying to seem uninterested. Obviously, she knew that as well. Why she had followed them to the dome, though, he would never know.

To break the awkward silence, Todd bowed and said, "To answer your first question, you may call me Squee, milady. Please excuse my horrible attitude a few seconds ago. My hideous adolescent mood swings have got the better of me, once again. Plus, it's fun to confuse people like this."

The girl just stared at him, frozen. Something flashed in her eyes. "Do... Do I know you?" She asked warily.

Todd straightened. "I haven't seen you before. Not that I know of, anyway."

"Never mind. I'm probably thinking of someone else..." She blinked once, realising what he had said before. "Squee?"

"The name bestowed upon me when my parents realised they had to take me home from the hospital," He said sadly. "Plus it was the sound I made when I was scared, and I used to be scared a lot. Feel free to mock me now."

The girl laughed, but it wasn't cruel. She was genuinely laughing at his joke.

"May I have your name?" He asked. This girl seemed like one of the few that actually respected the ones people usually ridicule, so Todd decided that she deserved more than cutting remarks and venomous glares. Instead, he held out his hand.

She shook it, her hand somehow even thinner than his own. He could clearly feel her bones through the skin. Then she shrugged and smiled absently. "Don't remember it."

Todd didn't know what to think. The one person he could have devoted any friendship to just happened to be completely out of her mind. "Do you remember why you don't remember?" He asked.

"I don't remember anything up until last week. Wait... I know what the longest word in the English language is. And I know that googelplex is a number. And that without mucus your stomach will digest itself. And that turtles can breathe through their anus. But I don't remember a thing about how I remember all that. Neat, huh?"

"Okay, that's creepy... They can really breathe through their anus?" He asked. "Never mind. I don't want to know. Do you have amnesia or something?"

The girl thought for a moment. "Probably not. I mean, I don't have a bump on my head. Well, not one that hasn't been made recently..." She rubbed the red mark on her forehead that had formed when she was violently trying to get through the barrier. "Ugh! What am I going to to?" She asked herself, turning to face the barrier. She looked like she was about to get violent again, but instead she just glared.

"Good question," Todd said, eying the barrier warily. He wondered where Shmee was, and why he hadn't butted in yet.

There was a sigh from beside him. The girl turned to him and nodded once, then spun around to walk off. She jolted and completed the turn, facing Todd again, and asked, "Which way is the town?"

He pointed in the general direction of the main street. "But I should warn you, there's probably no power right now. That would be the barrier's doing. Why are you going, anyway?"

"I've come this far, so I might as well see it through." She looked thoughtful, biting her lip. "Things are going to get bad if this doesn't let up. People go crazy if the right variables are introduced, and this barrier will be enough to set them off. You should probably get yourself ready for a rough time."

With that, she turned on her heel and left. Todd stared after her for a time, wondering exactly how much sanity she has left, then he went to collect his backpack and investigate the barrier again.

'That was the longest conversation you've ever had.' Shmee's voice intruded on his thoughts once again.

"Shut up. I don't think that counts. In case you weren't listening, that girl was insane."

'I agree. Let's burn her for making you interact with other human beings.'

Todd sighed and ignored the bear, trekking along the perimeter of the barrier to see if it went as far as the girl said it did.

-X-

October 13, 2007

Dear Die-ary

I know I only wrote yesterday, but things just got weirder. The lights still haven't come back on, and now I know why. Sort of. Apparently a strange dome just appeared around the city, cutting us off from the rest of the world. Maybe. I know this because I met a girl from the outside, and I contradict this because she came in from the outside. Strange, because apparently no one else could get through. I really want to know why...

My parents didn't believe a word of what I said. My own mother asked who I was again, and my father blamed me for the power outage. I'm sick of the way they treat me! Just a few more years until I can move out. Until then, I guess I'll just have to deal with it.

I'm going into town to see if anyone else has discovered the barrier... but I can't help having a bad feeling about this. Maybe it's just Shmee talking, but I believed the girl completely when she said things could get ugly out there.

Todd C.

-X-

A TV in the front of an electronics shop was on, somewhere outside the barrier. The dome was all they showed since yesterday, and word spread quickly. Now the entire world knew about this strange phenomenon. Perimiters were being set up around the thing, heavily guarded by foot soldiers.

A shadowed man grinned as he sucked a super-size Cherry-Doom flavoured Brainfreezy through a straw as he perched delicately on the roof of the shop opposite, watching the televisions intently. He had heard the rumors, but this was the proof he needed before he continued his venture. His unkempt black hair was rippling lightly in the wind, as was his tailed shirt, giving him a ghostly appearance. That and his wide, dark eyes that seemed to glow through the shadows.

"I didn't come this far to simply be denied access to my old home," he muttered loudly, earning glares from a few passers-by. Then he frowned and sighed. "I must be insane to still be calling that shithole a home... But I guess it's better than the rest of the world. At least I had friends there," he said, referring to the inanimate objects and dead animals he so often talked to. But that in itself was quite normal; the really fucked up thing about it was that they talked back.

"Freak," One man muttered as he entered the shop. Johnny's mouth twitched upwards involuntarily.

-X-

Red and blue lights were flashing in the windows of the shop and police were slamming the bathroom door open, pushing aside the man that had found it.

A sink was broken, flooding the room with water, blood mixed in intricate patterns as it swirled down the drain in the floor. A policewoman froze as she saw the reason for their call labelled 'urgent'.

A twelve-inch blade was pinning a gory human eyeball to the shattered mirror, crimson oozing into a sink that was full of human fingernails and broken toothpicks that were also covered in thick blood. The rest of the force swarmed in after a few barked orders, kicking open every cubicle door in the room, one by one. One policeman fell backwards, gagging and retching as he saw what one cubicle contained.

Stuffed roughly into the already dirty toilet bowl was a mass of various body parts, and organs littered the floor. Blood was sprayed across the walls, covering the graffiti completely with its oozeyness. The smell of it clogged up the policemen's noses and mouths, and they staggered backwards, holding their guns as if the dismembered body would begin to drag itself towards them like in some cheap horror film. But without the wires.

Some of them ran back out of the room, quit their jobs and resolved to lay in bed for weeks trying to suppress this memory before they were scooped up by the nice men in pretty white coats and given the tasty orange pills to make all the bad things go away.

-X-

Exactly four minutes and fifty three seconds later, Johnny C. was staring intently at the rushing police from his perch near the window, the idiots oblivious to his existence. He was short one knife, covered in blood and gore, and smiling happily. Ans he was still holding his Brainfreezy.

He hadn't put it down once during his visit.