A/N: This chapter actually wound up being 17 pages long, so I divided it up into three hopefully more digestible parts. The other parts will be up as soon as I get the chance to read over them a couple times.
Mokuba jolted upright at the sound of a burbling growl, but soon realized it was only his stomach. He wasn't ready to pull out of his not-quite-sleep state, but at full consciousness his churning stomach was too much to ignore. It didn't actually hurt, at least not as much as he knew it should. It was more of a discomfiting, heavy numbness, similar to the sensation of Novocain after a dentist appointment. The strange stillness of time that kept the level of light so constant seemed to have seeped into his very organs, suspending his metabolism.
He forced himself to stand and cracked his stiff back. The filthy carpet crunched under his feet as he made his way into the hall, his bat propped on his shoulder. Rotting wood groaned in complaint as he padded carefully down the stairs. At the bottom, he proceeded to examine the house he hadn't seen in a decade.
He couldn't remember enough to know if the depiction was accurate. He continued his exploration until a piece of paper on the coffee table froze him in place. It was the pamphlet he'd destroyed upstairs, crumpled around the edges and taped back together. His eyes darted around the remains of the living room. The debris cast strange shadows against the water stained walls, but there was no other life in the house.
Mokuba picked the pamphlet up between two fingers. It seemed thicker than it had been before. Tucking the bat under one arm—he didn't dare put it down—his hands pealed open the folds. Inside he discovered a map of the town. In a far corner of it, red pen marked a large building as 'exit.' Behind the map, trapped in the tape holding the torn paper together, he found a brass key. The key struck an unsettlingly familiar cord.
As he brushed his hand over it, a flash of that key jangling on a key ring filled his head. A wrinkled hand with cheap fake nails hung it on a high hook. Mokuba gasped and dropped the papers. The key to the iron gate. The mistress kept the keys carefully out of reach, so that the kids couldn't run off. Mokuba had stolen it once, to visit the park where his dad used to take him and Seto. Seto had risked his neck to go out and bring his little brother back. Of course Mokuba hadn't wanted to return, but he hadn't much choice. If the mistress had noticed his absence and had to send people after him, she would've banished him to the Quiet Room for months. The Quiet Room… Sunnyside hid a lot of horrifying things behind cheerful facades and innocent names.
As much as he wanted to escape this decaying world, he wasn't sure if searching the orphanage for the exit was worth it. Heck, the orphanage didn't have any business being here in the first place. This world clearly didn't belong anywhere near the reality where he grew up.
Pocketing the key and studying the map for road names, Mokuba made his way to the kitchen. He had to keep his optimism high. Maybe this time he'd find some palatable water or food. Glancing nervously at each window he passed, he checked the refrigerator first. Empty beer bottles cascaded out. Slamming the door on the horrid smell, he moved on to the cupboards. Nothing but dusty boxes of moldy cereal. As his attention returned to the window over the sink, he locked eyes with a pair of horizontal, slit pupils set in golden irises. The eyes themselves were set in a black, rubbery face. A sticky hand pawed at the glass. The friction created a sound like nails on a chalk board.
Not again. Mokuba groaned and clenched the bat tighter, backing out the kitchen door. This new thing didn't look as threatening as the bladed creatures, but it retained a nightmarish peculiarity that turned his mouth to cotton.
About two hundred pounds of sticky rubber tackled him from behind, clinging desperately with arms around his shoulders and legs around his waist. It jarred the bat from his hands and knocked the wind from his lungs. Mokuba's breath wheezed in his chest as he tried to refill his lungs, but the pressure from the constricting limbs prevented proper expansion. The boy's hands clawed reflexively at the pliable skin, the boy himself too panicked for oxygen to contemplate what might be attacking him, or how it got in the house, or search for his fallen weapon. However, the harder he fought the tighter it clung, grunting and keening frantically in his ear. Gonna smother… Its weight forced him to the floor where he dragged himself across the carpet, trying to… scrape it off, or maybe crawl away. He didn't know which.
His hand brushed the leg of an overturned chair. He couldn't see anymore, what with his hair in his face and the way his attacker's arms had worked their way up around his neck. Such a position allowed for more efficient strangling. Hoping the chair wouldn't be too heavy, Mokuba gripped the leg and attempted to swing it over his shoulder. The rotted wood snapped and the leg came off in his hand. Too brittle to bludgeon. Mokuba stabbed instead. The creature gushed like a water balloon filled with red jelly. Warm liquid seeped into his shirt and glued the fabric to his skin, but the grip loosened. The wood penetrated the rubbery shoulder over and over, making squishy slopping noises the boy could barely hear over the increasingly desperate moans. Finally, the moans petered off and Mokuba rolled the sagging corpse off of him.
Through the gray filter of his returning vision, he only paid the body enough mind to acknowledge its similarity to the thing watching him in the kitchen. These monsters possessed humanoid hands, capable of opening doors. Houses alone were no longer fortresses. Coughing deep in his chest to clear his throat and shock his lungs into function, Mokuba hastily collected the bat, the map, and checked his pocket for the key. Unnatural blood matted his hair and leaked into the crack between his yellow vest and his striped shirt, where it pooled in a pocket of clammy goo. He shuddered, but there wasn't much he could do. If he paused or backtracked, something would probably attack him again. A growing conviction told him the town possessed a mind of its own, and that omniscient intelligence grew weary of his lagging.
There weren't many direct paths to the circled destination. High fences cut off the alleys between the houses and, as he progressed into a small business district, between the shops. According to the map, the road he followed ran west past a hospital, where it joined with another and went north straight to his destination. However, it dead ended well before of the hospital. The obstacle was far stranger than the maze of concrete, bricks, chain link, and wooden planks that composed the world he now inhabited. Here, the road sheared off in a crumbling cliff. Even the buildings on either side of him sagged over the edge, one torn nearly in half by gravity and the other barely holding together. Testing the unstable ground with each step, Mokuba inched as close to the ledge as he dared and gazed into the misty infinity of the abyss. No bottom. No opposite side. He'd reached the end of the world.
Glancing around to make sure he was still alone, Mokuba pulled out the map. Aside from the street names, it wasn't very reliable. It didn't show any of the blockades impeding his progress. It certainly didn't mention anything about the ravine. He'd have to try every street until he found a way to cut north. It was too bad he didn't have something to mark the dead ends. He moved to close the map and crinkled his nose when it stuck to gore on his fingertips. What he wouldn't give for running water right about now.
As he contemplated a bloody thumb print, a rather morbid idea occurred to him. While part of him crowd proudly at his resourcefulness, a deeper part cringed at the macabre way the town affected his imagination. Finding a couple strands of hair that were still damp, he managed to scrub a light, red smear across the missing chunk of road. Hoping it wouldn't count as backtracking and merit another attack, he retraced his steps.
