Because You Exist
By Tiffany Truitt
Because You Exist
Copyright © 2014 by Tiffany Truitt. All rights reserved.
First Print Edition: November 2014
Limitless Publishing, LLC
Kailua, HI 96734
www.limitlesspublishing.com
Formatting: Limitless Publishing
ISBN-13: 978-1503009448
ISBN-10: 1503009440
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to locales, events, business establishments, or actual persons—living or dead—is entirely coincidental.
Dedication
To all those in my past, present, and future who supported, support, and will support me.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 1
If there’s one thing that’s certain about life, it is this: there’s no such thing as time.
My leg began to bounce as I watched the minute hand crawl its way around the clock while Hamlet continued to whine. And whine. And whine. Oh, and then whine some more. Did he know how to do anything else? No wonder Mommy Dearest ignored him. I knew I was supposed to be basking in the Bard’s use of language and metaphor, but I seemed to recall a pretty girl throwing herself at him only scenes before. Maybe if Hamlet got himself some on a regular basis, he wouldn’t be so damn depressed.
How long would I have to wait for his to-be-or-not-to-be introspective walkabout to end?
That’s the funny thing about time. It always seems endless when you want something to happen. But that’s an illusion. Time was forever segmented and marked by obtaining the things I desired. Glory. Recognition. Freedom. Sex. I didn’t see time as a marker of things I had to do; I saw time as the space between getting the things I wanted.
How long 'till the next time I would throw the winning pass at the football game?
How long 'till my uncle introduced me as Shepherd High’s star athlete?
How long 'till I got to touch Jenna again?
As I sat counting down the meaningless minutes until I was released from Hamlet’s soliloquizing, my right eye began to itch—like pink eye itch. I rubbed the back of my hand against it, hoping to dislodge whatever was causing the irritation. I brushed away, in the manliest way I could, a half fist-half grunt technique, the tears that began to stream down the right side of my face. I hunched over in my desk, keeping my head down, hoping the rest of my classmates were digging the emo-est piece of literature I had ever read. As I closed and opened my eye repeatedly, I silently began to cuss out every unclean hooligan on the football team. That locker room was a hot house of germs waiting to infect me.
Then I felt something else.
Slowly, it felt as if every hair on my right arm was being pulled upward away from my skin. It didn’t hurt exactly, but it felt uncomfortable. My mind flashed through the countless episodes of Grey’s Anatomy that Jenna made me watch. Was I having a heart attack? Wasn’t one of the signs your body going all funky but only on one side?
A sharp pain in my stomach interrupted my desire to pull out my phone and search Web MD, a frequent search of mine since my uncle didn’t believe in doctors. The odd sensation spread from my right side to my left. It felt as if someone, or something, had punctured my skin with claws, dragging me into its cave. Like I’d stepped inside some damn video game. Dungeons and Dragons to the extreme. I tried not to scream out, but a muffled cry of agony escaped my lips.
Even Hamlet stopped whining at that point. My teacher looked back at me with concern. I could see her mouth open, beginning to ask me what was wrong.
But then everything stopped.
Everything.
My teacher froze mid-sentence. The clock stopped working. Chelsea Harper quit secretly texting under her desk. Sleeping Mark Franklin’s drool was held frozen in the air, trapped before it could fall from his mouth and hit the desk.
Only me, a buzzing fly desperately trying to perform a Houdini act and get past a closed window, and a sharp, piercing noise remained. I didn’t really have time to freak out because the pain had become too intense. It hadn’t even hurt this bad after last year’s championship game, and I’m pretty sure I broke some ribs in that death struggle.
I moved my shaking hands to cover my ears, falling out of my chair. With every shriek of the mystery noise, a shudder ran through my body. I curled myself in the damn fetal position. It just seemed like the only thing to do.
I closed my eyes. Opened them. Closed them. Opened them. Each time cursing that I wasn’t waking up in my own bed at home. This couldn’t be happening. Not to me.
But then closing and opening my eyes made no difference.
Suddenly, I couldn’t see at all.
Had I gone blind?
And just as soon as this weird sickness grabbed onto me, it let go. I felt perfectly normal. No pain. No noise. Nothing.
I slowly sat up, waiting for some explanation for what just happened. Waiting to be rushed to the nurse’s office or the nearest psycho ward.
But everyone was gone.
Alone.
It had to be a prank—albeit an effing elaborate one. What other explanation was there ? It was almost homecoming. Pranking was in full-swing. A rite of passage for seniors.
The smell hit me first. The first wave of their attack. Last year, the seniors thought it would be funny to wait on the bus ramp for the freshman on the first day of school, a sort of welcoming committee. Instead of gracing them with smiles and cheerleaders holding handmade banners welcoming the “freshmeat” to the hellhole where they’d spend the next four years of their lives either trying to stand out or disappear completely, the seniors doused them with spoiled milk. The chunky sort. The smell was damn awful, and it lingered around for weeks. No matter how hard the janitors scrubbed. That’s how bad this smell was. Week old spoiled milk. It wasn’t strong enough to make me want to vomit, but still strong enough to tickle my nose and cause my throat to tighten.
My mind quickly, as quickly as my mind could at least, ran through everything I knew about what just happened to me. I needed to assess the damage their joke had done, so I could figure out what came next.
I'd had some sort of fit.
I blacked out.
Everyone left me.
I was pretty sure someone had set off stink bombs, or the t
oilets had exploded with weeks of teenage cafeteria-food waste. Judging by the faintness of the stench, the gaseous plague had happened hours or maybe days ago.
How long had I been out?
With a few muttered cuss words (I cuss too much), I carefully and slowly got back to my feet. I picked up my book bag and headed into the hallway only to find there was no one left there either.
Great.
They left me.
Lying on the floor no less.
Weren’t there laws about that kind of thing? Wasn’t the news filled with stories of bus drivers or parents who left kids sleeping in heated, sun-blazed vehicles of death? Did the rules of human decency change to include that it was perfectly acceptable to leave a guy lying on the floor while he was having a fit?
I knew it was Friday and that equated to a mad dash for the exits—even for the teachers. Especially the teachers. But that didn’t excuse leaving a fitful guy writhing on the floor. Even for laughs.
I pulled out my cell phone to text Jenna. She at least would have waited for me...
Great.
The damn thing didn’t have a single reception bar. Which, unless the world had ended, was strange. I spent the better part of Spanish texting with Jenna all the things I wanted to do to her since her parents were going to be away for the weekend. I even said a few dirty things in Spanish. At least I think I did.
What the hell was going on?
As I shuffled my feet towards the exit I almost fell. I wasn’t the clumsy sort. Star athlete and all. Looking down, I noticed the floor covered in an inch deep layer of dirt.
The janitors were going to be pissed.
Things were getting really weird.
Stephen King weird.
I picked up speed as I made my way to the exit, continuing to hope this was the most elaborate prank ever. Homecoming was soon. I was All-State. Maybe the school decided to punk their favorite football player. Like big time. History-making.
That’s how adoration works.
They must have drugged me.
Roofies seemed a little extreme, but hell I was a popular guy.
As I moved closer to the exit, the stench that was only a mild annoyance before became increasingly stronger. A wave of bile began to crawl its way up my throat and my nose began to burn with a putrid smell that was worse than any combination of rotten milk and teenage shit that I could ever imagine. I started to cough, trying in vain to hack up the smell that tried to mix itself with my taste buds, creating a coating of some tangy substance on my tongue.
I couldn’t take another step. At least not with my body being attacked with the stench of a thousand used jock straps. I pressed my hand against the door to the janitor’s closest and bent over. As my coughs became more violent, I must have pushed harder against the door—which gave way—pitching me stumbling face first into a wild tangle of dust mops and buckets. I had just enough time to clasp my hands tightly over my face before meeting the floor, dust making its way into my nose and mouth despite my wall-of-hands..
The dust was grittier than I expected. I didn’t go around eating dirt alongside my ten piece chicken nuggets, but what boy hasn’t tried some growing up? Bits of hard, jagged chunks of God knows what stuck to my tongue. When my fingers couldn’t dislodge the pieces, I began to lick my letterman jacket in hopes it would liberate my tongue from the crap.
If anyone saw me now—down on the floor, licking myself like some damn dog.
That is when I saw the first one.
The first body.
The first of many.
I could only see one of its eyes. Wide open, eyelashes crusted over in dried blood. It never blinked. It sat there staring at me. Frozen.
Cans of paint and bottles of cleaner camouflaged the rest of the body. There were other strange objects littering the floor of the closest—empty water bottles, a radio, candles, cans of Spam. Only the eye was visible through the mess. Like I was stuck in some fucked up Poe story.
I didn’t scream or run away. I didn’t feel much of anything. I knew what I was supposed to be doing—running, screaming, peeing my pants. I just couldn’t convince myself it was real. How could I? The most dramatic thing that ever happened to me was the death of my parents. That happened so long ago I couldn’t even remember crying. The next most dramatic thing? The news that Steve Carell was leaving The Office.
I didn’t lead such a bad life.
A dream.
A nightmare.
That had to be it.
I just had to wake up.
I pulled my t-shirt over my nose before getting on my feet. I was pretty sure Janitor Corpse was the cause of the stink that filled the hallways. I backed out of the room, still unable to look away from the eye. I made a promise to myself in that moment to lay off the mystery meat at lunch. My classroom naps usually involved scenes of sexual depravity with Jenna. Not this. Never this.
As I made my way back into the hallway, I started to notice all the things I was too busy to notice before. I needed to find out this was all a joke so badly, that I never saw how truly messed up everything was.
Most of the windows were busted, but I heard no noise from the busy street outside my school. Numerous lockers were opened and emptied like it was the last day of school, and no one bothered to tell me. The trophy case, filled to the brim the last time I walked by it, empty as well—sprayed across its glass doors in large red aerosol letters:
THE ONLY CERTAINTY IS DEATH!
I shuddered.
This wasn’t any ordinary nightmare.
I could see the shock reflected on my face as I stared into the vandalized glass of the trophy case. Gone was the calmness I felt moments before in the closet. I could hear my own voice repeating inside my head that this was a dream, but I could see in my expression that I didn’t believe it.
The smells. The roughness of the dirt in my mouth that felt more and more like eating fish that hadn’t been de-boned. The bright red of the words sprayed onto the shiny glass of the one place I made a point to visit every time I entered the school. These things all felt too real.
Too damn real.
My mind wasn’t able to create something like this.
I stumbled away from the trophy case and turned my body toward the exit. I wasn’t above running. Dream or not, I didn’t want to be there. As I ran, pushing my legs as hard as I could, I came up with a million explanations for everything. Each explanation felt more forced than the next.
Maybe I was in a coma, forever trapped in some messed up world. Though how I got in a coma seemed to be a bit of a problem to work out. It’s not like the Bard had ever been known to place someone in a vegetative state.
Maybe someone did slip something into my coffee, and I was having the worst trip ever. If so, I’d be drug free for the rest of my life the minute I woke up. No matter how cool reruns of That 70’s Show made smoking up look.
Maybe this was just simply a bad dream. Though never had a dream felt so real. Never had the smells or sights seemed so vivid—besides, most of my nightmares involved Jenna’s dad shooting my balls off.
Maybe it was real.
Chapter 2
My hand almost reached the door when I collided with someone.
The presence of another human being in the deserted school caused me to let free a very unmanly yelp. I was about to make some excuse, joke off my nervousness when I saw who it was.
Scary Carrie.
Not a very creative nickname, but I gave it to her in the fourth grade—give me a break.
My heart began to pound at the sight of her. There was no way I’d dream of her. No, freaking way. Scary Carrie looked like she always did. Wild, red hair that curled beautifully or frizzed disastrously depending on the weather. Jeans. No makeup. Hoodie pulled over her head. Complete lack of effort. Scary Carrie’s signature style. Scaring the penis away since 1996.
I quickly tried to think of the last time I saw her but came up empty. She looked like I remembered her with the exception
that there was an actual emotion on her face. She looked petrified.
Scary Carrie took a step away from me. “I...I thought I was alone,” she croaked out.
I didn’t want to hear her speak. It made her presence all the more real, and that was the last thing I wanted. Her being there with everything else I saw made it seem impossible it was anything but real. But if it was real...
The stench...
The body...
What had happened?
I couldn’t bear to look at her one second longer.
I felt it calling to me. The outside world. I wondered, wildly, insanely if it still existed. Was it possible that it didn’t? Where was all the noise? The students? Why did the school look like it hadn’t been in used for months? Why had that janitor hid in that closest with all those supplies?
I felt dizzy. I was on the brink. The edge. The whole world ready to slip away. I turned away from Carrie, pushing open the doors to the outside.
Destruction.
Ruin.
Absence.
The Wendy's across the street, the 7-Eleven on the corner even the I-HOP down the road. All destroyed. Had a nuclear war somehow happened in the midst of my freak-out? If so, someone should have bothered to tell me. It would have been the polite thing to do.
Every building that covered the streets surrounding my school—my kingdom—lay in ruin. Rubble. The silence was the most disconcerting. . Silence, despite popular belief, has its very own intruding, suffocating noise. It fills your ears and crawls its way down to the pit of your stomach, the place that alerts you to any heightened emotion: love, lust, disgust, fear.
My stomach was turning in on itself. There was no way what I was seeing could be real. It wasn’t possible. The same dust that covered the floors of my high school draped itself over the rubble of Virginia Beach. There were no people. No movement.
Nothing.
Just the silence that moved between the destroyed buildings and abandoned cars.
Because You Exist (Light in the Dark #1) Page 1
