PROLOGUE | a g a i n
23/2/17

A door slamming shut.

Adira closed her eyes tightly, feeling herself being surrounded by a swirling darkness which enveloped her mind as she willed the memory to leave her in peace. She knew what was coming; she knew it every passing second of every minute of every day. She woke up and just tried to survive for that day, before being ungraciously returned to a time she so desperately wished to forget.

Screaming. Footsteps pounding up the stairs. Ruffling through a drawer, something being taken out. A gun being loaded. More footsteps, and a gun being shot.

"No..." she mumbled, sliding down against a tree, unable to force it out of her mind as its cold grasp only grew firmer. "No, not again....no, please...". She couldn't deal with it. The daily torture was too much, her thoughts a jumbled mess of pain and regret. Pain for what she had lost; regret for what she had done. Or to be more accurate, for what she had not done.

Adira was sitting on her bed, reading a book about a minute before she heard these very sounds. Something was wrong - very wrong. She stood up and half-ran, half-jogged her way to the door, but her hand hesitated on the knob as her fingers curled and uncurled with the fickleness of her mind. Was it really safe for her to go out? No, common sense told her. However, her family could be in trouble; she had to see what was happening. So she turned the knob, and opened the door.

She shook her head, trying to stop reliving it. She'd do anything, anything to never see it again. Or at least have a day of peace. She shoved her knife into the tree, took it out, and stabbed again and again.

In anger, she tore up the tree. It was no longer encased in its sturdy, protective layer of bark. It was now torn up, sap seeping out from within. She kept stabbing though, hoping that perhaps, if she focused enough on something else, her memories wouldn't come back to haunt her today.

She turned and stabbed another tree, which met the same fate as its predecessor. Torn to shreds, just like...them.

She and her parents didn't live in the nicest neighborhood, and a prison was located nearby. Her father always told her to be careful because occasionally a prisoner would escape and come their way. She was never harmed, though. She took those words and burned them into her mind, so that her parents didn't have to lose another child. She knew they would never forgive themselves. But she hadn't had to worry for a while. She was twenty-six now, home for a visit after completing her fourth and final year of medical school. She was set to begin her residency in a week.

She begged for it to stop, for someone to come and help her, for them to make it stop. She needed someone to make it stop. She needed it to go away. She couldn't keep going with it, she couldn't. It was unbearable, it was torture. She begged and begged but it wouldn't go away, and she realized something.

No one was coming. Everything was gone. Everyone was gone. She was all alone. No one could stop this, nobody was there. She had to do it on her own, but she knew that she couldn't. She never seemed to be able to do anything, especially if it needed doing. She knew this from the very event she was reliving.

She ran down the stairs screaming for her mother, for her father. "What's going on? Dad, Mom? Are you okay? What is it?"

But no one answered.

This memory plagued her. She could never escape it. Each day, she broke down. It wouldn't stop. It couldn't, because after witnessing what she did, she could never forget. Ever. It came each day, playing itself back, over and over. Again and again. It never stopped. She was forced to see it until the end, the most gruesome and heart-wrenching part; the reason it was etched into her memories. It was written in permanent marker on a whiteboard. It wasn't supposed to be there, no one wanted it there, she regretted letting it ever get there. It ruined, tainted the entire image forever.

She turned the corner into the kitchen and screamed louder than she ever had in her entire life. She didn't understand. Her mother and father were behind the counter, hiding from the danger present in the room. Two escaped prisoners. But this wasn't any ordinary prison escape. They seemed to be...dead. Their skin was disgustingly green, their bodies half eaten, and when they turned their eyes on Adira, she saw that they weren't human. Their eyes were empty, dead, a void. And they were covered in blood. Their hands, their mouth...almost as if they had been eating something. Something alive.

In that moment, she stopped stabbing her knife into the tree. She stopped the screaming she didn't realize she was doing until that moment. For she knew - nothing and no one would help her. It was all gone, all, all, gone. Everything, everyone.

She ran and got her dad's gun from his study. She'd seen that he had already taken his gun from her parents' bedroom. But when she got back to the kitchen, she saw that he had run out of ammo. The two bodies each had several bullet wounds, yet didn't even stagger from them. She realized that if her medical training taught her anything, it was that the brain was the most important part. If she could kill the brain, she could end this. She could save them.

She was crying now, sobbing. She knew exactly what to do. But she didn't do it - she was the reason they were gone. She was the reason it happened. Why couldn't she do something? Why didn't she? It was all her fault, all her fault. She should've done something, she really should have. But she didn't. And what happened next was entirely her fault, entirely hers.

She had her finger on the trigger, and aimed the gun at the two monsters a mere four feet from her parents. She knew she had to kill them to save her family. But she couldn't - she couldn't live with herself knowing she had killed a human being. What she didn't know was that they were no longer alive. She wouldn't really be killing anyone. In that process, she ended two lives; her mother's, and her father's. All because she couldn't pull that damn trigger.

Adira screamed, because the next part was the worst. It was what tormented her constantly. It felt like she was being poked with needles all over, a punishment for what she did. Granted, she did rather feel like she deserved it, but it was so unbearable that she barely made it through each day. She couldn't escape. And no one could help her.

She lowered the gun, unable to shoot. Her parents were begging her through their eyes, their facial expressions, to do something. To help them. To save them. And two seconds later, the bodies reached her parents. They devoured them. And when there was no longer anything left except for bones, they turned their sights to her. And as they came forward, she shot twice. Once in the head for each of them. She heard the bodies drop and ran to her parents, cradling their dead, almost completely unrecognizable bodies. She cried, for them, for herself, for what the world had turned into. She got up after two hours and packed. She knew she couldn't stay there. It wasn't safe, and she couldn't handle being somewhere that reminded her of her parents. She took some food, clothes, and her father's gun from his study. Lastly, she took a knife, and didn't look back.

She wished she had looked back. She would give anything to see her home again. But three hours later, when she couldn't figure out where to go, when she needed to see it one last time, it was destroyed. The military was bombing Atlanta and must've decided to make sure the outskirts were clear as well.

She stabbed her knife over and over and over. She cried and cried, wondering why this had happened to her. Why it was still happening.

When she finally wore out, she opened her eyes. She hadn't even realized they'd been closed. And when she looked around, she saw five corpses on the ground. She'd killed five of the monsters by herself in her rage, pieces of them flung throughout the low-hanging branches of the trees surrounding her.

She couldn't handle it. This was the worst it had ever been. She was going insane, lonely and trapped with her thoughts and memories. She needed to escape it. She had been going for maybe six months now. She didn't know if she could make it to seven.

She shook her head and screamed at the world. It wasn't fair, any of it. She caused it, all of it. She needed help, she needed something to keep her there. She didn't know how long she could stay even slightly lucid. Her thoughts were drowning her, suffocating her. She needed someone to listen but there was no one. It was all bottled up inside her and she would soon explode. She wondered if she could even go back to how she used to be.

But she knew the answer to that question. She was too far gone. Nothing would help.

The tiny sliver of hope inside her said maybe she'd find something. Adira would find something to live for - wouldn't she?