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I like it... Nice controlment... Poor guy though... unless it's not a guy >.o ... then I appoligize... I'd like to know what happens next... Can't wait to see if the doll falls into someone elses hands or if the person with the seeping brain matter is saved... O.o or something else that my own mind just dowsn't want to think on at the moment.. 3nodding

Chap. 2
Dissimilate.
Assimilation is the natural order of life; if an animal fails to assimilate into its specie’s dynamics it will die. If a human being fails to assimilate into the pre-established social hierarchy of the supposedly modern world in which we find ourselves they will become rejected from the group. While the animals may seem to have it worse, who’s to say that death is really that bad?
John flung open the gate and pulled the box of shotgun shells out of his pocket; two left. He broke open the double-barreled shotgun held in the crook of his arm and pushed the shells into black tubes. He snapped it shut and ran headlong for the direction of his home.
A loud gunshot fired from about two blocks to the right. John paused before changing direction to make his way towards the sound. A gunshot meant another survivor and he could use all the help that he could get. Another gunshot rang out; closer this time, probably just on the other side of the building to his left. He turned the corner and the sight that confronted his vision gave him a sinking feeling of hopelessness.
A massive wall of gray skin and bloody clothing barred his way to the other survivor. It moved slowly inward and let out sickening choking, gurgling, and moaning noises. He recognized the survivor, whose head and shoulders could be seen above the crowd. It was his cousin, Cody; John couldn’t remember him having been that tall the last time he saw him.
The zombies, for that’s what they were, were turned towards Cody and John was, as of yet, unobserved. He only had two shots left but he couldn’t leave Cody here to die; he would have to draw them away from his cousin to save him.
Two shots were fired and two zombies fell; the rest turned their head, slowly, towards the source of the noise. While they turned, John saw why Cody looked so tall, he had been fighting while standing on top of a pile of bodies, all of which were most likely no longer animated as a result of his efforts.
“Run!” John shouted across the plaza at Cody who continued to lay waste to the mass of zombies while they were distracted. John caught a glimpse of the weapon that he was using and for only a moment wondered at the origin of the seven barreled handgun that Cody didn’t seem to reload before he had to turn the rifle around and use the butt as a bludgeon to defend himself against the same horde that his cousin seemed to have been able to dispense with so easily.
After several minutes of hand-to-hand combat the zombies collectively wrestled the weapon away from him and began to swarm around him. He noticed that Cody’s gunshots had stopped and sadly assumed that it had been in vain. Just before the zombies overtook him he heard a clatter on the cement near his feet. He looked down and saw the seven-barreled gun sliding across the ground towards him from in between the zombie’s feet.
The zombies quickly moved in and the gun was lost from sight. John started fighting his way towards it, punching zombies in any vulnerable areas that he could find. He was careful to avoid hitting them in the face because he knew that a bite would turn you.
After what seemed like an eternity of desperate struggle a zombie clumsily kicked the gun back into view. John dove for it and felt a zombie grab his legs. Several others joined it and they began to pull and scratch at his jeans. With terror welling up inside of him he realized that they were trying to rip his legs off. He tried to crawl towards the gun but the collective weight of the animated corpses on his legs prevented him from moving. More of them piled on top of him as another shuffling zombie kicked the gun towards him in its mindless pursuit to join its comrades in his destruction. Just as he grabbed the gun the force with which the crowd of corpses pulled on his legs intensified and he felt sure that they had to pop off soon.
He didn’t have time to figure out the machinations of the gun so he just pointed it blindly behind him and pulled the trigger, hoping that he didn’t shoot himself in the process.
Something cold and wet soaked through the back of his pant legs after the gunshot. The zombies piled on top of him stopped moving and he heard a few fall off. He stood up as quickly as he could and looked down; the substance that had soaked through his pants was the cold, half coagulated blood of the dead.
He looked for a way to open the gun for a reload when little vents on the base of then handle sucked in air and the gun grew strangely heavier. He wondered what had happened and decided to chance it.
Another shot fired and John understood that somehow it was making ammo from the air. Taking pleasure in the fact that the gun didn’t have to be reloaded, he open fired on the zombies.
John was a better shot and more used to handling guns than Cody was, so he was able to make even more use of the unique weapon than his cousin. Within minutes he had cleared the plaza of enough animated dead to make it to where Cody was fending off zombies with a chair that he had apparently picked up from in front of a restaurant on the north side of the plaza.
“Come on,” he said loudly so that he would be heard over the moaning, gurgling and strange choking noises of the zombies. Cody hit a zombie once more with the chair and then the two ran off, John running towards his house and Cody following.
They made it about a block before John had to stop. The zombies pulling on his legs must have messed them up worse than he thought because just from that the joints felt like they were going to pop. He sat down against a building and looked up at the overcast sky.
“What are you doing?” John asked when he noticed Cody fumbling with the metal chair he had carried from the plaza.
“Gunshots bring more of them; I’ve got another plan for when we meet any more on the way.” He replied as he bent one of the legs back and forth until it snapped off. He repeated the process with all four legs and handed two of them to John.
“What are we supposed to do with these?” John asked, noticing that they were to light to do anything from simply hitting zombies.
“Blind ‘em,” Cody replied nonchalantly. “Your legs feeling any better yet?”
“I can walk on ‘em.”
Cody nodded and held out a hand to help John to his feet. They walked quickly towards John’s house, exchanging no words as to keep their presence hidden from any zombies that happened to be lurking just behind any of the many miscellaneous objects that littered the city.
They rounded a corner after a short walk, Cody in the lead. He bumped into a zombie that had been standing there silently and stood motionless, stunned for a moment. The zombie opened it’s mouth, apparently to make some sort of noise that would summon more of its kind to its side; something that Cody hadn’t counted on in his plan of blinding any they met so that they would be less of a hassle to deal with silently. He made a reflexive decision and jammed the chair leg forward as he brought it up. It went into the zombie’s mouth and lodged itself into the soft flesh as the back of its throat. It made a few gagging noises before dropping to the ground and being still. They could only assume that it had died and walked on.
They moved out of the paved alley that they had been walking through and saw a car with the driver’s door open sitting at an angle to the sidewalk. They walked over to it and found the headless, legless, one armed body of the owner lying next to it. They checked the ignition and found it keyless.
“Well, crap,” John said as he searched for the keys “Check for any other cars around here.”
Cody stood up from his search in the floorboards and looked up the long street. A crowd of zombies could be seen about ten blocks down and were advancing slowly.
“Hey, we’d better get outta here,” Cody said.
“Why?”
Cody pointed.
“Damn it,” John said, also standing up. He looked the other way and saw an equal crowd of the undead coming from the opposite direction. The people in this particular neighborhood must have been expert evacuators, for there wasn’t another car on the street between them and the oncoming zombies.

Chap. 3
Groaty the Nasty Clown.
A pair of eyes stared at the two youths looking around frantically for the keys. Their owner recognized his opportunity and made its move. It raised its considerable bulk off of the ground and lurched forth from the shadows.
John was checking the shirt pocket of the one armed torso lying next to driver’s seat when he heard someone grunt and the uneven steps of an obviously drunken person to his left. He stood up and turned around; there stood the downtrodden man that the local kids referred to as “Groaty the Nasty Clown.” He was old, fat, bald, homeless and crazy; crazy enough to use any available materials to dress himself up as a paint-faced circus performer.
“You two looking fer these?” Groaty said with a slur, indicating the keys that he held in his left hand. In his right hand was a nearly empty bottle of booze, which seemed as if it would fall out of his slack grip at any second. He laughed drunkenly to himself before continuing. “I thought someone might come looking fer ‘em. You can have ‘em if you buy me a beer.”
John walked towards him but instantly regretted the action due to the smell. He looked the drunken clown over and contemplated leaving him for the zombies to feed upon. He knew that that was the wrong thing to do but he really didn’t want to be anywhere near the foul smelling, obviously alcoholic clown.
“Give me the keys and get in the car; we’ll take you to get a beer. Ok?” John said as if he was talking to a small child who isn’t getting their way. Groaty promptly collapsed into his arms and began “regaling” the two with stories about how what a riot John was being. He laughed in a moronic fashion before he lapsed into silence, still resting most of his weight on John, who looked very uncomfortable with the situation.
“Help me get him in the car,” John said. Cody, who was not from this part of town and had no idea who Groaty was, had been watching the scene in a perplexed manner. He promptly responded to the command and the two of them managed to insert the clown into the car’s back seat. He didn’t look in the least bit comfortable but they didn’t really care at the moment. John plucked the keys from their resting place in the clown’s hand and started the ignition without waiting for Cody to sit down.
The car roared to life as Cody walked to the passenger’s seat and uproar was caused amongst the zombies. Cody looked at the crowd that had begun moaning louder and increased the gate of their shuffling. It was almost as if they had just noticed them. A look that was a mixture of wonder and surprise at the sheer stupidity of the situation crossed his face and he sat down in the car.
“You know, they had no idea that we were even here before you started the car.” He said calmly after shutting the door.
“What?”
“The zombies, they hadn’t noticed us before you started the car. Apparently all zombies are short sighted.”
John stared at his slightly younger companion for a moment before all the stress from the situation culminated into a fit of hysterical laughter. He felt more like screaming and killing things but he kept on laughing anyway. His laughter didn’t stop as the car began to move forward with his foot on the ignition. It didn’t stop, but was in fact joined by Cody’s laughter as their metal vessel made contact with the wall of zombies in front of them. Their combined laughter didn’t stop as they almost got stuck amidst the crowd that they were plowing over. Groaty the Nasty Clown got up and joined in the laughter as the car’s wheels spun uselessly on the crushed bodies of zombies. Somehow the shift of weight distribution caused when he got up was enough to allow forward motion, because the car lurched forward and the trio laughed until they reached John’s house.
As soon as the car stopped, they stopped laughing, and Groaty passed out. The other two looked perplexed and embarrassed at the same time.
“What were we laughing at?” Cody tried to ask but his lips wouldn’t move. The words, in stead, emitted from the air around his head.
John’s face began to dissolve and his voice sounded from the car’s speakers. “Was it us laughing?” The entire scene faded from their view and they found themselves surrounded by blackness.
Their separate consciousnesses ceased to exist and in their place a third being arose. He felt himself falling through darkness hearing people screaming. He tried to open his eyes, feeling that the darkness might only exist behind their lids. The darkness, however, was all encompassing. It consumed his senses and infiltrated the layers of his skin until he was part of it. He opened his mouth to scream and a voice whispered in his ear. The malevolent words didn’t mean anything but they were laced with such antipathy that he was unable to stop himself from cringing. When he did the darkness subsided and he found himself lying on his back in a dark room. There was a thick, heavy quilt resting on his chest and he tried to shove it off; it was constricting his breathing. At first, when he pushed, the covering fastened down like iron and all the air rushed from his lungs. After a moment, however it gave and became nothing more than an ordinary quilt. He sat up in the bed and was confronted with visions of himself; all of them contorted with hideous deformities that should have rendered them incapable of sustaining life. They smile at him and faded away. The floor gave out and-

Chap. 4
Gravitation.
I could feel myself falling until I hit my bed with a thud. My eyes opened and I thought that I saw a face floating in front of me. After a few seconds of fear, I realized that it was just shadows on the ceiling. I sat up and rubbed my head. I’ve had a history of strange dreams but that one went down as one of the strangest. I swung my legs out of my bed and my feet hit the floor with a soft thud. I didn’t feel it; must have been sleeping wrong, because they were asleep.
I pushed myself up and precariously balanced on my numb feet, which clumsily carried me over to my bedroom window. I pulled on the cord to raise the blinds and had to squint my eyes at how crisply white the world beyond was. It had been snowing for the past week nonstop and it was starting to worry me, because the snow had already piled up to about a foot below the windowsill.
Feeling began to return to my feet, which I realized were freezing; I looked around for my socks. I could vaguely remember kicking them off just as I had fallen asleep the night before. I located them just off the foot of my bed and pulled them onto my feet; my toenails caught on the threads and I reminded myself to clip them later.
I walked into the living room where my little brother was already sitting on the couch, watching some cartoon or another. I sat down beside him and we watched in silence for a few minutes.
“Mom and Dad up yet?” I asked without looking at him.
He mumbled a slurred “I don’t know.”
I got up and went into the kitchen to see If Mom was making breakfast. The kitchen was empty, so it was safe to assume that she was still asleep. I walked down the hall to the bathroom to relieve myself but found the door to be closed. I glanced at the crack underneath the door and saw that the light inside was off. I knocked on the door but there was no answer. I tried the knob and found that it wasn’t locked.
At some points in our lives we wish that we hadn’t done certain things. Some people may wish that they hadn’t cheated their way through high school because it ill prepared them for life. Others may fantasize about what their life might have been like if they had waited before having children or taken a promotion offered to them, despite the fact that it would eat into their time with said children. I wished that I hadn’t opened the bathroom door on that cold day in late November.
It’s certainly true that someone would have found her body if it hadn’t been me. I should probably count myself grateful that it hadn’t been my little brother who had. However, a nagging feeling persists at the back of my mind, even to this day, that if I had waited and let someone else open the door that they wouldn’t have found the same thing that I did. That, maybe, I was meant to find my Mother’s already cold corpse and her hastily scrawled suicide note, and that if I had somehow defied this fate that things would have been different. I knew this line of thinking to be absurd, but seeing the way that my brother looked first at the scene before him and then up at me with a mixture of hurt and hatred in his eyes, made me feel somehow guilty. As if simply being the first to find her made me responsible for her death.
My father made some calls through his sobs and her body was removed after the police came by to do a routine check of the situation and make sure that it was, in fact, suicide. Hearing my father crying put me on the verge of tears. My little brother could be heard sobbing uncontrollably from his room, which was adjacent to mine. I could hear that he was saying something through his sobs but I couldn’t determine what it was.
The ground under the snow was frozen, so the mortuary said that her funeral would have to wait for the thaw in the spring.
The months that followed my mother’s suicide seemed to be colder and stranger than any that I can remember. Neither me, nor my brother took a bath for at least a week after her death. Just going to the bathroom was an ordeal, knowing that she had died in the bathtub right next to the toilet. Actually getting in to take a shower was something that neither of us could handle. After my smell got so bad that I couldn’t handle it any longer, I forced myself to get into the tub. I wont lie to you; I cried as I bathed. The thought that she had committed her last actions on this earth in that spot made it hard to force myself to stay there until I had finished cleaning. Once I had finished, I dressed as quickly as possible and went to my room without even bothering to dry my hair.
My brother didn’t actually get in the bath or shower of his own free will. My father had to force him to bathe. The only real wind of the event that I got was when I heard my brother screaming frantically that he “didn’t want to.”
After that, me, my brother and my father returned to life as normally as we possibly could. My father and me combined our scant cooking knowledge to keep the three of us from starving. My brother and me were put in charge of washing clothes and doing the chores that our mother had done before, combined with the ones that we had already been doing.
Three weeks passed before I got used to not having her around. My father still looked depressed and my brother still showed a strange contempt for me. It had been a long day and I was tired. So, without even saying anything to anyone I went to my room and got into bed. I hadn’t really noticed it at the time but the three of us; my father, my brother, and me, had grown distant from each other in my mother’s absence.
I closed my eyes and let sleep take my mind. It usually took me a few minutes before I actually fell asleep, but that night I dropped right off.

Chap. 5.
Deviation.
Every story has two sides.
I woke up from a dreamless sleep. It was colder than usual, and I could see that it was still snowing by the white powder collecting on the lower corners of the window above my bed. I put on my woolen socks, to keep my feet warm and walked out into the living room. I turned on the TV and sat down to find something to watch. It was a stupid cartoon, even to me. I got up to go relieve myself but found someone was already in the bathroom; the door was shut and the light was on, anyway.
After a few minutes of waiting, I grew impatient and knocked on the door; no answer. I figured that someone had just left the light on from using it earlier, so I opened the door.
I saw my mother, lying in the bathtub with a blank expression on her face. Her skin had already turned a shade of gray, but that wasn’t that caught my eye. What did was that one of her hands was hanging out the edge of the tub. Below the hand was a pool of blood with a razor sitting in the center.
I stared at this scene for a few minutes, in total awe of what I was seeing. I was having trouble making what I was seeing register. It was as if my mind couldn’t handle it and was refusing to process any information as a result.
A thought began to creep through my mentality. Maybe it wasn’t real. My mind couldn’t begin to form a rational justification for this proposal but willingly accepted it anyway. I turned off the light, shut the door, and walked slowly back to the living room.
I looked at the two doors leading to my older brother’s and my respective rooms. Mine stood shut, I remembered closing it when I had walked out. My brother’s stood ajar, and I thought that I could hear him mumbling to himself. I walked over to listen, not really thinking about what I was doing or why.
“You know, they had no idea that we were even here before you started the car.” He mumbled to himself. “What?” His voice changed to a deeper pitch as he questioned his previous statement. “The zombies, they hadn’t noticed us before you started the car. Apparently all zombies are short sighted.” He finished this last bit in a barely audible murmur. I waited to hear more, not really understanding why when I heard a noise behind me. I turned around and saw my mother’s frozen corpse crawling towards me. Her hair was hanging around her head in messy clumps and she was moving as if her legs were useless. Her hands left bloody smears on the cream colored rug as she dragged herself forward. I stood, for some reason my legs wouldn’t move. She made it to where I stood and clawed her way up the front of my shirt until her face was even with mine.
“Scott, don’t pester your’ brother.” She said in a voice that made me wonder if she had slit her wrists or her throat.
I awoke in my bed with a start. My hands moved to the front of my shirt and found no dead, frozen hands grabbing there. I felt relieved and repositioned my head more comfortably on my pillow. This brought my line of sight to the window above my bed; it was snowing outside.
At first I was terrified that my dream had become a reality, as it had been snowing in the dream as well. After some quick reasoning, however, I remembered that it had been snowing for the past few days and that it continuing today meant nothing.
I got up and the floor was just as cold as in the dream. This came as no real shock. I put on the same socks that I had in the dream and walked into the living room. I sat on the couch just as I had in the dream and turned on the TV. The same episode of the same stupid cartoon was on. The difference between the real world and the dream was that I didn’t feel the need to relieve myself in the real world, so I wasn’t going to go into the bathroom and find my mother’s body.
Of course it didn’t matter weather or not I did go check on the bathroom. I would be greeted with the sight of the sunny yellow shower tiles rather than the crimson puddle with the razor in it, because she wasn’t dead. She was asleep in her room.
After about thirty minutes of the stupid cartoon show, I heard my brother mumbling in his sleep from his room again. I walked over and closed his door so that I wouldn’t have to hear it. No matter how similar to the dream all of this was, nothing could make it real, and I knew that.
My brother woke up a few minutes later and entered the living room looking disoriented. He sat down on the couch and stared at the TV.
“Mom and Dad up yet?” He asked.
“I don’t know.” Was my intended response, It came out slurred, however and barely understandable. He got up and walked towards the kitchen.
I was suddenly overcome with the urge to tell him about the dream and beg him not to make it real by going into the bathroom. I suppressed it, however, and kept my eyes glued to the screen. I kept telling myself that nothing that he, or anyone else could do would make the dream real, but it didn’t make me feel any better.
My fear doubled whenever he walked away from the kitchen and towards the bathroom. I was barely able to resist running down the hall and stopping him from opening the door. After a few moments, when I didn’t hear anything else, I walked down the hall to find him standing in the doorway, looking shocked. I was stricken with the realization that the dream had somehow been made real. I didn’t want to believe it, so I walked over to the bathroom and looked inside. The scene matched my dream exactly.
I looked up at my brother, ready to accuse him of making the dream real. To me, this was his fault. If he could have left the bathroom alone then the dream wouldn’t be real and everyone could have stayed happy.
I rushed to my room and locked the door. I tried to stop myself from crying but the tears came anyway. I threw myself onto my bed and cried at both the loss of my mom and the feeling that my brother had betrayed me. I knew, logically, that he wasn’t responsible for her death in any way, but my mind wouldn’t accept that as a viable answer and kept insisting that it was his fault. I gave in and started talking to no one in particular as I cried.
“Why did he make the dream real?” This and several variations of it were repeated from my lips over the course of the next few hours. I thought that my eyes would have dried up by then but the tears kept flowing until there was a large dark spot on my pillow.
Later that night, I knew that I should have gotten in the shower but the idea of getting into the place that my mother had died sickened me and I couldn’t bring myself to do it. A few of our neighbors came over to comfort our father and us occasionally over the course of the next week. I could see in their reactions to my presence that my lack of showering was making my vicinity repulsive. They were kind enough not to mention it, however and I continued to try and convince myself to bathe, but to not avail.
One night my father came in and tried to convince me to take a bath. I told him that I didn’t want to go anywhere near the shower. After our conversation escalated to a somewhat headed argument, he forced me into the shower. I fought and screamed, of course. I kept telling him that I didn’t want to see her body again. The vision of her crawling across the rug towards me incited enough fear to allow me to put up a good fight but my father was a big man, and most of it was muscle. In the end he won and I had to endure the ordeal as best I could.

I liked. It reminded me of Garth Nix's Ragwitch.

Part Two.
Renewal.

Chap. 1.
Anticipation.
I woke up and pushed myself out of bed. The ground had finally thawed earlier in the week and they were taking my mother’s body from wherever they had it stored. Her funeral was this afternoon and I knew that I would cry again once I saw the body. I didn’t want to, of course, but I knew that I would.
As I put my shoes on, I wondered how my little brother was taking the whole thing. He had grown distant towards both my father and me in the past few months. He spent a lot more time than usually in his room, drawing. He didn’t let me see any of the things that he drew, but the few things that I had snuck a peek at didn’t make any sense at all; it had looked like a bunch of meaningless scribbles in red ink.
I finished getting dressed and walked out to the living room, where my father was talking to my brother about something. I walked past them and only heard a little bit of their conversation; something about why he would do something that he had done. It didn’t interest me, so I went into the kitchen to get a bowl of cereal.
After eating the cold, almost tasteless food substitute, I walked back into the living room to find my father alone.
“What was that all about?” I asked.
“Uh, not right now, son.” He said, looking downtrodden. I shrugged and walked back to my room.
The rest of the day passed uneventfully, and after a light lunch of a ham sandwich, and the trouble of me getting dressed in the nicest cloths that I had, it was time to go to my mother’s funeral.
I got into the front seat next to my father; my brother got into the back seat, looking as if he was pissed off about something. I turned around to look forward and didn’t say anything. My father got in soon after us and started to drive as if he were a machine, he never once looked at me, and his expression never changed.
As we drove over a bridge that led to the cemetery, my father began to sweat and his eyes darted around nervously. I tried to ignore it, thinking that it was just nervousness about seeing my mother’s body. I was proven wrong in my assumptions when he stopped the car, he didn’t pull to the side of the bridge, he just stopped the car and popped the locks.
“Get out.” He said.
“What?” My brother and I asked almost in unison.
“I said get out!” This time he was shouting. We complied with his demands and stood next to our open doors, looking at him. “You boys remember that I loved you very much.” He demanded before flooring the gas pedal.
I watched in horror as the car sped forward before veering off to the right and breaking through the guardrails. It plunged into the icy water below, still with two of its doors open, and began to sink. I ran to the spot that the car went over, my brother close behind. We looked at each other, neither knowing what to say. It was so unexpected and shocking that, for the time being, we didn’t know how to react.
The realization of what had happened struck the both of us a few minutes later, as a woman who had seen the entire incident from her car as she drove behind us called 911. She, in a rare display of human compassion, came over to try and console us. She tried to make us come away from the edge, but the instant that she put her hand on my brother’s shoulder he tried to jump over the edge, apparently in an attempt to save my father. Though, by that time, it was obviously too late. We were barely able to stop him from going over and had to forcibly restrain him until and ambulance and some police officers showed up.
They questioned me and I gave them all the information that I could. My brother had calmed down to the point that he was just crying uncontrollably. I found out that the woman, whom had stopped to help us, was named Gene. Gene Marine. The name would have at least induced a smile in both my brother and me had it been under normal circumstances.
I noticed a peculiar phenomenon during the ride back to our house; I wasn’t sad. I understood fully and completely the implications of the situation but I didn’t feel sad at all. I just felt…empty. It was as if a part of my mind, the part that would have allowed me to be sad, was gone; and in its place there was just a hole. My brother still hadn’t stopped crying.
The police officer that had given us a ride home told us to pick up a few changes of clothes, our uncle had been contacted regarding the situation and we were going to stay with him for a while. My brother just sat in the seat and cried, so I said that I’d go inside and get cloths for both of us.
It should have been a simple matter, just going inside to get some changes of clothes, but as soon as I stepped foot inside the darkened house I was overcome with fear. I tried to stay calm as I walked towards my room but I had the feeling that something was lurking just behind me, I kept checking over my shoulder but never saw anything. I knew that there was nothing there, but just being alone in the rooms made me terrified.
After gathering clothes for both my brother and me, I went out to the police car and got in.
“You alright, son? You look pale.” The police officer asked in a casual manner. I felt like calling him an idiot for asking weather or not I was ok after seeing my father commit suicide but restrained myself.
“Yeah, I’m fine.” I replied.

Chap. 2
Realization.

I had indulged in activities that I knew to be both wrong and strange in the weeks leading to the day of my mother’s funeral. I didn’t know why I found myself doing these things, only that it provided a release from the constant and unnatural feelings of resentment for my brother and now, strangely enough, my father. It wasn’t about the pain or the sight of the blood; it was about the material as a medium for art.
The first time that I ever painted a picture in my own blood, it was just a stick figure. I had accidentally scraped the skin off of the bottom of my toe on something while walking through the living room. I sat in my room after that and stared at the blood coming out of the small wound and thought to myself. Fumed to myself might be better phraseology, but we will go with thought. I absent-mindedly put the tip of my finger into the blood and drew the doodle on my arm. It wasn’t so much a conscious decision to do so, as it was how one might act in a dream; taking strange and unusual acts and occurrences for granted.
Something about drawing in my own blood made me feel good. It erased all of the feelings that I had towards anyone and anything. It was a sort of trance state that I became a junkie of over the time between my mother’s funeral and burial. At first, the pinpricks on my wrist and the missing needles that I used to draw both the blood and the pictures with went unnoticed. My father, however, caught me pricking my wrist for more of the macabre ink a few days before the funeral. He took the picture that I had been working on and left the room without even telling me not to do it any more; he even left me with the needle.
I thought that I wouldn’t be reprimanded for my actions until he confronted me about them a few days later. He brought me into the living room and told me to sit down on the couch. I complied and he pulled the folded up piece of paper that had my drawing on it from his pocket.
“Son, what is this?” He asked, something in his voice sounded off but I couldn’t put my finger on what exactly it was.
“It’s a drawing.” I replied, still having hopes of salvaging the situation.
“Of what?”
“It’s of…” I paused not knowing how to answer. I couldn’t remember what I had been drawing and at this point it didn’t look like anything more than a bunch of red scratch marks on the paper. My brother came out of his room and walked into the kitchen as my father continued talking.
“Never mind, that doesn’t really matter. Why would you do this?”
“Do what? Draw?” I asked. I knew that it was futile at this point but I had to try to get myself off the hook.
“No, no drawing is fine.” He paused and put his hand over his eyes, something I had seen him do before when he was thinking deeply about something. “What is this drawn in, Son?” He finally asked.
“It’s umm…” I couldn’t think of any way to get out of this so I decided to just outright tell him. “Blood.”
The news shouldn’t have taken my father by surprise but he sounded disappointed and a little shocked anyway as he continued. “Why would you draw in blood, is what I’m asking.”
“I um… don’t know.”
“Scott, I talked to a friend of mine, he’s a therapist and he says that he wants me to bring you in to see him.”
A thousand stories that my brother had told me about his own trips to see psychologists flooded through my mind and I became angry that he wanted to send me to one. All of the unnatural hatred that I had been bottling up over the weeks overflowed in that moment.
Darkness. I couldn’t remember where I was or what had happened. The paper that my dad and me had been discussing was crumpled in on hand and in the other there was an empty plastic bottle with the lid missing. I looked around the room and see that I’m in my room, sitting on my bed. I try as hard as I can to remember what happened but nothing comes.
I walked out to the living room to see what happened but there is no one out there. I looked at the clock and saw that it was two and a half hours after I had gone into the living room to talk to my dad. The bottle slipped from my loose grasp and hit the floor. I picked it up and saw that it shared the name of antidepressants that my father had been on. I put it on my dresser and threw away the unfinished picture.
About an hour later it was time to go to my mother’s funeral. I looked at my father when he got in the car and saw that he was acting strangely. I didn’t press him on the issue, thinking that I may have done something wrong during the time that I can’t recall any memory of, and that if I asked I would have to face punishment for it.
The drive to the funeral was uneventful; I got a strange feeling as we passed over the bridge that something might be terribly wrong, but I shrugged it off and just waited until we arrived at cemetery. My dad pulled up next to the cars of others who had arrived before us and we got out.
We walked over to where her coffin was suspended above the grave and I got a feeling of unease. Something didn’t seem right about the situation, but I couldn’t put my finger on what it was.
I looked at my mother’s body lying in the open coffin and thought to myself how eerie it was that it would sit so still like that. I knew that it didn’t make sense for her to move, being dead and all, but it was still creepy that she didn’t do anything. As if for the sole purpose of defying my thoughts, she placed her lifeless hands on the edge of the coffin and pushed herself up. She looked at me without opening her eyes and things started to float. The people around me floated up like balloons filled with helium; the grass and trees did likewise. After a short all there was in all of reality was the two of us standing in a sea of nothing.
“Son, why are you so sad?” She asked while her lips moved as if she were saying something else.
“Well, wouldn’t you be?” I answered despite the fact that I didn’t really feel sad at this point.
“Yes, but get out.” As she said this, her face seemed to dissolve for a second before reassembling.
“What?”
“I said get out!” She shrieked like a banshee and everything fell back into place. It was different, however. I wasn’t in the cemetery; I was standing on the bridge and looking out into the water.
Just as I felt a hand touch my shoulder, I realized that the outline that could be seen below the surface of the water was that of our car. I noticed that our father was nowhere to be seen and realized that he must have been in the car. I tried to leap out into the water to save him but my brother and someone that I didn’t recognize restrained me. I tried to tell them to be reasonable, that someone had to save him but all that my throat would emit was a slew of unintelligent blather.

Right... so here is some more of the...thing... It continues from right where the last update left off, to avoid confusion.

I continued to struggle, wondering why no one was trying to help him. Didn’t anyone care? It didn’t occur to me that he might have wanted to die, so I fought against them for as long as my mind and body could handle the emotions of anger, frustration, and confusion. After a few minutes, these newly induced emotions, combined with what I had been feeling for the past few months seemed to just break me. My body no longer seemed to be under my control, and I seemed to just shut out the world for a while. The place that this isolation took me was one of blurred memories and a sort of half consciousness that let me shed myself of all my problems. Nothing mattered any more.

#3
Devastation.
Cody walked back over to the spot where he had heard something fall into the water and saw what appeared to be a doll made of burlap had washed up on shore. He bent down to pick it up but found strange warmth emanating from it. Not sure what to do about something like that, he proceeded to pick it up. However, as soon as he touched the Doll’s burlap skin, he found himself to be no longer on the beach. Darkness surrounded him except for a tiny dot of red light far off in the distance. He took a step forward and the dot disappeared. He immediately put his foot back where it was and the dot came back into view. Thinking that he had somehow scared whatever it was, even from this distance, he took a slow step forward. It slowly faded out through the course of the step until it vanished at the end of it. He put his foot back where it had been and watched the light reappear. It occurred to him what was going on and he took a step backwards; the light grew brighter. Pleased with his ability to solve the problem, he began to walk backwards as fast as he could without tripping.
The light grew until he was standing right in front of it. It was the doll from the beach, but it had a bright red glow coming from under its skin. It was floating in the air at about chest height and had an unnaturally aware look for a doll; almost as if it were alive. Cody reached out to grab it, wondering what made it float when it’s button eyes opened. They just flipped up and back like eyelids and the source of the glow was revealed.
The empty eyeholes that the buttons had been covering were like doorways into a different dimension, one of suffering and heat. He recoiled and took a step backwards which moved him closer to the doll. It struck his chest and he felt a searing burning as the heat of the place the eyes revealed singed his flesh. Images of the place that the doll seemed to hold within it flashed in front of his mind’s eye.
Billions upon billions of people were restrained in every way from being chained up to being stabbed into place. The sound of their screams ripped through his mind like a tidal wave and he felt all of their pain at once.
It felt to Cody as if every possible inch of his body was being destroyed in every way imaginable in one continuous process, when a voice that was so cold he actually felt relief from the heat and pain just from hearing it spoke.
“Be my servant and I’ll stop the pain.” It said without even the faintest hint of emotion. Cody shouted his agreement to the proposal in agony, and woke up on the beach.
Dawn had come Cody found himself staring up at the rolling clouds with the doll resting on his chest. This doll was ordinary, not glowing and with eyes that were only buttons, rather than a portal to some sort of human fueled inferno. He picked it up and propped himself up on his elbow. Despite the fact that it wasn’t as obviously malicious as the doll from wherever he had been while unconscious, it still had a strange sort of life about it.
He was about to throw the doll back into the water and forget about it when a voice that was like his own, except with far more malice and capacity for cruelty in it, spoke.
“You made an agreement. Don’t go back on your word.” As it finished speaking there was a sizzling sound and fiery pain erupted from two spots on Cody’s chest. He cried out and quickly lifted up his shirt to see what it was. Two teardrop shapes had burned themselves into his chest in the place that the other doll’s eyes had hit him.

This is really interesting, and finally starting to make some sense. It's very good, and I hope you write more. Please?

I'll start reading regularly and reviewing now that NaNoWriMo's over; that just ate up all my free time. sweatdrop But I won, Yay! *does happy dance* yep, 50k words. Yeah, this has nothing to do with your story, but I'm happy so Yay! biggrin

It's a small update... the beggining of chapter three...

Chap. 3.
Invoke a sense of well being.

#1
Cody woke up the next morning and continued the monotonous routine of following the stretch of grass. He was already feeling the pangs of hunger and the burning of thirst after about ten minutes.
The day dragged on and the hunger became Cody’s main concern. It still wasn’t bad enough to impede his progress much, but he knew that he had to find food soon.
Just as Cody was beginning to consider trying to eat some of the dried out, yellow grass for whatever scant nourishment it would provide, he saw a small dot on the horizon of the beach. His first thought was to run and find out what it was as fast as possible but he held himself back, considering the distance to it; he would just get too exhausted to run at about a quarter of the way there.
After he had walked for another hour and a half, he saw that the dot was square in shape and had a gray looking lump lying next to it. After another ten minutes he identified the lump as a humanoid shape and ran the rest of the way. It was still another three minutes before he made it close enough to identify the human shape as John and the square dot as a wooden crate. Thirty seconds after that, still running, he dropped to his knees in exhaustion and skidded to a stop in the sand.
“John!” Cody called out, still about twenty yards away from him.
“What?” John said, sounding irritated in the way that people aroused from sleep usually do. He must have realized where he was sleeping, however, because he pushed himself up quickly. He looked around with an astonished expression on his face before resting his gaze on Cody as he stood up. “What the hell is going on?”
“Apparently an experiment in ingenuity.” Cody, who had gotten up on shaky legs and walked over to John while he had been looking around, responded.
“What?”
“Check your pockets.”
John complied and found a similar note to Cody’s. The only immediately noticeable difference was that it mentioned the crate as a “gift from the management.”
“This is weird,” John said after reading the letter aloud.
“Yep. If the test is about survival, why give us the crate, right?”
“No, I mean before I woke up on the beach here.”
“What was weird about it?”
“Well, for one you were dead, and for another I was trapped in the car.”
“Wait, I was dead?” Cody asked, astonished.
“Well, it’s probably just what the notes mentioned about our loved ones thinking we were dead. It was probably just a set-up.” John paused to see if Cody was going to say anything more on the subject. “Right, well that’s not the point. The point is that just before I woke up here, I was trapped in the car, surrounded by zombies. The last thing that I remember before waking up here is that they had begun to dismantle the car to get to me.”
“So, you’re dead? Is that what you’re saying?” Cody asked flatly.
“What? No! The people behind this experiment probably saved me at the last moment.” John said, almost defensively
“Alright, that makes more sense.” Cody paused. “Anyway, wanna look inside the crate?”
John didn’t respond, but, in stead, stepped over to the crate and pulled off the lid. Inside was the eight-barreled gun that Cody had used. Lying next to this was what appeared to be two handguns conjoined at the handle and a pair of tinted goggles.
“Sweet!” Cody exclaimed and grabbed the eight-barreled gun. John didn’t say anything, but grabbed the two-barreled one and the goggles. He raised the gun in front of him to see if he could aim with such a strange weapon and found it difficult.
“What do you think these are for?” He asked Cody indicating the goggles.
“I dunno, try ‘em on.”
John paused, considering that they might be some sort of trap, before slipping them on and looking around. Other than the dark tint, nothing seemed different. He raised the two-barreled gun in experimentation and found the barrels to me pivoting slightly as the handle remained stationary. He tried to figure out what they were doing but couldn’t make any sense of it; their small quick movements didn’t make any sense to him.
“Here, see if you can make any sense of this.” He said as he slipped them off and handed them and the gun to Cody.
“Alright,” He said and put the goggles on. He took the gun, looked down at it, and then looked off into the horizon. He repeated this procedure of looking from the horizon to the gun about three times, the gun seemed to move a few degrees each time he looked up. “Cool.” He said as he began to look around randomly.
“What?”
“The guns point where you look. Here,” He slipped off the goggles and handed them and the gun back to John. “Just don’t look right at the gun, it starts to twitch and I don’t think that’s good for it.”
“Alright.” John, who had already put the goggles back on, replied. He experimented with it and found what Cody said to be true, they followed the movements of his eyes perfectly. “How did you know to look out there to figure that out?” He asked without looking at Cody.
“Oh, I thought I saw something out there.”
John looked but didn’t see anything.
“Well, I’m gonna see how accurate the gun is, so step back.” John said. Cody complied. John looked into the crate once more to check if they had missed anything, they hadn’t. He stepped back and looked at a knothole in the side of the wood. “Ready?” He asked Cody.
“Do I really need to be?”
“It’s probably gonna be loud.”
“Just shoot.”
John put his pointer finger in the left trigger loop and his little finger in the right, refocused his slightly wandering gaze back on the knothole and clenched his fist. There were two loud, simultaneous blasts, and the knothole widened about a half an inch. Along with the blast, two other holes blasted out of the other side of the crate and splinters littered the beach for about three feet behind them.
“Not bad eh?” John asked.
“Dude, they didn’t even hit the same spot, they-“
“Yeah, look.” John said, bending down and pointing to the, now rugged, edges of the knothole.
“Then what’re those?” Cody asked, pointing at the two holes in the back of it.
“The bullets crossed each other’s path. The crate didn’t stop them.”
“Oh, right.”
“Idiot.” John said as he lifted the goggles to his forehead.
“You wouldn’t even know how to use the gun if it wasn’t for me.” Cody said angrily.
“Meh, I’d have figured it out eventually.” John said, ignoring Cody’s anger. “Anyway, I’m hungry. Any idea what to do about food?”
“No idea. I’ve been out here since yesterday without anything to eat or drink.”
“Well, I guess we should go look for something, then.”
Cody agreed, despite how tired his legs were and told John which direction he had walked from and they started walking in the opposite one.