The Beginning of An Apocalypse

The sounds of boats and small bombs going off. It sounded like it was everywhere and underneath the blue water it was even more so.

Marcus saw through his cloudy eyes fish were swimming around. They came over to him and nibbled on his oily flesh. Now there were piles of dead fish lying around him. Dead. He didn’t feel the water on his skin. He knew he was wet, he just couldn’t feel it. He also didn’t breathe it in. Every time he opened his mouth the water came in and he could never tell if it went down his throat into his lungs.

If it did he could not feel it.

He felt for his heartbeat and there wasn’t even that.

He could make noise. He could move his body. He could see.

But he could not taste and he could not feel. What he was losing? He was losing his eyesight. He was losing his hearing. But that was only decaying at a slow rate, really slow. What he was losing were his memories.

He looked back and he saw the face of his sister. Her blonde hair and her blue eyes. He remembered her being there but he didn’t remember how. He saw her sadness he saw her anger. He saw her love and he remembered the words she had told him.

She didn’t remember how she began his parent.

He wanted those memories back, but it was becoming easy to have some other feelings take over that want.

Thirst.

That was all he felt and it drove him mad. And he wasn’t thirsty for water. He wasn’t thirsty for juice. He wasn’t thirsty for anything that he could see. He didn’t know what it was, but the more he lived this way the more he saw it.

And it wasn’t in no glass. It wasn’t in a jug.

It was inside something living.

He was on the bridge and he saw those people running from him. He heard their beating heart, he smelled their blood from twenty feet away. Whatever they had he wanted. And he tried to get to them. He tried to stop that itching feeling inside his throat.

But every time he touched them that smell stopped emitting from them. Their hearts stopped beating.

So he went on a race to find more.

To find someone to stop the thirst.

And the more he found the less he had. The more the feeling became stronger and the only thing that mattered to him.

But now he was under here and he found that being under here distracted him. He was surrounded by water and dead fish and it somehow distracted that thirst. The more fish that had died from coming near him, the more he could stand it.

But it would only last a while before he had to leave. Before he had to find something else to distract himself or before the people that were searching the entire Channel to find him.

Which could be any minute now.

Marcus didn’t sleep so there was no way he wouldn’t know what was going on. He was hiding under a rock cave with his head hitting the top constantly. Humans don’t float when they fall into the water, but he did.

And he didn’t have a choice either.

Marcus watched as a small yellow rockfish swam toward him and instead of going to bite him or find out what he was, it stayed there. One of its eyes looking directly at him.

Come on, Marcus thought. He didn’t only want that fish to come over to him, he needed it too. The water surrounding him was like a magnet and it eased the thirst, but nothing compared to the life of a beating heart.

Marcus watched as the fish stared him down and didn’t move. It was like it knew what Marcus wanted and the fish wasn’t going to fall for it. No matter what Marcus tried to do, he raised his arm out and tried to get it to follow after him, but that didn’t seem to matter it. What it wanted didn’t seem to be there or enough to make it take the risk.

Marcus tried to reach out to grab the fish. No matter how close he got to the fish, the fish did not swim away instantly. It moved a few inches back with every inch Marcus moved.

Marcus moved without thinking. There had been a lot of that recently.

He moved out from under the rock cave and plunged forward to get the rockfish that was waiting for him. His fingers were almost to the fish. The fish looked Marcus directly in the eye and that was when it came to its senses.

That is when it turned and swam away. Faster than Marcus could swim or float, but Marcus tried. He tried to swim toward it while he could still see it. And he had moved forward and he thought he was swimming until he realized that he wasn’t. He wasn’t swimming, he was floating.

His entire weightless body was floating upwards. He tried to spin around and tried to see where he was going. All he could do was lay and let himself float. He was too light to try and swim back down. He could barely see the rock cave that was once his hiding place.

Now, all that he saw was the fish in the faraway distance. Seaweed with plastic wrapped around it floating around.

And with every second that he was higher up he saw more and more. He could see the sun reflecting in the water and he knew he was almost to the surface. To the surface where people with scary weapons would be there.

If they were going to be there waiting for him, he didn’t know.

He knew he had been hurt. When he was a human he knew he would have died with all these wounds.

He had been stabbed by people who tried to stop their fate. He was shot by soldiers and by others who had guns. He was impaled by a car as well. But none of those things killed him. They didn’t even hurt. He couldn’t feel the bullets inside him or if there was blood leaking from him. He didn’t have a hole in his chest from being stabbed or shot.

The only thing that had hurt him was that gun.

That gun that that man had. Gabriel Everett. Mr. Everetts’s memories were the ones that weren’t fading yet. They were being forced to stay by someone or something that wasn’t him. He remembered the big gun that he had. The weird thing about the gun was that Marcus knew it belonged to him, not Gabriel.

He knew that someone like Gabriel should not have it and Marcus wanted it.

And then it was shot and it blew half of Marcus to bits. As Marcus was pushed down to the bottom of the Channel by the car and then pushed into the rock cave by falling into a current pushed him into the cave. It took him a while but he watched all the blood and the bits of his body that were scattered across the Channel be brought back to him and to recreate him.

That was the only thing that he felt. That pain was horrible.

It was amazing and there was no one or nothing to stop it. To ease it.

When he was brought back together, he was stuck here and getting his life from the more fish that sacrificed their lives for him.

Marcus was above the water now. He could see something other than just a greyer version of the water. He was rolled on his back with his pushes and a few waves to help him. He looked up at the sky to see the clouds that were slowly passing by.

He could tell he was moving around because his view continued to change. It was the sky and then it was the trees. It was a plane and back to the sky.

There were loud noises everywhere. So loud that he didn’t hear someone calling to him. He moved his head in the water and looked over to see who would be calling for him. Who would be shouting?

He was beside a small beach of land in front of trees. A teenager was standing there in nothing but orange bottoms. He held his hands to his mouth as he shouted for Marcus to say or do something.

Marcus didn’t move and he didn’t say anything.

Words were something that he found he couldn’t say or couldn’t remember. Only a few were still intact.

The kid in the orange bottoms grabbed a long branch that was hidden under the sand and moved himself into the water but not close enough to touch Marcus. If it was obvious that Marcus was the person who created a virus and was killing so many people, it wasn’t obvious to this kid.

Marcus saw the branch go over his face and then land on his side. He believed the kid was pushing him to shore, but he couldn’t be shore.

But he knew he was getting closer to the kid because he could hear the kid’s heartbeat. He could see his blood running through his veins and the thirst was back.

The kid pushed him through the rocky watery beach and then onto the sand. Marcus was rolled on his stomach when he was on the ground and black bloody water came out of his mouth.

“Are you alright?!” The kid shouted as he stood there beside Marcus. The kid was smart enough to not touch him even though he had no idea who Marcus was. Marcus lay there listening to the kid’s heartbeat rise and fall and rise again. He saw the kid’s foot beside his face and he couldn’t help himself any longer.

He raised his arm forward and grabbed onto the kid’s leg. He grabbed on tight and as the kid screamed Marcus pushed himself forward and he bit the kid’s ankle. He could feel the vibrations of the kids beating heart and his life force coming into Marcus while the kid died. The kid screamed for help and tried to move away, but that was only for a second before his screams went to choking. His veins turned black and everything that was not taken from him was coming out of his mouth. From his nose, eyes, and ears.

Marcus was there till he was covered in charred blood and guts and the kid’s body on top of him. Marcus released the kid from his grasp and lay there. He gasped and panted as he felt so warm out but also energized.

Marcus lay there basking in this feeling before he pushed his body out from under the kid and into the beach.

It’d been so long since he stood and moved that he didn’t know if he could do it. He picked himself up from his arms and without any type of feeling, he was standing.

He stood there listening for something. He saw nothing living that he wanted to pursue. But he did hear noises that weren’t natural.

And he wasn’t so far gone that he knew that where there were noises like that, that meant there were people close by.

And as much as half of him told him to go sink back into the water, the other half, the stronger side of him, told him to go find someone else to take.

Something else to quench this thirst that was driving him mad.

Marcus turned towards the forest hill and moved his body forward. He went closer and closer towards the noises and he found exactly what he was looking for in little time.