HA\LF: Dead nor Alive

Chapter 1

“I have back to my sense again, but where am I?” He asked in his mind.

The loud clicking sound in his head was enough to stop him from questioning. The sound of his stomach rumbled because he hasn’t eaten anything, or to be precise he hasn’t eaten something normal for a human being.

His body moved on its own because of the thing inside him that slowly took over his body. He wanted to die, he wanted to end his life, he wanted to rip his whole body apart and crush his own heart with his own hands but he couldn’t do anything but watch his body slowly rotting away. He couldn’t move any muscle in his body even his eyes were controlled by that thing inside him.

“Why are you doing this to me?” He asked that question so many times even though he knew he won’t get any answer from it.

All he could do was watch what the thing did to his body and all those disgusting things he put into his mouth. He could still feel pain, exhaustion, hunger, thirst, every inch of his body and he could still smell everything but he couldn’t control them anymore.

“God… not again…” He looked, felt, and tasted at the flesh of a decayed creature with maggots on the flesh that the thing inside his body that forced him to eat it that he was going to puke.

His trembled hands were feeding his mouth with that disgusting rotten flesh, the pungent smell, and the soft, chewy, cold, and watery rotten flesh was getting chewed by his teeth. He couldn’t handle the taste, the smell, and the texture of the flesh but his tongue and his throat were forcing him to swallow it.

Whenever he tried to throw everything up, his stomach clenched and his guts were preventing him from doing so. His mouth was always tightly closed and so was his throat, all he could do was cry and hope that this will end soon because he couldn’t take this anymore.

There was a moment where he could gain a part of his body, his mouth, his voice, his eyes and that was it. It happened whenever the thing inside his body is resting. He kept screaming and shouting hoping there was someone or something that would take him off from this torture but it was all futile.

He didn’t remember what day, what time, where he was, or what he had become. Everything that had happened to him felt so slow and a day felt like a week. He didn’t know what was happening to him but if only he knew what it feels like to be consumed by these parasites, then he wish he could kill himself before this thing took control of his body.

He thought it was time to believe, but he was nervous that the answer was right in front of him, that he would be like one of them.

He looked at his surroundings filled with decayed bodies of these monstrous creatures and the wall of rocks that were blocking the sky. He didn’t know what he should do, he didn’t know what he could do, he was scared and he was alone with that damned thing in his head that took over all his memories and erased all of those memories he treasured his whole life.

“Any… anyone out there… help me…” He slowly tried to open his mouth and looked up at the wall of rocks, tears came out of his eyes while he was trying to speak. “Please… kill me…” He was sobbing and his eyes went blurry because the tears were blocking his vision and he couldn’t wipe them off.

He gulped and he could taste rotten fleshes he had consumed the whole day that was still sticking on his gums and between his teeth. He didn’t want to puke them out because it would wake that thing up.

He tried his best to move the tip of his fingers but he couldn’t. He took a deep breath while he was holding his tears.

“Kill me! Anyone or anything that can hear me! Kill me! I know that you all can hear me! Come at me and devour me! Please!” He glared at the ceiling of this place and screamed his lungs out with his voice echoing.

He heard roars, growls, screams, screeches, and bangs coming from all around him but none of them were coming toward him as if they were all mocking him and letting him suffer.

Immediately he couldn’t control his body anymore, tears were falling down his cheeks while he was staring at nothing in front of him. His eyes rolled up and everything immediately went dark.

Deep down he knew what was going to happen to him and to be honest, this was the only time he could enjoy himself, the memory that he could watch and soon would be erased from his brain.

“I’m sorry, everyone, I forgot all of your names and faces but I still can remember your voices. I can’t even remember my own face since it has been forever since the last time I saw my own face.” He talked to himself in his head, then a screen appeared in front of him like a projector screen.

“Archie! Hey! Are you even listening to me?” A woman’s voice, the voice that tingled his stomach and heart whenever he heard it. A blurry image of her was the only thing he wish he could erase so he could see her face, she seemed important to him.

“Oh, you were calling me? Sorry I was lost in thought.” Archie stood up and turned his head to look at her.

The woman sighed and shook her head, she sat down next to him and stared at the massive see-through glass. Earth, he was staring at earth.

“Ahh… how beautiful earth was,” Archie said to himself while he was staring at his own memory.

“So? What’s the score of your Virtual Survival Test? Come on, tell me, I have been waiting for weeks for this!” The woman gently slammed her shoulder to his, he looked and tilted his head, the woman seemed to be smiling at him.

“Virtual Survival Test or VST, I remembered that I took the test whenever they updated the machine and the complexity of the survival test. I forgot how naive I was back then and how stupid I was to believe that I would be able to be like them.” Archie said to himself in his head and slowly remembered everything from his past.

“My score? Well, I aced it as always.” He crossed his arms and smirked arrogantly.

The woman clapped her hands with joy and excitement, she wrapped her arm around him and they both were staring at the earth from above.

“Right, I was up there, huh?” Archie remembered that he used to live in one of the stations that were created so people could live in peace and away from danger.

Stations that were built above the sky but not high enough to leave the earth’s atmosphere nailed to the deepest of the earth as the foundation and connected one to each other made it look like a ring of a planet from outer space. A place for millions of lives to live peacefully, and it was created hundreds of years ago if he remembered correctly.

Hundreds of years after the gigantic meteor hit the earth and destroyed half of the earth leaving a third of the earth with a huge chunk that anyone from up the station could see a small part of the core of the earth or so what they told him.

“Are you really going to do this, Archie?” She sighed and looked down for a moment.

“She looked so sad and worried so suddenly, what happened to her?” Archie raised his eyebrow and questioned himself while he kept staring at his own memory.

“Archie! So this is where you are! We have been looking for you everywhere.”A manly voice was calling his name.

They both looked in the direction where the voice was coming from. A tall man approached him and waved at him.

He remembered this manly voice, a voice that always gave him pain in his heart. He couldn’t remember anything about this person but it must be someone important to him as well.

“Oh, and congratulations on your test! All of them were talking about you right now, you should see their faces. They want to treat you with a bottle of beer, come on! They’re all waiting for you!” The guy wrapped his arm around Archie and dragged him all the way to the end of the hallway leaving the woman alone back there.

“I couldn’t see her expression, I don’t know why I left her on her own and why I followed this guy rather than spending my time with her.” Archie felt an unbearable pain inside him as if thousands of needles stabbed him in the heart.

“It’s a blessing and a curse to be able to watch my memories but it’s not always good and most of them are the things that I regret.” Archie kept staring at the screen of memory in front of him and said it to himself.

Archie sat down and was surrounded by dozens of people, they were all cheering for him. He could tell that he was happy back then. A half-emptied bottle of beer in his hand and stared at them singing the song that he kind of remembered.

“If I remember correctly it was a song about despair turning into hope and dream.” Archie listened to the song through his memory.

“I remember these people, I want to be like them, they’re the Axis Humans, the people that evolved after they were making contact and infected by the parasite. Well, they’re not exactly got infected by the parasite, but their ancestors were and so all of their descendants inherited their superpower and strength from them.” Archie comforted himself by hugging his own body in this dark empty place with only a screen of memories in front of him.

Axis Humans have the superpower to a great extent that’s able to fight those parasites while those ordinary humans have nothing but their lives to help the Axis Humans during their expedition and exploration to exterminate the parasite beyond the walls.

“Now that I think about it, I think this memory was when I was about to be enrolled and become their helper for my first exploration with them. I was just an ordinary human with no power, but thanks to the VST I took so many times I managed to be a part of them and that was enough for me…” Archie looked at his own hands.

As he walked toward the screen, Archie pressed his chest with confusion, “But why my heart is pounding really fast right now and it feels like I’m getting stabbed by thousands of needles when remembering that memory?”