The Story Begins - Chapter 1

[Akira]

Time: 1:18 p.m. December 5, 4000
Place: Outside of Gamma Dome

       Trying to walk, I noticed I was paralyzed from my waist down, so I used my arms to drag myself away from the crash. My spacecraft was totaled and I had no way of getting off this doomed planet. Of course I had no home to go back to; Earth had been destroyed. After Earth’s destruction, the planet’s that were farther away from the sun had their orbits messed up. Mars, Neptune, Pluto, and Uranus were launched through space while Jupiter and Saturn collided into Mercury and Venus destroying them all. Neptune, Pluto, and Uranus collided into planets belonging to solar systems not yet discovered even in this time; these impacts destroyed them as well. Mars on the other hand was left careening though space until it was bound to collide into some other planet, lucky me. I noticed several alien spacecraft fly overhead, probably  from some other planet that was destroyed.
       “If I knew all this would happen, I would never have paid any attention to that ‘person’ that night or the attack shown on the news the next day,” I said to myself; my arms tired of pulling my paralyzed body.
       My name is Akira, I’m 15, I have grey colored eyes, and shoulder-length black hair. I know the color of my eyes are odd, I was always told that, but I was born with that eye color and I don’t know why. At the moment I was trying to escape from my problems, obviously that wasn’t working. Since you most likely have no idea of what is happening here, I’ll start from the day this whole thing started.

Time: 6:00 a.m. Thursday, July 15, 1999
Place: Ellicott City, Maryland, United States, Earth

       It was another slow day, well for me at least. I was trying to do some work, but was having troubles thinking. I had a substitute teacher who didn’t know what we are supposed to be learning today, and rowdy classmates whose loud talking was giving me a headache. These could have been the very reasons I was having troubles thinking, but, I didn’t want to think about that and wanted to concentrate on my work.
       “I wish they could be quiet,” I whispered to myself.
       As soon as those words left my mouth, everything became silent. I looked up from my work to see what was going on and found myself staring at a paper airplane floating right in front of my face, perfectly still. I knocked the paper airplane out of my view and saw that the entire class was frozen in place. I decided to look at the clock and found the second hand not moving either. Time had been obviously frozen, but why was I still moving and not frozen like the others?
       “What is going on here? Why is time frozen?” I asked aloud, wishing afterwards that I had kept my big mouth shut.
       “Time isn’t frozen, it’s just moving very slowly. It is impossible to stop time,” a mysteriously familiar voice, coming from out of nowhere, said.
       “Show yourself, or are you scared?” I asked boldly.
       “Scared? No. Curious? Yes,” the same voice said.
       “What do you mean by that?” I asked slightly offended.
       Then a familiar being, who I couldn’t figure out where I have seen before and most likely was the source of the voice I heard earlier, appeared before me. The being looked to be the age of 28 or so, with brown hair and brown eyes.
       “Who are you?” I asked.
       “I was going to ask you the same question,” the being said. “You don’t belong here if you can stay out of the time line . . . like me . . . hmm.”
       “That’s weird, I’ve been having dreams where I am in the middle of what appears to be nowhere and there are voices calling my name,” I said.
       “No, you can’t be the incarnation of him, but it is possible, you look slightly like him,” the being said.
       “Who are you talking about?” I asked.
       Then for some reason I remembered something about this being, something I don’t think I was supposed to know.
       “You’re Seeker, am I right?”I asked.
       “How did you . . . ?” the being started, then he tilted his head as if he was listening for something. “ I must be going and so must you.”

       Then my alarm clock went off. I woke up, slammed the snooze button on my alarm clock, and laid in bed, with eyes wide open.
       “Another strange dream . . . or was it . . . what is going on?” I asked myself.
       Then I heard someone knocking on my bedroom door.
       “Akira, it’s time to get up,” a voice belonging to my mom, said through the door.
       My mom wakes me up if I am not out of bed, dressed, and eating breakfast by now.
       “So that was all a dream, I can’t help but wonder if it is or not,” I said to myself.
       Then my bedroom door opened and my mom stood in the doorway looking in.
       “Oh, you’re awake . . . get up and get changed for school,” my mom said. “I thought you were asleep.”
       “Okay, I’m getting up,” I said as I was getting off my bed.
       My mom then left closing the door behind her. I grabbed some clothes and sat them on the bed, got undressed, took a shower, and put on the clothes I had chosen for school that day. Then I grabbed my backpack hanging off my desk chair, walked downstairs and into the kitchen, ate my breakfast, and then walked outside to my bus stop. I stood at my bus stop in the rain, waiting for the bus, and thinking about the dream I had last night, and the nights before.
       “Why am I having these weird dreams?” I asked aloud toward no one in particular.
       “What are you talking about?” a voice, coming from behind me, asked.
       I quickly turned around, surprised, and saw my younger brother, Alan, waiting for the bus, too. He was just one year younger than I, at the age of 14. He had blonde hair and blue eyes. I wondered with the difference in hair and eye color how we could even be related.
       “Nothing, just talking to myself,” I said, lying of course.
       I looked at my watch and noticed that I had been standing there, waiting for the bus, for more than thirty minutes and the bus was nowhere in sight. This meant that either the bus came earlier then scheduled and I missed it, or it is later than scheduled and hasn’t come yet. The school bus we ride, occasionally breaks down and the transportation department needs to get a replacement, which takes a while to get to our stop.
       “Great,” I said, slightly sarcastic.
       “What’s wrong?” Alan asked.
       I stared at him for a second, wanting to respond but nothing came out, then I stared at my hands. I noticed a scar that hadn’t been there before.
       “Akira?” Alan asked with a worried tone in his voice.
       “Let’s get mom to drive us to school,” I said snapping out of my trance or whatever it was.
       I walked back home, Alan following, and told my mom that we had either missed the bus or that it broke down. After I told her this, she sighed, and drove us to school. I said bye to my mom as she drove off and then walked into the school building and toward my first class. After class started, the teacher assigned some classwork, and so I started working on it. Then after that class was over I went to my next class and it was the same thing there as well.  My last two classes were like the first two and before I knew it the school day was over. Later, when I was back at home, I watched a couple of my favorite television shows that only come on Thursday nights. When I went to sleep that night, I had another strange dream.

       “Come . . . help us . . . ’Chosen One’  . . . , it is time,” a few voices said calling out to me.
       “How can I help? What do you mean by ‘Chosen One’? Time for what? Why don’t you TELL ME?” I asked frustrated.
       Images of places being destroyed and people being killed, flashed before my eyes.       “You must wake up . . . everything will begin then . . . you must wake up . . . right NOW,” the voices said.
       I woke up in a cold sweat.

       “Everything will begin then,” the voice repeated in my head.
       “What will begin?” I asked aloud, but no one answered.
       Then I looked around my bedroom, and saw sun light coming through a crack in my bedroom blinds.
       “Not again, why is this happening to me? Why am I having these dreams?” I asked aloud, but no one answered, just like before.
       I got out of bed, took a nice, hot shower, got dressed, went downstairs and into the kitchen. My mom was already in the kitchen cooking breakfast, so I sat down at the kitchen table.
       “Good morning, you’re up early,” my mom said.
       “I had a bad dream,” I said, placing my head between my hands, elbows on the table, and looking down.
       After my mom gave me my breakfast and I ate it, I walked out to the bus stop. This time Alan stayed home sick and the bus picked me up without being late or early. I sat up in the front of the bus and beside the window, staring out into the morning sky.
       The next stop along the way to school was where one of my male Caucasian friends, Jackie, was waiting. I only have male friends, one is Asian American, one is African American, one is a mix of African American and Caucasian, and the rest are Caucasian. I don’t have any female friends since I’m not good at talking to the opposite sex because I get nervous, when I try to talk to a girl I end up talking about stupid things and not stop talking. When the bus stopped, Jackie got on the bus and sat beside me. Jackie is 15 years old, just like me, with black hair and brown eyes.
       “Hi Akira,” Jackie said, “Is something wrong?”
       “Hi, and no, not really anyway,” I said to him, while still staring into the sky.
       “Well I saw those mysterious people again last night,” Jackie said.
       “You mean the ones wearing large black robes covering their appearance?” I asked, turning my head toward Jackie, “What were they doing?”
       “I don’t know,” Jackie said, “but I have a bad feeling about this.”
       “Oh well,” I said, “it’s not like we can do anything about it.”       “Yeah, I know,” Jackie said, “but -”
       “You wish we could do something,” I said, interrupting, “I know, I wish we could do something, too.”
       For the rest of the ride to school, we were quiet and I stared back into the sky.

       Later that night as I was walking home from my part-time job after school, I noticed something. It was one of those mysterious people Jackie had seen last night. I ran after the person, thinking that it may be Jackie just playing around in a disguise. I chased the person into an alley that was a dead end, and was exhausted from the chase.
       “Jackie . . . why . . . did you . . . run off?” I asked, while trying to catch my breath.
       The person in the large black robe turned around and I noticed that its face was scarred, from burns perhaps, and bald. Its eyes were solid gray and it had light yellowish-colored inhuman fangs.
       “You’re not Jackie,” I said no longer exhausted, and fully aware of the mistake I just made.
       Then this creature or whatever ran toward me, mouth agape. As it ran toward me, the hood of its large black robe flew off its head showing that it was completely burned and bald. I ran out of the alley and into the street and was nearly run over by a car, instead the car hit the creature at full force, flinging it over the car’s hood and onto the ground. The person driving the car screeched to a stop and got out.
       “Is that person okay?” the lady who had been driving asked.
       “That isn’t human at all,” I said as the creature stood up seemingly unharmed.
       The creature then picked the car up over its head and tossed it aside. The lady who had been driving the car  ran screaming at the site of this. It was then that I noticed the creature was wearing ear plugs.
       “Hmm, maybe sound hurts its ears,” I said.
       “Sound does hurt its ears,” a voice said, coming from the shadows of the alley I ran out of just earlier.
       “Who said that?” I asked.
       Then from out of the shadows of the alley, Jackie appeared.
       “Jackie?” I asked, as just then the creature tackled him.
       “Pull out its ear plugs, quickly,” Jackie said, moving his head out of the way of the gaping mouth before him.
       I ran up to the creature, and as Jackie was busy distracting it, I pulled out its ear plugs. Jackie got out from under the creature and waved to it. Then someone, who was trying to sleep, yelled out of the window telling us to keep it down. That yelling, being the first sound since the creature’s ear plugs were pulled out, caused the creature to scream in pain and clutch its ears. Then, unexpectedly, the creature’s head inflated and then exploded. It was then that I noticed that there were no pieces of its brain anywhere as if all that was contained in its body was air. The rest of its body started to deflate like a popped balloon, showing that its body was in fact just containing air.
       “That was weird, “ I said.
       “Their bodies are just rubbery skin full of air; any type of sound makes them explode,” Jackie said, stating what I already figured out for myself.
       “Them? You mean to say that there are more like this?” I asked, pointing to the now fully deflated body.
       “Yeah, they are actually demons,” Jackie said, “well, one kind of demon.”
       “How do you know this?” I asked.
       “I did a little researching earlier today,” Jackie said.
       Then I heard a scream coming from elsewhere, but it sounded like it was nearby. I looked to Jackie and saw  he was as scared as me, maybe more.
       “Uh, I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said, as casually as I could.
       “Be careful getting home,” Jackie said.
       “You too,” I said, and ran home as fast as I could.

       The next morning, I was flipping through channels on the television. I hadn’t told anyone about last night, since I didn’t want to worry anyone. As I continued flipping, something caught my attention and I stopped, it was a news channel with the words “Special Report” in the top right corner.
       “A horde of monsters attacked downtown Baltimore last night. Here is our only footage of the incident,” the news anchor on the news said, holding a tape in his hand. “This may be a little graphic for some viewers.”
       The news anchor handed the tape to a staff member to play, and show to the viewers. Then the screen changed to the film, showing on it a female reporter.
       “Come on, keep the camera straight,” the female reporter said, most likely to the cameraman off screen.
       “What is that behind you?” the cameraman off screen said.
       “Oh my God, let’s get out of here,” the female reporter said.
       “But what about the camera?” the cameraman asked.
       “Forget it,” the female reporter said.
       The camera appeared to fall to the ground and was pointing toward the female reporter and cameraman running away, but were still near enough to the camera. Then suddenly they were tackled by what appeared to be a hoard of zombies and other monsters. Some blood, possibly belonging to the female reporter, cameraman, or both, splashed onto the camera lens. The film went fuzzy short after that, and the screen flipped back to the news anchor.
       “This is not good,” my mom said, coming from the direction of the kitchen.
       “What is going on?” I asked.
       “I don’t know . . . I really don’t know,” my mom said.

       Later that day I met up with Jackie to talk about last night and the news report I saw this morning.
       “Hi, Akira,” Jackie said.
       “Hi,” I said back. “Did you see the news report this morning?”
       “Yeah, I was going to ask you the same thing,” Jackie replied.
       “What is going on, first demons, now zombies and other monsters?” I know I’ll regret saying this, but what next?” I asked.
       “I do not know,” Jackie said.