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It had been 3 days since the other men had shown up at my door, but that didn’t stop me from changing the locks for the fourth time this week. They had always shown up unannounced, silent, waiting for me to notice their tall unearthly silhouettes standing at the windows beside my front door, always waiting, never moving. I never saw their faces, but would I even want to? Just looking at their bodies was evidence enough to what they really were.
The first time I had seen them, I was making my way past the front door, to replace the wire traps by the backyard gate, as the backyard door was right adjacent to the front hallway. The window blinds had been snapped shut, bound by wire and 6 full rolls of duct tape as they always had been in the last 4 years, but that didn’t distract from the tall alien-like shadows they cast on the tile floors. I was walking silently, carefully past the front hallway, and then I saw them. They were standing there. I was surprised, of course. Not even an old beggar had come to the house looking for some raw meat to feed on, much less 2 tall faceless men standing straight as the rusty steel bars piled outside of the abandoned nuclear fall-out bunker about a 5 minutes’ walk away from here, in the woods behind the house. But surprise eventually melts away to curiosity. I lurked like a shadow by the front hallway, hiding behind the wall, occasionally peeking over to see if they had moved or not.
The answer?
Not.
For the rest of the day, they didn’t move. They were like statues, and their shadows slowly shifted as the sun made its way across the sky. I didn’t sleep much that night.
I had awoken from an unintended doze and jerked my head up, several of the vertebrae popping in the process. Rubbing my neck, I stumbled bleary-eyed from behind the wall into the hallway, where I had last seen the men. The sun was shining through the cracks in the blinds, and, to my immeasurable relief, they were nowhere to be seen. However, that alone was not enough to alleviate the paranoia that had seeped into my bones through the night.
Why had they come? Why were they there?
What were they?
They obviously weren’t the regular visitors I got at the house. Those were slow-moving, contorted beings, flesh rotting and stinking of chemicals that had since vanished from the shelves of preservation facilities and abandoned morgues. Sometimes they were raving, frothing zombies, other times quiet, spectral things that softly glowed blue at night. They were quite dull, boring creatures. Always stumbling around after me, groaning, moaning; no wonder why I never went outside. Not because of the potential danger these Walkers supposedly risked me, but because I had long lost the feeling of euphoric pleasure that came of ridding these ugly, tainted un-dead beasts from the land they roamed outside of my house.
It was such a shame, really, when I had entered the house one day 2 months ago, dripping with blood and gore head to toe, crimson shoe-prints on the clean white floors; as the former residents of the house said, “with a look of such nothingness, like such a void, sucking up all that was alive” in my eyes that they thought I had been infected by the Walkers themselves! Apparently, I had stared at them with such intensity, unnerving them greatly for a period, and then just walked away to my temporary (but not so temporary anymore) residence upstairs, and stayed there shut in for a week or so in delirium.
All I can tell you is that when I gained some sort of self-awareness, there was still blood on the floors, and the couple that had owned the house was gone. Don’t worry about them, though. I bet they met their end swiftly.
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The sunlight burned against my face, and when I opened my eyes, all I could see was blinding whiteness enveloping my entire vision. Blinking, I absentmindedly rocked back and forth on the dilapidated wooden swing that hung from the porch overhang. A cool breeze scattered leaves across the whitewashed wooden porch, and a squirrel skittered up the skeletal remains of a nearby tree.
It was the first time I had been outside in a while since the men had shown up, and in my absence from nature, the seasons had begun to change without my noticing. First it was the Walkers; they were less active and fewer in number, and I could spend my endless free time wandering about the woods and the property, buffeted by the cold Northeastern wind; provided I still took ordinary safety precautions.
I sure wasn’t going to sit around here with nothing to do for the meager 10 hours of daylight I had at my disposal. So, I hopped off the bench, picked up the rifle leaning against the porch swing, and crunched through the leaves off into the woods behind the house, hoping to find some horde or something I could possibly eliminate to alleviate my boredom.
What I found, however, was much better left alone.
As I was walking, I had stumbled across a dirt road that had clearly not been used in a while. It was muddy, with large puddles of dirty water collected in sunken holes. Vines and bushes had creeped across the road, and by the looks of it, some of them hadn’t been maintained properly in years. The whole thing was a sad and sorry affair, and somewhere in my heart, I felt a slight bit angry at the person who was responsible for upkeep around here.
Then I laughed and kept walking- that is, until I accidentally walked into a barbed-wire fence.
I was aiming to find a shortcut through a thick bank of vines and dead foliage, but because I couldn’t see where I was going, rushed through the tangle of vines and leaves, and right into the fence. Doubling back, clutching my nose in pain and astonishment, I looked up and saw an old sign:
ĮSPĖJIMAS. DABAR JŪS KĖSINATĖS Į LIETUVOS VYRIAUSYBĖS NUOSAVYBĘ.
(“WARNING,” it read. “YOU ARE NOW TRESPASSING ONTO PROPERTY OF THE LITHUANIAN GOVERNMENT.”)
This, of course, made me curious. I hopped the rusty fence easily, and squinting, scanned the perimeter of the fence for any security cameras. There weren’t, however, and I hadn’t expected anyone to be around to operate them still.
Inside the fence was a simple courtyard; not shabby, but not exactly pretty. There were some skinny trees scattered about here and there, but they were marked by the tell-tale sign of radioactive contamination: a white and red stripe painted horizontally on the trunk. Then a glint of ivory caught my eye, and I turned over to gawk at the gigantic building that occupied most of the courtyard.
It was a tall, white behemoth, gleaming in the hazy sunlight, probably a former institution of some sort. It bore no markings, except for some rusty signs that warned against trespassing: you-will-receive-capital-punishment, blah blah blah. If there was only me here on this god-forsaken earth, then who would possibly get me in trouble?
Then I traipsed into that building like nothing in there could ever definitely mess me up in every way imaginable.
It wasn’t like I skipped into there with no protection, however. I had the common sense to put on a gas mask, and I am glad I did, because as soon as I walked through those iron doors, the rancid scent of chemical fumes and dust and debris and everything not-so-sugar-and-spice-and-everything-nice about the building definitely assured me I wouldn’t be doing my lungs any favor had I breathed in that environment.
The building -at least on the inside- wasn’t anything much to look at, and despite its formidable exterior, the interior was much more spartan and bare. Rubble lay about in the darkened rooms, and debris was everywhere- ancient wheelchairs and gurneys were a common sight, and my steps left clear footprints in the decades-long accumulation of dust and grime that the floors had built up on their surfaces. The corridors were long and dark, and one hallway’s emergency alarm had been triggered, flipping a switch for a complimentary strobe that bathed the abandoned corridor an eerie red light every second.
But there was one corridor that was…different. Maybe it was the lighting or something indiscernible like that, but for some reason it felt wrong to leave the foundation without at least looking at it to see what made it so strange. Horrible idea, am I right?
Yeah, it was.
My feet once again found themselves facing the entry to the corridor, and I steeled myself to not wander off once again to avoid going down that hallway-to-hell.
The corridor was silent, save for the incessant humming of fluorescent lights. My footsteps echoed loudly off the cinder-block-and-linoleum walls, one at a time, slowly and carefully. Step by step, I walked down the ever-longer corridor to the heavy doors, the doors of subliminal destiny. A harsh white light was emanating from under the doors, and as I went, the humming got louder. My tongue started to tingle as I reached the doors.
Slowly, I pushed the heavy doors open, cringing at the piercing squeal the doors made, slicing through the silence like gunshots.
The room I stepped into was deceptively… normal.
It looked much like the others at first glance, but as I walked around the space, I saw remnants of broken glass bottles, the congealed residue they held radiating a soft blue light. My shoes crunched on shattered glass, and a breeze came, seemingly from nowhere, ruffling soaked and mildewed papers scattered on the ground. The exposed wires overhead flickered and sparked threateningly. There was a drip-drip echoing from the ceiling.
Suddenly, there was a flash of light from some small unseeable corner of the room, and to say I was surprised would be an understatement. I was shocked. So shocked, in fact, that I fell backwards in surprise and sliced my hand on a bottle that was conveniently placed right where my hand was going to land.
With my hand shaking and my mind seething, all fear vanished and was replaced with anger. I shakily stood up and, after steadying myself for a few seconds, stomped over to where the light was to figure out the source of this mess.
The light was illuminating everything immediately around it, and it was thanks to that that I figured out the space was a makeshift office, and that the light was in fact a computer. The computer was rebooting itself, and I twiddled about impatiently as the numbers indicating that the reboot was done finally reached 100.
Then, a new screen popped up, and this one made me shift forward in my dilapidated office chair. The screen changed from white to green, and the words across the screen asked an intriguing yet disturbing question.
“Jūs ketinate atidaryti "Radon Labs" slaptų testų, susijusių su apsinuodijimo radiacija savybėmis ir tuo, kaip jis plinta per skirtingas terpes, failus. tęsti?”
Oh, did I ever.
As soon as I clicked Taip, pradėkite, however, I knew it was a grave mistake.
The first sign was the silence.
Then it was the shadows on the wall, the long alien-like shadows that had been cast on my floor all those days ago.
Slowly, ever so slowly, shaking, I turned around, and there they were.
And they just stood there.
Always waiting, never moving.
The men had come back.
And they never ceased to follow me.