Another day in paradise

Another day in paradise

(v.1.1)

A short story

By S. D. Wallwork

Copyright 2014 by Samuel Wallwork

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Part 1: living in the past

1

If there's one thing that is guaranteed to make me wake up in a bad mood, it's that god damn sensation you get when you're asleep but your alarm is ringing in the background. You're still asleep, and your still dreaming, but somewhere, something within your dream is emitting the single most irritating noise on the planet (or so it seems at the time) and you can't find a way to shut it off.

My most common one would be my mobile phone ringing in the dream. I go to answer it and the noise keeps going. Then I think it's the music player within the phone. It keeps going. Sometimes I would throw the phone away or try and hide it somewhere, but the noise just doesn't stop.

I remember the alarm I used to have on my phone back before I ended up here. It was a soothing piano tune backed with bird song and the noise of a babbling brook in some picturesque forest. When you scroll through the endless list of tunes to pick from when you set that alarm, a piano, some birds and a stream seems like a really nice to tune to be waking up to. I guarantee you, a week later it will be the worst melody you ever heard. When you repeatedly hear a tune that has no other purpose but to wake you up in the morning, it becomes despicable. It means you have to get out of your comfy bed and go to your boring job. It signals nothing but bad news (presuming you have a boring job).

If there's one piece of solid advice I could give to someone with the absolute certainty of it being true, it would be this. Never set your alarm to play a song you like, because next week you'll hate it. Trust me, I know.

This morning though it's a different dream. I'm in the middle of the desert all alone. Its dark and the moon is full, casting a beam of silvery light over the barren landscape. I can hear a noise, it starts quietly at first and builds with every repetition. It's an siren of some kind, like something you hear when Bond is discovered in the bad guy's lair.

I'm stood in the desert, all around me are dunes, that much I can see. Immediately I come to the conclusion that there must be something over the rise, some kind of civilisation. At that point I didn't even know why I was in the desert or that I was even looking for civilisation, but when one is in the grasp of sleep, the mind tends to take the most logical path.

A man stood in the middle of the desert. He must be lost or stranded, an unknown noise must signal help and saviour. I begin to run. I can feel my heart pounding as I fight to climb the sides of the dune. The sand beneath me is slipping away and I might as well be going nowhere. Somehow though, as is strangely the case with dreams, I find myself atop the dune, panting and hunched forward with my hands on my knees trying to catch my breath.

As I look up, I see nothing, just more dunes. I turn to see if there is anything at all around me. Just sand, just dunes. The noise is infecting my mind, it's becoming unbearable and just as I'm about to drop to the ground and yell, the desert disappears.

All I see now is black. I can feel the pillow beneath my head and the warmth of the duvet on top of me. My eyes are still closed but I can sense the room around me. The cold concrete walls, that infernal alarm. The alarm!

My head shifts into gear and I throw the duvet against the wall beside me. I leap from the bed and land roughly on the floor, double stepping so as not to fall. If I was a gymnast, that landing would have really hurt my score.

How long has that thing been going off. I knew one day I would sleep through the damn thing and wake up to find the place in ruins (if I woke up at all). I raced into the control room and slammed into the chair that was standing before the console, sending it careening off along the floor, eventually coming to halt after slamming into one of the instrument panels. I frantically turned dials and threw switches. Lights were flashing all kinds of colours in front of me but I wasn't paying attention. I've done this so many times before I could do it blindfolded with my toes.

Eventually, the lights all went green and the alarm stopped halfway through a whine. Looking up and seeing the instruments all falling out of the red I let out a deep sigh of relief. I realise there's beads of sweat starting to collect around my hair line. Just what I needed after chasing that fucking sound through a desert in my head. If I wasn't in a bad mood already, I sure am now.

I suddenly remembered my partner's favourite saying, it used to drive me mad hearing him say it every day. Somehow, now it made me smile. 'You know what Phil Collins used to say. Just another day in paradise.'

2

Im almost certain that would have been his first sentence if he had been stood with me right now. That would be of course, if he wasn't dead.

Just about two weeks ago now he stayed up late drinking what was left of the scotch and yelling to himself about how everything was gone and we were all gunno die down here if not from radiation, but from starvation or from thirst. The pantry down here was stocked with box after box of MRE's (meals ready to eat). Not the nicest food on the planet, but it kept you alive, just. We had been down here for three years and not so much as a fart had been heard from the outside world. No radio messages, no phone calls no contact whatsoever.

I counted the boxes a couple of months ago and predicted we could live down here for roughly another year, eating three meals a day each. I used to tell John over and over that the guys who sent us down here knew what they were doing and in a year's time they would likely show up and relieve us of our duty.

He would have none of it, especially when he was drunk, which by the end was most of the time. He just kept on babbling that no one was coming and everyone else was dead. I would plead with him night after night, telling him he had no idea of knowing what was going on outside our little world and we should just keep doing what we are doing and wait it out.

Sometime's I would get through to him and he would just kinda sit back and stare into space. After a little while like that he would accept defeat and go to bed, leaving me to clean up his mess (usually broken glasses and a bottle of scotch lobbed at the steel door).

That night a couple of weeks back though, that was different. He had started to drink early in the afternoon and by night time he could barely stand. I managed to calm him for a few minutes while he was on one of his rants and get him to sit down. I swapped his bottle for a cup of stale coffee while he wasn't looking, hoping he would be too far gone to notice and just drink it. Boy was I wrong!

He looked down and without saying a word, he launched the cup across the table, almost hitting me with it. I looked at him and he was already on his feet, hands under the edge of the table ready to flip it. He let out a yell and threw the table upward, knocking me over in the process. Before I could gather my breath he was on top of me trying to strangle me. I riled fiercely trying to loosen his grip, but it wasn't working. Drunk people don't know their own strength. Eventually I dug a knee into his ribs and he let go with a horrible grunt. I managed to push him off and get to my feet but he kept coming at me. Next to my feet I spotted the half empty bottle of scotch I'd swapped with the coffee.

He had a look on his face that chilled me to the core. It was evil almost. The look of a man who truly believes he's going to kill you. I grabbed the bottle and as he lunged forward i wrapped it around his head, sending shards of flying glass across the room. He dropped where he stood and didn't move. For a second I panicked, thinking the worst, so I knelt down to check for a pulse. He was still alive. Phew.

I left him there, thinking he would wake up in the morning and understand what a dick he had been and maybe it would change him for the better. How wrong I was. Again (I seem to making a habit of it).

I went off to bed, checking the consoles on my way past toward the sleeping quarters. All was well.

I undressed and lay down on my bunk. I had an ache in my side where the table hit me, but the mattress seemed to cure it for now. I didn't lie there long, I was soon asleep.

Seemingly immediately after I was gone I was awoken. This time it wasn't the alarm and it wasn't my drunk colleague falling out of his bunk. In the distance I was opening my eyes, I heard something drop to the floor and strike the hard concrete, something heavy, and it wasn't a bottle.

I got up and trundled off in my shorts, wiping my eyes trying to keep them open. I passed the control room, all the dials still doing their job. Nothing out of the ordinary. I walked on and noticed the pantry was open. John wasn't in there, so I guessed maybe had wandered in for a midnight snack due to having drunken munchies.

As I entered the common area however, I was greeted with a scene that looked like it had been ripped from a Stephen King horror book.

John lay slumped on the couch, his faded green overalls being stained a new colour. I saw next him, what he must have been in the pantry for. Unfortunately it wasn't a bag of chips. Inside the pantry is a locked metal cabinet, and in that cabinet we keep guns. Laying on the ground, surrounded by blood spatter was one of our shotguns, a delicate tendril of smoke still creeping out of the barrel.

The blood wasn't too upsetting. I'd seen it before, dead bodies and pools of blood. In a world like this, feuds get heated pretty quickly. No, not the blood. The worst of it was what remained of john. His mouth hung open, and his eyes. Past that there wasn't much else. All the back of his head was gone, most of it clinging to the wall behind him, the rest scattered across the room and sprayed on the roof. It was truly horrifying, no horror flick or gritty war movie could do it justice. I just stood, shaking, my hands clasped over my mouth. Eventually my legs began to go weak. I backed up to the wall and slid down it all the way to the floor. It was a good few minutes before I could do anything but stare and shake.

Eventually I would begin to ask myself why he would do such a thing, taking the easy way out and leaving me with the shit. I realised pretty soon though that the answer was fairly simple. I'd contemplated it myself after everything went to shit. Contemplated it and even come pretty close. I'd been in almost the same situation as John, an empty bottle of scotch at my side and a .45 in my mouth.

Luckily I saw sense and put the gun down. Was it lucky though? Is this life so much better than death?

3

After the initial shock, I sat staring at him from across the room. I had no idea how long I had been sat there but it must have been several hours.

Eventually I gathered the strength to stand up and look at the clock in the control room. 7:45am. Lot of good that did me since I didn't actually know when it was that the sound of Johns head exploding had woken me up.

The clean-up wasn't as bad as I always thought it might be. I guess I probably was still in some sort of shock. I remember just kneeling on the floor with a bucket and a brush, trying to scrub the dried in blood from the concrete floor. Though it seemed the more I scrubbed, I was just spreading a big pink stain all around me.

I left the body were it was while I cleaned the rest of the room. I barely even looked at it. At him. I couldn't face it. As the shock sunk in, it turned from numbness to all out nausea. All of a sudden while I was scrubbing the floor, I came across John's foot hanging lifelessly over the edge of the sofa. I hadn't even realised I was so close to the body, I was just following the stains. I stopped dead and after a few seconds I could feel my insides begin to panic. I knew what was coming.

I grabbed the bucket next to me and hung my head over the edge just in time. At least I wouldn't have to clean my own vomit off the floor as well as someone else's brain.

4

It took a good day at least, to clean up most of what I saw, and even then there was still a noticeable pink stain where I had tried to scrub away the blood.

The next day I spent wondering in and out of the living quarters, finding the odd bit of discarded skull fragment now and then. I couldn't decide what to do with myself, so I just ended up sitting in various different chairs for twenty or thirty minutes at a time before getting up and finding a new place to sit.

The biggest question on my mind was what the hell to do with the body. For the time being it was covered with a spare bed sheet, left exactly how I had found him the day before.

I couldn't bury him for obvious reasons, I'm in a solid concrete bunker. The walls and floors are several feet thick and even with a jackhammer it would take me forever to find soft ground. That's if the place wasn't topped off with steel plates.

The next time I got up I passed through the control room and saw the dials on the console. They were getting pretty close to red. It wouldn't be long before the alarm started blaring. Maybe a couple of hours. See, spending so much time down in this hell hole, you learn to predict when the shits gunno hit the fan. Now and then it takes you by surprise, but most of the time you can look at the dials and make a fairly accurate guess.

Passing back through after sitting at the desk, staring at the console for twenty minutes, I walked by the panty and had an Idea. The door was still open, just how john left it.

I stopped and turned to the small dark room to my left. Past the shelving there was long chest freezer. There had been joints of meat in there when we first came down, but they didn't last long when the alternative was army MRE's. Since we emptied it, it lay unused.

I stood there staring at it, letting it sink in to my mushed up mind. Im going to have to bury my only friend in a chest freezer.

5

The thought of that shook me, sending a cold shiver right through my very soul. I knew I was going to have to live down here for at least another year, and all that time, I would have a dead body just a couple of feet away from the food I was eating.

I didn't move him until the following day. I wanted to let it sink in and see if the shock got any better. It didn't. I was awoken in the middle of the night again. This time by the alarm, my guess of a couple of hours being a little out. The moment I opened my eyes I could feel my heart pumping like it had when I laid eyes on John's body. Somehow I must have thought I was experiencing it all over again.

Fortunately the sound of the alarm calmed me down, which is strange because it usually just irritates me.

I wandered off from my bed and stopped the thing blaring. I didn't do anything else, I wanted to stay as tired as possible. They say shock can hit you at any point after an event such as this, so I wanted to get straight back in bed and get as much sleep as I could, just in case.

The next morning, I awoke to find that strangely I had slept in. It was half eleven when I finally pulled back the sheets and I rose with an odd sense of calm. Maybe it was just tiredness, but I wanted to make the most of it while it was there. I needed to move the body and get it out of sight while I had the courage.

I pulled on an old jumpsuit, one I wouldn't miss if it got covered in blood. I stood and took a deep breath and made my way to the living quarters. I turned the corner from the control room and the shock took me all over again. This time, it wasn't the shock of seeing a body on the couch, or knowing it was my only friend. It was a shock on a whole other level. Shock that made me stop dead and gasp. Every hair on my body felt like it was standing on end. Goosebumps popped up all over my arms. When I thought to myself the day I found John, that it looked like something from a Stevie King Novel, I was more right than I knew. This definitely was something he would have written. Some sick twist only he would have thought of.

I stood looking across the room to an empty couch. There was no body.

6

My inner movie buff seemed to take the lead from there. The first thought was to go pick up the shotgun that I still hadn't moved from where John had laid. I think maybe I had seen one too many Zombie films.

I picked it up and turned it over to look into the loading gate. Looking back at me was the brass tip of fresh cartridge in the magazine. Thank god John had loaded more than one round (as if he thought he would miss the first shot having put the muzzle in his mouth).

I pulled the pump and racked in another round, checking the safety catch as I did so, I saw the little red dot indicating it was hot.

I backed up to the wall and fell silent. My mind was a mess. Oh shit, oh shit. What the fuck is happening to me?!

My arms where shaking. Fuck, my whole body was shaking. I didn't hear anything coming from any of the other rooms so I started to make my way to the door, the shotgun pressed into my shoulder ready for anything.

I went to the pantry first. The door was still open and the light was still on just how I left it before going to bed. I took a quick look inside. Nothing.

Next stop was the control room. Nothing there either. Just dials and monitors all doing their thing.

I made my way hesitantly through toward the door leading into the sleeping quarters when I heard a noise from behind me. It was some kind of mechanical noise that much I could tell. Without hesitation though, I swung round and squeezed the trigger. The noise in such a confined space was, quite literally deafening. I recall the pop after I pulled the trigger, but after that there was just a dull ringing sound.

I looked across to where I had aimed, hoping to see the reanimated corpse spread across the wall. Unfortunately I was met with a shower of sparks and great big hole in one of the instrument panels. I racked the next load into the chamber and carried on.

Through the door there is a short corridor to get to the sleeping quarters and fortunately for me it met every horror clichin the book. It had two small culverts, one on either side in which any self-respecting murderer would take refuge in prior to an attack. To top that off, the fluorescent tube where buggered. One didn't work at all, and the other one flickered like the lobby of a cheap motel where the hooker gets stabbed in the bargain basement slasher movies.

Once again I hugged the wall with the shotgun taking the lead. When I hit the culverts I swung round ready to blow away anything lingering in there. There was nothing there.

At the end of the corridor was the steel door leading in to the sleeping quarters. It was half open already, though it most likely like that when I came through. As you would expect though, the mind wouldn't think like that in a situation like this. Immediately my mind saw the door as an invitation to die, the slasher was most likely waiting behind it, waiting for me to push it open the rest of the way before driving a kitchen knife into me.

Like I said. Too many movies.

There was no one there. There was no one in the bathroom either, not even hiding behind the cheap plastic shower curtain.

I sat on the edge of my bunk all day with the shotgun on my lap, just running the last few days events through my mind, trying to figure out what the hell could be happening.

Was I going slowly mad? Had I been down here so long, I'd created another being in my mind that I would spend three years with before imagining him kill himself and then imagining myself clean up his exploded brains?

I searched the whole place, even blew a hole in what I assume is very expensive machinery, especially in the world we live in. He couldn't have doubled back, it's not your average home with several doors leading in to each room. It's a concrete bunker, with rooms connected by narrow corridors and a single steel door.

Even If he was alive, why the hell would he sit there for a couple of days before getting up to scare the shit out of me.

This insane tennis match of the mind went on for hours. One minute I would think I was crazy. The next I would think I perfectly sane, but it wasn't until much later I realised I was missing the obvious point. Whether there was a body or not, the back of its head was completely blown out. I spent a whole day cleaning it up and even if zombies did exist, we all know you kill them by destroying the brain. The obvious point being, it had no brain left.

So, the way I saw it. Either I was crazy, or someone else moved the body. Either way, it didn't sit well with me.

I stood up with a sense of great determination. I had to know what the hell was going on. I strode into that living area feeling like Clint Eastwood strolling into a saloon ready to take a bounty.

7

I stood for a few moments, contemplating what I should do. I wanted to know what had happened, but I didn't know how to go about it.

Blood! The place was covered in it just yesterday. I'd cleaned most of it up yes, but there was still the pink stain on the floor, and who knows how much had soaked into the couch beneath the body!

I raced over to the couch and almost felt sick all over again. It was spotless. Not a trace of even spilt tea never mind a huge blood stain. I was going mad.

But what about the floor? I didn't even want to look. I knew what I had left there the day before, but the day before there was also a body on the couch. If the body and the blood stains were all gone, I doubted there would be a pink stain on the floor behind it.

I leaned forward slowly, wishing so deeply that it would be there. I was greeted with nothing. Bare concrete.

What the fuck is wrong with me? I'm a fucking nut case. I've been stuck in a hole for three years tending to a nuclear reactor that I've never actually seen and I've actually cracked and gone totally bat shit.

The sickness didn't hold back now. It came like a tsunami and gave me no warning. I stood in the middle of the room and vomited all over the floor.

My legs went weak and I fell down. The weight of this realisation pressing down like the hydraulic ram in a car crusher. I was crushed, in one sense. The last three years had all been a lie. Well mostly. John never existed, I never actually saw him drink himself quite literally to death. This made me feel worse. I'd seen documentaries in the past where people say we create things in our mind to lock out a deeper and scarier truth. What if john was me, and somewhere in my mind I wanted to drink myself to the point where I stick a 12gauge in my mouth and shower the walls with my brain. Maybe it was just a test run, like I had been looking for a way out and created this whole scenario with someone else holding the gun to see if I could, or even wanted to do it. Right now, it didn't seem that bad an idea.

I looked down at the shotgun I still had in my hands, but I didn't have the courage to lift it up. Maybe I didn't want to kill myself after all. The test run was a failure and now the whole world I created was crumbling because I didn't want it to become a reality.

I didn't know what the fuck to think anymore. I lay the gun on the ground and scrambled to my feet, creeping my way to the pantry where an open crate of scotch was calling out to me.