You will be the fall of realities, the end of all…
A single ray of sunlight pierced the curtains of Lynn Mason’s dorm room window. The thin radiant spear of light beamed right onto her nose and soon found its way to her eyes. The dream she was having quickly faded from memory. Lynn, sighed and lamented the feeling of being awake after having pulled a late night playing a new online game. Lynn rolled over to look at her clock through bleary eyes. She blinked a few times, and then her eyes shot open.
She was late for class.
She leaped out of bed and ripped her curtains open, immediately regretting the action as sunlight flooded her dorm and blinded her. Once her eyes adjusted, she peered outside to check the weather. It was a warm Autumn day with a gentle breeze, and the leaves on the trees blazed with brilliant red and gold hues.
Suddenly remembering she was late, Lynn frantically dashed around the room, picking up the pieces of her uniform she had flung all over when she’d arrived home the day before. Her blazer was covered in lint, her skirt a wrinkled mess, her blouse also wrinkled with a slightly musty scent. Once her ensemble was complete, she dashed out of her room.
Lynn’s long auburn hair trailed behind her as she raced across campus. She had a slender build and was relatively short. Overall, she was rather unremarkable, just the way she liked it.
Blending in is what Lynn excelled at because whenever most people noticed her, something terrible happened to them almost immediately. As she grew older, she realized that she always had something tugging at her senses when someone had their attention on her.
Over time, Lynn began to try and focus on these feelings. The more she focused on it, the more she realized that the sense she felt slightly differed depending on who paid attention to her. She tried to home in on the differences and found two distinct senses.
The first, more frequent sense, felt like walking from a comfortable room to one cold enough to give you goosebumps. Whenever Lynn felt this, something bad was going to happen around her. The first time she made this connection was on a hot summer day when she was fifteen.
Lynn had gone for a walk in her neighborhood and found some shade at a park. She found a bench and sat heavily, looking at the sunny sky.
”It’s so hot!” she complained quietly to herself.
Suddenly, a chill washed over her, making her sit bolt upright to look around. The street was empty except for one girl on the other side looking right at Lynn.
The girl, about Lynn’s age, began walking toward Lynn with determination in every step. Lynn sat, unsure what to do with the girl approaching, when she suddenly dropped out of sight. A thud snapped Lynn out of her trance, and she jumped off the bench. Running over, Lynn found the girl had fallen down a manhole and peered over the edge to see if she was okay.
The girl had a broken leg, and Lynn called an ambulance. Lynn later found out from her nurse mother that the girl thought Lynn was someone she knew.
A few days later, Lynn was again sitting on the same bench. The temperature had dropped since the last visit, and despite the light jacket she wore, it was still cold.
While she sat shivering, a wave of warmth washed over her, cradling her body like a mother’s gentle embrace. She looked around again and saw the same girl who had fallen down the manhole.
She had never sensed two different things coming from the same person before, and she didn’t know what to do. The girl, now on crutches, started making her way over to Lynn. Fearing for the girl’s life, Lynn scrambled off the bench.
The girl called breathlessly after Lynn, “Please wait!”
Lynn stopped. No one had ever called out to her like that. She turned around to face the girl, terrified about what might happen to her. As the she drew closer, nothing happened.
Lynn waited and braced herself for something terrible.
Nothing happened to the point where the girl stood in front of Lynn, leaning heavily against her crutches and panting heavily. Lynn stared her and blinked a few times.
”My name is Jen,” she said between breaths.
Lynn calmed down a little and said, “Ly…Lynn.”
Lynn still felt the warm sensation on her skin despite the bite of the wind. The girl looked at Lynn, beaming, and stuck out her hand to shake.
”It’s nice to meet you!” Jen cheered.
That was the day Lynn made her first real friend.
The muscles in Lynn’s legs started to burn. She silently chastised herself for not being more athletic and continued running as fast as she could. Finally arriving at the doors to her classroom, she took a moment to pause outside to try and collect herself. She leaned against the wall outside the door heaving massive breaths to steady herself. The door suddenly swung open, and Lynn’s professor stood in the doorway glaring at her.
”You’re late again, Miss Mason,” he said, annoyed.
”Lucky for me, you’re the nicest professor at this fine institution!” Lynn said between breaths, grinning.
The professor stood aside and let Lynn pass. She took her seat, and the lecture resumed. The rest of her day passed as usual, and at the end of the day, she met her three friends, among whom was Jen, to take advantage of the pleasant weather.
After walking around for a while, chatting and window shopping, they decided to check out a cafe that had just opened. They sat down and ordered some food.
Lynn suddenly felt a chill down her spine and felt like something was bearing down on her. The cafe suddenly felt stuffy, and she started looking around.
She had had feelings like this before throughout her life, but nothing as strong as this. Her breathing became labored, and she felt like she was drowning.
When Lynn was young, she found that if she closed her eyes, the feeling tended to pass quickly. She closed her eyes slowly and started taking deep calming breaths. She did not know how long her eyes were closed, but it felt like hours had passed. When she’d calmed down enough, she realized that she could not hear anything. She quirked a brow and slowly opened her eyes.
Everything appeared to be frozen in time. Everything that is, aside from Lynn. She sat in the booth sandwiched between the wall and Jen. Lynn looked around, bewildered and terrified, unsure of what was happening or what she should do.
She reached out a hand and apprehensively touched Jen’s shoulder. Jen’s once warm, soft, thick uniform blazer now felt like rough granite. The finite detail of the threads looked like they were chiseled with a precision needle.
Lynn jerked her hand back at the unexpected feeling of the blazer and held her fingers like she had been burned. Her eyes began to mist over while she looked at the frozen figure that was her dearest friend. She then shook her head slowly.
”Okay, come on, Lynn, pull it together. You’re dreaming, or you’ve been drugged and are hallucinating,” she told herself.
Lynn sat for a few minutes waiting to see if her dream or hallucination would do anything next. After sitting in eerie deafening silence, she decided that was enough.
”Okay, you need to get out of here and find help,” she convinced herself.
Lynn wiggled out between the wall and Jen and slid underneath the table. She navigated through her friends’ stone-like legs, making it challenging to get out from under the table. Once Lynn was free from her prison of legs, she stood up and looked around.
People were frozen mid-bite of their meals. Others had their mouths agape, frozen in the middle of talking. Cafe staff had been milling about tending to customers and clearing off tables.
Lynn peered through the window in the kitchen door and saw that one of the cooks had just spilled a large stock pot. The spilled soup was frozen in midair like a wave of glass.
Lynn tried to push the swinging door open, only to find that it would not budge. She pushed harder, laying into the door with all the strength her lanky body could muster. The door remained unyielding, and Lynn finally gave up, leaning against the door and breathing heavily from the exertion.
Lynn abandoned the desire to enter the kitchen and moved to the main entrance. Fortunately for her, another person was leaving the cafe. The door was in mid-swing, leaving just enough room for her to squeeze through and out onto the crowded sidewalk.
People, primarily other college students, lined both sides of the street. Like everyone in the cafe, they were all frozen in place. She saw a pigeon that had just taken off from the sidewalk hovering in the air with its wings spread. She leaned down to touch the bird and found it was solid like everything else.
Lynn was processing the bizarre phenomenon bit by bit, amazed at all the sights. The idea of finding help faded out of her thoughts as she became more enamored with the phenomenon happening around her. She took her phone out of her pocket to take a picture. Oddly enough, her phone was functioning normally.
She glanced up to see that despite her phone being on, she had no cellular signal. She shrugged and lined up the shot of the pigeon. The phone clicked as she tapped the shutter button. She continued taking pictures of the world that was familiar yet now alien to her.
While Lynn continued roaming around, snapping pictures, she was unaware of a set of gleaming yellow eyes that followed her. A creature about the size and shape of a house cat stalked her closely from the shadows.
The beast was hairless, and the four legs’ ends had human-shaped hands that padded softly on the ground. Its head resembled that of a bearded dragon lizard except with skin instead of scales. It had a sleek physique and toned muscles showing through its tawny skin.
Lynn was bent over, taking a close-up video of a mid-flight insect. She was pushing on the bug with a finger trying to prove in the video that it was completely immobile.
Lynn’s mind suddenly froze in shock as pain bolted up her leg. After her shock wore off, she looked down to see a creature had silently latched itself onto Lynn’s leg.
The mouth of the beast had a jaw that extended down its neck, allowing it to wrap around Lynn’s leg completely. Lynn screamed in agony as razor-sharp teeth sunk into her flesh. She kicked and stomped her leg, trying to loosen herself from its vice-like grip.
Finally, she stepped on the creature’s body with her other foot while wrenching her leg free from its grasp. Chunks of flesh tore away, blood seeped from her leg and started pooling at her foot.
The creature under her foot flailed around wildly, trying to escape. It tried helplessly to grip at her foot and leg, giant maw gnashing as blood and saliva sputtered and sprayed from it. Lynn continued standing on the creature, applying as much weight as possible.
She lifted her sundered leg and brought it down heavily on the creature’s head, screaming in agony, pain shooting up her leg sharply as it connected. There was a crunching sound as the skull caved in, and the body went limp.
Lynn stood dumbfounded for a moment and then collapsed, sitting heavily on the cold hard ground. Her leg throbbed hard while blood continued seeping out the tears where flesh used to be. She tore off a sleeve on her blazer and painfully slid it over her calf like a giant tube sock to help staunch the bleeding.
Her vision started to haze, and she lost consciousness before she could do anything and slumped over.
