When the world went to s***, nobody had time for books. Why did I have to be a writer? I was, in my modest opinion, so good at writing but... I had never written a book. My problem was all of the distractions. In a world that constant war, I found it difficult to write about the topic of my book: a planet exactly like earth, untouched, waiting… it would have been the book people really wanted to read. It would've given them the escape from this Hell hole they so desperately needed. After World War I you would think the human race would've learned their lesson and most definitely after World War II. But no, the violence prevailed and now we are stuck in the never ending hope that the next bomb dropped won't be on our heads. I desperately needed an escape. I needed to write the book that would give people hope. I packed up my things: a MacBook plus, three changes of clothes, some old sneakers, PJs, and a charger, and set off for the hotel where  I had a one-week rental.
I boarded the shuttle to the hotel at 4:15 PM. There were two other people on the shuttle with me; an old woman with a bag full of soy-meat and corn, and a man in his mid-thirties sleeping in the corner. The woman seemed very nervous, a bad thing to be on a public shuttle. She kept glancing between me and the man nervously. My guess is she couldn’t afford a private taxi to take her to the grocery store.  As our shuttle clattered down the makeshift rail, I watched out the window. Buildings flew by outside some new, some old. Two new public bomb shelters had been built on either side of the old TD bank. The bank had been closed for as long as I could remember. I guess business isn't too hot when paper money ceases to exist and everything is done online. Few people walked around outside. Most of those who did kept their heads down and walked quickly. I counted seven people wearing black hoodies and three with “concealed-carries”. I was so busy looking at solemn faces roaming the streets I hardly even noticed the shuttle come to a stop. The old woman tapped me on the shoulder, then pointed out the window at the hotel. I smiled at her but she looked away. I walked to the front of the shuttle and slid my ID card through the payment slot. The green light lit up and I stepped off the shuttle and onto the sidewalk. The doors closed behind me and the little cart sped away.
The first thing I noticed about the hotel were the lights. The neon sign above the doorway that probably want said Studley's now said S udl 's and was completely dark. There were two rooms that had lights on; one on the third floor and one on the eighth. When I walked inside, I was immediately directed to the detectors by a prerecorded message. There were three separate conveyer belts; one for electronics; a second for weapons (I didn’t have any on me… probably not the best decision), and a third for bags, shoes and anything else you might be carrying. A couple weeks ago a woman was arrested  for trying to smuggle an RPG into a hotel room in an oboe case. The message then instructed me to insert my ID card into a slot in the side of the detection machine and step into it. I cleared it but the man two behind me got stopped by the machine. Police ran in from out back, guns trained on the man. I quickly put my sneakers on, gathered my things, and walked over to the check-in station pretending not to notice. I waited in line behind two people, one of which was the man sleeping on the shuttle. When I reach the station, I inserted my ID card and was printed a room key with the number 14-28 across the front. I got inside the elevator and hit the 14 button. Next to the keypad there was a sticker advertising “Nuclear Bomb Protection Units". The elevator door opened and I walked down the hall to the left until I found the 28th room. I inserted my key and turned the doorknob.
The hotel room was relatively nice. It had one bed (full-size mattress), a bathroom with hot water, a desk, a lamp, and a mini fridge. My first course of action, was to turn up the thermostat although I never did notice a difference in temperature after. I then walked over to the desk and plugged the charger into the outlet near one of its legs. I opened up the laptop and started it charging. I walked over to the door and locked the deadbolt and chain locks, then crossed the room to close the blinds. I sat down at the desk and cracked my knuckles. When prompted, I typed in my username: StevenFisher12 and my password: Martin Fisher (after my dad died, his name became my password for everything). It took me what seemed like an eternity to type the first sentence of my new novel but then the rest started to flow knowing I had an entire week ahead of me of solitary confinement. A whole week to do nothing but write . No access to the outside world, no persistent notifications, no Internet, just simple writing.
Seven days is enough to make a man go mad. The first day was easy, I got 30 pages of my book done and started to feel the pin pricking reminder of the outside world fade away. Day two, I woke up forgetting where I was, but I was soon calmed down by the clicking of my fingers on the keys of my computer. I could lose myself for hours at a time. I soon discovered how to stick to a strict schedule to avoid insanity. Wake up, write, breakfast, write, lunch, write, dinner, write, bed. Each block had its allotted time. I soon lost track of days but I didn't care, figuring the hotel manager would eventually come up and kick me out. I lost grip on reality and the only reality I knew was in the world of pages I had written. I had multiple conversations with the characters of my novel whom appeared to be in the room with me. Jarod the main character comforted me as he conquested to find this new world and when he did a relief I can describe washed over me. At one point, there was a bright flash outside the window that lit up the curtains. I probably would have taken greater notice to it but I could have sworn I imagined it. It must have been close to a month before I placed the final period on the end of my work of art.
I woke up and immediately walked to my laptop to write. I sat at the desk and entered my password. I sat for seven and a half minutes  with the cursor blinking, trying to figure out how to continue the novel. I finally realized that I was done. I had finished my novel. I jumped out of my chair and yelled at the top of my lungs. It was the greatest moment of my life. I got up on the bed and jumped up and down like a little kid. I ran to the door and unbolted and unchained it. I quickly sat back down at my laptop and compiled the document into a PDF and attach it in an email. My editor will be a static I thought to myself. I hit send and ran back to the curtain and threw it open. I quickly unlocks the window and pulled up, hard. Fresh air came flooding in. Two things happened simultaneously after I opened that window: 1) I noticed the streets, gray and cracked, were completely vacant, 2) my world ended.
Odd how insignificant a little crack in the ceiling is. But when you wake up on the floor of a hotel room in Boston after having your brain deep-fried and covered in molasses  it can be the only thing that holds you together. My hands slowly felt their way along the floor until they found something solid. They grasped the bedpost tightly pulling my head up above my hips. My feet remained sprawled out in front of me. I pulled my feet up and curled into a ball while I waited for the ringing in my ears to end. However, it never did. I clapped my hands in front my face. No noise. I did it again, same result. I began clapping sporadically in front of my face over and over and over again until my hands went numb. That's when I remembered my novel. I started to stand up, but was quickly overcome by dizziness and fell over. I was a bit more successful on my second attempt. I stumbled to my computer and yanked the cord out of the wall. I closed it and hugged it to my chest with all my strength. I made my way to the door, turned the handle and left the room.
I felt alone. The air was still, nothing moved, and a strange smell hung in the air. I walked down the hall knocking on every door on the 14th floor, and every time I got the same results; no answer. Every door was sealed shut except one. There was something propping it open. A piece of string? No. A shoelace. I started to push open the door, which in turn revealed to me where the odd smell had been coming from. The wave of it that was released into the hall made me drop my laptop, turn around, and empty the contents of my stomach onto the carpet. I stood hunched over for a few seconds staring at the blue-and-white striped wallpaper. I slowly stood up, once again becoming dizzy and approached my laptop where it had fallen. I check the screen to make sure I had cracked it and talk to back under my arm. I once again tried to push the door open but it was stuck. I tried again, pushing harder this time and leaning my shoulder into it. It gave way with a sickening peeling feeling and I fell forwards. I landed on something all-too-familiar; skin. I picked my head up and found myself staring into the glazed eyes of a dead girl.
I didn't stop running until I was safely in the street. I was out of breath from running down the fire escape and fell onto my hands and knees.
“Help!” I yelled. “Is there anyone out there?"
I couldn’t hear myself yell it, so for all I knew it could've ended up simply being a series of screeches and mumbles. I looked up at the windows of all the buildings to see if there was anyone up there. The image of the girl flashed across my mind; the empty bottle of pills next to her cold body, her blue eyes covered in the milky white film. I snapped out of my daze and continued searching the building for a face but there wasn’t one. Suddenly, about 25 stories up, a window shattered, glass flying out towards the street as if something large had been thrown out through it. I watched a shirt, shorts, and socks hurtle downwards towards the ground. What happened next was the oddest, most terrifying thing that had ever happened to me. When the clothes are about a foot off the ground a man's body appeared inside them. And as if in slow motion, his head hit the ground, his spine compiled and his feet hit the ground behind him. He lay on the ground completely motionless as blood poured out of his neck.
I panicked, I ran. I ran down the street towards my apartment. I continued to run down the vacant street, past the TD Bank, past the bomb shelters… The bomb shelters... something about them caught my attention. I stopped in my tracks, out of breath. I straightened up and turned around to face them. I saw exactly what I hoped not to see: the red emergency light was flashing. At first I thought I counted wrong, so I counted again… And again… And continued counting until I had reached the conclusion that my kindergarten teacher had taught me how to count to five pretty damn well.
Acid rain? Poisonous air? End of the world? The possibilities seemed endless but none of them seem to make sense. I walked over to the bomb shelter slowly. I grasped the handle of the doors and pulled, but they were locked. Clearly they were in lockdown mode. I had no choice but to simply wait until they were unlocked and the people inside would be let out. But quite frankly that could take months, years even. I backed away from the double doors and promptly tripped over a clump of grass and landed on my back on the pavement. I hit my head on the road and felt a wave of pain consume my brain. Still laying on the ground, I reached my hand to the back of my head and brought it in front of my face. It was covered in blood. I felt it drip down my neck, staining my light purple T-shirt. I looked up at the sky watching the yellow of the sun impale the foggy atmosphere. The sun disappeared behind a cloud, or was it my eyelids? Everything went black.
While I was asleep, I dreamed about my mom. She standing in a cotton field. A small speck in a field of puffy white. Way off in the distance, oak trees grew taller than the red barn to my left. I was standing at the edge of the field, on the road to the barn. The path lead street to the wide open door. There was no hay or animals inside, only a bright white light coming out. I looked out across the cotton field to my mom. I called out to her and I thought I saw her turn her head towards me. The spec of her began to grow and grow and grow until she was again her actual size. She left the cotton field and stood directly in front of me.
“It’s time,” she said gently.
“But I’m not ready.”
“It’s ok darling, I’ll be here by your side the whole time.”
I reached out and took her hand as we started towards the inviting door of the barn. A few feet away, I paused and looked up at her, but wasn't met with the familiar blue crystal eyes of my mother. Instead, where she had been standing, there was a hooded man whose face I couldn't see. All I could see, was a yellow gas mask sticking out from under his empty black hood.
The gas mask stared down at me. I was definitely awake now and my heart was pumping. The hooded figure was simply an empty hoodie with no head or face inside. Only the yellow gas mask seemed to indicate there should be something holding it up. I was still on the ground when something grabbed my shoulders and the hooded thing grabbed my ankles. Only, where his hands should have been, there was nothing. He was… in all aspects… a ghost. The ground fell away from me as I was lifted into the air. I was still too dizzy to do anything. My head rolled back and I caught a glimpse of a white shirt stained with blood. On top of it was another gas mask above it. I was aware of the two ghosts walking in the direction of the bomb shelter. I picked my head up just enough to witness myself being carried through the open doorway, but I again fell into the comforting confines of sleep.
In my dream, two men in gas masks stood on either side of me, both turned away. The one on my right picked something up to examine it. When he turned around, he revealed to me it was in fact, a scalpel. But that’s not what caught my interest. Instead of having no face, the man had the screen of my laptop where his head should have been. The screen was scrolling through the pages of my novel on loop. The computer man looked up and nodded at the other man who’s face was not a man’s or a computer’s, but instead, a crow’s. The computer man looked down at the inside of my left arm and swiftly cut along a black line. Blood began pouring out, and to my horror, the Crow man leaned across me and started drinking it. I thrashed in the hospital bed but I was strapped tightly to its posts and couldn’t get away from the beast. The crow man turned and looked me in the eye with a drop of my blood hanging from his beak.
I woke up in a hospital bed much like the one in my dream. I was wearing a paper gown and was trying to remember what had happened. The novel… the dead girl… the street… the man jumping out the window… the light blinking five times… the crow… the scalpel… I glanced over my arm but there was no cut, just an I.V. and the small of rubbing alcohol. Was it all a dream? I looked around the hospital room. I was laying in the bed in the middle. There was a door opposite me, three chairs on my left, and various medical machines around the room I couldn’t identify. A television playing the news was on over my head. Subtitles had been turned on and I tried to read them but they were going too fast. I must have gotten a concussion from the fall. I only picked up a few words: “...Bomb...nerve gas takes control of...Russian engineers designed...launched...symptoms include:...vomiting...deafness...lack of the ability to see life forms...permanent brain damage…” I didn’t read the rest because I fainted.
My dreams were far from pleasant. A drop of blood hung from a crow’s beak. It lowered its head to the dirt and flew away. The drop of blood rested on a blade of grass. One blade of grass in the center of an old woman’s yard. The clicking of her old grandfather clock could be heard by nothing but a small mouse eating seed a few yards away from the blade of grass. The drop of blood dangled in the form of a tear on the tip of the blade weighing its fragile tip down. When the tip of the blade neared the ground, the drop of blood slipped and fell. As soon as the drop lost its grip of the grass, everything disappeared; the grass, the mouse, the seed, the house, the clock, the old lady, the crow… All that was left for the drop of blood was a large brown sphere called earth. The blood hit the earth and aroused a cloud of dust but didn’t make a sound. Even if it had, there wouldn’t have been anyone around to care.
I woke up but I didn’t feel awake. I prayed for everything to go away, for this all to be a dream. But when I opened my eyes, I was still in the same hospital bed, wearing the same paper gown. I glanced to the right and something on the table next to me caught my eye. Odd, how something that was so frightening before now seemed so inviting. I lifted my arm and reached towards the little table, on which, rested the scalpel. My fingers wrapped around the cold metal and I brought it close to my face. I looked at my reflection in the razor sharp blade and smiled. The reflection smiled back. I moved the scalpel to to my wrist and and pulled it up towards my elbow. They say your life flashes before your eyes when you're about to die but I saw nothing. I guess I had no destiny any more so there really was nothing to show me. I closed my eyes and let my blood soak into the paper gown. I began to relax knowing that soon the pain would end and I could finally relax. At least I brought joy to the world in the end. My laptop would be discovered on the ground outside the bomb shelter and I might even go down in history. But that’s just wishful thinking. All I really ask is for one person to read what I left on my deathbed. I opened my eyes one last time to see an invisible man standing in the doorway to my room wearing a white doctor’s outfit. Nice to finally meet you, I thought.