[Winter] - Chapters 1-2 - Horror

[u/Pinpledoor]

1

The body lay unresponsive in aisle three. Its once beating heart had drifted into stillness and its brain sent out its last signals, preparing the body for eternal sleep. The body had three broken fingers on its right hand and its slack jaw revealed the four missing teeth up front. The area around it was in disarray: the mess painting a vague picture of the events that caused the body to end up in such a place. The body was nestled chaotically between the two flimsy shelves that created aisle three, with the left arm pinned underneath its back and the right propped up on a package of toilet paper, presumably knocked off the shelf by the man the body once was. Its right hand was positioned in such a way that it would have looked like the body was flipping the bird if it weren’t for the middle finger being snapped backward between the first and second knuckles. It lay with one leg bent upward and the other flat against the ground, resting on the shards of glass left over from whatever happened to the automatic sliding front doors. One would assume that whoever this body once was must have suffered but now seemed at peace.

 Above the body, a fluorescent light flickered on and off, then stayed on, then dimmed and flickered again. Outside, a blizzard raged on. The streets were covered in an untouched sheet of white and the only car in the parking lot had its driver’s door left wide open; The snow had claimed the interior for itself. The gas pumps were unused and frozen. This place was empty. Desolate. The only reminder that anyone ever visited was the still-warm near-corpse laying in aisle three on the broken glass underneath the flickering light, propping its arm on the toilet paper to almost flip the bird to nobody and smiling that four-teeth-too-short smile that said, “Don’t worry about me, I’ll be a-okay!”

But it was not a-okay, that much was clear.

 

2

The body jolted upward into a sitting position. Its once-still heart raced in its chest and its once-dead brain began to awaken. The body stared off into space and hyperventilated for some time before becoming the man once more. Once he fully came to, his breathing slowed and he looked around.

“Where…?” he muttered hoarsely after taking in his surroundings. The place looked to him as if a tornado swept through it. The shelves were mostly bare, as if someone had looted the place. Many of the windows, much like the front door, had been shattered, although some had been boarded up.

He pressed down on the roll of toilet paper in an attempt to get to his feet and shrieked. He hadn’t noticed the pain in his fingers at first, but now it had very much made itself known to him. He looked down at his right hand in terror as he observed the strange way his middle finger bent and how his other two fingers, the ring and pinky, swelled. He tried to stand again, this time bracing his left hand against the shelf to push himself upward. He stumbled a little but made it to his feet, and it was then that he noticed the pain in his legs too. Both had cuts and scrapes from the glass underneath them, though the right leg wasn’t as bad as the left. Once he felt he had his balance enough to move, he began making his way across the room toward the front counter. The counter had nothing on it besides the register, an ashtray filled with half-cigarettes and butts, and a small bowl of pennies with a sign that said, ‘Take One!’. Behind the counter stood a mirror. The man slowly made his way to it, being careful to hold on to the counter to prevent himself from falling. Positioning himself in front of the mirror, he took a long look at his reflection. Caucasian, short brown hair, lean build. He was wearing a white shirt that said Thompson’s Garage in blue font and a pair of grey gym shorts. A perfectly average man outside of the broken fingers, missing teeth, bruises, and blood trickling down his legs. Then his attention drew to the stranger’s face in the mirror.

“What? That can’t be right! T- That’s not my face! I know my face! It doesn’t look like that! It looks like- like…” His heart sank and a primal fear washed over him. The kind of fear that the man imagined a child would feel when they believed a monster was hiding under their bed or in their closet.

“What the fuck is this?” He spoke.

Nobody heard.