Blog From Afar — 001
November 3rd, 2019
Okay, so I’m right about this you should be able to read this. If not this is going to really grant me nothing but a creative outlet and a colossal waste of time. Oh, and don’t take the “you” personal, I just mean “you” as in whoever stumbles across this.
Let me try to explain what happened. I promise that you won’t believe this and that’s okay. I just want this out there in case something happens to me there will be a record of it.
I am from a town in Ohio called Parma. It’s not really anything to write home about. I think the Russo Brothers filmed a scene here recently with Tom Holland so that’s kinda interesting. But beyond that it’s big claim to fame is that we have about twelve Verizon stores so, that’s fun.
Anyways, I decided to go for a walk. Fall is rapidly approaching and Ohio tends to take to cold weather like it just found out company is going to be over in thirty minutes and they’re expecting cold all over the place, so I wanted to get out and enjoy the air while it wasn’t freezing my lungs.
As I walked I passed a house for sale. I’m not looking to move but I always enjoy peeking at houses for sale. I walked up the driveway like a creep so I could take a peek at the backyard. It was a tiny little fenced in area. The grass was a bit overgrown and there was evidence that there was once a garden in the fact that dark weeds now grew in a perfectly rectangular plot of the land against one of the fences. In the back corner of the yard there was an old rusted yard swing. It was behind it though that I noticed the…hole.
The light was shimmering in a strange way behind the swing and as I approached it I noticed something odd about the air behind the swing. The ground seemed slightly askew. The grass was brown and longer. As I approached it though and walked around the swing, the brown grass disappeared, replaced with shorter green grass. Confused I went in front of the swing to see the brown grass had returned.
I went behind the swing and knelt down. The grass was still green. I leaned to the side and the grass was brown again. I stared at the brown grass and reached for it and drew my hand back suddenly as halfway there my hand got a feeling like I reached it into a cobweb. Looking at my hand I realized nothing was on there. I thought it might have been a trick of the mind so I reached again. I pushed my hand through the feeling and touched the brown grass. It was hard, dead. As I touched it, I shifted my body and leaned back again. As I did not only did the grass suddenly look green again but I couldn’t see my own hand!
I freaked out and pulled my arm back and, luckily, the hand was there. I leaned again to see the brown grass and brought my head to it, passing it through the cobweb feeling and ignoring it. I could see that this part of the grass was long dead. Without lifting my head though, I looked up and was startled to see the neighboring house and the fence were both destroyed. I jumped, falling back against the swing the fence and house both instantly repaired themselves in the blink of an eye.
Determined to let my curiosity win out over self preservation I got back in place and looked at the brown grass again. Sure enough, the fence and house were destroyed once more. Not breaking eye contact I crawled towards them, getting closer, the feeling of cobwebs covered my shoulders and I started feeling resistance. I crawled harder, feeling like I was pushing against rubber until I started feeling some give against my forehead. I shoved a little harder and it gave and I fell forward into the brown grass. I got up and brushed myself up, expecting to see the repaired fence and house but they were still destroyed.
I looked around and all the grass was dead. The rusted swing was a few pieces of loose metal bent on the ground. Every house was mostly destroyed. Fences were collapsed and weirdly the world was silent. You don’t even notice how the ambient sound of cars is ever present until it suddenly gets cut off. The only noises were the wind and my slightly panicked breathing.
I ran out the driveway and looked up and down the street. The cars parked on the road were destroyed. Smashed, windows broken, tires flat. The houses were all beat to hell as well. Some of the trees had collapsed. Power lines wrapped around them like a fork in spaghetti.
I ventured out into the street and from my right I heard a hushed voice yell “Get off the street, idiot! They’re coming! Hide!” Still panicked I fell back and tripped into the shrubs in the front of the house where I landed with a hard thud in the mulch behind them. My head, on it’s side, looking out between the shrubs caught as these things ran down the street.
They looked almost like the raptors in the Jurassic Park movies but they were fast. Insane fast. And their limbs were much longer. Almost human length arms and long legs that allowed them to move faster. A group of about twenty some passed. I was in shock just laying there perfectly still, almost afraid to blink.
I heard footsteps approach and I clenched tighter, afraid to get caught. I felt something grip my shirt and I was suddenly yanked up. I almost screamed until I realized the thing that stood me up was a man. He looked like he was in his 50’s and was filthy.
“What the hell are you doing on the streets? Suicide by Marathoners or something?” the gruff man said.
“Suicide by what? What the hell happened?” I asked.
“Oh hell, you just got here did you? Okay okay, come with me.” he said as he lead me a few houses down. “Come on in, don’t worry about taking your shoes off. It doesn’t matter, honestly.”
I entered the filthy two story home and was lead immediately into the basement. For the record I’m not the kind to normally be lead in a stranger’s basement but I’m also not the kind to stay outside when giant raptors run about.
We turned the corner and went into a room in the far back of the basement. Inside, three other people sat on the floor. One was clearly a younger couple, probably early twenties that sat together under a blanket staring off into the middle distance. The other man I was surprised to say I recognized. He used to live across the street from me until he moved out about a year ago. He was in his sixties and had a thick white beard. I always jokingly called him Santa.
He looked up at me and said, “Hey! You’re the guy from that tudor house across from me right?”
“Uh, yeah…I’m Eric.”
He stood up and excitedly shook my hand. “Richard. Man, so excited to see a familiar face.”
The man that lead me there cleared his throat. “Okay, I see you already met Richard here.”
I took my hand out of the handshake. “Yeah, kinda. He lived near me but we never really talked before.”
My tour guide shrugged. “Well anyways, that’s Richard. The two under the blanket are Lisa and Ryan and I’m Dennis.”
I looked around and gave a wink wave. “Um, cool. Again, I’m Eric but…can anyone just tell me what’s going on?”
Richard was the first to answer. “You found yourself a wormhole!”
Dennis added, “There are…portals…Richard likes wormhole but it honestly fills my mind eye with a disgusting image so I stick with portals. But you found one. I’m not sure what happened here but this place is, essentially, our home dimension if it would have been completely destroyed by creatures.”
I thought about this for a moment and recalled my time in the shrubs. “You mean those weird running things did all this?”
Dennis responded, “First off, we call them Marathoners. They basically took to the road. Obviously I have nothing to properly measure their speed but I’m guessing they can get up to about 50–60 miles per hour and they are ALWAYS running. We’ve never seen them resting. They even eat when they’re running, it’s…it’s a nightmare to behold. But no, they’re not the ones that caused this destruction. See, we have no idea what happened here but there are all sorts of creatures here. Apparently this reality had some sort of bizarre event occur where these creatures showed up one day and just wiped out anything and everything.”
“No survivors?” I asked.
“Oh hell,” Richard said, “There are other survivors, they’ve just been at this a lot longer and are way better at hiding. You’ll encounter them sometimes but they’ll be in a huge rush to get you away from them.”
“Um, not to ask the obvious, but why are you still here? I know where the portal is, we can all just duck through the wor…the portal.” I said, looking at Dennis.
Dennis shook his head, looking at the ground. “Yeah, here’s some more bad news. Those portals? They’re one way tickets. It took a bit of a push to get one way but once you’re through they heal like scar tissue and we can’t make a dent in it.”
I plunked down on the floor. The room span for a bit. “So…I’m trapped here.”
Lisa lifted her head up for the first time since I got there. “We. We’re trapped here. Probably for good.”
“Hey! What did I say about that kind of talk?” Dennis chimed in. “Listen, Eric showing up tells us there’s more portals. If the five of us managed to find four portals on accident that’s got to mean we can find another one that hasn’t been used on purpose. We just have to keep combing and take it day by day and we’ll be fine.”
“Yeah, just like LeAnn was fine right?” Lisa responded angrily.
“LeAnn?” I asked.
Richard looked at the floor a moment before speaking. “LeAnn. She was one of us. Young girl, maybe not even out of her teens. The marathoners got her. They just swept her off and we could…we could hear her screams in the distance.”
Dennis responded, “As we learned from that. I feel bad for what happened with LeAnn, sure. But she didn’t stick to the rules and wasn’t careful. I hate to call it this but LeAnn’s death was a teachable moment and we all need to learn from it.”
Lisa glared up at him. “If you weren’t as right as you were I’d slap you and I want you to know that.”
The dizziness wasn’t getting better for me in that barely lit basement. My stomach was creating a Gregorian knot. “Um, I need to get some air. Bad.”
Dennis started to speak when Richard cut him off. “I’ll take him. Come on, neighbor.” And together we walked outside.
I looked over at the old man as we walked. “Hey, is it cool if I go look at the portal again? I get we can’t go back through it but…I wanna look.”
Richard smirked. “No problem man. Honestly we’ve all looked back through our home portals at some point. I think it’s almost a right of passage.”
We carefully, slowly, quietly made our way back to the house. It was easily identified by the broken “FOR SALE” sign sticking out of the ground. We made our way into the backyard and I saw the glimmer. I reached my hand to it and, sure enough, it felt like glass block. I’ve been told I have a thick head but no way was I pushing it through that.
I looked to Richard. “Hey Richard, what is the pl…” my leg twitched. “What the…” My leg twitched again. Then again. Each time two pulses hit my thigh in equal rhythm. I reached in my pocket. My phone was letting me know I got a notification!
Richard was taken aback. “How is that even possible?”
I tried to hold back my excitement and be quiet. “I think being close enough to the portal allows me to get a little bit of a signal. I can’t get any calls in because it can’t get the satellite but I’m definitely getting someone’s unprotected wifi service.”
“Can you contact anyone?” Richard asked.
“I’m going to try. And while I’m at it I’m going to try something else too, just to make someone knows we’re here. Can you cover me for about an hour so I can get some typing done?” I asked.
“Sure thing. Just try to get it wrapped up okay? It’ll be dark soon.”
So here I am typing this to let people know where I am. I haven’t heard back from anyone I messaged at the time of me finishing typing. Oddly some online features are a little wonky but I guess normal wifi isn’t entirely compatible with cross dimensional signals. Hopefully this sends. I’ll write back soon with more information on this weird place. Wish me luck.
