Survival is Crucial

Bad Bad Things

It was a normal day like any other - a family minding their own business, the brother sitting on the kitchen counter, waiting for a pot filled with water to boil, a mother sitting upon a couch as she read books on a tablet set up to a small crane, the father watching television beside the mother, eyes focused intently on the screen before him. One of the youngest in this quaint family is theirs sat quietly in their room, his young, baby sister sitting within a crib playing with a variety of toys.

The young boy was never normal, at least compared to his other siblings. He did not cry during birth, he would remain calm when provoked, but above all, he loved his family. Outside the room that the child was in, his brother's pot had finished boiling as he had lowered the temperature a bit as the doorbell went off. The brother dropped everything, walking over to the door as he was closest. The brother, without checking who it was, opened the door.

It happened within seconds - the brother dropped to the floor, dead, blood spilling from the back of an exit wound as loud snapping sound could be heard from someone who had entered the house, gun pressed against his hip as he entered the living room carefully. The dad's eyebrow was raised as he peeled himself off of his couch attempting to speak to the man who had just entered uninvited. The mother got up from her chair as well, brow furrowed, leaning forward as she stood. Two snaps... two thuds - a short screech from the mother being cut off abruptly as she fell. The young boy within his room knew something was wrong, quickly grabbing the baby and hiding under his bed.

All he heard under his bed were panicked thuds of boots against wooded flooring before the door to their room is violently thrown open by one hand. The boy attempts to stifle the noise coming from the baby within his arms but it is too late, the baby's cries could be heard, ringing in the man's ears as he taps the trigger of his pistol lightly, bloodshot eyes shifting across the entire room as he crossed to the bed.

The boy could only hear ringing by now, the sound of his breath... anxiety filled his heart as an unknown man had approached the bad that he lay under, all of this was enough to force him to swallow down the putrid bile that had surfaced in his throat.

Snap - two more shots went off before the man kneeled, seeing what was under the bed, finding one corpse and a young boy clutching onto his baby sister in desperation.

After that, the boy's memories end, all he knew was that he woke up in a hospital bed without being able to see through his right eye, voices screaming in his head about random miscellaneous things, body status reports that were all too precise, cursing, it was headache-inducing.

First, there were questions, "What happened to my sister? My brother? My Dad? Mom?" constantly repeating these words in his head as he stayed curled in a ball, lips pressed together as sweat poured from his forehead, barely stifling vomit as his throat grew to be tighter and tighter, digging his nails into the skin of his legs as fear overtook his body. Nurse and police officers fill the room, one of the nurses jumping over to the boy in surprise, yet he could hear nothing coming out from her mouth. It wasn't as if he couldn't hear, he knew this well, but the fear that overtook him seemed to have deafened all of those around him.

A private investigator sat on the opposite side of the hospital bed, snapping his fingers a few times, causing the boy to focus completely on the investigator. "We have something to tell you." It took a few minutes for the investigator to tell the child, but eventually, he told this child, unable to actually say that the child's family is dead, the only words he could utter was, "I'm afraid that you are now an orphan."

The child knew what this meant, but he still wanted to know one more thing, "What about my sister?" The silence was enough for him to understand what had happened. The second, is realization, piecing together what had happened, processing the information, repeating the process once again, not quite accepting that such a thing could've happened. The third is despair, and... for the first time in this child's life, he wept.

By his third day in the hospital, it was as if all emotions had left him, eyes empty of life, only moving in a slow methodical manner to do basic activities to keep himself alive like drinking water and eating food, pissing, shitting. By the fourth day, he had rendered himself temporarily immobile, covering himself in sheets as he cried himself to sleep for two days straight.

The fifth day came, standing in front of a mirror. He had long black hair that went over one of his eyes, covered in bandages, wearing a gaunt expression on his face. One voice would speak of people moving in pin-point precision, perfectly describing their movements and the speed - one voice spoke of conditions, his body was lacking nutrition, water, basic necessities, even listing various organs and the quality of each one - another spoke of curses, telling the boy to kill himself - the last voice of the hundreds that had begun speaking within his head spoke in a positive manner, encouraging life, describing the sadness of life and going into detail in such a thing should not put him down. Needless to say, he was overwhelmed and confused by what was going on, yelling to himself until finally realizing that they were not real, they were all in his head... they were him.

With this realization, something inside the boy had changed.

This was the story of Tyche Asmodeus Hunt.