Deadwastes

Mason gasped and jerked up, feeling like he was being frozen alive. He looked around his room, trying to make sense of everything that was assailing his senses. Shaking his head, he realized something.

This wasn’t his room.

Or, at least, it wasn’t his room as he had left it. He glanced up at his window, or what remained of it.

The glass had been shattered, and the few pieces remaining were laced with frost. Cold air flowed into the dilapidated room. He stood up slowly, clutching his body with his arms to keep himself as warm as possible, and shakingly looked at his surroundings.

His room, or whatever it was, had been ruined. His belongings were gone, and there was a hole in the roof. It smelled like old wood and trash. Mason turned and looked at the bed where he’d been laying. It was just a frame, barely staying together.

What the hell had happened?

He tried to open the door, but jerked his hand back at how cold the metal knob felt. He looked at it for a moment and shot his hand out as quickly as he could manage, trying to grab the doorknob and pull it open as fast as he could, but it was stuck. He pulled his hand back again, thinking.

Mason stood back, took a deep breath, and tried to pull the door open again, slower this time.

Managing to ignore the cold, he pulled, but it was frozen shut, and his hand slipped off the icy doorknob. Mason flew down onto the ground and smacked his head against the remains of a dresser. His vision swam with black spots. He groaned and sat up, rubbing the back of his head.

He stood up, and looked at the door again. He wasn’t very strong, never had been, but there wasn’t any other way out of here. He gritted his teeth and pulled off his jacket, wrapping it around his hands. The freezing air burned his skin, and he barely managed to ignore it long enough to grab the doorknob again.

Using all of his force, he pushed it as hard as he could away from him. After a few moments, it slid open with the sound of cracking ice, opening inwards. He looked out the door, into a dusty, dark hallway.

He slid his jacket back over his body, grateful for the small amount of warmth it provided. His teeth were chattering uncontrollably.

Mason walked out of the room, nervous. He followed the hallway outwards, leading into a stairway down towards what must have been the living room. Tattered curtains hung above shattered windows, and a musty old couch sat facing a cracked television. Moving downstairs, he walked past a decrepit kitchen, the cold air squeezing his shivering frame.

The layout of the building reflected his home, but there was no way that this was his house.

Somehow, he must have been moved while he was asleep to this freezing place. He needed to figure out where that was, though.

Mason walked to where he assumed the front door would be, and sure enough, there it was, seemingly blasted off it’s hinges. He stepped outside and couldn’t really understand what he saw.

It was his road. He saw all of his neighbors houses, across the road and to his sides. Strange burn marks marked them all, lines of black crisscrossing and weaving on the old wood. A faint acrid smell hung over the air, something that Mason couldn’t quite place, but it smelled familiar. All of that paled in comparison, though, to what was right in front of him.

Standing like a lonely giant, in the middle of the road, was a jagged spire of glowing, blue ice. It reached higher than the houses, with lines of frost curling down the cracks in the street.

Squinting, Mason could just barely make out a figure, frozen inside. Its hands were spread far from its body, almost like it was shouting at the sky. He couldn’t make out any details apart from it looked male.

Stepping closer, he thought he could hear something coming from the ice block. His natural reaction would be to leave whatever it was alone and walk away, but he didn’t exactly have anywhere he could go to. Feeling hopeless, he decided that he might as well try to check it out. Mason walked towards the frosty pillar, getting closer and closer while at the same time feeling colder and colder.

Stopping right in front of it, he leaned in close, trying to make out what the noise was. He could almost hear it.

“You’ll pay for…” he heard whispered, faintly.

Trying to make out more, he kept listening, but his foot caught itself on a stray shard of ice, making him trip towards the frozen structure.

With a loud cry, he instinctively flung his hands out to catch himself, both landing firmly on the ice.
Mason held his breath as he watched, silently, while small cracks formed from his hands in the frost, breaking the block of ice. With an ominous shearing noise, the top half of it slid backwards, colliding with the ground and shattering into thousands of tiny, razor sharp pieces.

He tried to pull his hands away. The cold was unbearable, and Mason felt like his hands were about to fall off. But it was like he was attached to it, bound by some unbreakable force, and made to watch as the scene before him played out.

The figure in the ice screamed, loud and primal, a deep scream from the bottom of its soul. Its eyes flashed a brilliant blue, outshining the pale Bright flashes of lightning suddenly burst out of it, hitting decaying street lamps and crashing into the old, abandoned houses. Mason desperately tried to yank his arms free, but he felt like he was super-glued onto the ice.

The figure, and the lightning, both suddenly stopped. It was freakily quiet, like someone had killed sound itself.

And then, his world shattered.

A massive surge of electricity shot from the figure in the ice, hitting Mason square in the chest. He felt incredible heat and pain, his mind instantly going blank. His muscles locked up, and he felt like his body was melting inside of itself.

For an instant, he saw a bright white light, reaching towards him, warming his soul. He knew he was dying. He didn’t know why or how, but he had no choice but to accept it.

He saw his parents staring at him in disbelief and anger as he gave them the news of dropping out of high school.

He watched his little sister crying all over again after her first breakup, how he failed to comfort her and make her smile again.

He saw his closest friends all standing in front of him, disappointment sketched on each of their faces, one by one fading away as they left town or went on to better things, eventually leaving him alone in his own misery.

He stared at the dozens of torn fragments of college letters on his floor, shredded in anger and regret.

He gazed at the expression on his own face as his girlfriend of five years told him she was moving away forever, remembering and feeling his confusion, his anger, his sadness.

Every image vanished almost as soon as it appeared, vanishing from his thoughts and his mind.

Mason finally felt ready to let go, to leave all his mistakes behind and go somewhere better, to become something new.

But in a cruel, ironic trick, the light vanished, and he felt cold hands pulling at him from behind, dragging him back down to an earth that he didn’t recognize. For a brief moment, he felt like he was burning alive and freezing to death at the same time.

He crashed back down into his body at the speed of a bullet train, gasping awake. The pungent smell of electricity stung his nose and made his eyes water, clouding his vision. Gasping, he fell to his knees, feeling incredibly weak.

After a few minutes of catching his breath and trying to clear his eyes, he shakily stood back up, feeling oddly warm. Looking down at himself, Mason let out a small startled cry.

He was suddenly wearing a bright, orange winter coat, with fur at the hands and neck, a pair of snug black snow-pants, heavy brown boots, and a pair of black gloves. A gray scarf was pulled around his face, his hair was wrapped in a black watch cap, and feeling an odd weight at his brow, he put his hands up to it, pulling down a pair of orange ski goggles. He was completely geared up, for some reason, and he felt even more confused than before.

Looking around, he saw that he had been somehow sent to the center of the pillar of ice, now turned into a quickly freezing puddle on the ground.

A dull green military backpack lay on the ground beside him, lines of smoke curling off of it.

Mason’s gaze nervously flitted around the area, trying to figure out what had happened. His eyes landed on something that instantly made him feel cold and hollow, despite the clothes. His knees buckled, and he fell back down to the icy, unforgiving ground, feeling numb.

There, on the ground in front of him, was his own corpse, staring blankly up towards the sky.