It's the night, filled with darkness across the sky, with the moon nowhere in sight to light the streets. Chilly winds rattle the curtains of the window near my hospital bed, the only sound here except the beeping of the heart rate monitor.
My fever was down and so did the needling pain in my body but my head still felt weird, heavy and foggy. I wasn't able to figure out what I saw was real seeing the current circumstances, the nurses told me that I was lucky to survive the mass food poisoning that happened at school, told me the authorities were still trying to figure out how more than half the school got the infection. The death toll was high, it was unusual she added further that the infected were dying of some kind of shock and the whole area was sealed off and experts have been called in.
I knew it in the very core of my consciousness that this was untrue, I knew what happened because I was the one of the last ones in there facing the Pishach of nightmares itself, destroying it and releasing everyone from the horror of the web it built.
Though things seemed still unclear to me, as far as I knew I was the last one surviving in that nightmare but these other kids sounded like they were still trapped.
I quite clearly remember that Pishach turning to rust, I thought maybe its something else, maybe it's the after effects of the murderous horror.
I stood up to get some fresh air outside the window, and feel the cold breeze of summer. I stared into the pitch-black skies; these skies looked as if they were screaming.
I smelled and tasted the iron blood and realized that my nose was bleeding. I pulled out a tissue from the box on the bed stand, wiped some of the blood from my nose and pulled my head up to stop the bleeding. But I felt as if the piece of tissue was drenching and put my face down and realized that my blood was all black.
A thick smell of rot now covered my nose, I was unable to breathe, out of instinct I pulled my head outside the window to get as much air as possible in my nose.
I heard the pitch-black skies screaming and whispering, the earth in the moment teared up with thick pine trees coming out of it, the trees covered in blood. The noise of the screams grew louder and louder as the trees started locking the grounds of the hospital.
The next moment the skies went silent and its screams were replaced by the ominous crows which rushed through the window and with them the whole room filled with shadow.
Their beaks attacking me like needles in my body. The black blood throwing from my nose increased, a hundred-fold, swallowing the whole space around me creating waves and drowning me in it.
I was already on the last drop of air in my body with my face turned blue now. I was dying of suffocation now. Almost exhausted of oxygen I tried to swim up with my left hand reaching out of the water.
As soon as my hand was out of the black water, the water evaporated all at once and I was falling from a great height from the sky but when I was about to hit the ground I was jolted with a current running through my spine.
I heard noises, and faintly opened my eyes to the face of a doctor, covered in all a ppt kit, shouting at his fellow doctor one more shot and a current again ran through my spine and I was fully awake now.
The next few moments went by and I felt the rush of adrenaline in my body and I felt alive, breathing as much oxygen as possible from the mask.
I was awake and okay the rest of the ride and realized I was hallucinating. When I arrived at the hospital I was admitted in quarantine with the other survivors of the nightmare in the special camp outside the hospital. All the staff attend to us were covered in full protection suits.
I tested almost okay in all the tests they did on me at the moment but the blood reports will only come the next day.
Few hours went by, I didn't stand up to look around owing to my last nightmare at the hospital. The other kids seemed fine only gossiping about how they have no memory at all except feinting.
Few more hours went by and the lights went shut but the moon light lit the sky in surveillance. I came to know through my phone that the water supply of the school was contaminated by a poisonous moss of unknown nature growing inside it. All of the moss pretty much died when taken out of the water. It mostly affected students and few died of the slow poisoning and others were paralyzed in shock, few survived who received proper treatment on time, the news channel reported there were sixty-two deaths, it was getting a lot of heat in the media.
Finally, I stood up because they were shifting two more patients to quarantine. I overheard the nurses gossiping that one of them might be the first ones to be infected.
Later when the buzz died down, I left my bed and went on to check around the quarantine zone, the lights were dim and the sound of machines covered the whole area.
The whole setting looked so much different than that of the nightmare, I clearly remember the hours I spent in the murderous school and the Pishach murdering.
But a small part of me was still unsatisfied even after the Pishach turned to rust. It felt like the horror wasn't over; it felt like something was off. I went around the beds and discovered that all of them were empty, only the machines beeping by default. What was the whole buzz about a few hours ago? Where did the gossiping kids go?
I increased my pace and started rattling the bedsheets and realized no one was actually there, I reached the end of encampment, it was separated by the rest of it, I went near the transparent part and discovered two bodies all mauled up, with worms eating them from inside, upon looking closely I realized one was Shobhit and the other one was Vedanth. I was shocked and stumbled back, the smell of rot again wrapped my nose and I looked back, now the beds were filled with bodies, all rotting and most of their flesh gone.
I ran toward the exit of the quarantine, shouting for help but no one answered. As near as I got to the exit everything behind me started phasing out and it caught up to me before I could exit and transported me to the tournament stadium.
Yes at that time I was also confused like you all, the Pishach was dead but why wasn't the nightmare over? Why were things repeating themselves?