The Loop

You awake suddenly very late in the night. You glance over at your alarm clock and see that it is almost 3 A.M. You don't know why, but you feel like going downstairs and watching some T.V. You get out of bed and walk down the stairs into the living room. Sitting in front of the TV, you start to flip through the channels. You keep flipping through the channels until you get to channel 1008, which is comprised of nothing but static. Feeling as if something is controlling you, you stare endlessly at the blank channel. You start to notice after about five minutes that there are a few lone words that momentarily flash in the middle of the screen. You manage to pick out three words: Help, All, and Dead.

It's been about ten minutes, you still feel that you need to be watching the screen. Now you notice that the grey fuzzy screen will momentarily flash different colors. It follows a pattern: ''Red, Blue, Red, Red, Blue. ''You don't know what these things are supposed to mean, and you don't necessarily care. You need to be watching the screen for some reason. Suddenly, there is a message that appears on the screen. You can't read it, it seems to be in some sort of code. Three more codes appear before they all stop. The screen starts to distort and warp. Two bony hands emerge out of the TV screen and reach towards you. You stand up and walk over to the screen. The hands open and you feel as if they want you to grab them. You reach out and grab the hands. They quickly retreat back into the screen, bringing you with them. Everything goes black.

You are awoken by the touch of an unseen force. You are lying in the middle of a cold, dark hallway. You have no idea how you got here, and you have no idea where you are. You stand up and dust yourself off. The hallway looks as if it goes on forever either ways, but it is hard for you to judge the distance in the dark. You decide to go in the direction you were facing when you had first awoken. The hallway seems to get darker and darker with each step you take. You keep walking and walking until you stumble upon two doors. You find a flashlight lying in the middle of the two doors, so you bend over and pick it up. You press the button on the flashlight and shine it over onto the left door. It is colored red, and has the word 'help' scrawled on it with pencil. You focus the beam on the right door. It is painted blue, and has the word 'dead' scratched into it.

You think about what door you should choose. After a few minutes you decide to go through the right door. You grip the handle and twist it. The door swings open and the hallway is instantly filled with a rotting stench. You plug your nose and step into the room. The door swings shut behind you and you hear it lock. You desperately try to get the door open, but to no avail. You swing around and shine the beam down the hallway in front of you. It is much wider than the previous hallway, and the walls are lined with numerous body bags. The stench emitting from them is unbearable. You wander down the hall for a good five minutes and notice that the body bag count starts to get higher and higher. Soon the piles are getting to be taller than you. You get a very uneasy feeling and start to run down the hall. While you are running you notice that some of the body bags seem to be twitching and moving.

One of the bags bursts open, spraying a mess of guts and blood in front of you. You stop running and stand over the mess in front of you. You think you are going to be sick if you keep looking at it, but you just can't look away. The utter silence of the hallway is soon broken by the sound of more bags bursting open. You shine the light of your flashlight down the hall behind you and see that more of the bags are bursting open, and at an alarmingly fast rate too. Once again, you start to run down the hall. The bags are bursting open faster than you can run. The ones right behind you start to burst open. Luckily, you reach another door at the end of the hallway and thrust it open. You look behind you at the door and see the mess splattered all over the window on the door. You fall against the wall and vomit more times than you ever have in your entire life. You don't want to be here anymore, and you don't know how to get out. You take a look around you and notice that you aren't in another hallway, you are in a very large room. In the middle sits a very big pile of body bags, more than you can count.

You sit slouched against the wall, not wanting to move from where you are. You feel someone tap you on the shoulder. You look up and see some sort of figure holding a bat. It was wearing a white mask that had no features except for blank eye sockets and a nose. There was blood splattered all over the mask. You start to back up slowly and the figure followed. Before you could get on your feet, the figure swung the bat and socked you in the head, knocking you out cold.

Your mom walks into your room and wakes you up. You sit up and look around, everything seems to be normal. Your mom says that it's time to get up and get ready for school. You get dressed and grab your backpack. You walk into the kitchen, grab your lunch, and walk out the door. You notice that there are no vehicles passing you by on your street today. You get to the hill behind your school and climb to the top. You look down towards your school and see that it's not there. There is an empty plot of land surrounded by fences. You walk down to the fence and look around. A stray newspaper lies on the ground in front of you. You pick it up and read the front page headline. "Mysterious Virus Unleashed At Local High School, 517 Dead" You are mortified at what you just read. Why hadn't you heard of this yet? You check the date on the newspaper. ''1995 Apr. 19. ''

You walk through an open part of the fence and onto the foundation of where the school had once stood. There was nothing left of the school except for the concrete foundation and a couple of papers scattered here and there. You walk over towards where the gym used to stand. Sitting there in the middle of the foundation of the gym was a single body bag. You walk over to it and notice that that there is a lone rotting corpse laying in it. The skin that was left was covered in various blisters and sores. Some of the remaining skin had turned a sickly shade of green. You look down at your own skin and see that it looks the same as the corpse's skin. You realize that you were a victim of the virus. You do the same routine everyday and come to the same empty lot everyday, you are a ghost.

You realize that there is nothing more left here for you. You finally decide that it's time to go. The light appears and you walk on through to the other side. Your vision fades to white as you pass on through.

You awake suddenly very late in the night. You glance over at your alarm clock and see that it's almost 3 A.M. For some strange reason.. you feel a strong urge to go downstairs and watch T.V. ...