A Dreamy Reality

He got there and even went as far as unlocking the door. All he needed to do was pull the door handle to open the side door when he heard the sound of something being consistently smashed into coming from somewhere in the main house upstairs.

He was in the basement and the fact that he could clearly hear such a loud sound, meant that it must have been something huge.

"What the hell is going on?" Aran asked himself with a worried and confused expression on his face, right before he abandoned the thought of opening the door, and began walking up the stairs that led out of the basement to the main house.

He walked fast, heading up the stairs as quickly as he could and pulling open the door in one pull before he stepped out into the corridor without fear.

Even if it was a robber, the person had to be crazy to decide to rob someone's house early in the morning without any fear.

"Hee…" Aran began about to call out to whosoever was around, wondering where his family was, and ask them for the source of the noise but decided against it when he saw no one.

Nothing but a messy house.

The kitchen was empty except for the huge mess of food he saw which further worried Aran since it didn't look like someone had robbed it, and more like someone had quickly picked up a few things in a hurry.

"What the hell is going on?" Aran thought making his way to the living room with both hands on his waist looking around in surprise to see how messy and deserted even the living room looked. It seemed like it had been abandoned for a few days.

Aran was still looking around when his eyes landed on the windows leading outside to the main road. 

At that moment his entire body froze. The scene in front of him was so unbelievable, for a second he believed that he was caught up in a dream.

Right in front of him on the main road was a young woman with one eyeball dropping out of her sockets, still barely attached to her face as she bit incessantly into the body of another young woman who was gurgling for air as she frantically tried to scream and push her attacker away.

With blood pouring from her throat and mouth. As much as she tried crawling away was impossible for her since a split second was enough for the other crazy people around her to notice the fresh blood oozing from different holes in her body.

In seconds, her body became a buffet and it was free for the picking as more than five other people descended on her.

"What the..."

"Hehe…I'm dreaming… I'm dreaming," Aran chuckled to himself cupping his face with both hands before shaking his head vigorously from side to side.

"Haa…It's probably a long-term effect of the weird zombie game- it has to be," Aran thought, the biting sounds of the people on the street loud and clear enough for him to hear them tear into her flesh with their teeth.

At that point, for fear of him losing his mind, he raised his left wrist up to his mouth and sank his teeth into his skin without holding back. An action he would later regret.

He bit hard enough until the intense and instant pain was too much for him to bear. The moment he let go of his own arm, he could see specks of blood around the teeth marks on his arm where he had dug in too deep.

Along with the realization that as much as he wanted it to be one, he wasn't in a dream.

Out of fear, the only thing he could do was run upstairs as soon as he could. He couldn't even fathom the thought of something happening to his mum.

Unknown to him, his fast footsteps and the fresh specks of blood on his skin was enough for a few unruly men and now crazy women still eating on the road directly in front of Aran's house to faintly pick up.

Aran ran as quickly as he could to his parent's room swinging open the door of the room the moment he got there. An instant sense of relief came over him when he noticed their absence and that of some of their clothes right before a feeling of utter sadness crept in.

"I guess they had enough time to pick their clothes and run but no time for their useless son," Aran thought, unable to stop the angry and self-loathing thoughts that crept into his mind.

He was still absent-mindlessly standing in his parent's room when he heard a growling noise from outside the window. 

Out of curiosity Aran slowly moved closer to the window trying to figure out what was making the grating sound.

Pushing the curtains to the side, he had only just popped his head out the window, looking down to see what was going on when his eyes landed on what seemed to be a dirty human with torn clothes, clawing at the wall as he tried to figure out how to climb the bare walls.

"Is this a disease or something? Calling them Zombies would be utterly dumb but what else could they be," Aran thought looking around at the other people growling and stumbling around him.

Each of them seemed to have been seriously wounded in one way or the other and the man that was trying to climb the bare walls was no different as his fingers bled yet he seemed not to even notice as he continued to do what he wanted to do.

"Humans can't climb walls idiot," Aran whispered to himself with a half-smile on his face, half glad that whatever was wrong with them didn't in any way make them smarter in a way that would make them difficult to avoid.

He continued to stupidly watch in amusement only for the scene in front of him to suddenly lose its humor as the mindless and struggling man'shands whom he was watching slowly began to morph into sharp claws, long and sharp enough for Aran to notice that with them, he could do more than climb walls.

As quickly as he could, he popped his head back in the window, the second he noticed that the growling man suddenly went stiff and he looked like he was about to look up at him.

Closing the curtains, Aran ducked, hiding beneath the window as fast as he could, his breathing erratic enough for him to consider the possibility of him having a heart attack.

He was still trying to figure out what was happening in his head and why the man he had just been watching had suddenly changed the form of his hands when his eye suddenly caught a weird red sign hovering inside the wardrobe a few steps away from him.

It was a drawing of a Red colored mole sign staring him right in the face,

"It'ss…It's impossible" Aran gasped unable to comprehend what he saw in front of him regardless of what it clearly represented as he recalled his first few scenes in the offline zombie game he had played and what the Zombies had been capable of.

"The Zombie Apocalypse can't possibly be here," Aran thought, his heart on the verge of pounding even faster than his body was able to bear, yet the grating and growling sounds coming from the road were undeniable.

The glaring absence of cars on the road and people suddenly became very glaring and noticeable.

Just as he was trying to come to terms with the fact that the world inside the game he was in couldn't possibly be the same with real life, he suddenly heard the windows downstairs being smashed into,

"People?" Was the first thought that came to his head, embers of hope igniting in his heart and not at all caring whether or not they were there to rob the house.

With other people, there was always a greater chance of survival, Aran thought. Without thinking more about it, he stood up and walked slowly to the entrance of the room he was in to peek out through the tiny space in it.

But he had just reached the still door, about to poke his head out to check when the various growling sounds that filtered through his ear, instantly made him jerk back in fear, with him subconsciously closing the door as quickly as he could and not as quietly as he would have liked.

At the edge of tears, Aran made his way back to the window of his parent's room taking another look outside it to make sure that the climbing zombie wasn't still climbing only to dive back with lightning speed, when he noticed that the man was barely a foot below the window.

"I-I…Dead," Aran quietly and calmly said, noticing how difficult it suddenly was for him to breathe.