I had a near-death experience when I was fifteen. I know the truth about the afterlife. It's more terrifying than you can imagine. PART ONE

(PREFACE: when I was fifteen I was shot in a convenience store robbery. I lay in a coma for three weeks before regaining consciousness. This is my account of what I experienced during those three weeks.)

​I guess I just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.

I walked out of the stifling July heat into the soothing air-conditioned coolness of the convenience store, my sole objective to buy some jumbo Slushies for me and my friends waiting in the parking lot outside.

I only had a couple seconds to savor the cool air before things turned to shit.

"HEY!" a voice shouted.

I spun my head in the direction of the counter.

A tall, skinny guy in a leather vest, his head shaved and tattooed, was spinning in my direction, away from the terrified clerk who was trembling behind the open register, their hands held in the air.

I didn't even get a chance to cry out in alarm.

I had just enough time to register the guy's pock-marked face and jittery, wild, drug-addled eyes before the 9mm he was aiming in my direction went off.

I didn't hear the shot. A yellow flower bloomed in my vision.

Then blackness.

*****

I remember floating weightlessly through the blackness, drifting like a feather through the darkness of nonexistence, blind and deaf in the void, for what felt like an eternity. There was no pain. No sound. No light. Then gradually, slowly, the blackness faded away.

*****

I regain consciousness and opened my eyes, thinking for a brief instant that it had just been a bad dream.

Except I wasn't in my bed. I lying on the floor of the convenience store.

I shook my head and slowly got to my feet, dazed and perplexed. I quickly checked my T-shirt, but there was no blood, no bullet hole, no apparent wound. Then I touched my forehead -- the same. I felt relieved. Guy must have missed me and I passed out from shock.

Then I realized how quiet it was in the convenience store. And how gloomy it was.

I looked around. I was shocked by what I saw. I hadn't noticed it before, being concerned with my miraculous near-miss and the fact that I was still alive, but the convenience store was...different.

It had changed. No longer bright and clean, the counter and shelves were now covered with a thick layer of dust. There were cobwebs everywhere, and all the food and merchandise looked rotted and ancient. It looked like a convenience store that had been abandoned for years. It was dark, too; the fluorescent lights were off, the only light the natural daylight coming in through the now-dirty windows.

I was alone. There was no sign of the clerk or the guy with the gun.

For a few seconds I was so bewildered, I couldn't even react, I just stood there, looking around in a daze, trying to make sense of what I was seeing.

Abruptly, I remembered my friends waiting for me outside.

I turned and bolted through the entrance, the hinges of the door squealing with the sound of rusty, unoiled metal -- as if the door hadn't been opened in ages.

I stepped outside and stopped dead in my tracks. I looked around, stunned all over again.

Outside was different, too. The parking lot asphalt was in a state of disrepair, cracked and crumbling. The gas pumps were rusted and dilapidated. There was no sign of my friends or our car -- or anyone else and their car, for that matter. The parking lot was completely deserted. The only sound was the wind, a desolate, eerie wail, like a mournful banshee.

Everything was dull and nearly colorless, like an old sepia tone photograph. As if the vitality of everything had been drained away, leaving it diluted and lifeless.

I glanced up at the sky. Minutes before, when I had first entered the convenience store, it had been a typical, bright, sunny summer afternoon. Now the sky was overcast, a dismal dark gray.

I looked around for any sign of life, but there was nothing. "Hello!" I shouted at the top of my lungs, "Is anyone there?!" My words were carried off by the wind. There was no reply.

It was at this point that my confusion began to give way to something else -- fear. Only a few minutes before I had been going into a perfectly ordinary convenience store on a perfectly ordinary summer afternoon with no other intention than to buy some refreshments for me and my friends. Now I had survived an attempted murder only to awaken to find myself all alone in the same convenience store, except now it looked like it had been deserted for decades.

"What the fuck's going on?" I whispered to myself in a trembling voice. I remembered my phone and quickly pulled it out of my shorts, intending to call my parents, my friends, anyone who could tell me what was happening.

The screen wouldn't come on.

I fiddled with the phone, but it was dead. It didn't make any sense. I had just charged it earlier that morning. Had it been broken when I passed out?

"Shit!" I snapped in frustration and pocketed my useless phone.

I stood there for a moment, thinking. The convenience store was only about three miles down the road from the neighborhood I lived in, so with no other options, I began to walk back that way.

As I walked down the highway, my fear and astonishment only grew. It wasn't just the convenience store.

I was walking through the small shopping plaza downtown, and I could see that all the buildings looked to be long deserted and in disrepair. The supermarket, the strip malls, the fast food places had the look of derelict buildings in a ghost town. Everything was dirty and weather-beaten and aged. All the windows were dark -- there was no electricity. What few cars dotted the parking lots were extremely rusty and sitting on flat, rotted tires. There was no sign of another living soul. It reminded me of photos I had seen in history class of the abandoned city of Chernobyl years after the disaster.

I stopped in the middle of the road, turning slowly, looking around at the desolation all around me, then glanced up at the forbidding gray sky. No people. No animals. I hadn't even seen a single bird in the sky.

I sniffed the air. It smelled...stale. Flat, lifeless. Dead. Like an empty house that had been closed up for a long, long time. And...there was some other smell underneath it. A faint odor I couldn't quite place. Then I realized what it was.

The sick, sweetish smell of death.

Now fear was giving way to something closer to pure terror.

Then, up ahead of me, I caught movement. I looked and, about thirty yards away, I saw a figure walking in the road. It looked to be a man wearing a suit. He was facing away from me, heading in the same direction I was.

I felt a wave of relief at having finally found another person, someone I could talk to who might be able to explain what was going on.

"Hey!" I shouted, and began sprinting toward the figure. "Hey, mister! Wait up!"

As I got closer, I noticed something. The man seemed to be walking very slowly with a strange, staggering shuffle. I brushed it off, figuring maybe it was an old guy or disabled person.

"Hey, mister!"

The figure stopped abruptly, swaying slightly. It began to turn slowly to face me.

"Do you think you can--"

It turned all the way around, and I couldn't finish my sentence. My words trailed off as I exhaled the rest of the air in my lungs in a low, horrified gasp.

I could feel my eyes growing wider.

I took a step back, staring in stark, uncomprehending horror at the thing I had though to be another living human being.

It looked back at me with black, eyeless sockets. Its nose was an empty cavity above its lipless mouth, its bare teeth set in a rictus grin. It's rotted skin was stretched tightly over its skull. It was little more than a skeleton in a filthy, rotted suit. It extended one of its bony hands toward me, then let out a hideous shrill howl of pure, animalistic rage.

It took a shuffling step forward, and I compensated by retreating back a step, holding my hands in front of me.

"What...what are...?" I began to stammer.

It spoke, its voice a dry, choked rasp. "Life..." It repeated it, louder. "Life!" Then it shrieked it furiously. "LIFE!"

It suddenly charged at me, moving with frightening speed and agility given its frail, decayed appearance. I spun around and bolted down the road. I could hear it giving chase behind me.

"HATE LIFE! HATE LIVING"

I ran at top speed, my heart racing, terrified out of my mind at this insane, incomprehensible nightmare I had found myself in. As I ran, I glanced over at the shopping plaza. There were more of those things in the parking lot, those walking corpses. At least a dozen, in various stages of decay, with more emerging from the darkened buildings, drawn by the screams of the enraged cadaver chasing me. And they were all running in my direction. As they got closer I could hear they were screaming, too. And all of them were screaming the same thing.

"HATE LIFE! HATE LIVING! HATE LIFE! HATE LIVING!"

I don't know how long I ran, maybe a mile or so. It's all a blur now in the extremity of my terror at that moment. I darted a glance back at one point and saw there were now at least thirty or forty of them chasing me, the one in the suit in the lead, less than ten yards behind me. They showed no signs of slowing down.

"HATE LIFE! HATE LIVING! HATE LIFE! HATE LIVING!"

My lungs felt like they were going to explode. I realized I couldn't run much longer. I was going to pass out.

And then I was going to die.

Suddenly, in the middle of the road about twenty feet ahead of me, I caught movement. A manhole cover was being pushed up and shoved aside.

A head emerged from below ground. It was a man -- a normal, living man. He emerged from the manhole, carrying a pistol-grip pump-action shotgun. He was filthy and his clothes were torn and ragged but he was alive. I stopped dead, momentarily forgetting my pursuers, stunned by the sudden appearance of another human being. He looked at me. "Get over here if you want to stay alive!"

I didn't pause to consider the pros and cons of going with this stranger who I had just met. I had no clue if he was friend or foe. All I knew was he looked like better company than the Welcome Wagon currently behind me. I ran to him. He gestured down the manhole. "Get down there! Quick!" He turned to the fast-approaching horde and fired a couple blasts from his shotgun. The lead corpse, the one in the suit, was hit in the head. As I watched, it let out a hideous shriek and collapsed, spasming on the ground before dissolving into a puddle of black liquid in an instant.

I blinked in disbelief at what I had just seen.

He turned to me. "Now!" he shouted, and fired two more rounds.

The rest of the horde was getting closer.

I looked down and saw a metal ladder descending into darkness. I quickly began to climb down. My rescuer was right behind me. He paused at the top just long enough to drag the manhole cover back in place. It blotted out the light at it closed, leaving us in darkness

TO BE CONTINUED