Serious MANNDAMMERUNG

[Cindy]

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"Where am I?"​

The words slammed into him like a knee taken to the gut- his face winced in pain at its impact, slightly jolting. His eyes clenched even tighter, and his hands clutch into the bag piled up beneath his head. He tried desperately to ignore its chilling query. Desperate for serenity from the wails, he clenched his teeth.

"Can anyone hear me?"​

Its voice chimed again, and he quivered in the bunk. He sputtered a breath in a shudder, and adjusted his position beneath his coat, in hopes to combat the open air of a cold and unforgiving night. Sweat dripped from his forehead and rolled down his face like rain from a bygone storm.

"It's so dark in here..."​

The words continued to barrage him in his sleep, like shattering explosions, erupting far off in the distance, yet still manage to turn your stomach with their quaking of the earth. Like witnessing lightning cast from the heavens, only to be caught in the seconds before the rolling of thunder that would stampede over him. His grimace illustrated a silent agony amidst the clacks of a stone hitting the side of a well's walls before eventually reaching the bottom in a subtle splash.

"Please... I'll give you anything..."
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Larry swung up from his sleep as if to emerge from the bottom of a lake, gasping for air to fill his lungs with life. His face was met with a smack from the bottom of the bunk above his own and the metal bars that held up the cushion, and he spat out a grunt while bracing his nose. His hand crept up to his forehead, and his fingers slowly swept the sweat into his hair and away from his face. He curled up on the bunk and held his knees to his chest while he let himself slip back into the real world, taking in his surroundings once more to make sure he's awoken exactly where he fell asleep.

Instinctively, he stood and turned to the bunk above him. His partner laid resting, deep asleep in his thoughts. The nature of his own lack of sleep, however, left him with an enigma. Dane was with him when the machine beckoned for their culling, yet he rests without much disturbance. The traumatic encounter anchored only him to waking amidst the midnight hours. He swiveled slowly on heel and approached the doors to the outside.

Throughout the night, the sound of plasma discharges and roaring machine guns cackled through the moonlight ruins in mechanical villainy. With every shot, with every explosion, he knew that somewhere a man, a woman, a child- someone was being ruthlessly slaughtered, and it had been that way since the very bombs fell that fateful afternoon. Judgement day. Those that had survived for as long as he or longer had become numb to the pain of knowing what became of those at the mercy of the machines. He knew most of all- as his fingers brushed against the lower base of his neck- against the small dotted scars which were mirrored all across his torso, as a grave reminder of his former captivity as what could be considered no better than one of the countless terminators that wandered the wastelands of Los Angeles.

If it were not for who was now his partner- his closest friend, if not his only family, he knew he still would be bound in such bindings, kept in a state of illusory and numbness. It was the one last long sleep he had ever had since then.

Now, nothing could tear him from the grim nature of the world he inhabited. It was all he had ever known. And a certain pessimism murmured in his ear that it was all he would ever know.
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