“Unheimlich YoU"

You woke up suddenly, startled and confused, groggy, as your eyes adjust to the bright shafts of daylight stabbing at your eyes. Daylight? What were you doing sleeping? Weren’t you supposed to be at class? What time was, is it? You pause to take in your surroundings, unsure of where, when, or why, or even where on campus you are. Rubbing sleep from your eyes, you realize you’re lying on green grass, freshly cut and finely manicured, and, off in the distance—the bell tower. As you ponder this, you stretch your neck, uncomfortable from sleeping on your own book bag.

You’re in the quad, at the center of the college you've just started at last semester. Unsure what has happened, or why, you consider that perhaps you may have overindulged last night, an idea re-enforced by your pounding headache. But why sleep in the quad—you wander… lurching slightly, as you shake the tiredness off your very bones and begin to try to find your way back to your dorm.

Shining just past its peak, the sun saturates everything, bequeathing your awakening with even further surrealism. A weird pseudo-twilight cascades over everything: all is picturesque, and almost hyper-real, casting your safety school into the kind of college campus you’d see on in those movies about rowing clubs and secret societies. Buildings tower and enclose you almost menacingly, majestic and alabaster, they seem learned, academic, and intimidating, swathed in the robes of their white washed walls. Shaking your head again, unable to loosen the crick, now a knot, in your neck, unsure where or what exactly you are supposed to be doing, you sit back down. Suddenly, the wind picks up, howling with an almost eerie sudden ferocity between two of the closer walls.

As the howling exchanges again for silence, it dawns on you, finally, that you are alone, an uncanny unreality which enhances your erstwhile unease. Where was everyone? Where might they be? You begin to move about the campus. You consider, briefly, calling out, but your vocal chords remain somehow paralyzed with fear: fear no one will answer, that you are truly alone, also, perhaps, an even greater, irrational fear that someone will answer, and expose the silly childlike absurdity of your initial fear. After searching, with only the wind echoing as companion, you start to accept it. I Am Legend comes to mind, among other apocryphal dystopias chronicled in literature and film. Just as you sink into a seemingly endless quagmire of despair, the eerie silence is broken by a sudden sound. Around the corner. You arise slowly and stumble fearfully in that direction, coming to the edge of the wall, peering around, and see…

Nothing. Alone. Again and still. Completely. Something has happened. Something had to have happened. Your campus is much larger than this, too large to be so empty, so deserted, even if it was a weekend. But, was it? You quickly check your phone. Monday. In October, too, so it wasn’t likely everyone was on break. Fortuitously, again your fearful frightened imaginings are interrupted, this time, by a tapping scraping clawing sound, almost animalistic, and flash of movement, in the large foyer window of a slightly distant building.

You glory in this discovery, whatever it might be, certain, then hoping, to find all normal within those majestic towering hallways, with their semi-reflective glass reflecting the semi-majestic towering hallways of paired and partnered with those self-same semi-majestic buildings. Why hadn’t you thought to try the buildings—seriously why wouldn’t you—you wander… slowly but with a growing warmth rising in your soul, over to the source of the sound movement, picking up speed. Finally, rushing, wanting to open the door, and purposefully stride in, determining, finally, what has happened… Which was sure to be nothing, right? But the locked door does not open, and your arm recoils against the force with which you tried to open it.

Lost in the mystery of this empty campus, with these possibly occupied but locked buildings, you edge along the windows, peering in, uncertain of what you would see, but then shocked, for you see not what you expect, but something far worse, something far more post-apocalyptic than you had ever as yet imagined. After the first window, you rush to the second, then the third, peering, hoping, searching, for difference, finding only similarity. Then, the next building… And the next. Every one revealing the same stark truth, behind the same locked doors.

Rather than the normal bustle in hallways, than students and teachers in the classrooms as nominally normal, instead, a grotesque mockery of all you expected. Men, women, students, teachers, all shuffle lifelessly, dressed in clothing ragged and worn, tattered strips thinly suggesting formerly fashionable dress; the occasional brand-name logo, or clever slogan fluttering in and out of existence with their own lurching movement. Beyond their clothes, their bodies, wasted away. Dull eyes, sallow sagging skin, expressionless faces, neither seeing nor desiring to be seen. This is the zombie apocalypse of Hollywood’s nightmares, which have now become your own too real haunted dreams. The teachers were even worse, the worst. Husks of humanity, living skeletons, pecking at keyboards, a ghastly and ghoulish mockery, marking away at non-existent assignments, “teaching” at the zombified students who themselves could not learn, could not listen.

In exasperation, in the howling wind which has returned, like your long lost and only friend, the one who still owes you $50 but who will never mention it, in loss and lost, you sink down, wrapping your jacket around you. You think, again, of your cell phone, and check halfheartedly, hoping, but there is no service. Whatever has happened to those… to them, it must have affected the rest of the world too… Glimmers of hope flash, as you consider the limited nature of plagues in such films as 28 Days, and 28 Days Later, but the difficult struggle of the journey to escape, if escape is even possible. That alone wears down your soul.

The shadows grow longer, the wind begins to howl more loudly and incessantly, demanding, and the macabre masquerade continues on within the college itself, as you sink further down in yourself, drawing your coat closer still. Tomorrow, you think, as you lean against a windowless wall, tomorrow, you’ll explore more, and maybe try to find some food. Yeah. Food would be… nice. And then, if needed, you can try to make it to the highway, not too far a hike, really or find a car, or, or maybe plan for the next day, and the next, and the next. And the next. But, in the back of your mind, swelling, growing, like a cancer, spreading its infectious tendrils amongst the dying dendrils of the firing neurons in your brain, you know the other option, the more likely option, the option that will only grow more and more real with every passing day, with every second of time lurching on towards the end.

In that moment, in a prescient flash, you know. You know the truth. You know, ultimately, that you will succumb. You will give in. You will find something, anything, eventually, to break one of those windows, any of them, to break it, break in, to give in, to become one of them… For, although they do not look happy, by any means, they also do not look alone, not like you, and a mockery of existence with others, surely that must be better than nothing, nothing at all, the wind howls, whispering insidiously to you, to sleep, with its sickly sweet lullaby.