HALO - MITALEE RAWAT

Halo
By Mitalee Rawat

“Two beers!” a loud, sharp voice came from behind me. Charlie, my boss, passed me two mugs “Try smiling at the customers once in a while, its good for business.” With three jobs and the mounting bills I wasn’t exactly your perky kind of waitress. There was so much commotion in the room it was hard to concentrate on anything. The sports channel suddenly switched to a special broadcast of Truman. The man sounded shifty, talking about some counter attack or something. I couldn’t care less. I was too busy spilling beer over the counter.

I turned back with the mugs in my hands. I couldn’t see the man who asked for the beers. All I could see was harsh white light coming from everywhere, all around and a loud, drowning sound, like an explosion, and the ground began to shake violently. At that moment, everything was frozen. I didn’t know how to react. This wasn’t a heart attack or an accident. What do you do when you’re caught in an explosion? So I just stood there and looked out the large glass windows, too stunned to feel my own breath move. The harsh light was getting brighter in the distance, racing to catch up to where we were. Suddenly, the people, the bar, everything was swallowed in light.

It seemed like the light was going through me. I felt my body split in half, slowly, as another force passed in. For those moments, more like hours, I felt split a hundred times over.

I don’t quite understand how I got to be like this, or whether or not this means that I’m living at all. I must have blacked out. When I woke up, everything was gone, my house, my town, Buildings, houses, trees, people, animals, everything, as much as my vision would allow. I could see but I couldn’t move.

It took me what seemed like days to completely understand where I was and what had happened. I couldn’t feel my body; well I can’t really call it a body. There was no flesh and bones on me. I felt every atom of my being move at a time as it were a constant vibration. Strange light seemed to emanate from me. They were in distinct shades of blue, green and yellow.

I was floating above a vast space of nothing but what seemed like bluish black small hills. The world fell silent and dark for days. Everything floated aimlessly in the air as did I. and it seemed to me I was the only glimmer in it.

Time seemed to go on forever I saw something like a glimmer of light floating in the distance. Just in time, I thought, or I’d lose my mind. The light got closer as I moved in. I could hear something faintly like words from the object. It looked just like me. I picked up what sounded like a “Hello” mixed with five other words pronounced simultaneously from it. Maybe I was hearing his thoughts. I tried to think up the word “hello”, to transmit it back to him.

Then I heard another bunch of words all mixed up together “lost Sam show dead Mia wish” The second word made all the sense in the world. He was my best friend from high school. It was his voice and his name. All I could really do was go closer.

I was just glad I wasn’t alone anymore.

As I moved towards him, he seemed to grow larger somehow, with a larger halo surrounding the moving, pulsing surface of his being. For some reason, I didn’t feel good about what was coming next.

He grew bigger and closer almost to the point that our halos met. I felt the same excruciating feeling of being pulled apart as had happened earlier, when the explosion happened, in the bar. And that experience didn’t end so well for me. So I tried desperately to resist. Luckily, my efforts came through, the union was reversed and I separated from him entirely. What was he trying to do? Eat me? I tried listening in, but there was not the faintest inkling of a “sorry”under his mangled, mumbled words.

I began to move away. Just then, I saw what seemed like twenty to thirty more creatures like me, racing in my direction. The menacing way in which they moved was extremely frightening. I tried to outrun them but ultimately they would catch up to me. Strangely enough, on their way they broke out into a frenzy and in a mad melee nearly half of them swallowed each other.

The pressure was on. I had to think, and fast! What would I have to do to survive? If I were big enough, maybe I could fend them off? I began to think hard, to make my body increase in size. And so it began. It became thrice the size of the lot of them put together. There were violent bursts of what seemed like electricity from my core to the outside of my halo. The others, for some reason, didn’t stop on seeing what had happened to me. They were in some sort of crazed trance and desperate to feed off me.

They tried attacking me from all sides but I sucked them in. It made me feel stronger, as if I hadn’t eaten for a long time.

This was all too bizarre. Everything I had ever loved had been destroyed. I had nothing to live for anymore. I needed to end my purposeless existence. So I tried to concentrate on the deepest part of me and somehow convince my body to obey my thoughts as it did before and self-destruct. After a long time of concentration and thinking and drifting, it happened as I wanted it to. I imploded.

“Wow!” I thought, “that was rather easy”. Quick and clean.

I was supposed to be dead. But I could still hear myself. At that moment I realized that I was born again, into the same form after the explosion. Human beings were supposed to have the power to end their life as they pleased. But I suppose I’m not human anymore.

So I live on, floating through spaces across time, experiencing the same cluster of insane creatures trying to devour each other…and surviving them. And occasionally, eating some of them! Forever.
(end)