I was never a very good person in life. I cheated on my wife, cheated on my taxes, stole from my business partners, beat my kids any time they looked at me wrong and overall just acted as a general scumbag. In hindsight, I see it clearly. I wish I could start over and do it all again.
One night, on my way home from my law firm, a freak ice storm covered the highway. I had four-wheel drive and didn’t think about the falling sleet and hail, until a truck in front of me began to slide, then jack-knifed and flipped, landing not even ten feet in front of my SUV. I had no time to react. I slammed the brakes at the very last millisecond but ended up going into the side of the trailer at seventy miles an hour, without a seat belt on. The last thing I remember was time slowing down to a crawl as I flew through the windshield, shards of safety glass glittering like stars all around me in the winter air. Then it was blackness.
I awoke, screaming and hyperventilating, in the same blackness, but without any pain. In the darkness, I felt my body, running my hands over my arms, legs, chest and face. I didn’t seem to have a single broken bone or laceration. I was even in the same expensive Armani suit I had been wearing during the accident. It seemed miraculous that I had somehow survived unscathed, without even a tear in my suit.
I stood in the darkness, putting my hands out in front of me and stumbling around in short, hesitant steps. After a few minutes of this, I ran into a wall. The wall felt warm and seemed to vibrate under my fingers. I pushed on it, and my hands went into it, like pushing into silly putty. I began to rip away pieces of the wall and throw them behind me, and a shaft of light pierced through the hole I had just made.
The light illuminated the cavern I was in, showing a floor of cobblestones soaked in layer after layer of dark red, clotted blood. The wall itself looked like the guts of some massive creature. It had long shards of white bone running through the top and bottom with smaller pieces of bone connecting them. The rest was some light red and vibrating tissue, like intestines that had been unspooled to form a never-ending, solid wall.
I looked down at my hands, and saw with horror that dozens of black, maggot-like worms squirmed all down my wrists and hands. With a yelp and a jump backwards, I frantically tried to shake them off, but I could feel hot stings coming from my hands as they bit me, over and over. After a few minutes of writhing and rubbing my hands together, I got them all off. I could feel my heart beating out of my chest and instinctually kept checking the rest of my body to make sure I didn’t miss any more of the biting, blood-sucking maggots.
The soft, fiery light that came through the hole I made in the living wall showed me a door on the opposite side of the hall from the wall. From what I could see, it had a straight hallway that went off into the darkness. Having no other good options, I started walking down the hall, the miniscule light quickly fading into nothing. I put my hands out in front of me and felt the smooth, stone walls. I walked in a straight line for what felt like hours before seeing a glimmer of red light, at first only a tiny pinpoint. As I walked towards it, it grew and grew, until I realized I was staring at a door that must have been twenty feet tall, surrounded by polished white bones on all sides. The bones that composed the framework of the door were so massive they looked like they had come from a blue whale, as if someone had taken the ribs off of one and fused them together into an archway.
All I could think of as I approached this door was my wife, my child, my job. Everything that I identified as me, everything that gave me meaning. Despite having cheated on my wife many times, I still loved her deep down. After all, I had protected her from the knowledge of what a poor husband I was, simply out of love for her. I had never let my five year-old child suspect that his father was involved in anything illegal or immoral. My love for them had made me protect them from all the things I had to do to guarantee us a better life, and now I just wanted to see them again, to be with them. I knew I was basically a good person, and I just wanted another chance to prove it.
I kept their faces in my mind’s eye as I walked through the massive archway. It looked big enough to drive a tractor-trailer through. I saw flickering light coming from the other side, and, taking a deep breath in, stepped over the threshold. What I saw horrified me and shocked me into stillness.
I had walked into an open field, the dark red and black clouds above blocking out any sky. The light filtering through them cast everything in a bloody glow. The field itself looked at first like a farmer’s field, with finely-spaced rows of soil plowed into perfect lines. Growing out of the earth stood many squat brown plants covered in thorns. Out of the tip of each one, a large egg sack clung, weighing the plant down and bending many of them to the ground. The egg sacs were pale and unbroken, filled with fluid and dark silhouettes in each one. I saw beings writhing, one adult-sized silhouette in each sack, some putting their faces up to the wall of the sack in a silent scream, others trying to reach their arms or legs out through. But the sturdy covering of the yolk just bowed out with their arms and legs and didn’t pop. It looked as if the people inside the eggs were all drowning.
