Imprint

(Tentative title)

It is 9:02 on a Monday morning, lifeless corpses litter the streets and since last week, nobody has left town. Everyone wanted to leave, but none of us would have the will power to do it apparently. The soothing music of a piano emerged from one of the houses and the voice of a frail shy man was singing a sad Spanish song called “Duérmete.” As we walk towards the place, the music changed, a pumping baseline emerged, and we all stop. Another Spanish song, this one repeated the same lyrics over and over, “you paint everything in color, instead of black and white. De que color es nuestro presidente…” The woman next to me laughed and said they were singing about what’s the color of the president, or something similar. Quickly after that, we hear a massive explosion from the house but nothing happened.

“Let me tell you something dear, I have no idea what’s going on and I sincerely don’t want to find out,” said a middle-aged woman from our group.

“Look, we need to go and see if anyone survived,” I said with a four-second delay.

“Survived what? I didn’t see an explosion and to be honest with you it’s kind of creepy that someone was playing music in there in a time like this,” said a pale young man called Dan.

“Let me go and check,” I have no idea what I was thinking when I said that. With the will power of a five year old I walked towards the house. There he was in the porch, a scruffy looking man that had the loudest and biggest sound system I’ve ever seen. I laughed and he looked at me funny.

“What are you people doing here?” he yelled from the porch.

“We are among the few survivors,” I yelled back from the sidewalk.

“It doesn’t look like you survived,” he yelled as he grabbed a vacuum cleaner. “Damn Yankees I wish they would understand when they died easily,” he said to himself but loud enough so I could hear it. He then ran towards me with the vacuum cleaner and yelled, “go back to the street or I swear I’ll vacuum you to oblivion. I have plenty of your friends here.”

I probably looked confused to him so he lowered the vacuum and tried to explain. “Look kid you’re dead; well kind of dead. It was all a big accident. People either died or turned into whatever it is you people are. You probably have a reflection in one of the buildings around here.”

“Are you crazy! Let me in, we need supplies and we need to figure out what happened here,” yelled the pale young man from before. As he ran towards the house, the man raised the vacuum cleaner like a weapon. In a few seconds the vacuum sucked the kid into oblivion.

“I told you dude, you guys are dead. My name is Frank by the way, now go deal with your existential dilemma somewhere out of my property,” he said rather condescendingly. I was freaking out by now and I think two of the people in the group fainted, if that’s even possible.

I look at Frank drifting away; he gets in the house and closes the door. There was a metal door underneath the porch. I walked a bit forward to get a closer look but I heard the vacuum cleaner turn on. I walked back and it turned off. Everyone in the group was confused, some were crying and others tried stealing things from the dead bodies on the street but couldn’t lift anything. Like ghosts, we were almost translucent and had no real body. I couldn’t cry but wanted to. I took a closer look at the house and see that the entire second floor was destroyed and when I look back I see a few houses still standing but the rest of the city was flat. Afar the downtown area was flat with a few buildings fuming a strange looking smoke.

I walked back to the group and looked at the building a few steps away from were we first met. The imprint of our bodies decorated the outer wall of the building. All terrified faces and I started to cry. There it was, my imprint, I died crying.