Reliquiae Chapter I
I yawned loudly after a good night’s sleep, stretching my arms and legs across the bed. I opened my eyes, thinking about my plans for the day.
Hm, what day is it? I clicked my tongue. Ah, yes. Saturday. Heck yeah, no classes! I paused. Oh. Well, I guess I don’t have anything to do, then. Maybe I’ll get up and call Eli...
I rolled out of bed and onto my feet, immediately losing my balance and falling flat on my behind.
“What the what?” I groaned, rolling over and pushing myself up off the floor onto all fours. Two blue, furry appendages greeted me. “What the what?!” I yelled, scurrying away from them.
Unfortunately, they only followed me as I scooted backwards into a dresser, bumping the back of my head as I crashed into it. “Ow!” I reached up to rub it with my hand. One of the furry appendages moved as I did so, and when it reached the top, I could feel it caressing my head.
Hold on a freakin’ minute, I thought.
I commanded my hand to float in front of my face. The appendage moved exactly to where I wanted my hand to move. I then commanded it to move right, and it did. I willed it to move all the way to the left, and it happily obliged.
Wait, this is my arm? Where did my hands go? I brought my arm closer, inspecting it. There was a short, flat nub at the end of it. I cautiously brought up the other one, which I soon found to have an identical nub. Were they amputated? The thought of my hands being amputated suddenly made me want to throw up.
I held back the contents of my stomach the best I could as I eyed the rest of my body, suspicious that something else had happened to me. True to my fears, it was completely different. I was covered in blue fur all the way down to my feet which, by the way, also seemed to be missing, with nubs very similar to the ones on my arms in their place.
I need a mirror.
I slowly stood up, awkwardly trying to walk over to the bathroom on my two legs.Walking through the open bedroom door and into the hallway, I fell down yet again as I entered the bathroom. I crawled over to a wooden crate I used to store magazines and pushed it over towards the mirror, propping myself up on it. I looked at the mirror. A blue unicorn with unusually large green eyes looked back, its mane a lighter shade of blue. I felt more and more light headed as I stared at my reflection, eventually fainting off of the crate and onto the bathroom floor.
***
“Ugh,” I groan, opening my eyes. “What happened?”
I looked around. I was still in the bathroom.
“Some weird freaking dream, that was.” I began to rub my eyes, but immediately stopped as a familiar blue object entered my vision. “Or… I’m still dreaming.” I quickly sat up onto my haunches and slowly placed it against my elongated face. I then drew it back and slapped myself as hard as I could.
I expected to feel myself lying back in bed, but all I felt was an unpleasant, stinging pain across my face. Just my luck – it wasn’t a dream at all.
How was I going to explain this? My friends, my peers, even my family would never believe I was who I am. I had to call somebody. I ran to my room, hopped onto my bed, and grabbed my cell phone. I managed to press the home button with the edge of my hooves and open to the main screen, I shuddered at the realization of my lost fingers.
“Hey Siri,” I said timidly.
My virtual helper came onto the screen and said, “yes?”
I sighed in relief, I would still be able to use my phone even without fingers. “Siri, call Eli.”
The screen froze for a moment before it processed the order and followed through. The phone barely got through the first ring when someone picked up sounding frantic, “Zach? Zach, is that you? I thought you were gone too!”
I spoke frantically, “Eli I need you to come over here, something happened I--”
“You changed too, didn’t you?” he said knowingly.
The way he said it made me lock up, “what do you mean?”
“You're a horse thing, too. Aren’t you?”
“What? You don’t mean to tell me you’re...
“Yep.”
“Hold on. What did you mean when you said you thought I was gone too?”
“You haven’t been outside, have you?”
“No, I saw what I looked like, passed out, and then called you.”
“Lucky you, I threw up... everyone is gone...”
“ What are you talking about?” I said insistently.
“Everyone is gone! Look out your window, there’s no one.”
I ran over to the window by my bed and looked outside, cars sat in the middle of the road unmoving, A hot dog cart sat on the sidewalk with no one manning it, and several birds seemed to know this and were taking advantage of it. Nobody ran to stop them; in fact, nobody was on the street at all. I began breathing heavily into my phone, and Eli’s voice came through it, “you looked outside, didn’t you?”
I nodded emptily then said, “Yeah.”
I heard him sigh on the other end. “I already looked everywhere, there’s no one. I was just going through my phone when you called, I must have called half of my contacts before I heard from you. Nothing.”
I sat down on my haunches. “Are you sure everyone’s gone,” I asked. “What about 911; did you try them?”
“Yeah,” Eli said solemnly. “I tried that four times. It was the weirdest thing, nobody picked up. It just kept trying to connect me with different operators and I hung up after a while.”
“We should meet up somewhere. Can you get to the park?”
“Yeah,” Eli said. “I can’t really drive like this, but I’ll get there and I’ll check everyone else in my contacts list on the way.”
“Alright, I will too. See you there.”
I pushed the edge of my hoof against the end call button, which, surprisingly enough, worked and ended the call. What a start to a day, I thought. I managed to unlock my front door with my mouth and somehow managed to lock the door with my hoof and my keys in a surprisingly easy manner. My hooves seemed strangely capable of manipulation. I made my way to the elevator and pressed the first-floor button. The doors closed and the elevator descended slowly.
The first-floor was just as empty as the rest of the world seemed. My hooves clicked and clacked across the hard linoleum floor as I walked to the door and pushed my way outside. The wind blew chillingly against my fur and I turned towards the park and started walking. Trotting? Walking, I resolved in my mind.
The streets were quieter than I'd ever heard them. Cars sat empty, newspapers blew by me clichély, and an empty breeze was the only sound. It had to be the most unnerving experience of my life. I'd heard of the eeriness of abandoned cities and towns, but never had I lived in one. The walk was a bizarre parallel of a walk I'd made many times to the park. However, most of what took so long was the amount of people packed into the sidewalks, so what was usually a ten to fifteen-minute walk only took five.
The park was somewhat less unnerving than the streets, because I'd seen times when the park seemed nearly abandoned, though it was usually later in winter when it was much colder and snow covered the ground. I sat on a bench like I usually would, which left my new body with a bad slouch, I straightened up somewhat when I heard a noise behind me.