My City Screams

I was always interested in mental disorders - how they turn a person into something else, something unexpected. They introduce a new variable into the equation of life, something we cannot predict. Oftentimes, a mental disorder can change someone from completely harmless into something... terrifying.

So what happens when a city full of people gets overcrowded, polluted, and corrupt? Is a city just a collection of buildings, or is a city the collection of people in it - their collective conciousness? And what happens if that conciousness begins to break down?



The city is quiet.

Ryan Colocco sits at the edge of his bed, rubbing the lazy sleep from his eyes with the heels of his hands. The bed springs creak as he stands up, his six-foot frame scraping the low ceiling. He stretches his arms with a wide yawn, making his way to the bathroom as the dull thumps of his footsteps accompany him.

Today is one of 'those days'. The days when you wake up in a mess, and your eyes don't want to open more than a few millimetres. The days when everything feels cold, and grey, and the world is devoid of anything meaningful. Ryan splashes cold water on his face, blinking vigorously. The water twirls down towards the dark drain, and he watches it make its spiralling path, swirling around and around and around, just on the lip of that black hole, poised there for a moment, until it falls into that endless pit with a quiet gurgle.

He places his elbows on the rounded edge of the sink, then presses his face into his cupped palms. The porcelain is icy cold against his wet skin, and he lets loose a low growl, shaking his head back and forth like a dog. Looking up, he meets the glare of those sky-blue eyes, the ones his mother used to call 'lady-killers'. Today they don't seem anything of the sort - instead, his half-closed lids seem full to the brim of grim madness. His tousled bedhead and unshaven chin make him look more like a vagrant than the 26-year-old designer he truly is.

An hour later, Ryan is out of his apartment, a bagel pressed between his teeth as he locks his front door. Although clean after a long shower, the world still seems to press around him, tainting him with tendrils of grey, just out of the corner of his eye. To make matters worse, as he turns to leave, his front door swings open, even though he is sure he had just locked it.

Playing with the lock only irritates him further, as he attempts and reattempts to secure his privacy. He turns the key, pushes on the door to ascertain the deadbolt is in the slot, which it is, but once he turns away, the door swings wildly open again. Fed up, he pulls the door shut, making a mental note to talk to the manager about the defective locks in the building, but as he does so, he hears a sharp snick and the door is suddenly locked. Furthermore, when Ryan looks down, he is surprised to find the key is no longer in his outstretched hand, but in his shirt pocket.

An unsettling claustrophobia closes in around him. The hallways seem darker than usual, and the elevator seems to be a mile away. With a quick pace, Ryan heads for the silver doors, and is relieved to find that the illusion of distance is merely an illusion, as he reaches the doors in just a few seconds.

He presses the button to summon the elevator, and the sharp beep as the carriage rises pierces the silence like a scream. Ryan is perfectly reflected in the polished steel doors, and he attempts to organize his hair while he waits.

After a few seconds, he realizes he is not alone. The reflection shows a middle-aged woman standing next to him. Startled, he turns around and finds her standing next to him, and he laughs inwardly at his irrational fear of ghosts.

As the elevator arrives, the two board, and he notices that the woman is wearing what appears to be an elaborate Victorian-era costume. The ruffles on her dress flare out like curtains, and her face is painted white, as was the style in those times. Curious, he attempts to make conversation, but she deigns to reply. In fact, as Ryan soon finds out, she doesn't even react to him, and even waving his hand vigorously in front of her face neglects to provoke a response.

They reach the bottom floor in a matter of seconds, and Ryan walks out of the elevator with one last look back. He drops his briefcase when he sees that the elevator is in fact empty, with no sign of the lady, and no place she could have hidden, unless she had climbed through the elevator's maintanence hatch - a ludicrous notion in a dress such as hers.

With an odd day getting much odder, Ryan also notices that there are many people in Victorian wear loitering about in the lobby. None of them seem to respond to his presence, and he jumps out of the way numerous times as the strangely dressed people barrel towards him. The lady at the front desk is missing, and his attempts to interact with the crowd in the lobby only serve to aggravate him.

As he steps out of the apartment building into the cloudy sky, he turns around, and isn't too surprised to find the entire crowd of people gone. In a day of weirdness piled on weirdness, Ryan just picks up his briefcase and continues on. Maybe it was the medication he had just started taken the night before. Its bottle said it may cause drowsiness or dizziness, and hallucinations aren't too far off from both.

Fortunately, although cloudy, the sky is still rain-free, and Ryan lives only a short distance from his office. He begins to walk down his usual route, but soon finds himself lost as the road he usually takes no longer seems to be there. Instead, a white house with picket fencing faces him, almost staring in contempt with frosted windows for eyes and a red door for a mouth.

Confused, Ryan turns around to find the road leading in the opposite direction. Not only is the road going the wrong way, but the street sign marks the road as Hammond Avenue, instead of the usual Corolia Boulevard. Even so, he begins to walk down this new street for about ten minutes, until he realizes he must be going in the wrong direction.

With a sigh, he realizes he's going to be late for work, and turns around. To his utter confusion, Corolia Boulevard has just appeared to his right, even though he knows for sure he didn't pass it.

Dropping his briefcase, Ryan stands in the middle of the street, paralyzed by fear and confusion. He remains there for a few minutes, afraid to move, until the sky booms and rain begins to pour down. Reaching into his briefcase quickly, he opens an umbrella over his head, upon which the rain abruptly stops and the sun begins to shine down.

The second he puts his umbrella away, it begins to rain again, big fat drops of water soaking through Ryan's clothing and thoroughly drenching him. Holding his briefcase over his head, Ryan begins to run down Corolia Boulevard, haphazardly turning down random side streets that seemingly appear from nowhere. Soon, the rain turns into snow, in the middle of July, and white flakes settle on his head. Drenched in water and covered in snow, Ryan nevertheless feels warm, as if the sun were out.

Ryan runs. People in Victorian clothing appear and disappear in front of his eyes. As he runs past what appears to be St. Paul's Cathedral, it suddenly bursts into flame and collapses seconds later, only to disappear and be replaced with a modern office building. He notices people screaming, both in modern clothing and medieval wear, as buildings collapse and reassemble themselves.

A low keening cry pierces the air, and at first everyone stops. Ryan spins in place, hands over his ears, eyes wide. The cry grows louder, coming from all directions at once, until Ryan realizes it really is coming from everywhere, the ground and the buildings and the sky all reverberating with sound. The city is screaming, and as the people scream along with it, the buildings begin to shake.

Walls falls, buildings begin to crumble, and the roads shake as if an earthquake has just hit the city. The sky flickers like a failing computer monitor, with rain and snow and shine all jumbling for space in the sky. Ryan drops to his knees, curling up in a fetal position, as the snow settles around him, sizzling into steam as it touches the ground.

Someone shrieks, and a thick groan fills the air. An odd whistling seems to drown out all other noises, as it gets louder and louder. Ryan looks up just as an office building collapses on him, and with a loud crunch of splintering glass everything goes dark.