When the world woke up, it was quickly thrown into chaos. Everyone woke up from a sudden sleep and found theirs cities with some level of destruction. A mountain of accident and death alerts, as well as several invasions of fantasy creatures. It was obvious that things would not be able to sustain themselves.
Even more so with the power grid and communication interrupted, due to that huge rain that had appeared out of nowhere and served as a catalyst for everything, apparently.
Even though a few places suffered less from this, everyone still had some level of disaster, thanks to the accidents caused by planes and ships. Things would take time to calm down and return to normal, but time is what humans had the least of in this new time, or as some came to call the Awakening of the New Age.
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I have no idea how long I was out, but it was still light when I got up, even though it was cloudy and threatening to rain. Not that I had looked up at the sky for very long. For some reason, as soon as I looked up at the sky, even when it was overcast, my eyes felt burning as if I were looking directly at the sun.
Have you ever been challenged by yours friends to stare at the sun without blinking for as long as you could? Then when you closed and reopened your eyes, you felt your corneas burn?
That was basically the feeling I had when I glanced up at the cloudy sky. I even found it strange, but not so much since it was almost a habit for my eyes to burn every time I woke up (I've been to several opticians and they all prescribed me different types of eye drops that only worked for a while and then the problem came back. So I decided to stop wasting money and time, and I'm using generic eye drops).
Since my eyes were bothering me so much, I decided to keep my eyes closed and feel my way to the bathroom near the civered area to wash my eyes and wait for them to get better. My body was moving much slower than usual and I could feel my muscles stiff and burning like after a weight training session, but not the good kind of burning.
Very uncomfortable to say the least.
After I washed my face in the sink the burning in my eyes went away, although my body still felt heavy and lethargic. Just like when you just wake up after a cold or a bad allergy attack.
I sat in the bathroom for a while until I felt a little better, which must have taken at least 3 or 5 minutes. I wasn't feeling lethargic like before, but I also wasn't feeling as well as I had before I practically passed out.
While I was sitting I also realized that I was very hungry, to the point where my stomach was burning. As I was already feeling a little better, I left the bathroom and went to the kitchen to get something.
As I walked past the "garage" I noticed that there was no one in the places where they had "gone to sleep". But I couldn't hear anyone, not even my sister's dogs. Then I saw that the two gates to the house were open (for those who don't know, houses in Brazil, at least in most of the capital cities and which are usually not in condominiums, have two gates, one at the entrance to the street and another in front of the house door).
I thought they had taken the dogs for a walk without me. I was a little sad about that, but I also understood. If they had woken me up after I had "passed out", just to walk around the block with the dogs, I would have been at least grumpy and most likely the biggest pain in the ass imaginable.
I didn't take it personally, but I was angry that they had forgotten to close the gates. Like, there are three people and none of them remember to close the gates?
Even though it was a holiday (end of the year) and there was little traffic in the city, there was still a risk of someone coming in and robbing us. But as they say: those who have time to complain also have time to act.
And that's what I did.
I went back to the covered area to get the gate control, but it didn't work. I tried my father's remote control but that didn't work either. I tried my mother's remote control and nothing either, and my sister's remote control did the same.
That's when I noticed that all the remote controls were here. I wondered if they had left it open because they would be back quickly.
Maybe they had just gone to the bakery up the street or something, so I just closed the gate at the front door (usually the gates at the front are automatic with tracks on the floor, and the ones at the front door are solid iron with pulleys, but this can vary) and went to make myself something to eat.
My stomach was almost completely digested by this point.
As soon as I entered the kitchen I saw that things were wrong, everything was messed up. And not in the sense that someone (probably my sister) was looking for something and forgot to put things back.
But everything, absolutely everything, was either turned over or broken, cupboard doors were open (some ripped off), plates and glasses were broken on the floor, shelves had been pulled out completely and without any cutlery, only a few still had some forks and spoons but the knives were practically gone.
Almost all the food was gone, except for a few things the thieves didn't want, like a bag of flour, some old tea bags, etc. Just to be on the safe side, I checked the fridge, which was half-open, and as expected, there was almost nothing there. Honestly, I was surprised that there was still something in there. Even though it was mostly dairy products that had already gone bad by the smell.
Only when I opened it that I realized there was no power, something that was hard to notice, since it was still afternoon and no one was around to turn on the light. It wouldn't do to look at the clock on the microwave either, as he had been stolen. But strangely the TV hadn't, but it had been broken, as if someone had repeatedly stabbed it.
Seriously, what happened here while I was sleeping?! Everything was normal before I "went to sleep" and now...
'Oh, shit!!!. We were robbed while we were sleeping outside?! WAIT!!!, If It is that...
What if everyone was kidnapetd?!, and what if they did somerhing!!!!, what-'
*Takes a deep, heavy breath*
Before I went into a spiral of "what ifs", I finally paid attention to the smell coming from the fridge. It's incredible that I hadn't noticed it before. Could it be that the shock of seeing the house like this had suppressed my sense of smell?
It doesn't matter, the important thing was the horrible smell I felt. Then another realization dawned on me: why had so many dairy products been left? They had all gone bad.
But wait a minute, when I went to sleep I was sure that everything was normal, and even if the power had gone out right after, the dairy products still wouldn't spoil so quickly. Resisting the urge to vomit from the smell and the hunger I felt, I grabbed some milk and threw the contents in the sink, what came out was completely curdled milk, almost completely solid.
...Okay, even a child knows that for milk to curdle it should be left out of the fridge for at least a whole day, and the way this one was certainly shows that it had been left out of the fridge for longer than that. I would guess that it had been spoiling inside the fridge for at least 3 days.
Question: how?
As much as my father complains about taxes, we always pay everything on time, so there's no reason why the power hadn't come back on after 3 days. Especially because the rain that seemed to fall when we went to sleep seemed to be the typical summer storm that was passing, strong and heavy, but that would soon go away.
So the chances of damaging the power lines were slim, even in Brazil. Ok a while back, some city in São Paulo was left without power for 10 days because of something similar. But could that happen again? And here? Seriously?
And that leads to another question, if such a strong storm appeared why wasn't I woken up when it happened?!
How could I, or anyone else, have slept for days (apparently) in the middle of a torrential downpour and not have heard a single thunder?!
That, plus the disappearance of my family, sent me into a spiral of questioning that even trying, I couldn't stop.
*Bang, Crash*
If it weren't for a very suspicious noise that I heard coming from the front yard.