The world was a blinding, painful white.
Zaire's own ragged exhales for air, drowning out the audio supplied from his headphones. He had turned a fifteen-minute walk into a two-minute, lung-burning sprint, and his legs, now leaden and trembling, threatened to give out from under him.
He stumbled the last few feet to his front door, his hand shaking so violently it took two tries to get the key in the lock.
The cool, homely air of the foyer washed over him as he slammed the door shut, leaning against it for support. He saw his parents moving in the hall, their familiar silhouettes bringing some semblance of peace to his chaotic mind.
"Mom—"
Zaire began, but the words jammed in his throat. They turned towards him, and the world turned upside down once more.
Where his mother's cynical, gorgeous face should have been, there was a smooth, black, glowing screen. The same for his father. From hairline to chin, their features were gone, replaced by the cold, impersonal glass of a smartphone, the ambient light of the room reflecting unnaturally on its surface.
"What is it, Zaire?" His mother's voice was distorted, muffled as if coming from a cheap speaker. She paused, a hand—her own, real hand—rose to touch her throat. "Why does my voice sound so… compressed?"
His father gasped, the sound equally synthetic and wrong. "Blaire… dear God, your face…"
"What about it, Zach?" Her voice pitched higher in that cartoonish, digital way. Her new, screen-face swiveled to her husband, and a sound that was meant to be a scream, pitched and hollow, echoed from her. "Oh, my God! Zach! There's a phone in your face!"
Zaire, unlike them, took it differently. The trauma from the accident, the impossible sight before him—it all coalesced into a single, overwhelming wave of fear.
Zaire's mind, which was ever-composed, simply broke.
"Ahh!" Zaire screamed from the deepest part of his being. Recoiling, stammering backward, his hand fidgeted for the doorknob he had just released.
In that instant, his movements seemed to set off something.
In the span of a heartbeat and the next, the air in front of him shimmered. His parents' forms glitched like a corrupted video file, dissolving for a nanosecond into a smear of static and color before snapping back into existence.
But they weren't where they had been.
"NO!! M-mom, dad!" More cracks and sobs came out than words as Zaire staggered forward.
His mother was now grotesquely merged with the wall to his left, the clean white concrete panel twisted and fused with the fabric of her blouse and the skin of her arm. Her phone face flickered erratically, and muffled, unintelligible gurgles were the only sounds that escaped her.
His father was plastered to the ceiling, his body stretched and distorted, melded seamlessly with the plaster. His form was still; his lungs, neck, and ears were fused to the ceiling, yet the screen of his face lit up. White text appeared against the black background.
'Live on, my son. My most proud legacy.'
Zaire felt a numbness crawl all over his body. His teeth began to clatter as the world transformed into utter darkness with the two stiff, pallid shapes of flesh and stagnant blood sucking all the light to themselves.
The message on his father's face flickered in static before the screen, too, dimmed down into a dead, black rectangle.
For Zaire, the fanality of the dark screen on his father's face was the breaking point.
They were gone.
This epiphany broke him out of his paralysis, and suddenly, he felt the desperate need to leave.
He tripped over his familiar rug, bumped into his shoe cabinet, but somehow made it to the door. His hand slammed on the door multiple times in the few agonising seconds it took to open it.
"HELP!!" Zaire screamed from the top of his lungs as soon as he was out. "SOMEBODY HELP ME—"
"Yo, kid! What's up!"
A man, a deliveryman based on his uniform, turned to Zaire with concern in his voice. It was an older gentleman with a jaded but attentive expression on his face.
For a fraction of a second, an indescribable wave of relief passed through every fiber of his being.
"Ah, ah… Wah!!" Relieved tears streamed down his face as he stumbled towards the person, his mouth opened to form words, but only cries came out. In the end, he simply pointed frantically at his house with a desperate expression.
Then, the cold clutch of fear gripped him again.
Zaire locked eyes with the stranger, about to sob out a plea for help, when he saw it. A flicker. A digital static. In the blink of an eye, the stranger's concerned face glitched away, replaced by the same smooth, black, reflective screen as his parents'.
"Oh, my God!" Zaire screamed and took several steps back.
His eyes frantically looked for safety. In the end, the last place he wanted to be in became his only option.
With hesitant steps, Zaire let out a choked gasp and sprinted across the yard into his house. Once inside, he slammed the heavy modern door shut, locking it, and pushing the heavy shoe cabinet against the door.
Inside his house, the familiar quietude he had grown up with seemed to relax him, causing the exhaustion from the overwhelming stress of the last ten minutes of his life to hit him like nothing else.
He collapsed on the furniture that barricaded him from the outside world.
Back against the door, his eyes involuntarily caught a glimpse of his parents' lifeless state. As if a cold wind passed by, Zaire folded his legs and hugged them, burying his face deep in his knees.
"Someone… H-help me…!"
He sobbed, trapped in a nightmare he couldn't escape from and a world that had become one.
When he had run from his house, he didn't know that the unknown, spreading horror of the outside world was infinitely more threatening than the known horror he had left behind.
Yet, now inside his house, forced to face the corpse of his parents, he didn't know which was worse.
He could only cry vain, hopeless tears.
——————
[Approximately a day later, at an unknown location.]
A brunette in her late teens was dining alongside her siblings and parents. The dining table was a modest one with six seats, all six of which were occupied.
The man of the house, the father, was a big, sober man with bushy brows and a mustache. He had an air of perpetual seriousness around him as he read a fantasy novel while dining.
"Akira," the man said in his deep voice.
The brunette kept her eyes on the food while replying, "Yes, father."
"As your father, I discourage you from doing what you are about to do. I will not forbid you, as the lesson that actions have consequences must be experienced eventually. But in this particular matter, I strongly encourage you not to get involved."
Akira chewed her steak, savoring its flavor to balance out the bitterness caused by his father's words. "Is there any particular reason why?" She asked if there weren't any, she would go through with it.
"It can cost you your life, as well as put the family's well-known neutrality in question. If such a time comes, I will be forced to disown you. I hope you will consider that."
Akira glanced around the dining table to take a look at her brothers and mother, before raising her head to face her father. The man hadn't moved his gaze out of the book for even a second.
"I would consider it, Father," Akira informed, taking out her napkin and wiping her lips. "Thank you for the dinner, mother. As always, your cooking is unmatched." She said, before walking away from the dining room.