Jack, Week 4

Jack turned to the final page of text in great frustration, disgruntled at the pessimism he perceived the novel espoused, and upon reading every bit of text on the page flung the book far ahead of him and let out an anguished shriek, having wasted his time reading the novel. Steinbeck was no longer welcome.

He had left the city some time ago and had been walking ever since. The plains that surrounded the city had given way to a heavily forested area, which seemed strange to him, but he was not particularly familiar with geography so he didn’t question it. The trees were tall and cast a large pall over the ground. Jack was for some reason reminded of a forest composed of giant mushrooms towering over swampland, with giant bugs and marsh creatures stalking him through the night, as the fear of something following him had not quite left itself behind in the city. What exactly is there to fear in the forest these days, he did not know and did not care to think, but he was fearful nonetheless. Despite the shade Jack found himself sweating nearly all the time, shivering and trembling weakly as fever raddled his body. As he fell to the ground one day he thought that for a moment he saw himself fall and then stand back up, outside of his own body, but as the figure that he thought was himself turned around it was just an average man from before the Incident, a pen in his hand and a fearful look in his eyes, which quickly vanished and gave way to a faceless creature in a business suit that reached out for Jack who recoiled and shut his eyes in fear, only to open them to emptiness.

He needed medicine. And he was searching every home, every building he came across for it. But he never found. Because he wasn’t really searching. He did find another book, Stephen King’s The Gunslinger. He read parts of it haphazardly, but the fever was sapping his resolve.

He made his way to a spot of higher ground, a hill of sorts within the forest, when he was struck with another hallucination. This time there were hundreds of figures like the one with the pen he had mistaken for himself surrounding him, so he ran towards one of them and it vanished in a puff of smoke, sending Jack tumbling down the hill uncontrollably, eventually crashing into a tree. He stood up, brushed himself off, and then walked a short distance before collapsing from exhaustion.

Beneath the tree he collided with lied a broken, shattered golden locket.