Chapter 15: 15. The Key to the Otherworld

School was as boring as it was yesterday. Nobody really talked to me. Some classmates whispered and snuck peeks into my direction, some classmates just plain avoided me. Some classmates looked curious, but unwilling to get involved.

I sat in the corner, mind wandering, wishing I had brought a suitable book. But Jun had taken them all. Perhaps he fancied them, or perhaps he didn’t like me reading them. My expression grew colder as I thought of him. Luckily, though, I didn’t have to worry about what to do during lunch break. The teacher asked for me. It was because I was twenty minutes late for school today, I guessed. And I yawned several times in class.

“Is school difficult for you?” Teacher Wang asked me after I sat down.

I frowned. Annoying, tiring, boring, yes. Difficult? It was indeed being difficult. But was Teacher Wang talking about ‘difficult’ in the context of ‘hard, strenuous, needing much effort or skill to deal with’, or was she talking about it in the context of ‘inconvenient, causing hardships or problems’?

“I don’t understand what you are saying.” I answered after a while.

Teacher Wang just looked gently at me, like the face on an inflatable punching bag. Then she repeated the same sentence slowly.

I looked at her blankly as if she had turned into a racoon. I couldn’t understand people who repeated their words. I could hear them well the first time. Repetitions were unnecessary. And I said I couldn’t understand her. How could simply repeating the sentence help with that?

“In a way.” I answered, feeling a little disdainful. My teacher was very confusing. “The food’s great, though.” I added, in an attempt to lessen the poor soul’s distress.

Teacher Wang was not comforted. She seemed to be thinking something over. She wrote something down in a notebook, then patted my head. I dodged. I didn’t like headpats. Headpats reminded me of how weak and short I was.

She put the notebook down and in a split second I could see what was written on it: call parents, 666. 666 was me. I was in Class 6, student number 66. I wondered why my teacher would want to call my parents. They were very useless, sad people. Not very amusing to be around. She would be disappointed if she met them.

School ended just like that. We didn’t have dodgeball today. I stretched and jumped around, checking my physical state. I flexed. Sadly, there was nothing to flex.

Which was why I was commencing operation ‘Be Fit’.

Ahmad was a strong person. He could run faster and further than Sahar without breaking a sweat. He could lift several kilograms worth of supplies and carry them home. He could kill a mutant rat. However, I thought darkly, Aby was weak. I got tired after climbing a flight of stairs. I couldn’t lift anything heavier than a book. And most importantly, I had never won a fight my whole life.

I remembered the incident two days ago. My eye was still covered with the bandage Teacher Wang gave me. I took it off just once in the morning, to wash my face at school. It was red.

I couldn’t run away. I couldn’t hide. I didn’t heal quickly, either. Only yesterday, the older girls at school had refused to do anything with me. They called me a preschooler. Short, weak, and pathetic. I sighed.

With the state I was in, Grandma on life support could kill me.

I did some more stretches. I was now at the park. I planned to come here every day after school from now on. It wasn’t like I was welcome back home. I better make myself useful. The park had plenty of people, but most were seniors. There were especially a lot of grandpas. Grandma liked seeing them stretch, I thought. She could comment on their ‘Tai Chi’, which was a ‘martial art’. I sighed again. I wished Grandma was here.

Grandma told me I was smart, and she wasn’t wrong. I was smart. But the problem was, I wasn’t as smart as Grandma. She had a lot of knowledge that I couldn’t even touch on. If she were here, she would know exactly how to combat the apocalypses. Both of them.

Well, look who was reminiscing! Stupid, I told myself. My expression turned cold as ice, and I took a deep breath. It doesn’t matter. The past is past. Forget it.

I put down my backpack, prepared myself for sprinting, then took off.

It was nothing complicated. I was weak, therefore I needed to be stronger. Therefore, I needed to exercise. Working out muscles helps them grow. Not even a minute had passed, but I could feel a strain in my legs. My speed turned slower. I gritted my teeth, ignored my calves and thighs complaining, and forced myself to pick up the pace.

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I didn’t require myself to be strong enough to kill someone. I knew that would be difficult. It wasn’t suitable as a short time goal for an eight year old. No, my physical requirement was being able to run away. If I had the ability to run away from a zombie, if I was faster than the older girls I had met at school yesterday, then I would be happy with that. For now. But more importantly, I wanted stamina.

My end goal was the park’s lake. Men and women in jumpsuits and teenagers in shirts were doing laps around it. Grannies and grandpappies walked or jogged, teenagers ran like the wind. I wondered how it was possible for a human to run that fast. I imagined a teenage zombie running towards me in the apocalypse. I shuddered.

My heart felt as if it was bursting out of my chest. I breathed in large, whooping gasps and coughs. My legs felt like they were made out of lead. My muscles hurt. I flopped onto the grass, suddenly feeling faint. Was this what they called a runner’s high? I wondered. I felt weak.

I eyed the distance remaining to the lake. There was still a fair bit left, I thought. But just the thought of running all that way made me feel sick. And there was also my backpack. I needed to go on a return trip to fetch it and return home.

I didn’t want to walk or think. My head drew a blank. I was tired. I started to close my eyes.

My stomach grumbled, and my eyes opened again. My head felt groggy. I stood up uneasily, then started to walk at a very slow pace. I was used to hunger, but it had never been this bad. I had lunch today, I thought irritatedly. I couldn’t believe I was hungry already. I could usually live for more than a week on lawn weeds and water. In the winter, I could last two days without a single bite. If I stopped moving, I could double that.

Compared to the past, I obviously had a very lavish lunch everyday. I looked forward to tomorrow’s. It was the exercise, I thought sadly. It couldn’t be helped. Action took all the energy out of me.

I didn’t even want to walk. I lay down with my backpack on the grass and took off my eyepatch to let the sweat vaporize into the air. The sweating and muscle aches got better over time. The tiredness, however, did not.

I rolled up the sleeves of my shirt. I should just stop moving, I thought. I looked up towards the pretty sky. It was spring. Of course the sky was pretty.

Cloudys danced on a pale blue background. I raised an arm and compared myself to the sky. My body was weak, but the sky was not. My arms were mottled, just like the patterns of the clouds. I frowned. Actually, they looked a little too similar.

Was the floor brimming with aphids? My arms were not this mottled before, I thought. It might be a trick of the light. It looked like- I squinted curiously. The mottled spots on my arm looked like a pattern. A circle.

My imagination started to drift off into the distance.

The lines on my skin were clearer as time passed. It was on my left arm, which was a relief. If it was on the right it would show. The circle on my arm was decorated with interesting patterns. They looked familiar, somehow.

Encircling the circle were several vines. Some were thorny and looked dead, some were fresh with new growth. The circle was becoming even clearer now. It was like, I thought interestedly, a tattoo. Perhaps it was due to sunburn. Should I worry about skin cancer? These were some peculiar results.

The medallion- yes, I thought with alarm, I could see it now. It was a tattoo of a medallion on my slim wrist, though I had no idea how it got there. The center of the medallion was blank.

“DB-9098” I read.

DB-9098. I remembered that. DubbAlina.

Energy filled my body alongside newborn curiosity. I touched the tattoo. The tattoo sparkled. There was a flash of bright light.

My head hurt. “But it’s… still afternoon!” I yelped, not that it was heard by anyone. I was already outside the world. And when I opened my eyes, I knew exactly where I was. I was Ahmad, inside his room, in the middle of the night.