The Bullets

[WP] Everyone has a bullet with their name on it made soon after birth, somewhere in the world. It never misses, never misfires, and never fails to mortally wound the named individual.

Life was lived in fear.

We were all afraid of when the day would come. Yeah, there were motivational speakers who spoke about letting go of all our fears and living life to the fullest, but everyone knew there was more to it than that. You could be in a bar, on live television, in the classroom, on the street, in the hospital, on your knees proposing...

And a bullet would tear through your flesh, penetrate your skull and sever the link between your spinal cord and your brain. In an instant. Without any warning. One minute you're alive, the next, you're gone.

Some days, I would watch someone next to me get shot. I would hear the whistle of the bullet through the air, the sickening crunch as it connected with the skull, the soft sound of shock from the victim, who was dead before they could register it.

Sometimes I heard the pop and bang. An invisible gun being fired, a bullet popping out of thin air at a point where it would most certainly hit its target who could be hundreds of meters away.

The way everyone around the bullet froze and shuddered, wondering if it was meant for them, and the guilt-filled sighs of relief as they realized that they were rejoicing because 'it wasn't their time'.

I was sick of it.

But, then again, these things were out of our hands. Life and Death, that is. We had little or no control over it. We didn't know who or what was in charge of the deaths, of firing the bullets, of the teleportation technology behind their sudden appearance, and worst of all, of choosing when it was anyone's time to die.

We lived perpetually in the fear of an invisible god of death who could snuff the lives out of us at any point in time without so much as a reason or warning. Attempts to find out were futile, since, as I mentioned earlier, we had no intel whatsoever.

I went to libraries more often and researched the phenomenon. It had always been a bullet, a bullet on which the full names of the victim were written. Carbon dating suggested that the bullet was formed at about the same time the person was born.

It was a shocking truth for me, knowing that as I was born, somewhere in the universe or beyond it, preparations had been made for my demise. It made me believe that this world was a simulation. A setup, a game to some force beyond my understanding.

A force who could put me here and watch over my life for their amusement, before wiping me off the face of the earth with a big finish.

It was something I had decided I was going to do away with. I was bothered more by the lack of knowledge, the limit to my understanding.

The idea of there being a secret that neither science nor philosophy - nor any of those other theories or beliefs which sought to answer the questions of humans - could solve. I needed to have an audience with this 'Hades' of sorts, to know who he, she or they were, and what gave them the right to do so.

And it became clear to me how I was going to do that. I was going to have to take a chance and seize a rare opportunity, and I was prepared for that.

I left my house for the busy city every day, just walking around aimlessly wherever there was a crowd. I did this for two weeks before I saw it happening.

And, as though planned by providence, it happened right near me.

A bullet popped out of thin air, and as I saw the warped space where it popped out from. It looked as though someone had squeezed the fabric of space and time, and created a crumpled swirl. I pushed my hand into that swirl, and as it began to unravel itself and return to normal, it warped me away.

To the dimension of death.

TO BE CONTINUED.