This was the first and only short story assignment and a personal favourite of my short story’s. Kyle from accounting. I couldn’t find a way to just add the document so I copy pasted it into my website down below

 

Kyle from accounting

 

Normal. It seems like a simple concept, it indeed is. Not many people can achieve this state of “normal” as one accountant would. Off the spot this person seems normal everything about him is, yet this is not the first time it’s been called out. Like this. What an interesting phenomenon a person could be simply out of the ordinary, but he retains this state of inertia in which he is inceptively normal. Improbable, yet it is done. Through the focus of one.

“Hello, my names Kyle and I would like to apply for a promotion at Indonesia fancy bank. Yes, this will do, the intro isn’t bland nor exciting. Perfect! Just the way I like it. Normal, ordinary, unexceptional. This will surely get me that promotion I guarantee it.”

As Kyle finished his email a voice came on the two tv’s, placed in the corners on the fount desk overlooking the grand halls of the bank. They blared warning sirens, and news reports of a large devastating tsunami hitting directly on the bank and surrounding city. Kyle panicked a little inside this would mean his papers would get wet from the water damage, and the potential for all his friends to die. But the paper was currently more important, and relevant to his situation. Kyle started to think more convoluted, he knew that the doors would be blocked by debris and sand from the outside beach, so he had to find a way to survive inside the bank. Everyone in the bank was fleeing from the sight by leaping out the windows and breaking through the doors that held up the hall. Kyle without a second thought dashed straight to the vault thinking that it will hold him in.

He implemented a code into a keypad and thrusted open the door, his hand slightly bruised from the cold metal of the steel door lock. He hurried inside a slammed the door behind him locking all seven locks behind him. With each one he could hear the water seal getting tighter around the door frame. He could hear the screams of his fellow coworkers suffering in the freezing waters that enveloped the bank, and the shattering of glass against the steel door. He waited in anticipation for the moment when the screaming would stop ringing in his ears. The rumbling of the earthquake that followed send stacks of bills, gold, and safes on to the floor of the vault. One of them hitting Kyle in the head causing him to pass out cold on the floor.

As the panicking fell into silence an unconscious Kyle looked like he had been trashed after a party on a Friday night. Of course, if that party was in a pig stye.  Seaweed and sea onions covered him, his shoes had their own mini aquariums. He could feel fish swimming in his socks. Kyle sat up to remove the locks on the door, obviously to check his surroundings. A tingling in his head caused a painful sensation that forced him down to the ground with a thump on the vault floor, Falling on his butt. He stood up to fast. Kyle couldn’t ponder for too long since he heard a knocking on the steel vault door.

Kyle stood there flabbergasted, “someone on the outside of the door?”

“Impossible, improbable?”

Kyle stood there black faced trying to make sense at the ghost knocking that he heard from the other side of the vault door. He pried open each lock, made tight by the door seal, and crimped his hands against the handlebars spinning them to open the door. There, the large steel door swung open to revile a large, empty grand hall. Water and blood soaked from the large death toll of the tsunami. Shards of broken glass appeared before him, stabbed into already infected wounds. Those taken by the sea swallowed were whole by it. He took it all in, the smell of iron and sea water. It made him go crazy.

Crazy I was crazy once, they locked me in a room a rubber room, a rubber room with rats and the rats made me, NO! He didn’t have time for this he noticed that the floors were soaked in seaweed and blood. A trail of red led to under a piler where a dim voice could be herd underneath just shy of reaching the surface. As well as a hand under a pillar, trapped in the concrete. Twitching franticly, squirming from the pain.

Kyles eyes widened from the shock, darting across the room looking for the ghastly sight. From the corner of his eye, he could see his hands covered in blood from his own wounds, dripping and pouring from his face. His palm covering them. Images from his past came flooding in from the back of his mind. Images of death and pain. He would rather forget this; it was not useful to him yet. He snaped out of his trance and made his way to the pilar with all his strength lifted it into his arms and moved it aside. Seeing a half dead man underneath the rubble. Silence only broken by screaming in Kyle’s mind. How could he survive? How is he not dead? How is he the only one? That last thought was one that he had pondered on for a while but did not relegate on.

The man was red, everything about him was red the blood on his face, ginger hair complimenting the red suit he wore to work. Kyle thought it looked uncanny to like such a bold colour. Kyle helped the red man to his feet, his clothes tattered, he slung his arm across his shoulders. Kyle felt a sharp pain in his shoulder almost like mini staples in his arm. He brushed it off as glass shards and left it at that.

When they reached the vault, he sat the man down with a blanket and some fresh water from the rations pile and uncollected donations. The man drank a full bottle and threw it across the vault floor. Kyle followed it with dead eyes, turned and looked back at the man in red.

“Might I ask who you are, sir?” Kyle inquired, no answer from the man in red. Only silence and dread filled the dead steel room.

“Not much of a talker huh?” No answer from the man.

Kyle took it he was simply still in shock from the tsunami, but the man had a name tag crumpled on his back from when he entered the bank.

“John, what a normal name.”

Kyle stood up to stretch his legs from kneeling down to his level. He could hear the popping in his knees as he stood up, shaking down the dirt and powder from the bank floor. He tried to think rationally about where to go next, they had food and water from rations and desk candy from the pocket of his jacket. They could theoretically survive for three more days at best since most of the food was soggy and moldy from the seawater. Kyle and john stood outside the vault to find some means of escape or a secondary food source. John leaped out from the steel doors protecting, him unaware of the injury to his foot and legs from being crushed under the pillar.

Kyle thought he was psychotic for such a thing, but he did not pay much attention to it.

Kyle could hear a radio sound coming from the corner wear the now broken tv’s were. He sprinted over to it, but the sound disappeared. But he could still hear the ringing in his ear from the static of the radio feedback. Kyle could see john by a desk examine the stapler on the table, this must be what he was attracted to. It was a blood red bright like john’s suit

            Uncanny. But familiar.

            He didn’t know rather to go help john or to just lie there in silence from the pain. Kyle was running on pure adrenaline from the experiences he felt only now noticing the glass in his shoes and feet. Or what he presumed was glass. Kyle felt the maddening radio go on and on in his head tormenting him from inside. He could feel his flesh peeling off him exposing the pain and undertones of veins inside himself, he felt perfectly normal, normal that’s right everything was normal. He turned to look back at john creepy fellow. His eyes felt homely to stare into getting lost into his soul the sleek red almost plastic look from what he though was a normal human, he was normal. But no, he could feel the nails from when he carried him no, he could feel not nails but staples.

            Yes, he had said this before. Staples. Of course, he could feel them puncturing his skin and clotting his blood from the inside out. Kyle had now been standing still for 10 minutes. John had now disappeared from his vision appearing like a small red stapler on the floor covered in dust and dents.  But of course, of course, Kyle doesn’t notice that his perfect vision of a human was gone. Lost in his own thoughts he accepts that he will never leave the bank. Why would he. He had the perfect normal life that could be inside the bank. Kyle broke from the trances inside what he thought was john’s eyes he could feel the speed of his legs pick up and franticly run for the exit. Maniacal laughter pouring from his soul. His face was twisted into a crooked smile and almond shaped eyes dashed across the floor from blue heavenly pupil’s glossy from tears, and pain. Him running from his pain and suffering. Ignoring john’s lingering eyes on the walls and floor.

            But all stopped. Kyle had tripped on a rock. Falling onto an exposed metal poll from the ripped infrastructure of the bank. Holding his breath, he fell on the poll the sharp spikes impaling his chest his blood running down the poll. he could feel his blood stilling out of him and his stomach twisting into a knot. His heart had been pierced. The highlights from the tears in his eyes fading. His body twitching then relaxing. Slowly the normal world faded away from his mind the cold sea had come to take him away, and only silence remained.