A sharp and harsh coolness hits my body with no remorse, causing my body to shiver and wake up.

'So cold...' I think, my body too lifeless and tired to verbally backup such thoughts. ‘Wait… I’m awake?’ I interrupt myself, focusing on the bigger issue, probably.

A flood of questions, all with different interrogatives and different meanings, soon bombarded my head. Shaking them away, I found a common answer, ‘no fucking idea…’

Ignoring my thoughts, I try - but fail - to open my eyes, so give up and fumbled my way around with only touch and hearing to guide me.

Mustering my strength, I peel my head off the ground. Mud squishes on the ground as chunks fall off me due to gravity. Yet, even with this, my head is too heavy and my neck suddenly snaps back to the ground.

Groaning from the sense of impact; and through the lack of pain, I realize most of my body is numb.

'What the fuck did I do last night?' I ask myself, getting no reply as my focus shifts to my surroundings.

Re-orientating myself, I feel the cold, wet feeling of surrounding water and mud on one side of my body, cool wind sweeping from - uh... I couldn't tell the direction from how numb my skin is from the coldness, so I assume I'm lying down somewhere outside and have been here for a while.

Prying the rest of my body from the mud, my arm becomes the axle of my lifting. However, this arm falters, collapsing beneath my weight, entrapping said arm into the squelching mud below me.

I weakly flounder around like a dying fish out of the water, attempting to free anything to allow me to get up, with no succession. Giving up, my body reaches a point of no movement and stays that way.

Now, the only difference between me and a corpse is the pressure on my chest from my breaths.

Helpless, I just lie there, hoping for an eventual recuperation.

Thoughts wrack around my mind, pushing whatever clockwork that still works in my mind into gear; my head is soon filled with images.

The first thing that comes to mind is gold, then red dyes this image, coming in splotches, quickly dying the whole picture blood red. Finally black washes over my memory. But that's it, nothing on what those colours mean or anything.

With nothing but time to think on the matter, I think back to who I am, but don't even remember my family, my name or anything about my past. I'm just a human lying somewhere.

Alone...

-

Delving on this subject for what seemed like an hour, my body suddenly spiked in energy, as if it was giving up in its effort to fight against the cold and went fully into fight or flight mode.

As if by magic, my eyelids fought whatever bound them shut and opened, my neck, arms, fingers, and legs faultlessly lifted my body's weight, which I immediately utilized to stumble my body into an unstable stand.

When my orientation settled itself, it allowed me to finally take in my surroundings.

This didn't help with my memory though. All around me was a trench, a wall or something immediately facing me. The darkness of the starless, new-moon night obscured any precision.

As I turned around, a huge, darker object a few meters away met my gaze.

Looking around before moving, I noticed that, for some reason, none of my flesh was covered, feeling into the trench, no cloth, towel or anything laid nearby.

Again, my mind parroted the phrase 'What the fuck happened?', but my mouth still refused to move with it.

Worried something happened, I feel around my mouth, the cold mud from my left hand masking the parts of it I felt. There was no such cut blocking my speech, but when I felt the rest of my head, my hand quickly became wet with a gooey substance. Observing the wet hand, this fluid was darker than my hand.

'Wait... this couldn't be...' I thought, my mind wrapping itself into a shock as the conclusion 'blood' was made.

I froze, standing like a statue for a while, contemplating this news. So I now knew I was attacked, but my mind screamed two questions at me as I was fixed in place.

'Was I dumped there to die!?' and 'is the person responsible still there!?'

Both lead my mind to hallucinations about what awaited nearby, needless to say, they weren’t optimistic...

Unable to make a decision in time, my body automatically went towards the massive dark object my eyes could barely distinguish. The sound of my breath and my feet sloshing in the mud as I walked was only accompanied by a gentle sound of blowing wind, creating an unnerving, nearly silent atmosphere.

Reaching the end of the dirt, the soles of my bare feet met hard, cold concrete. From here, I could make out even darker areas, dotted in rectangles like windows, and one that was larger, taller than me and from the ground up. I thanked god under my breath since this confirmed this was definitely some sort of shelter.

Taking the chance to make one final look back to the ditch, the darkness of night blended the ditch, the fence and all the things in the lawn into an indistinguishable mesh. So even if someone was watching from above, without an obvious light source, they shouldn't have been able to see me. Though hearing me was a different story.

Having not been attacked yet made me ignore this threat, making me wander further into this house. The mental conclusion of: 'my cold body should at least warm up in there' cemented this plan as beneficial.

The door was wide open, and I assume all the windows were too, so the room was immediately just as crisp as the outside was.

Unable to trust my eyesight, I fumbled around the room.

After bumping into a chair, then a softer, wider object of the same height, my foot felt something round underneath it. This knocked me off my balance, so left me staggering backwards into a wall. I felt - and accidentally pressed - a switch with my back, a click came from doing this.

The light that followed burned my eyes, forcing them to close and hide behind my outstretched hands.

Given what seemed like a minute to grow accustomed to the light and ignore the headache brought by it, I reopened my eyes, my mind stopping my body's motion as it clearly saw what the light revealed.

Blood.

Red blood, with spots of white and pink coating the wider chair, which painted a gruesome picture on the canvass of a leather sofa. The round thing I felt, was probably the forehead of a corpse, of which, only half their head remained attached to the main body, and a splatter of red, pink and white coating an area which started from where the other side of the head should’ve been.

Further looking into the room, I saw nearby furniture had been squashed haphazardly into the corner, with a single chair, possibly the furthest chair from the scene, alone near me, now knocked over. And a thin trail of dried blood lead through the room, from where I entered from to the only room which connected to this, this door of this being wide open as well.

Just thinking about what could've happened here made something cold run up my spine, making my body even colder than it had been already.

The silence around me didn’t represent how hectic I felt. My body screamed at me even more to run away, but something in me wouldn't. My mind screamed at me to scream, panic or throw up, but again, something in me stopped me.

I just couldn't react.

-

Eventually, I moved. But not away; some urge from within me was telling me to follow the trail of my own blood, ignoring the mixed reactions the rest of my body ordered me to have.

I moved through a bland room, found a switch, pressed it, then waited for the light to fully illuminate the room and continue into another room, this one being a kitchen.

Lighting this room as well, I located a desk which had wallets laid strewn upon it, both of which had their contents emptied and had two IDs left face up. Half eaten food littered the rest of the work surfaces, but, something was off.

From what I could see, my hair was black, yet both the IDs showed brown-haired people. And neither of these people had any features like the ones I felt on myself.

Asking myself why, I delved deeper into the building. Passing through one more room, turning its lights on, then clambering upstairs which I found connected to this room.

Reaching the peak, I located the light switch and saw the next corpse.

This one, unlike the last, was stripped nude - like me - with clothes lazily thrown around it. Blood dyed the orange carpet brownish red, another, transparent liquid came from both their mouth and from between their thighs.

Again, my body roared at me to run away, again my mind pressured me to scream, panic or throw up, but again, I couldn't.

The part of me that refused looked deeper into this corpse, seeing black strands of hair in her hand.

At this point, part of me had already put the story together, the other parts trying to deny it.

However, I already knew by the time I checked her neck that she was strangled to death, the deep hand impressions I saw proved it. They were Chris' hand impressions.

Forced to recap myself on who I was, the rest of my body which had shuddered, now numbed in face of the facts.

The scene, which had been a botched burglary with a friend, had turned into this.

Flashbacks of Chris begging me to stop after shooting the first, then me yelling him into submission whilst grabbing a nearby hammer and smashing her brains out flooded my mind.

He panicked, checked the rest of the house for witnesses and then killed the girl upstairs, this was when true insanity overcame him.

But, why was I in that trench? What did Chris do to me?

'Right!' I thought, recounting the last part of the story to myself. ‘I said no to raping her, but he was too mad at that point to stop himself,’ I added, filling the details for myself.

My body rippled as my true being returned to me, a smile creeping to my mouth.

These were by no means my first murders.

'He... Ha ha ha.' "Ha ha ha, HA HA HA!" A snicker in my mind turned into a full-on three-stage laugh.

My body then automatically moved through the rest of the blood trail, Not even bothering to turn the lights in the later rooms, I still made out enough to work with from the light back there.

I soon heard a voice, ranting in their sleep; his voice brought back a rush of memories, making my smile crawl into a grin. I couldn’t make out words, but from his tone, they were apologetic to everyone, but me.

Reaching the room with the voice, I suppress my laughter, hushed my breathing and waltzed in.

Inside there was a small night light, probably owned by the people who lived here, which barely lit up the main objects in the room, making my job even less risky.

A few steps in, my toes stubbed on something heavy in the middle of the floor.

Having to squint my eyes in order to make out the handle from the night-light, I picked it up out of a pool of a viscous liquid - which I assumed to be my own blood - and wielded it above my head.

Hearing an apology to a ‘sam’, this shocked me and I almost pitied the beast I had created.

Remorselessly, I turned to face the small round thing making noise, which I could barely distinguish in this darkness, I lifted the hammer further and swung.

A small groan lead to the end of his raving, a large spatter of liquid coated me completely, a number of sharp pieces and small rubbery chunks hit my front.

Reveling in the imagined violence, I couldn't suppress my laughter anymore.

With the surge of strength over, I couldn't lift the hammer another time and soon slumped onto the bed.

My hysterical laughter finally ending, I fell asleep the moment my head hit the covers.

I didn't wake up.