Chapter 2: Race Against the Inevitable
My legs were shaking, my heart was trembling, each beat threatening to sink me. My thoughts were tangled, confused and chaotic. My body, crushed under the unbearable weight of anxiety, was flinching. My knees gave way, I will be my chest with such force that every breath became a torment. An excruciating pain was unleashed, gnawing at my entrails, paralyzing me from the inside. My breath was breaking off intermittently, while a persistent nausea overwhelmed me, heavy and suffocating. As I tried to get up, my vision blurred, and my trembling limbs refused to obey me. My body, exhausted, threatened to break, and my spirit, trapped in a whirlwind of terror, could no longer grasp the slightest shred of reality. The smell of iron, heavy and persistent, seemed still impregnated in my nose, pernicious illusion of a massacre too recent to erase. The images of horror were constantly running through my mind, like a poison clinging to my soul. Under the overwhelming pressure of panic, I lost consciousness, engulfed by darkness.
Ding! My disconnected mind resurfaced, each sound brutally bringing me back to reality. Ding! Ding!Ding! After several rings, I finally emerge, the sensations still blurred, unreal. Still in shock, my body betrayed me, unable to regain control. I was trying to calm down, to hold on to something, anything, to find some semblance of serenity. I used to deal with my anxiety, but never at that level. This fear was different. Deeper. More overwhelming.
I kept saying to myself, "It's okay, Anthony, it's okay." Inhale. Exhale. Slowly. Repeat again and again, until the ringing comes back, more violent, more threatening. DING!
I turned my head to the source of that unbearable noise. There, several bright orange windows were floating in the air, like video game notifications, but much more disturbing. They wobbled, suspended in space, like a signal from which I could not escape. Trying not to fall into panic, I forced myself to fix these windows, hoping to find an explanation.
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My face turned pale, emptied of colour. Little by little, my mind made a connection between the ringtones and the notifications floating before me. The number of rings corresponded to the number of notifications, and the more this awareness was necessary, the more my breath was cut off. Each light seemed to mark a point of no return, and a cold wave came down on me with every new appearance. Reality was distorted, mixed with this waking nightmare.
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Damn! A silent swear choked in my throat while a devastating migraine settled in my skull, a hammer striking with unbearable violence. Each pulsation amplified my panic.