A Note On Your Insignificance In This Massive Universe (Horror Short Story)

It began, like so many bad things, with an idea. And a teenager. See, Thomas Smith wanted to sleep more. He had no girlfriend, no day job, and as a senior, he would really love to just cruise through these last few weeks of high school.And what better way to do that than asleep? When you're asleep, you don't have to deal with anyone, you don't have to do anything, and best of all, you wake up and it's like freaking time travel. Oh, boring few weeks of school? Goodbye.

Problem is, people had other ideas. They kept waking him up, bothering him, etc. So he wrote a note. And then he slept.

When Thomas woke up, he was in an entirely different room. Instead of the clean, mostly white room he'd gone to sleep in, the room was now chaos. Gone were the clean white walls, gone was the empty space, and his beloved white carpet was hidden. Upon further inspection, he noted why. Someone had read his note. Many someones, in fact. And those in his room appeared to be dead.

There was an old man, his dead hands still clutching a pistol, with a hole in his head. The blood near the whole was dried, old. A gunshot through his cranium. Thomas was horrified. But there was more. Of course there was more.

There was a middle aged man, average in every respect, with a bit of a pouch, who at first glance could have been sleeping, but his eyes were open. Thomas got up, praying that he was. Not to be. His eyes yellow, bloodshot, and very, very dead. Forever gazing at thomas's cieling, now. He'd drunk himself to death.

Another poor old man was next. Beaten to death, it appeared. Thomas guessed that the drunkard had gone into a rage after the tequila got the better of him. Furious at some tiny provocation, the fiend had beaten the man to death. Or maybe it was something else. Who knew, Thomas hadn't been there for the killing.

This was far too much, but there was more. So much more. Bodies lay strewn around the medium-sized room, the once white walls stained with blood, barf, and tears. Thomas could practically hear the screams of each new entrant, as the room must've become more horriffying with each death.

Thomas stumbled out of the room. His eyes saw what his brain rejected and his mouth screamed denial. There were more bodies. So many, many more bodies. Fathers, college students, high schoolers, and then there were the children. All dead. What could've been thousands upon thousands of bodies lay there, haphazardly strewn across the hallway, out the door, into the street, as if whatever horrible god had taken their lives had grown tired of his massacre and thrown the corpses down onto the earth.

Thomas threw up. The results landed on a body. He looked down. A little boy, his wrists slit and his blood on the ground. This was far, far too much. The wrongness of this place shook him to his very core. Thomas went back into the room he had awoken in, his entry into this hell on earth. He took the gun from the old man's hands.

Crying, he placed the barrel level with his temple. This was a more satisfying end than living in this corpse filled hellhole of a landscape. He pulled the trigger. In his last moments, he was glad to be dead. Better this than to live in the "mercy" of whatever vengeful being was in charge here.

Thomas awoke to the sound of a gunshot. A bloody body, a teenager by the looks of it, lay on the ground, twitching. A gun had fallen out of his hands, now surrounded by blood pooling around the man's "head", now destroyed by what must've been a .50 calibre round. Thomas didn't recognize him, but was glad of such a thing. Who would want to? The man could've been his older brother, the one who would pick him up from his middle school.

Then Thomas looked around, and saw his previously white bedroom was covered in barf and tears. And blood seeping from the bodies. So many, many bodies. Thomas stood up, horrified, to see if the fat man staring at the cieling had any answers.