Day 771

The windows and door have been boarded up, the nails and hammer sit beside him as he tries to keep his eyes open. A small torch illuminates the far side of the room where the balcony door is, locked and barricaded by an ornate dresser. It's the most likely place for his visitors to come from.

Months of moving from empty house to empty house have left him utterly exhausted but the second he starts to sleep, they start to move in. It's how the got everyone else - they gave in to sleep and never woke up again, at least not on this world. He still had no idea where they got taken too, any notebooks or pieces of research he found all ended in sleep-deprived nonsense before cutting off entirely.

The adrenaline syringes he found in the local hospital lay in the small box on his lap alongside energy drinks, caffeine pills and ice cold water to splash on his face. It worked well enough but the brief naps he managed were more than enough for the visitors to find him and start breaking into wherever he'd holed up in for the night.

Over the past month he'd survived on an hour of sleep per night spread out over several short naps followed by desperate attempts to reinforce his barricades against the persistent thumping from the other side. Sometimes he'd hear them speak to each other, quietly testing out different vocal pitches and accents as they tried to sound like someone he knew. It was smart but he was smarter, too used to them and their tricks by now.

Tonight would be harder than the rest, that much he knew for a fact. He'd been going for too long on too little and was stretched too thin to hang on for much longer. The first shot of adrenaline made his pulse race and his limbs twitch, ready to run but too fatigued to do more than that. The energy drinks only made it worsen to the point where his chest and head ached by dawn, his eyelids felt like concrete shutters ready to seal themselves for good at any moment.

Gradually, as his eyes began to droop, he noticed little things changing around him. The boards on the windows were slowly being pushed off, nails being gently forced out until they fell to the floor with delicate pings, rolling by his feet. He knew he should get up and fix his barricade but his limbs felt like air - too light and hazy to move.

The door handle for the balcony was slowly twisting, so slowly that he didn't notice until the dresser began to scrape against the hard carpet as it was pushed forward. He wanted to fix this so badly but his body was past the point of being able to. It would only be a matter of minutes, he reckoned.

A loud clattering behind him meant that they'd removed the nails holding the hallway door closed and could finally reach him. After all these months it had come down to this last stand. He felt something heavy and soft wrap around him - a blanket with cartoons winding around it as guttural voices began to shush him to his last sleep.