Kylie was having trouble breathing.
Every single breath that she took was painful, and it felt like there was a sharp knife slicing her throat and stabbing her heart each time she took a breath.
She needed air, but she couldn't breathe properly.
So she tried to take slow, shallow breaths in the insane hope that the pain would be less.
It wasn't.
Tears pricked her eyes, flowing down her fair face, washing away the grime that had accumulated on it. Despair filled her heart, for she knew that there was absolutely no other way out of this other than the inevitable end.
The floor was cold, and hard, making her body ache even more as the cold seemed to seep right into her bones. Maybe that was due to the excessive blood loss, caused mainly from the wide, open gash on her skull. It was a miracle her brain wasn't splattered all over the floor.
The perpetrator had been careful and meticulous.
Each slash and each cut was precise to cause deep gashes of pain yet not deep enough to cause immediate death.
The blood was flowing out of that open wound, trickling down over her face and mixing with her tears.
Kylie couldn't move anymore, and she could feel the wetness upon her head. The pool of blood grew in front of her eyes and she watched it with morbid fascination as it grew bigger. She couldn't move anymore, and she felt her body grow even colder, her breath even more ragged.
Dark, black dress shoes came into her line of sight, stepping on that pool of blood. Kylie felt her hair being pulled and her head lifted up a bit as a harsh voice rasped above her head, "Where's the thumbdrive?! Where did you put it?!"
Kylie looked at him ... or at least, tried to.
One eye was already swollen shut and the other could barely open.
The man's dark, cold eyes bore into her and he saw that sense of defeat upon her face and he rejoiced inside. Finally, she was broken. Finally, he could get what information he wanted.
He saw her lips tremble as she struggled to say something. She then coughed harshly, blood spurting out as she took more deep breaths to calm down.
She then closed her eyes, and whispered feebly, "It's … it's …"
The man brought his ear closer to her lips to catch her words, only to be met with a snarl and a sharp pain.
Kylie had managed one final burst of energy and bit hard on his ear. She hardly had any strength, and it was not enough to bite it off (much to her chagrin), but it was enough to cause him to curse and smash her head back onto the floor.
Kylie's entire body racked with pain, her head feeling like a jackhammer was playing yankee-doodle on it. She could feel her consciousness fading slowly, despite the pain. She fought hard to stay awake, but failed, her eyes rolling at the back of her head as she fainted.
Images of her life passed by in her mind, finally ending with her two beautiful children smiling at her. Seeing this, she felt as if her entire soul was screaming in despair and denial.
"Nooooo!! My babies … my poor babies! They are still so young. They still need me. I can't die. I can't . I can't!! I'm so sorry my babies ..."
Those were her last thoughts as tears trickled down her face, hardly seen amongst the blood and gore.
She could no longer feel pain, and thus, there was no reaction other than a broken body being beaten even further.
The man continued to kick her chest and face in anger for several more minutes before he finally stopped. Beating a dead horse wasn't any fun. He stepped on the body, pushing it to face upwards and sneered at the dead eye looking back at him.
Straightening his shirt, he rubbed his hands on his pants. It looks like he would need to burn these clothes now. He then glanced around the room, watching his men ransacking the place but not finding anything. They had wasted enough time, and it wouldn't be long before they came back.
"Enough!" he shouted angrily, "Just burn everything down!"
The thumbdrive had to be hidden somewhere here. If they couldn't find it, then the next best thing is to make sure it was completely destroyed. He watched with cold eyes as his men took out their lighters and started lighting up the curtains. One saw that he had taken out a cigarette, and went to light it up.
Seeing the flames becoming bigger, the man grunted in satisfaction before turning on his heels and going out. He didn't even spare a glance at the bloody, broken body that was left behind, slowly being burned together with the rest of the room … and eventually, the house.
-----***--------****--------
Kylie awoke in darkness. Rather, her consciousness awoke.
"I'm alive?" she wondered, but quickly dispelled that thought.
She couldn't be alive. She knew she had died. So was this the afterlife? Or the space after death? She didn't know what it was, other than it being so completely dark.
Where was the renowned light at the end of the tunnel thing? Wasn't that was what all those 'return from the dead' people always talked about? She tried to open her eyes but she couldn't. Heck, did she even have eyes?
She tried to move, but nothing happened.
She tried to take a breath, but there was no familiar moving sensation of air entering the chest.
It was as if all senses had been cut out. She couldn't see. She couldn't hear. She couldn't feel anything. Logically, when one is being deprived of all senses, one should be in a state of complete panic. Yet, she wasn't.
What was this?
Kylie couldn't fathom why she would be so calm like this.
Perhaps it was due to the fact that despite the strangeness of the whole thing, she just felt safe. She felt like she was cocooned like a precious being in this floating sac of gooey fluids. It was such a weird, yet comforting feeling.
There was also this rhythmic sound.
Well, not that she could actually hear the sound. It was more like, she could feel it. Thump thump … thump thump … it was steady. It was constant. It was rather hypnotic. The sound lulled Kylie to sleep (if you could call it that). It wasn't that she fell asleep like she had done when alive, but just that her consciousness seem to fade.
Kylie found herself to be in this regular state of consciousness, then not.
She didn't know how long it was but it was during one of those conscious moments that Kylie appeared to have realised something.
At each conscious moment, there had been some changes. It had been slight at first so she had missed it.
However, after several times of this, Kylie began to realise that she was … growing.
Not growing up but in actual fact, growing limbs.
From just feeling like she was floating, to feeling like there were things she could move. Not much at first as it felt like simple stumps. Then those stumps became longer and eventually, she could feel like she could now form a small fist.
It was at that point, when she formed the fist, that Kylie had an epiphany.
She was a fetus in the womb.