บท 2: WELCOME TO PUBG

Vin

Let's do it, guys!

Matty

We are ready.

Chris

May the best team wins!

The beep-beep sound of the oven went unheard by Cole because of the headphones attached to his ears.

Cole

Amen!

And a big blast took place, blackening the view, time went static and a ping sound was heard in the background.

___________________________________________

The heavy wind blew, the rays of the bright sun sparkled on Cole's pale skin. His closed eyes squirmed. He could hear noises, noises of people running, guns, and...and voices. His head hurts.

He ran his hand over his temple, rubbing it trying to soothe the pain and feel a little bit comfortable with the broken sleep that was lurking around him. He was not ready to get up yet.

He closed his eyes tightly as he furiously started rubbing his forehead, trying to hold onto the broken sleep. He felt so tired...he felt tired to the point even not wanting to move his body by an inch.

He felt like doing nothing...nothing at all. He did not even know how he had the energy to move his hands up and massage his forehead like that.

But even that was not working at all to make him relieve of the damn pain that was hurting him so bad. He felt like giving up and just bang his head on the nearby wall yet again he felt like he had not any energy left to even open his closed eyes.

It hurt badly. He was reluctant to open his eyes so he put his palms above it trying to block the rays of light. And added to that the noises, the voices were beginning to irritate the endings of his nerves.

As time passed by, he could hear the noises more clearly and it hurt his head more than ever. He rolled over and pressed his pillow closer to his face trying to get rid of the disturbances theat was now starting to irritate him more than ever.

Damn! his mother could just never get rid of the habit of watching the television in high volume. Perhaps she might be watching one of those usual wartime movies and hence the gun noises. She loved those movies being a history student in her college back at that time before she dropped out to move in with his father.

The noises now more prominent than ever as he could literally pinpoint the kind of sound. It was the gun shooting sounds from everywhere mixed with people screaming and yelling.

Oh! Sweet Lord! He just wanted it to stop. He just wanted everything to halt and let him go back to his much desired sleep for another hour or two.

He groaned when he felt like someone just walked past him. What the hell??? Did his mother turn the volume to more numbers despite of knowing how much it annoyed him??

He was a light sleeper from the starting and his mother knew best about it than anyone. Why was she being so ignorant then at that moment?? Could she not turn the damn volume down?

He turned to the other side only to feel weirdly weird. He felt some grass-like things poking at his face. Probably because he had not washed the bedsheet for a month now...it had dust on it.

But strangely he felt like he was not sleeping on the bed at all. He felt like he was laying on some muddy ground with grasses poking at his back.

Now slowly and slowly he felt too much uncomfortable even to just lay ideally because sleep had bid him farewell long ago. It was just impossible to sleep anymore.

A moment later it was just impossible to even lay straight ideally on there for just a few seconds more either. The surrounding became so damn noisy. He bought his hands forward to block his ears but then the ray of sunlight flashed on his eyes making him see the red inside of it.

Was there a hole in the ceiling that the light was sneaking in through? He wondered. He felt like someone bought the sun right over his face and it was shining making it even impossible for him to stay in the same place with his fucking eyes closed.

Sooner laying on the bed became impossible. Damn his mother! He decided to just wake up and run down the stairs to ask her to shut it off. It was always like this. Unless he stormed down the stairs, she would never know that she was disturbing his sleep.

But the moment he opened his eyes, he got the shock of his life. He closed his eyes right away only to open again in the next second to be confronted by the same view.

There were people...people everywhere dressed in tight army pants or any fancy underwear running around with M416 on their hands, aiming at one another. A few falling on their knees as they got shot in front of his eyes.

Fuck! Fuck! Where the fuck was he?

He closed his eyes again. And opened to see the same scene again. This time he woke up from the ground with yellow golden grass spurting out from it which for so long he had been mistaking to be his bed. He looked up to see the sun over his head.

It looked like the battlefield. Was...was he daydreaming by any chance? Was this real or reel? Had he been thinking about the game so much that it had now begun to dance inside his head?

Just then when least expected, a bullet pierced in through his chest from the behind. It answered all his questions. The pain felt too real for all of this to be unreal.

He held his right hand tight on the bullet wound on his chest, blood oozing out of it. He fell on the ground, his eyes trying hard to remain open. Before everything blacked out, he heard it...did not know if he heard it alright...

WELCOME TO PUBG!

___________________________________________