She was startled awake by a crack of thunder so loud that it shook the room and reverberated through the floor she was laying on. After the initial auditory shock, she began to become aware of her surroundings and how the hard wooden floor was painfully pressing against her body.

What the hell am I doing on the floor? she silently wondered to herself. She looked around using only her eyes for now, as she got her bearings. The room did not look familiar, but it wasn’t menacing or foreboding. She was facing the bed, which was neatly made. There was a digital clock on the nightstand that was blinking 12:05, a clear indication that the power had at least been momentarily knocked out by the storm. Under the bed she could make out a plentiful colony of dust bunnies which was enough encouragement for her to get off the floor.

As she sat up, she was struck by a wave of nausea accompanied by a sharp pain in her head. She clutched her head and closed her eyes to still the pain and abate the nausea, but her hand touched something wet on her head. When she pulled her hand back to examine it, she found it was covered in what appeared to be blood. She touched her head again, but that wasn’t the source of the pain. And as she started to take stock of herself, she realized she was covered in the same substance that her hand was wet with. A quick sniff revealed the tell-tale sign that the already drying substance was indeed blood.

With this realization, the nausea struck again, but she could not hold it back. She vomited bile onto the wood floor in front of her. Shaking and half blind from the tears in her eyes, she got to her feet. She needed to clean up this mess and herself, and with this thought she attempted to find the bathroom in this unfamiliar apartment.

It was laid out exactly as she expected, and the bathroom was the first room she opened. She quickly found a bath towel and took it back to the bedroom to clean up the vomit. With that mess sufficiently cleaned up, she returned to the bathroom discarding the towel on the floor and moving to the sink. The stink of blood and vomit was still intense and she desperately wanted to clean the source off herself.

When she approached the sink, she glanced in the mirror as she reached for the faucet and had to do a double take. The woman staring back at her was a stranger! It was her reflection, that much was clear… but she didn’t recognize the face looking back at her with confusion and horror. She examined the face in the mirror, brown eyes, blonde hair with darker blonde roots showing, pale white skin, white but unremarkable teeth, no visible scars or injuries, and everything else was obscured by the nearly dried blood that was in her hair and on her skin and clothes.

She vigorously cleaned her hands and then splashed cold water on her face to clear her head, but it didn’t help. She gargled some of the cold water, trying to eradicate the aftertaste of the vomit.

She decided that a shower might help, so she set out to find another towel. She would find replacement clothes after she had cleaned the gore from her skin, and with any luck she might have some mental clarity afterwards. As she pulled back the shower curtain to turn on the water, she was greeted by the sight of a body partially submerged in water that was murky with blood.

It was a woman, similar build to herself but with red hair that was stuck to her face obscuring her features. The woman’s throat had a deep, jagged gash across it. The reality of the situation finally settling on her, the blood she was covered in belonged to the woman in the tub. With this realization, her eyes rolled back as she lost consciousness striking the back of her head on the sink as she crumpled to the floor.

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