Faceless, the story

I don’t have much time; I’m the last one left. My name is XXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXX, although by the time you read this, my name will just be a row of Xs due to the strange effects of this fucking thing. It doesn’t seem to affect nicknames or pseudonyms, so I will refer to myself as “Origin”. This is my story.

            My friends and I dick around in school a lot, and since we’re all kind of techies, there is a LOT of dicking around in the computer labs. One of our favorite things to mess around with was this online app called “goggles”. It basically lets you doodle on other web pages, everyone with “goggles” can see it and draw on it too, or erase your drawings. It’s still available, just google “goggles”. The problem arose when the school’s tech staff decided to block it, just like everything else fun. They also recently found a way to render Tor ineffective so that wasn’t an option either. I swear it’s always a battle between us and those fun-hating asshats. Our only alternative was to find something different. At home, we were all in a Skype call, when my friend XXXXXXX XXXX (we call him “Chaz”) found something nearly identical to goggles, it didn’t have a name, but it let us to virtually the exact same thing. Without further ado we began doodling on each other’s facebook pages.

            Further into the night, I went on Chaz’s page to doodle something. When I looked at it, his profile picture was crossed out with a red X, I thought that was kind of weird, but I left it alone, figuring it was someone else messing around. We all eventually got off Skype and went to bed, preparing for another day at school. The day went by quickly; we didn’t have any classes in the computer lab so we didn’t get to use the nameless doodling app. When we got home, we all got on Skype again and continued our dickery with the doodles. After about an hour and a half, we started hearing something in the background of Chaz’s microphone. We jokingly yelled at him to turn his TV off, but he insisted it wasn’t on. The noise got louder, and through the distortion of Chaz’s crappy microphone, we recognized the noise as inhuman screams of pain and agony, then we heard Chaz scream, there was a blinding white light that flashed from outside. I ran to the window but there was no identifiable light source other than the dim street lights and the starry sky. I got back on Skype, and found that Chaz wasn’t in the call, nor was there any evidence that he had ever been in the call, or that his Skype account had existed at all.

            His Facebook was gone without a trace too, but the thing that scared me the most was this. On my profile there was a recent picture of the entire group hanging out at one of or favorite Mexican restaurants. It wasn’t too long ago, and we knew Chaz was in the picture, but he was gone. All of us were standing there, but Chaz wasn’t. Suddenly we realized this was no joke, we all agreed to meet at Chaz’s house as soon as possible. He only lived a couple houses down, so I was the first one there. I was horrified with what I saw.

            There was Chaz, lying face up on the front lawn; his body was arranged in an X, as if he was making snow angles. He had no face. Absolutely no face. He had no mouth, no nose, no eyes, just blank skin. I was still standing there, frozen with fear, when the rest of my friends arrived. I couldn’t help but gape, nothing had prepared me for anything like this. In a moment of clarity, I ran up to the steps of the front door and started banging on it. Chaz’s parents opened and I told them that XXXXXXX was dead on their lawn. They stared at me with confused faces. “Who?” they asked. I led them down to the lawn where Chaz lay; they said they had never seen this person in their life. I sat down, bewildered and scared.

            The police arrived on the scene soon after, autopsy revealed that he died from asphyxiation, probably from having no nose or mouth. They found that his skull was also solid and blank where his face should be, but behind it were the nerves, the throat and the windpipe in their respective places. They ran a DNA test, and found it matched his parents, but no birth certificate of him existed. The room we knew as his room was a broom closet. The authorities said that even the name XXXXXXX sounded foreign, almost Arabic, despite it being a normal English name like John or Charles. They told us it wasn’t a name.

            The next day at school, nobody but us noticed he was absent. Chaz literally never existed. We uneasily went through the rest of the day. When we got home, we checked our Facebook pages with the unnamed app. Sure enough; we found someone’s profile crossed out, just like before. This time it was XXX XXXXXXX, we call him “The Bomb”. We went on Skype and turned on the video chat. The Bomb armed himself with a knife from the kitchen and set his webcam to watch the entire room. Then we started hearing the screaming again. The Bomb’s microphone was much better quality, and we could hear individual voices. I swore I heard Chaz’s voice in there as well. Thinking quickly, I started capturing the footage from the video. The screams got louder and louder, and The Bomb grew visibly more on edge. All of a sudden, the stream got distorted, and a giant red fucking X appeared in the middle of The Bomb’s room. From the distorted footage of the stream, we could make out him backing away, then an X appeared on his face, he gripped something on his face, holding something as if there was an animal attached, he clawed at it before the X disappeared along with his face. Immediately he gripped his throat and his face, trying to claw out a hole to breathe through. Before long, he collapsed, then a flash of white light forced me to blink. That was the last I saw of The Bomb, alive anyway. I looked at the video I took, but found that the file was corrupted. Once again, there was no evidence that XXX ever existed. No Facebook, no Skype, and his parents insisted they didn’t have a child named XXX. His corpse was the same, found in his parent’s front lawn, faceless.

            Every day, one of my friends disappeared in the same way. Like I said, I’m the last one. That fucking X is going to appear any moment and take my face away.

I can already hear the screaming, that fucking inhumane screaming. I hear them all, Chaz, The Bomb, Muscles, Mooch. These are my last words. Oh my god, It’s not an X, it’s a fuckinXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX