The Drums of Isolation

It was 10 o'clock by the time I gained sufficient consciousness to raise myself from my bed. I looked to the wall directly to my left where a small analogue clock hung.
I lifted myself to a seated position, swung my legs from beneath the duvet and placed my feet on the floor.
As my soles pressed down on the carpet there came another loud crash of thunder from outside. It had been like this all night, again.
With some reluctance I rose to my feet, the tiredness of six continuous nights of restless sleep was taking its toll. Here I was; stood in my bedroom, mid morning, still in my nightwear – consisting of a pair of shorts and old REM t-shirt – and with nothing but the sound of thunder for company.
I was no longer counting the seconds between the flash of lightning that lit my room like a flood light positioned directly outside my room and the persistent drum roll of thunder pursuing it. Always 3 seconds after, whilst the volume and intensity would vary which each wave, the correlation between the thunder and lightning remained constant.
I walked out my bedroom and into the living room where my laptop sat on the coffee table. I knew there was no point in trying it, three chances the power lines had been restored overnight was next to zero. Nevertheless, I leant down and pressed my forefinger down on the small plastic button and held it for a couple of seconds.
Another flash of lightning followed by a rumble of thunder prompted me to lift my finger. There was no sign of life on the screen and so I withdrew my hand and stepped away.
In the kitchen was my only remaining means of communication with the outside world; a small battery powered radio.
As I pressed the power switch my eyes immediately turned to the digital display to confirm the time. I was to restrict myself to no more than 5 minutes, in the optimistic hope that the power would be restored before it finally gave up.
From the clock, which showed the time as 10:12 I glanced at the tiny battery image showing a full three cells. For now I had nothing to worry about, but with the storm not looking like ending soon I had to be cautious.
The radio took a few seconds to come to life. I had only been to find one station still transmitting and so had stuck with it. The DJ was always the same at this time of day; he had a calm albeit slightly monotonous tone. His voice was quite high pitched suggesting he was quite young and often took uncomfortable long pauses as though he had lost his place on the page he was reading from our had tried to improvise a section and completely lost his train of thought.
As the DJ spoke with his familiar, solemn time, I wondered whether there were other DJs with specific time slots. Perhaps I could chance on further news updates throughout the day, proving I remained strict with my time ration.
I'm not sure what I was hoping for when I turned on the radio. Perhaps they would announce a likely timescale when the storm would finally come to an end, or maybe I was just hoping for an explanation for what was happening. However, what I was greeted with was the morbid devastation that was being caused outside the four walls which had become both my protection and prison.
More news of multiple deaths across the county were bring reported. There was then a strange and unexpected change in tone from the presenter which I hadn't heard from him before. He said a name, it sounded female, but I couldn't say that I recognised it.
The level of intensity in his voice suggested he not knew who she was but was genuinely effected by the news. Maybe he expected the listeners to know who she was, maybe that's how famous she was. Or maybe he didn't know himself, and the reason for the change in tone was actually in order to cover his deception.
It made me wonder where this news had actually come from. Was it even true or had the DJ just made it up knowing very few people had the means to fact check for themselves? That then led to the question, how did he still have power to transmit his radio show? I still had a few AA batteries lying around to power my handheld radio, but he must have needed something far more powerful and assuming he was broadcasting for the majority of the day, how was he able to sustain such a power output?
So many questions that, in the grand scheme of things, were relatively unimportant and yet they helped distract my mind from the consistent crashing of thunder every minute of every day. It was one of only two ways I had to maintain my own sanity.
I picked up the note pad and pencil sat on the kitchen counter beside the radio and began to scribble furiously. This was my other option, scribbling incoherent shapes on pieces paper which I then proceeded to stick across the walls around my apartment.
There wasn't any particular theme to my scribbles, I certainly hadn't visualised anything particular when I frantically scrubbed the pencil against the paper. But on this particular day, something very strange happened.
I took a small piece of tape and used it to stick my latest piece of art to the kitchen wall in between two previous pieces I had composed over the last couple of days.
When I stepped back to take a look at my creation, I couldn't believe what was looking back at me. This could be it. This could actually be the answer to the continuous thunder storm which had now taken the lives of so many people and left the rest of us living cut off from the world and in isolation.
I stared in disbelief at image in front of me. Individually they were no more than three pieces of scrap paper with childish scribbling across them, and yet together they had somehow created a solution to this devastation.
But the storm had other ideas. Perhaps the loudest crash of them all! I felt my entire apartment shake, and then things started to falling from the walls like I was living in the middle of an earthquake. First the pictures I had created, which stood to the floor, then my plates on the kitchen counter. Suddenly the kitchen cupboards just collapsed to the ground, the wood splintering as it crashed on the hard floor.
I quickly turned and leapt out of the kitchen just in time. As I slammed the door closed, I heard a thud like the sound of a knife on the other side forcefully embedding itself into the door.
What had I done?