by Lucy Auburn
“I could poison him,” the stranger with sleek dark hair offered. “Make him go out nice and slow.”
There was a whimper in response to this. Richard looked like he was thinking of something; surging to his feet, he tried to fight one of the guys—only to get knocked down to his knees again, eyes blackening.
“Let’s do this one fast.” The guy with the accent prowled towards Jake, a black length of cord between his hands. “I’ve got him.”
If I’d been smart, this was the part where I would’ve run away and never looked back. In the car, into the woods on foot—any way out of there could’ve worked then, when they were distracted.
But I couldn’t seem to keep my eyes off the strangers. It wasn’t just that they were violent, or I was scared, though there was that. The way they looked to my eyes, strange and a little off-kilter, was a mystery I wanted to solve.
Nice accent guy stood behind Jake, placed the black cord beneath his chin, and yanked up. Athlete that he was, Jake fought, scrabbling and struggling. But the stranger, who I decided then and there was Choker, just calmly tightened the cord until Jake couldn’t struggle anymore. He dropped his limp body onto the ground and put the cord away.
Poisoner, with the dark hair, knelt and slashed Jake’s throat with a knife for good measure. “Done. That just leaves this one.”
“What’s he like?” asked Swordwielder, voice full of authority, light brown hair tossed back from his face. “Read his soul for us.”
Choker knelt by Richard, grabbed his chin, and forced his terrified gaze towards him. “Stay still, worm.”
I remembered then that I was trying to escape, and tried to force my feet towards the car. But I was frozen—in fear or fascination, I don’t know. Though I tried to move, I just couldn’t anymore.
“I’m bored,” declared the last guy, who I hadn’t yet named; he had light brown skin and arms covered in black tattoos, and was the one who’d broken Amanda’s neck. “Let’s blow something up. I’ve got plenty of grenades. Maybe we can use one on this guy.”
That was when he looked out into the darkness, straight towards me. And I thought to myself don’t see me, don’t see me, don’t see me, over and over again.
Bomber’s gaze slid right past me somehow, down to the road. He sighed, miserably. “Well?”
Choker declared, “His name is Richard, and from what I can tell, he’s a monster. A sadist, a manipulator, and worst of all—a rapist.”
“Ooohhhh.” Bomber’s attention returned to Richard. “Well then, I think we all know the punishment for that.”
Richard, for his part, didn’t beg or babble. He just turned to Choker and spit right in his face, anger in his eyes. “You’re a liar. I don’t know who you are, but I’ve never raped anyone. All those girls were dripping wet for me—”
They didn’t listen to the rest. With a roll of his eyes, Poisoner leaned down, put his hand on Richard’s crotch, and grabbed his dick right through layers of clothing.
Then he tore it out at the root, balls and all.
Richard screamed; blood poured out of his torn clothing. Laughing sadistically, Poisoner dangled his bits right in front of his face, taunting him. “Sad you won’t be able to use this to hurt little girls any more, Dicky?”
It was so gross. A limp, bloodied dick, flopping around. Horrified Richard, bleeding out onto the ground from his mangled crotch.
Suddenly I couldn’t take it anymore. Terror and disgust ripped out of me, right from my center.
I screamed.
Richard died.
And all four of the murderers looked right at me.
Chapter 2
Suddenly it was just me and the four of them, from stoic Choker to blood-spattered Poisoner, laughing Bomber and piercing green-eyed Swordwielder, who would’ve been handsome if he hadn’t just disemboweled Leila like a piece of meat.
As soon as they saw me, I cut off my scream and remembered how to move. It was like my legs had been asleep and now they were very much awake and didn’t want to fucking die. I turned and ran right towards the car, heart thrumming a mile a minute, adrenaline pumping.
I shouldn’t have bothered.
Bomber saw where I was going and casually lobbed a grenade on the car’s hood. I felt it start to explode right before it happened, and turned on my feet to run in a new direction—the woods, away from the cliff.
But Swordwielder was there, his blade drawn and edged with blood, staring at me. “Where did you come from? I didn’t see you before.”
They were so fucking fast. Choker was there too, a length of rope between his hands; he looked like he could whip it out and tie it around me in a second. Poisoner had two knives drawn, his blue eyes shining with reflected moonlight. And Bomber was holding what I figured had to be a second grenade in his hand.
Somehow, in the blink of an eye, they’d surrounded me. And they were stalking towards me step by step, ready to kill me just like the others.
“How did we miss you?” Poisoner asked. “I swear there were only five of them when we arrived.”
Swordwielder grunted. “Doesn’t matter. Look into her soul.”
At his words, Choker approached me, cord wrapped around his fist. I scrambled away from him step by step—until I felt air at my back, and pebbles falling beneath my heel.
Daring to glance over my shoulder, I saw that I was at the edge of the cliff and swallowed. There was no way out now, no car, no escape to the woods, just the dark, bottomless water beneath me.
I don’t really have a good history with water.
“Shhhh,” Choker said, stepping up in front of me and grabbing my chin. “It’ll all be over in a second.”
“My death, you mean?” I managed to bite out. My head still felt fuzzy. “I wish I’d never woken up.”
“I know who she is!” Swordwielder snapped his fingers in recognition. “She’s the bait. We missed her because we thought she was dead.”
Meanwhile, Choker was staring intensely into my face for reasons unknown. His fingers were surprisingly gently on my chin, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that they were the same fingers that ended Jake’s life with impossible strength. If he got that cord wrapped around my neck I had no hope of getting out of it.
I was trying to decide if it would be better to drown or be choked to death, when I realized his expression had changed. He looked... confused. Or frustrated.
“Well?” Swordwielder demanded, sounding impatient. “Tell us what punishment she deserves.”
Bomber pointed out, “If she’s the bait, she might not have a black mark on her soul like the others. I can take her memory away.”
That sounded fucking insane, so I just ignored it. I had a merciful death to plan.
Finally, shaking his head, Choker let go of my chin. He sounded reluctant as he admitted, “I can’t see her soul.”
This irritated Swordwielder, who seemed like some sort of leader. “That’s not possible. Try again.”
“I’m telling you, Ezra, I can’t see it. I know what I’m doing. Unless you’d like to try.”
Grunting, Swordwielder sheathed his blade and approached us. He narrowed his eyes at me, which this close were impossibly green, like moss in a forest in spring.
I was suddenly aware of the fact that I had dirt ground into my hair, blood on my shirt, and recently-vomited partially-digested chunks of hot dog smearing my mouth and chin. What a way to meet a drop dead gorgeous bunch of murdering psychos. Some part of me wanted to ask them if I could take a quick bath before they spilled my guts all over the ground.
That was when I knew that I’d lost it completely from so much fear coursing through me. I was thinking like a crazy person.
“I don’t know what she is,” Swordwielder admitted, staring at me with narrowed eyes. “She looks like a human, but there’s something inside her. Something she’s hiding—or maybe she doesn’t even know it’s there.” He shrugged. “Either way, we can’t let her tell anyone what she saw tonight
.”
This was when I knew they were going to kill me; I’d seen them do it five times already. But I didn’t want to go out without answers. So I dared to ask Swordwielder, “Why did you kill my friends?”
He blinked at me. “Friends?”
Poisoner laughed, a cruel sound. Approaching from the other side, he smirked at me, giving me a good look from head to toe. “If those were your friends,” he drawled mockingly, “you should think about getting some better ones. They drugged you and were arguing about how best to cut out your entrails when we showed up. Another minute or two and one of them would’ve summoned the drunken courage to make your insides your outsides.”
If I’d had more hot dogs to puke, I would’ve spewed them straight in his attractive, smirking face.
I wasn’t going to let them kill me. As soon as I got the chance, I vowed to myself, I’d jump down into the water below. Maybe I wouldn’t die—maybe I would escape. But at least if I did, the death would be my choice, and not some ignoble bullshit at the hands of four psychos.
I saw my chance when Choker stepped back from me, turned towards Poisoner and asked, “Wait a minute—they were really preparing to stab her when we showed up?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“That doesn’t make sense. If that’s right, they were going to use her entrails to summon us.”
Bomber said, “That’s why I thought she was dead.”
“Exactly,” Choker echoed, sounding like he was trying to figure something out in his head. I took a precarious step backwards, as Swordwielder frowned and turned away from me, towards the others. Choker went on, “So if they didn’t manage to kill her to summon us, who brought us here?”
I didn’t care about their nonsense, their summoning or looking into souls or any of that other bullshit. I’d learned in every shitty foster home, and especially the group home I ran away from, that you had to take your moment the instant it came.
This was mine.
Without even thinking twice, I glanced down at the dark waters and leaped straight for them, away from their conversation, glad my entrails were still in my body—for now. I took my chance.
In fact, I took it so eagerly that I didn’t bother to turn towards the water before I jumped, which was how I slipped off the cliff instead of getting a good two to three feet of air away from it.
And as everyone knows, at the bottom of cliffs there are rocks, which is why you’re supposed to really jump as you leap off of one into the water below.
So instead of flying out in an arc, out towards the churning waves, I kinda just... fell straight down.
To the hard, jagged rocks.
Yeah.
You can imagine how it felt when I hit them.
Pain exploded. Everything hurt. It was like my worst dreams about falling, intensified times a thousand. The agony of the cut near my belly button was nothing compared to this. My back broke, my neck twisted, and everything hurt.
The agony felt like it would never end.
It was almost a relief when I felt my body start to give up and rush towards death.
As blackness enveloped me and my awareness faded away, all I could hear was the sound of the waves hitting the rocks over and over.
And I found myself thinking this was an ideal way to go, in the end. After all, I’d always known I wouldn’t live to old age; homeless kids who age out of the foster system and barely manage to graduate high school aren’t exactly known for our health and longevity. If it wasn’t freezing to death on a cold winter night, catching a plague, overdosing, or getting stabbed over a blanket, I figured I’d probably die because a cop shot me or a dog with rabies bit me.
So dying near the ocean felt a bit more peaceful.
Until I came back to life.
Here’s the thing about dying: I did it, but I don’t really know what happens to you after you die. At least, I don’t remember; maybe something happens.
I know there was pain. I know my body gave out, my heart stopped beating, and my brain began to shut down. I know there was oblivion, and the sound of waves hitting the rocks I died on, as my broken body ceased to function.
But if there was a glowing light or a thousand angels, I didn’t see either. No hellfire or harps and clouds; no line to get reincarnated into a newt.
Just oblivion, like the space between stars, or the feeling when you sleep so deeply that you can’t remember a single thing that happened when you were out.
And then.
Agony.
The kind of endless, painful agony I’ve never felt before.
I still felt the rocks beneath my broken back, but I couldn’t hear the waves anymore. As I came to awareness, fighting past the agony, I realized that the pain was different now. It was a whole-body pain, like a shiver from head to toe, or when you’re hot all over.
My back wasn’t broken. My neck wasn’t twisted. When I forced myself to sit up, I didn’t feel blood oozing from the wound on my stomach. In fact, as I probed my skin, I realized there was no wound at all.
Physically, my body was whole.
But going back into it felt like having several thousand needles press against my skin all at once.
Other things were different, too. At first I thought that it was dawn, because there was so much more light on the water below the cliffs; suddenly I could see everything. But when I checked the moon’s position in the sky, I realized it hadn’t changed—mere minutes had passed. In fact, I could hear the strangers’ voices in the distance.
No, they weren’t strangers. They were demons. I somehow knew that now, with a shocking clarity, just like I knew that I’d died. And, as I blinked and stared down at my newly-made hands, I also realized that it was my vision that had improved, not the light surrounding me.
My body wasn’t the same anymore. Neither was my mind. I’d gone to the beyond and back again, complete with all the pain of a soul getting rammed back into its body.
So yeah, like I said, dying was a real bitch. The fact that my death started because of some jerk’s severed dick—well, next time I witness torture, I’ll run away quietly instead of screaming my fool head off. If there is some kind of afterlife, I don’t want to have to introduce myself as “the chick who flipped out because of a severed dick and got disemboweled by a bunch of demons she’d nicknamed Swordwielder, Poisoner, Bomber and Choker.”
Now that you’re all caught up, here’s what I’ve decided is gonna happen next:
1) I’m getting the fuck out of here.
2) I won’t let those goddamned demons catch me.
3) I’m never, ever speaking to any of my old classmates from Fern Valley High again.
The rest of it, from the thing about entrails to the part where I died, came back, and now know what a demon is, can all wait. I’ve got a cliff face to scale, an escape route to find, and a bunch of demons to outrun.
Richard’s motorcycle.
It’s the first thing I see when I peer my head over the edge of the cliff, which I scaled somehow in record time. Maybe it was the adrenaline coursing through me, or the whole pretty-sure-I-died thing, but somehow I found the strength to climb all the way up here without losing my breath.
Looking around, I spot the four demons. They’re standing at the spot on the cliff where I fell, arguing about something. As I watch, Choker takes off his shirt, revealing rippling muscles and gorgeous brown skin. It looks like he’s trying to convince Swordwielder to let him dive off the cliff and look for me in the water below—to finish me off, probably.
Now that I’m looking with new eyes, I can see the peculiarities about him even more clearly. He moves too fast, his reflexes smooth and even, his strength just a little inhuman. But more than that, it’s the stuff rippling beneath the surface that I somehow sense: a strength that comes straight from the beyond, so dark and unholy that it gives him the power to see human souls.
Well, I’m not letting him look at mine again. Taking a deep breath, I pull myself up over the edge of the cliff, get
my feet under me, and run as fast and hard as I can.
There was no way to sneak by them—I know this now that I’ve seen them in action, and can sense what they are. But if I can just run fast enough, turn the motorcycle on and get out of here, they won’t be able to catch up with me. Or so I hope.
I gotta admit, I’ve never run so fast in my life. I was always the kid in gym class who whined about doing laps and lagged behind. If I got the chance to hide under the bleacher and smoke instead, I’d take it. It wasn’t that I couldn’t; I just never saw the point in running around in circles getting nowhere. But somehow right now that previous laziness is gone, replaced with an unknown desperation.
“Hey!” They see me, and turn towards me, drawing their weapons. “She’s going for my bike—get her!”
That’s when I realize the motorcycle I’m running towards isn’t Richard’s at all; his shiny chrome bike must be somewhere near the pools of blood, or sitting by the burned-out husk of what was once a car. No, this bike is sleeker, painted black matte with silver skulls on the side.
Even better. It looks like it’s fast—fast enough to maybe even keep me from dying again, which would be good, since I have no idea what the fuck happened last time and I don’t want to repeat it.
My foster father’s words echo in my mind as I throw a leg over the bike and grab at the handles. The keys are in the ignition, just waiting for me to give it gas, and the kickstand is right at the tip of my toe. Lessons long buried surge to the front of my desperate mind.
Barry was my third foster home; by then I was tired of being passed around, but still naive enough to believe that the next place might be the last place. He was nice enough, if a bit of a drunk. When I showed interest in his motorcycle, he threw a helmet on my head and showed me how to ride, taking me down little side streets with my arms thrown around his waist, both of us laughing and screaming in joy.
All that ended the day his wife Bethany came home and saw what was going on. At first I thought she was mad because it was dangerous; that would’ve made some sort of sense. But she was screaming at him because I had my hands around his waist.
