by T. Rudacille
***
I sped to her house with absolutely no idea what I was going to do when I got there. My tires squealed around every turn, and I blazed through every yellow light I came to. On the one red light that I was unfortunate enough to catch, my legs were shaking up and down the entire time, and I’m pretty sure that I was bobbing in my seat a little, too. Anyone who saw me would have assumed I was probably just racing home to use the bathroom. Little did they know I was actually zooming to my girlfriend's house where I would more than likely be killed by a demonic creature that had been stalking us for a week...
I watched the light that was green for the other direction of traffic turn to yellow and slammed the gas, swerving to avoid a car that had been trying to make it through before the light turned red. The flash of the traffic camera made images from the dream run through my mind; I wouldn't have to worry about ever paying that ticket...
As soon as I reached her house, I put the car into Park and pulled the keys out of the ignition, running to the trellis thing I always climbed up to get to her room. But my eyes found her front door instead of looking up to climb. It was open completely.
I ran forward, ducking down so that if the thing was watching, it couldn’t see me. But something told me that it knew I was there. It was waiting for me to come into the house, too.
Despite believing that, I walked inside, staying down low, listening for any sound, even the smallest, that might tell me where the thing was. I wanted to whisper Alice’s name but knew that it was too risky. So instead, I let my feet carry me and found that they seemed to know exactly where to go.
I was walking down the basement steps, hearing the soft breathing now in the distance.
“Alice?” The woman’s voice hissed in the darkness ahead of me, “Alice?”
“Get to Alice.” My mind demanded, and instantly, I picked up her familiar scent of coconut shampoo. She was close; if I kept walking, I’d probably trip over her. I had to chance saying her name. I had no other way to find her.
“Alice?” I whispered, my voice so low that there was no way she could have heard. But I felt her small hand reach out and grasp mine. In an abrupt jerk, she pulled me down to the floor. I closed my eyes, picturing the layout of her basement, where we always hung out. I knew that we were now crouched down below her mother’s old computer desk.
“Quinn, she’s close.” She whispered with her mouth right up against my ear.
“How did she get in?” I breathed back as my eyes widened by their own accord, trying to see her.
“Shh!” She shushed me, and suddenly, she came into view.
I could see in perfect darkness.
“Holy shit, I can see you!”
She nodded but said nothing. We both looked simultaneously to our right, where we could see the creature pawing the ground soundlessly.
“What is it doing?” I mouthed to her, and she shrugged, shaking her head slightly as she watched it with terrified eyes.
“Where?!” The creature exclaimed suddenly, causing us both to jump.
“She can’t see us. Or hear…” I mouthed to her, and she nodded again.
“We have to hit her with something!” Alice mimed the gesture as she said the word before crawling out from under the desk and moving quickly to the fireplace at the end of the room. Her father hid his shotgun in a secret compartment under the ledge that their family pictures were currently decorating. I rolled out from under the desk to help her move the pictures silently and quickly. Our eyes never moved from the creature that was now stomping the ground and jerking around the open space with its arms outstretched.
Alice opened the shelf silently and took out the shotgun. She pulled it open, checking to make sure it was loaded before carefully snapping it back together. She had always been the more outdoorsy one out of the two of us; her dad took her shooting at the gun range in the next town over almost every weekend. If we stacked our experience with firearms side by side, she trumped me every time. I had never even held a gun.
She aimed expertly and whistled for good measure. The creature’s head jerked up, looking in our direction now. It hissed, its already hideous face contorting to a new, horrifying sneer; it was the face of a hunter cornering its prey. But Alice raised the gun, the fear she had felt for days vanished completely from her eyes. Without hesitation, she fired one shell right into the monster's bony chest.
It was thrown backwards before it could even shriek in protest. It landed, twitching and spewing frothy spit from its mouth. I put my arm around her, pushing the shotgun down before she fired it again. She looked at me, nodding slightly, still saying nothing.
“Well, I think we killed it.”
“I don’t think it’s dead.” She replied, walking forward. “I can’t see anymore. Can you switch on the lights?”
I couldn’t see in the dark anymore, either, so I had to feel my way along the wall to the light switch. When I clicked it on, she was delicately placing the shotgun back in the compartment above the fireplace. We walked back to the creature hand in hand.
It looked different; its body had filled out to the shape of a healthy person instead of a fully decayed corpse. Its hair was no longer white and long but cut short and matted to what remained of its blood-soaked head. And when I flipped the thing over onto its back, I stumbled away in horror. Beyond horror…
A scream erupted behind me. It was a scream of terror and grief that consumed her instantaneously. It was the scream she had kept forced down deep inside of her since the moment that thing had arrived.
We were looking at her mother.
