The Day After
Well, the night out last night rocked. Went out and had fun with friends for the first time involving alcohol in a long time. And because I'm awesome, no hangovers. Don't be hatin', that's just how it is.
Anyway, I have 4,000 words to write today, so that's a good thing. Here's the next installment of:
Mark Haver’s face loomed over the smaller boy. His fists seemed to move in slow motion as they struck over and over again into his pale flesh. Tiny hands and arms tried to deflect the blows, but they offered little resistance to the larger boy’s strength. There was nothing he could do but cower behind his frail appendages and hope it ended soon.
And it did. Or at least it ended soon enough. Somehow, Arkady knew that. If the beating had gone on much longer, something bad would have happened. Although he really wasn’t sure who would have been on the receiving end of the bad thing.
Three months after his recovery in the hospital, Arkady was a pale, withered child compared to those who shared his sixth grade classroom. Even his hair seemed to have lost the living sheen. No longer quite the same warm, cinnamon it used to be, now it resembled fall leaves lain too long in the gutter, or swept down a street in the afternoon’s last rays of sunlight. A muddy brown, just like his eyes.
Picking himself up from the locker room floor, he crawled slowly to the shower. Raising his bruised arms above his head to turn on the water, he washed his body. The blood slowly fled from his upper lip and chin, but the shivering wasn’t from the water. In fact, it might almost have been burning him it was so hot. The shivering was from a fierce hatred that burned inside him. Hatred, and a fear of what it meant.
Those days in the hospital where he had lain feverish and unconscious had stamped him with a change. His parents thought that it was entirely because of the sickness, but it went far deeper than that. Actually, it was curious for Kade as he thought about, and he often did, whether the feelings he experienced now were a side effect of the illness he’d endured, or the sick feelings that swirled around in his mind. Which caused which?
As he lay in the shower, recovering himself, his memory flooded with images from his fever dreams.
Awakening in the cemetery near his house, he had found himself laying within a crypt. A granite angel loomed over him, sword in one hand, book in the other; someone’s testament to divine judgment. Thinking that he must have fallen asleep after playing with some friends, he began to head to his house. Or at least that had been his intention.
His head exploded with stars as he moved it sideways, and his neck, shoulders, arms, and torso cramped up while his legs thrashed wildly in agony. A horrible moan escaped his throat through clenched jaws, and his fingers dug rivulets through the debris in the stone sarcophagus. He didn’t have time to think about why he was where he was, only to wish everything would simply stop. And it did, just like that. And then the cold returned; the unfeeling numbness that was like a pain itself. After the pain and sensation, the contrast was unbearable.
He screamed. With every fiber of his being, he cried out in anguish and visceral agony. The wind caught his cry and carried it through the staggered rows of headstones outwards into the countryside. From somewhere deep in the woods, or the mountains, or maybe even from the earth itself, something answered. The cry of the elements clamped Kade’s mouth shut, and he shuddered in fear and understanding.
Something was out there, and it was looking for him.
Forcing himself up, he looked around. The pain didn’t return, and he barely noticed as he leapt from his hiding place and scampered to the shadows of a nearby mausoleum. Still within the grip of numbness, he waited, listening and watching with everything he could muster. The wind stirred the leaves of fall from the trees to chattering and whispering while the scurry of squirrels, chipmunks, mice mingled with the flurry of bats, owls, and other night creatures. All of it was in his scope of existence. He could hear everything, smell everything, view the entirety of the dark.
Slowly he became aware of something out of place. Or rather, absent from its rightful place. Testing, he probed his wrist, he placed a hand in front of his face, he prodded his face and muscles and bones. No pulse, no breath, no feeling. He was dreaming.
He laughed, and the sound shocked him. Sinister and hollow, the deep, rasping devil’s chuckle trickled from his lips damnation itself. Wondering what his dream self looked like, he slowly crept out looking for something to reflect his face. Even though he knew he was dreaming, he couldn’t shake the sensation that something was watching him, feeling for him through the tendrils of fog that crept upwards from the river that ran through the valley and down from the mountain tops all around the small city.
So he crept slowly through the graveyard, cautiously examining it, learning its mazes and secrets. And while he was enjoying the novel feeling of being in the cemetery after dark without fear of what was in it, he knew that outside the cemetery he would find things to fear, or they would find him.
Eventually he found a birdbath partially obscured by moss, multiflora rose thorns, and matted, dead leaves from countless years before. It was in a remote part of the cemetery where the caretakers didn’t go anymore, but it still held rainwater. Pulling himself up to the lip of the bowl, Arkady gazed down at his desiccated visage. Dried, rotted flesh filled the water. Shriveled, withered arms gripped the sides, and unseeing eyes stared back up at him. A zombie. He was a zombie. Definitely a first, and very creepy occurrence, in his dreams. Arkady felt a chill go through him, and he turned to see beams of light sweeping the lanes and haphazard stones of the mortuary. Someone was coming to find him, probably drawn from his screams before. Quickly he ducked behind a crumbling tombstone and watched.
Anyway, I have 4,000 words to write today, so that's a good thing. Here's the next installment of:
Mark Haver’s face loomed over the smaller boy. His fists seemed to move in slow motion as they struck over and over again into his pale flesh. Tiny hands and arms tried to deflect the blows, but they offered little resistance to the larger boy’s strength. There was nothing he could do but cower behind his frail appendages and hope it ended soon.
And it did. Or at least it ended soon enough. Somehow, Arkady knew that. If the beating had gone on much longer, something bad would have happened. Although he really wasn’t sure who would have been on the receiving end of the bad thing.
Three months after his recovery in the hospital, Arkady was a pale, withered child compared to those who shared his sixth grade classroom. Even his hair seemed to have lost the living sheen. No longer quite the same warm, cinnamon it used to be, now it resembled fall leaves lain too long in the gutter, or swept down a street in the afternoon’s last rays of sunlight. A muddy brown, just like his eyes.
Picking himself up from the locker room floor, he crawled slowly to the shower. Raising his bruised arms above his head to turn on the water, he washed his body. The blood slowly fled from his upper lip and chin, but the shivering wasn’t from the water. In fact, it might almost have been burning him it was so hot. The shivering was from a fierce hatred that burned inside him. Hatred, and a fear of what it meant.
Those days in the hospital where he had lain feverish and unconscious had stamped him with a change. His parents thought that it was entirely because of the sickness, but it went far deeper than that. Actually, it was curious for Kade as he thought about, and he often did, whether the feelings he experienced now were a side effect of the illness he’d endured, or the sick feelings that swirled around in his mind. Which caused which?
As he lay in the shower, recovering himself, his memory flooded with images from his fever dreams.
Awakening in the cemetery near his house, he had found himself laying within a crypt. A granite angel loomed over him, sword in one hand, book in the other; someone’s testament to divine judgment. Thinking that he must have fallen asleep after playing with some friends, he began to head to his house. Or at least that had been his intention.
His head exploded with stars as he moved it sideways, and his neck, shoulders, arms, and torso cramped up while his legs thrashed wildly in agony. A horrible moan escaped his throat through clenched jaws, and his fingers dug rivulets through the debris in the stone sarcophagus. He didn’t have time to think about why he was where he was, only to wish everything would simply stop. And it did, just like that. And then the cold returned; the unfeeling numbness that was like a pain itself. After the pain and sensation, the contrast was unbearable.
He screamed. With every fiber of his being, he cried out in anguish and visceral agony. The wind caught his cry and carried it through the staggered rows of headstones outwards into the countryside. From somewhere deep in the woods, or the mountains, or maybe even from the earth itself, something answered. The cry of the elements clamped Kade’s mouth shut, and he shuddered in fear and understanding.
Something was out there, and it was looking for him.
Forcing himself up, he looked around. The pain didn’t return, and he barely noticed as he leapt from his hiding place and scampered to the shadows of a nearby mausoleum. Still within the grip of numbness, he waited, listening and watching with everything he could muster. The wind stirred the leaves of fall from the trees to chattering and whispering while the scurry of squirrels, chipmunks, mice mingled with the flurry of bats, owls, and other night creatures. All of it was in his scope of existence. He could hear everything, smell everything, view the entirety of the dark.
Slowly he became aware of something out of place. Or rather, absent from its rightful place. Testing, he probed his wrist, he placed a hand in front of his face, he prodded his face and muscles and bones. No pulse, no breath, no feeling. He was dreaming.
He laughed, and the sound shocked him. Sinister and hollow, the deep, rasping devil’s chuckle trickled from his lips damnation itself. Wondering what his dream self looked like, he slowly crept out looking for something to reflect his face. Even though he knew he was dreaming, he couldn’t shake the sensation that something was watching him, feeling for him through the tendrils of fog that crept upwards from the river that ran through the valley and down from the mountain tops all around the small city.
So he crept slowly through the graveyard, cautiously examining it, learning its mazes and secrets. And while he was enjoying the novel feeling of being in the cemetery after dark without fear of what was in it, he knew that outside the cemetery he would find things to fear, or they would find him.
Eventually he found a birdbath partially obscured by moss, multiflora rose thorns, and matted, dead leaves from countless years before. It was in a remote part of the cemetery where the caretakers didn’t go anymore, but it still held rainwater. Pulling himself up to the lip of the bowl, Arkady gazed down at his desiccated visage. Dried, rotted flesh filled the water. Shriveled, withered arms gripped the sides, and unseeing eyes stared back up at him. A zombie. He was a zombie. Definitely a first, and very creepy occurrence, in his dreams. Arkady felt a chill go through him, and he turned to see beams of light sweeping the lanes and haphazard stones of the mortuary. Someone was coming to find him, probably drawn from his screams before. Quickly he ducked behind a crumbling tombstone and watched.