The Shattered Genesis

  ***

  As we suspected, the two jocks were still outside of my apartment building, sitting across the street on two different benches and staring at the door with expressions of pained concentration on their slowly decaying faces.

  “Is there a back way in?” James asked me as the car idled.

  I nodded, studying the physical deterioration of the two young men who only the night before had been so boyishly good-looking. No longer were they clean-cut and stocky. Though I knew that their height remained the same in actuality, the way they slouched cast the illusion that they had shrunk down at least three feet. Their emaciation was severe; they were merely wisps of skin clinging tightly to creaking bones. Even from across the street, I could see that their eyes were surrounded by menacing dark circles and their hair was beginning to fall from their pale-white, snake-veined scalps. To a passerby, they simply appeared to be afflicted with some terrible, fatal disease. To me, they were the perfect real-life imitations of the monsters I had run from in my childhood nightmares.

  “Why do they look like that?” I whispered to James, and I did not realize how tightly my hand was squeezing his arm.

  “Do you want me to sugar-coat it, or do you want me to be blunt?”

  I frowned at him over my shoulder.

  “What do you think?” I answered sarcastically.

  “They haven't eaten you yet.”

  I looked at him, my eyes bugging in fear but then quickly resuming their normal shape.

  “I will let you know when I require a full explanation on that. Now is certainly not the time.”

  “I wasn't going to give you one anyway.” He drove away slowly, rolling his window up before we passed them. Thank God his windows were tinted, or they surely would have seen us.

  He parked the car just behind a meter. I watched him hop out with charismatic grace and had to roll my eyes; this was a gentleman who knew how good-looking and powerful he was. Arrogance never complimented a male, I had been told once by Maura, who believed herself to be the all-knowing authority on the matters of men. Shaking my head, I started to open my door only to find that he was already there, opening it for me.

  “Thanks.” I murmured, “Chivalry isn't dead, I suppose.”

  “No. Not to old guys like me, at least.” He replied as he walked to the meter to dispense three quarters inside of it.

  “Shall we?” He beckoned towards the alley. I nodded, striding ahead of him with no fear of what might meet me. I just wanted to pack my things and go, knowing that every second ticking past was too precious to waste. We only had twenty-three hours left until the ship that would carry us far from the chaos and carnage departed our world forever.

  Once safely sheltered by the shadows of the corridor, we hastened our pace until we reached the back door of my building. I took my keys from my purse and tried to steady my trembling hands long enough to unlock the door for us. I tried to tell myself that it was adrenaline causing me to tremor that way and not fear strong enough to drain what was left of my vitality. Thankfully, James reached out after a moment of watching my pathetic attempt at completing the simple task and held my hand still with both of his; together, we unlocked the door.

  We moved quickly up the back stairway, jumping the steps with ease. After reaching the fourth floor, we both had to stop and breathe heavily. Damn smokers, we never learn.

  “Alright, let me check,” He said, “I don't know how many of them there are. I've seen as many as ten of them casing someone's place.”

  “Do you always use action movie jargon, or is this new for you?” I whispered to him in a lame attempt to make a joke. Sometimes a little humor can go a long way to ease one's anxieties.

  “I always talk like this.” He whispered back, deadpan, as he looked up and down the hallway. He looked back at me and said in an intentionally hoarse voice reminiscent of a chain-smoking drill sergeant, “Coast is clear. Move out.”

  I could not help but laugh softly at that. If my joke was of slightly below average hilarity, his was scraping the very bottom of the meter.

  I have never been as stunned by normalcy as I was when I walked into my apartment. Everything remained exactly where I had left it: My clothes were still strewn out on the floor, my dishes were still piled in the sink, and my window was left open from when I had burned muffins the day before.

  “Nice place.” James complimented me as he looked around. “How much do you pay for this?”

  “Wow, nosy.” I replied before walking in further and going straight back to my bedroom.

  “Not nosy. Just curious!” He called to me from the living room.

  “You can come back here.” I told him as I started to pull the clothes from my drawers. I shoved them unceremoniously into my overnight bag before moving over to my closet. “So many shoes, not enough space...”

  “What is it with women and shoes?” He asked me, “Why do you need a pair to go with every outfit?”

  “I know. Why can't we just wear the same severely scuffed pair that we bought almost a decade ago every day?”

  “Are you talking about my shoes right now?”

  “I am sorry, you are allowed to call me out on my excessive footwear collection, but I am not allowed to call you out on your scant one?”

  I poked my head out of the closet, raised my eyebrow in sardonic scolding, and awaited an answer.

  “Touché.” He held up his hands in surrender. “But just to verify, I don't wear these every day. I wear them for work. And for your information, it was six years ago.”

  I smirked and went back into my closet, quietly commanding myself not to take my stilettos, boots, or flats, but only my practical walking and running shoes. I sighed heavily again as I looked at the ones that would be left behind. I had spent so much of my parents' money on that assortment of shoes. How very sad I was to leave them all behind. I grabbed a few more items out of my closet that I could not bear to leave behind before moving past James into the bathroom.

  “I do not like the silence so I will answer your nosy question.” I told him as I pulled my shampoo and conditioner out of the shower. “I don't pay for this place at all. My parents are responsible for paying my rent. They are responsible for all of my expenses, actually. Credit cards, cable and phone bills, things like that.”

  “Typical rich kid, I see.”

  “I didn't say I was proud of it. I just answered your question truthfully.”

  “Is your relationship with your parents a good one?”

  An iciness must have come over my features because he immediately backed off of the subject.

  “You don't have to tell me if you don't want to.”

  I nodded before answering.

  “It is better that way. Let me just say this: a part of me wants to leave them behind.”

  He reached out suddenly and grasped my hand, startling me with the both the suddenness of the gesture and the emotional meaning behind it.

  “You have no choice but to leave them behind, sweetheart.”

  Some would have considered that a bombshell. But somehow, I had already known. My parents, I am sure, knew of the impending crisis because of their jobs. My mother was a senator who was, if we are being honest, partially responsible for the predicament in which the the human race found themselves. My father ran a news organization that was no doubt hushing it all up. Guessing was not needed; I could denote easily that they had no place on the ship that would carry civilians away from the earth they had doomed.

  “You don't seem surprised.” James gently prodded me to speak, to tell him in detail about the blustering war of sadness and fury inside of me. Instead, I simply posed a question to him:

  “Is it because they are responsible?”

  “Yes. We all voted. Every one of us who had the vision first voted on whether or not to allow your parents to come. But since they are involved in covering this up and since they were of the many that were going to leave us all behind, we decided against it. Originally, they had a
ll agreed that even you couldn't come. But I persuaded them.”

  “Why?”

  My blue eyes raised to meet his light brown ones. We gazed at each other for one long, curious moment and then he answered.

  “I don't know.”

  How anticlimactic. How insulting, too, that he had no idea why he had persuaded the others to save me. I would answer for him, just so the question would be closed for good, and just because I was urged to say something to fill the space of silence. Words were brimming at my lips, urging me to say them before it was too late to regret my remaining silent. If I didn't speak, I would surely meet my end much earlier than expectation dictated...

  “I guess you are a good enough person that you didn't like the idea of me being eaten by those things that are just outside the door.”

  The words fell from my mouth before I could fully appreciate the magnitude of what I had said or the fact that I had known those creatures had arrived at all. James looked away from me and then looked back, his own shock evident on his face.

  “Alright. We have to go.” He picked up my bag and grasped my hand. “I'm going to get us out of this.”

  “How?”

  “Don’t know yet.”

  “One more thing...” I told him before creeping out into the living room. I grabbed one of the two picture frames I had placed on the mantle over my fireplace. It was of my sisters, my brother, and me from the Christmas before, standing on either side of Maura, my “nanny.” Anyone who didn't know us or our family tree would think that she was just a proud mother surrounded by her loving children. But as it turns out, that just was not the case.

  The only other picture on my spacious fire-place mantle was from a campaign event of my mother's. Someone with no knowledge of my shaky relationship with her had given the photo to me as a gift. I had kept it simply because I liked the frame and nothing else. In the photo, my mother had her arm around my back and was smiling as she waved to the crowd around her. I was still young enough not to question the perpetual charade under which we were forced to live. In the photo, I was smiling, too, and looking up at her.

  That photo made me feel genuinely ill, from my chest to the pit of my stomach. As I shoved it into my other bag, I felt a wave of nausea that was so forceful, I had to reach out and grasp the mantle for a moment and focus on my breathing. It was the only way to avoid the disgusting, inevitable consequence of the tumultuous, acidic feeling in my stomach.

  “What is it?” I heard him whispering to me from some far off place. I shook my head slightly, unable to explain my strange behavior away. I was unable, for the first time in a long time, to pretend that I was fine. He slung my bag onto his back and put his arm around my shoulder. As he steered me towards the open window, the feeling began to dissipate.

  “The fire escape doesn't work.” I murmured to him once my stomach stopped bubbling completely.

  He looked at me, instantly trying to work out a solution to our conundrum. My two ideas were useless, at least if we wished to live another day: We could jump to our deaths or get eaten by Reapers. I was well aware that they were the only two options, and for me, there was no contest between the two. James interrupted me as I silently prepared to take that first step onto the window ledge.

  “I know this is going to sound insane, but I need you to just go with it.”

  “After everything that has happened today, do you really think I am not going to go with it?”

  “Do you have something sarcastic to say every time someone speaks?” He asked me, clearly amused and bewildered by the tendency. Most people just found it annoying.

  “Indeed, I do.” I replied, and before I could add, “Thank you so much,” I heard my name being hissed on the other side of the door. My eyes must have widened and betrayed the revulsion I felt. I had never heard such a sound, and to hear it saying my name provoked a fear that froze my ability to comprehend firmly in its place. Chills ran laps up and down my spine, and the hair on my arms stood up straight. One of the creatures outside made a sound like a guttural bark followed by what sounded like my name garbled out through spit and clenched teeth.

  “James…” I whispered, not realizing how tight my grip on his arm was once again, “What are we going to do?”

  “Get behind the couch and close your eyes.”

  “What? No, don’t open the door!” I ordered in a furious whisper. “James, please don’t. Please don’t let them in!”

  To call that “begging” would be inaccurate. To call that pleading with him as though he possessed and could allot the rest of the days of my life would be closer to accuracy. But instead of hearing my desperate plea and jumping with me out of my fourth story window, he spun me around and sat me down behind the couch.

  “I won’t think less of you if you cover your eyes,” He told me hurriedly, “But whatever you hear, do not come after me. Understand?”

  I nodded vigorously, suddenly cognizant of the fact that I might very well witness the end of him. Given all the other complex emotions of the moment, I didn’t quite know how to process the idea of not having him by my side from then until the end. I would only understand how the thought paralyzed me much later.

  My entire body jolted upwards as the door he had just thrown open banged against the stopper in the wall. I stared straight ahead, my eyes wide, my breathing shallow, but my body motionless. The first sound I heard was that short, raspy breathing of the two creatures. Next, I heard their pounding, labored footsteps.

  “Come on.” James was saying, urging them to get past him, to try to come at me. “Come on!”

  One long, deep, ragged inhalation followed by a shrill shriek of animal fury startled me; my hands flew to cover my ears, and my eyes squeezed tightly shut. Several hard, evenly spaced thuds vibrated the floor beneath me. I heard the bark that could have been produced by the voice of any particularly large breed of dog. After two more barks, the monsters drew in two long breaths before those blood-freezing screeches blasted from their fanged mouths again.

  Several minutes had passed since the creatures had entered my apartment and still, James did not attack them nor did they charge him. They truly were searching for only me. I sensed that their stomps and roars were displays of power meant to frighten James away. I did not know why they would want to spare his life. Perhaps the Reapers only had one kill in them. Perhaps after they murdered me, they would die as well, like two bees whose prized stingers had been sacrificed in a final attack.

  It didn't matter. The paths out of the trap we found ourselves in were closing, slowly becoming just thin lines over which no man or woman could pass. I couldn’t sit there with my eyes and ears covered like a skittish child awaiting whatever foul beast lurked in the darkness of her closet. James had gone out of his way already to save my life, and his chance against those things was almost nonexistent. I wasn’t going to allow him to face that ominous darkness alone just because I was afraid. Not a chance.

  I jumped up and saw that James had grabbed a knife from the kitchen. Given the size difference, the sight of James staring down those two hulking masses made me think of a rabbit charging headfirst into a battle with a hungry, stomping bull, armed only with its thin, almost transparent claws.“Brynna, get back down.”

  The only reason James knew that I was standing in view was because the two creatures stopped stomping and hissing and jerked their heads sideways at an unnatural angle to look at me. As I stared into their bottomless black eyes, I could feel the wrath, terror, sorrow, and loathing of every lost soul in the history of our race. The feeling enveloped me in blackness, swallowing me whole and sending me hurtling through time and space to the place where all evil must go.

  “Snap out of it! Snap out of it, Brynna!” James screamed at me, and it was hearing his voice that sent me flying back to earth and landing with a gratified thud. It was upon landing that something took over me.

  That “something” was an inner beast I never knew existed, and it rivaled the real monsters in t
he room.

  First, I hurtled over the couch. I lunged for the first beast’s throat, wrapped my arms around its meaty neck and forcefully spun so that I was behind him, tightly latched onto his back. My body was working completely at its own will, and my mind was just along for the ride. When my ears heard another deathly scream behind me, my foot swung backwards to nail the second monster quite perfectly in the center of its hideous face. It flew backwards, gasping in an almost absurd display of surprise before putting an elephant-sized dent in my newly painted wall. Beastly bastard…

  Out of the corner of my eye, I watched James rush forward in a blur, raise the knife over his head, and bring it forcefully down into the gasping beast’s right eye. Another prolonged gasp and then another scream filled my ears.

  My monstrous opponent sunk its several rows of razor teeth into my forearm, and instead of crying out in pain as I wanted to, I ripped my arm from its slobbering mouth. I was aware of a spray of my blood but was too focused on what I was going to do next to faint at the sight or from the pain that was beginning to burn through my body as though the blood in my veins had suddenly morphed into gasoline lit aflame.

  I wrapped both of my arms around its massive head and drew in a deep breath of my own. During the seconds it took to gather such a massive inhalation, I unconsciously focused every remaining iota of strength into my locked arms. As soon as I felt the muscles swelling with fullness, I twisted, hoping to snap its neck but getting a result so much more satisfying. The beast's head spun around twice, bobbling like a top ready to topple off of its neck bone. It collapsed to the ground, face forward, and I looked up while still perched on its back. James's arm that held the knife was plunged up to his elbow in the monster's chest. My head jerked downwards, and from the way it was angled now, I could see that the knife had burgeoned out of the beast’s back. My head jerked up again as I took in the deep, wonderful, inexplicable smell of a nonexistent rain. Images of playing with my siblings in the dew-soaked grass at our family’s country estate danced in front of my mind’s eye, flooding my body with the strongest sense of euphoria I had ever experienced. That feeling is what calmed the impossibly rapid beats of my heart.

  James ripped the knife out of the creature’s chest, sending a spray of black liquid in his direction that he smoothly walked sideways to avoid. The monster gave one feeble moan as it fell forward and hit my living room floor with a ground-shaking thud. That moan was not reminiscent of the animalistic sounds I had heard before, but in fact, sounded distinctly human.

  I was aware that I was very slowly and slightly moving downwards. When I looked down at the beast under me, I found that it was no longer a beast, at all. Though its head was severed from its body, its face had transformed into one that was boyishly handsome once again. Its body was sculpted into the physique of a post-adolescent who spent far too much time at the gym. The monster was gone, and all that remained was the unfortunate boy from the bar.

  James was obviously experiencing a moment of joyous recollection similar to the one I had been intoxicated by earlier. He was facing the window, standing perfectly still, smelling the air deeply. After the moment had passed, he turned to see that his own adversary had transformed back into what I assumed was its true self. A sadness flashed across his eyes that I am sure he would have seen reflected in my own. I had never killed a human being, and I still had not. What I had killed was a hulking, beastly creature hell-bent on ripping me apart and devouring the pieces. I hoped that was the case, at least. I could not bear to wonder if the boy was actually human, though I certainly did know for sure that he was. He had been, anyway, at one time.

  When James's eyes finally met mine, I was stunned to find that they had turned over to a milky bluish-white, giving him the appearance of being blind.

  “James…” I whispered in a trembling voice.

  “Go look in the mirror.”

  I jumped up and hurried to my dining room where a wall length mirror hung beside the sliding glass door. What I saw made my heart leap tremendously forward as a curiosity unrivaled by anything I had ever felt took hold of me. My own eyes were the color of blindness, of death. I became aware that I could see every pore on my face and every color around me down to its basis of black. I could see every different follicle of hair on my arms, every different shade of color in my irises that were still visible just behind the blue and white.

  I walked to the sliding doors, pulled them open, and walked out onto my balcony where the magnificently colored lights of dawn were beginning to descend on a city so intricately designed, so infinite and unending, that it surely could not have been my own. When I felt James reach his place by my side, we stared in silence at this dying world, seeing it clearly in all its intended but failed goodness for the very first, and very last, time.

  We were both covered in the black substance that flowed through the bodies of those creatures that laid dead on my living room floor. That strange nostalgia was still cradling me, and I could hear the blood droplets that were seeping from the gaping wound in my arm exploding against the pavement in front of our feet as clearly as I could hear the summer rain against the greenhouse roof of my parent’s estate all those years ago. Despite the severity of the injury, I felt no pain. I slid my injured arm around James’s back, feeling a brilliantly comforting onslaught of warmth spread through me as his own draped over my shoulders.

  Words I never believed would be spoken by me fell from my lips before I could understand how sadly profound they were:

  “I will miss this world.”

  He didn’t break his gaze from the fantastical realm that was our earth in its true form when he replied softly:

  “I will, too.”

  Quinn

  Alice was starting to lose it. We had been running from that thing for too long. I can’t think of any other way to describe it but by calling it a “thing.” It definitely wasn't human.

  Were we still human then?

  I won’t spend time re-telling all the conversations we had on the subject. We spent hours trying to decipher the situation and still, we couldn't make sense of it. We would sit behind our barred bedroom door, draw the shades as soon as we saw the darkness of night beginning to come our way, and brace for its awful presence.

  I had never been brave enough to open the shades to see her again after the first time. I had never been brave enough to face her. But was Alice? I think so. She had always been braver than me. I was her boyfriend who was supposed to protect her with no thought of my own safety. If I were to die for her, it wouldn’t prove my bravery. It would only prove that I had done one of my duties. She was genuinely fearless and always had been.

  The first time the thing appeared, we had only gotten out of school for Christmas break two days earlier. Her parents had gone out of town (which couldn’t have been stupider, given that we were newly on break and looking to party), leaving us to our own devices in their modest house. The second semester was over, our down-time had arrived, and we were free of homework, our parents, and the restraints both had put on us.

  Our parents are a story for another time.

  While all of our friends were hunkering down together in the basements of their houses for a week of drinking and the stupidity said drinking would certainly incite, we decided to hang for the duration of her parent’s vacation at her house. Our high school friends found us dull once we decided to date, and we didn’t feel we had much in common with them after that, anyway. Her parents told her that I was by no means allowed in the house, not even to thwart a burglary, which was one of the scenarios she had presented to them sarcastically.

  We spent those first two days of independence streaming stupid 80’s movies, going out at two in the morning just because we could, and eating all of the food in her house. Not exactly the badass rebellion that people might have expected two teenagers free from their parents to get up to, but that’s really all we did.

  “They’ll know you were here.” She told me one hot afternoon,
“They’ll know that I couldn’t have eaten all of this food by myself.”

  “Oh, just tell them you smoked a bunch of weed and got the munchies. They’ll take that, as long as I wasn’t here.”

  “Smoking weed with me.”

  “No, not even. As long as I wasn’t here at all.”

  We spent time talking about how we had gotten together and how much our parents hated our relationship. I guess that is where our rebellious streaks came in, because we found their protests to our love thrilling. We talked about how we had been friends for so long and how the feelings had changed. I told her that it took years for me to realize that I loved her in a different way than the way I would love a girl who was only my friend. She went further than that, telling me she had loved me that way all along.

  I still get a weird feeling of intense happiness and also, bewilderment, when I think about her telling me that. It’s one of those moments that I hold onto these days, when things get too dark to see straight anymore.

  We had both just dropped off to sleep on the second night when a loud scratching sound jerked us both awake. I sat up, thinking that someone was trying to break in; she had jinxed it when she had suggested the possibility to her parents in derision.

  “What is that?” She whispered to me, her doe-like brown eyes appearing strangely contorted in the darkness.

  The scratching sounded again, and we both looked at the window. Whatever was just behind the closed blinds was running its claws down the windowpane. Somehow, I knew that it wasn’t normal. I knew that it was not of our world. But our minds tend to rationalize, to keep us grounded in reality when we should be bracing to face the unusual.

  “Quinn, what is that?” She whispered again, and when I stood up, she jumped up, too. Her small hands wrapped around my upper arms and squeezed so tightly that my fingertips began to tingle within seconds.

  “I don’t know.” I tried to keep my voice steady for her sake. “I’m going to open the shades and see. Maybe it’s a…” I stopped, searching for a plausible explanation, “…squirrel.”

  Yeah. I thought that was plausible.

  “That’s not a squirrel!” She gripped my arm even tighter to stop me from walking forward, and I winced.

  “I have to see what it is.” I told her, “I'm sure it's nothing, babe.”

  “No. Quinn, please don’t open the shades. Don’t…” She stopped and looked up at me again, tears glistening in her eyes, “Don’t let her in.”

  I looked at her, seeing a look of shock on her face that I’m sure mirrored my own. How had she known that it was a woman?

  “Close your eyes.” I whispered to her before turning back to the window.

  How had I known to say that?

  There were several galloping footsteps, like something heavy running on all fours. Whatever it was stopped in front of her other bedroom window.

  It was a warmer night than what we were used to for that time of year with the temperature hovering in the mid-forties instead of deep down in the twenties. Alice had cranked the heat up too high, thinking that eighty degrees was only going to be balmy, so we had turned the thermostat back down and opened the windows in her bedroom. When we heard soft, slow breathing outside of one of the wide open windows, we both ran forward to slam it shut, knowing now that it was a person outside trying to force their way in. We both stopped, though, when we saw the shade blowing towards us and then retracting with each slow breath the mysterious thing took. We looked at the other window to see if the shade covering it was moving the same way; that would prove that the wind was to blame and our imaginations were running away with us. But we got no such relief because the other shade was as still as the sudden silence outside of the window.

  Just as we began to calm down, believing whoever it was had gotten bored and moved on to another house, we heard it speak.

  “I… smell… you…”

  Alice gasped and grabbed the phone to try dialing 911.

  “Quinn, it’s not working!”

  But I was in a trance. At the same time my mind was screaming at me, begging not to see what was out there, my body continued forward, moving at the accord of the tiny part of me that needed to see, that still believed that we were imagining it all. Or was it just a need to see whatever grotesque creature was out there? I still don't know.

  How did I know it was grotesque?

  My legs were resisting now, refusing to move me forward, but I was already close enough to reach the shade on the window. I reached out, just needing the relief of knowing that it wasn’t real, that we were in a waking dream. I needed the relief that came with realizing a bump in the night was just a neighbor slamming a door in his house. With my breath held tightly in my chest, I threw open the shade.

  It was a woman. But it certainly wasn’t human. Her eyes were too large and all white, with thin flecks of black like someone had sliced at them with a sewing needle or erased her iris and pupil in a hurry, I couldn’t decide. Her hair was long and as white as her eyes and her jaw jutted outwards at an impossible angle. When she opened her misshapen slash of a mouth for every slow, tedious breath, she immediately snapped it shut and ground her pointed teeth together.

  As soon as she saw me, she raised her arms, shrieking in rage, her head shaking back and forth quickly. She slammed her hands on the window hard, trying to break the glass. Even as an icy fear seized me, I did take a moment to marvel at the fact that the force she hit the window with didn’t shatter it into pieces. A gargling noise was coming from that slash I knew now was her mouth, followed by another loud shriek that forced Alice to finally uncover her eyes and look.

  Alice drew in a gasp and before the words, “Don’t let her scream” could pass completely through my mind, I turned backwards and grabbed a hold of her, trying to cover her mouth. But she had already covered it with both of her own hands, forcing the scream back down.

  I let go of her and rushed forward, pulling the shade down again. As I stumbled backwards to put as much space between me and the window as I could, I tripped over my feet and splayed out onto the floor. Alice knelt down beside me and wrapped her arms around my neck, staring at the window with wide, alarmed eyes. I looked at her and then back at the window where we heard the thing grunt in frustration and then go silent.

  “What is that? Quinn…” She whispered, her voice trembling along with her body.

  I shook my head, feeling as though my heart was lodged in my throat, blocking any words that I could possibly say to explain away what we had seen.

  We sat up for the rest of the night. I had to be driving her crazy with the way I was opening my mouth to say something that would rationalize what was happening, only to come up short on words. The thing stayed out there all night; though it never spoke again, we heard its steady breaths until the first light of dawn began to break. As soon as I could see light starting to leak through the crack between the shade and the window, I jumped to look outside.

  She was gone, galloping over our heads on the roof away from the rising sun. An ear-splitting howl wrecked the quiet of the early morning, and I scanned the houses across the street to see if anyone came running, searching feverishly for the source of such a strange noise. No one came, nor did I even see any curious faces appearing in the windows.

  Because no one knew she had been there, no one would know why she had been there. Alice and I were, horrifyingly, alone in the mess, left to decipher it by ourselves before cleaning it up, if we ever could.

  It took precisely an hour of daylight before we began to excuse away what had happened.

  “Maybe it was like one of those group hallucinations that Dr. Meyers was telling us about in AP Psych. Do you remember?”

  “A group hallucination? Caused by what, exactly?” She asked as she twirled the glass of orange juice on the table in front of her but never brought it to her lips for a drink.

  “I don’t know. Maybe there was something in our food last night.”

  “I don’t remember readin
g anything about Burger King suddenly adding LSD to their onion rings, Quinn.”

  “Do you have an explanation, then?” I was frustrated now. I just needed to know that what we had seen wasn’t real. I needed to believe that. If that thing was real, then the world as we knew it didn’t make sense anymore, and that was more dangerous than I could fully understand at that young age.

  “I do, actually.” She told me, “It was probably one of your stupid friends.”

  “They’re all over at Mia’s house! Remember, they said something about having burgers! Or not having burgers! I don’t know; I think Mia was stoned as hell when she was talking to me.”

  “Probably, but I was supposed to chat with her last night, and she didn’t get online.”

  “Just because they’re too drunk or high to pick up the phone doesn’t mean that they’re going to come over here and try to freak us out, Allie.”

  “Actually, I think both of those things are the perfect reason why they would come over here to try to freak us out. They probably went to the new Halloween store and got a mask. You know it’s open all year round now.”

  “Do you really think that they would sit out there all night? And what about those noises?”

  “What noises?”

  “The noises it was making! I know you heard it! That’s why you covered your ears all night.”

  “I don’t remember any noises.”

  I looked up at her to find that she was staring out the window, making a point of avoiding my eyes. I had known her long enough to know that meant she was lying.

  I downed what was left in my coffee mug before pouring myself a fourth cup. I looked at the clock on the canary yellow wall of her kitchen; it was 9:35 AM, and we had been downstairs for an hour. Drinking three cups of coffee during that time definitely didn’t help settle my nerves.

  “Allie, I know you’re freaked out. I am, too. But there is no way that thing was any of our friends pranking us.”

  “Maybe it was a neighbor kid, then. There are these stupid kids who live up the street from here who always ding-dong-ditch the house.”

  “People still do that?” I asked in disbelief. I shook my head slightly to get my mind back on topic. “It wasn’t anyone playing a prank. It was either a hallucination or…”

  “Or what?” She asked, looking at me now. “Or what, Quinn?”

  We were both quiet, not knowing exactly how to answer the question I had asked. Neither of us wanted to. We didn’t want to face the truth. Who could blame us for that after what we had seen?

  “You’ll stay here with me tonight, won’t you? I can’t stay here alone.” She told me, and the fear I had seen in her the night before resurfaced for a quick second.

  “Duh.” I replied, and I saw the faintest trace of a smile on her face. “All we can do now is just see if it comes back. If it does, we’ll handle it.”

  “How?”

  I looked at her and shrugged slightly.

  “I don't know. But I'm working on it.”