A Fight

Spit your venom my way, see what happens. I’ll spit right back. Show me your fangs, bear your teeth and snap your jaws at me. I’ll stare at them and show you mine, but I have nothing more to prove to your pitiful words. Blindly you’ll fire your pistol, hear the noise and feel the recoil, but you won’t do any damage. You curse and snarl while I stand in front of you, refusing to play your game of ignorance. You have all the rage and all the show, but no ears. When the attack comes you’ll be the first to fall.

Monster in the Basement

Everyone stood back-to-back with their hands raised, holding guns and daggers, looking at each of the windows that led to the opaque world outside. I stood at the opposite side of the room, occasionally glancing down to my bare feet at the polished wood floor and listening to the rumbles and groans beneath the floorboards.

The house was large and with a mainly white interior. There were two floors that I had explored—a basement and a main floor—but we all stayed on the main floor for fear of our creation, snarling and screeching below us, snatching one of us away and tearing us apart. It was our fault it existed, and now we had to contain it and stop it from doing any real damage.

I looked across the room at my best friend, a girl in a peculiar outfit and cropped dark hair. She was clutching a pistol between her fingers, staring back at me with frightened eyes. I remember her telling me that something was very wrong.

Not a moment later we dashed into the kitchen, wheeling around a corner and pressing ourselves against the wall. My friend stayed completely still and I took a few steps back to keep watch on the other doors. Suddenly, massive green tentacles exploded from the floor, ripped the doors of the room off and wildly flailed around, grabbing anything that it could find. I ran outside, calling back to my friends to keep it contained for just a few minutes longer while I got help.

I ran to an old, abandoned high school baseball field. The only light in the hungry darkness of the night was a single orange streetlight, dim and flickering, that lead me to a dirt pathway near peeling crowd stands. I reached into my shorts for my phone, flipped it open and searched for someone’s name. They could help us.

4:23pm

I’m lying in my bed, on top of the covers, thinking.

It still hasn’t gone away.

I roll onto my side, clutching my small pillow.

How can this change? What can I do?

My tongue swells and I close my eyes.

Right now. But when will ‘now’ come? How can I make it ‘now’ after all this time? I let it go too far, get too deep in my bones.

I pull my knees up more, curling into a ball, protecting myself from outside harm.

I can’t change. I’ve lost.

Firing Into Thin Air

“You have to get out of here.”

I looked down at myself and saw that I was wearing a white cotton dress. There were some purple stains on it, probably from some kind of creature I had slain in the earlier hours. There was also a Colt next to my pinky toe. I looked back to the man speaking to me.

“What for? I can do it just fine,” I replied. He scowled and disappeared behind a corner of the hallway.

I heard screaming and screeching from outside the house. It was bright daylight, but I knew that the time of day made no difference—either way I would be torn apart if I ventured out on my own right now. There were too many of them.

Who “they” were, I didn’t know. I couldn’t see them, because they were so fast that they were invisible to the human eye. That, and they made distractions by banging on windows and doors and roofs and floors while they got inside by other means, so you could never see them.

A few of my comrades were standing behind me, all of them holding whatever they could find as a weapon. I was glad my good friend had a shotgun. Suddenly, a loud ker-THUD! came from the front door, making us all leap up and sprint to the back of the house.

We ran towards a room with a queen-sized bed and glass doors. The windows outside showed that it had fallen to nighttime. Everything was lit in artificial yellow light from shaded lamps on either side of the white bed. The air felt close and cold. The Colt was heavy in my hands as I neared the room.

Just before I stepped inside, a man shot out from the other side of the room, standing and staring at me. He had short dreadlocks and milky blue pupils, and he was wearing ragged jeans and a blue-and-yellow striped long sleeve shirt. There was something very wrong with him, something distinctly evil, but he did not attack me. Instead he informed me that there were more of them coming, and that we would have to outlast the night.

The others flocked behind me as I raised the nose of the Colt to the empty air, listening to the clawing at the front door. A screech came from the side of the house. I was not frightened, but I was trembling with adrenaline. I was worried about what was going to happen to us, and especially worried about my friends.

I woke up.

kontainr

search

 shiver

  wait

   clutch

    leave

     hide

    dark

   hold

  bury

 sink

lie