Read The Shattered Genesis (Eternity) Online
Authors: T. Rudacille
The Shattered Genesis (Eternity) (10 page)
“It hasn’t done anything to try to hurt us…”
“Besides trying to break the window on the first night! What’s stopping it from breaking in here and… who knows, Quinn?! Do
you
know?!”
“How would I know, Allie? What, you think I have some sort of connection to it?”
“It’s always looking at you. It’s always looking directly at you! It’s never looked at me the way it looks at you!”
“Are you really happy about that?! Are you real
ly happy that it wants me?! And it has totally looked at you!”
“Did not! It smiled at you night before last!”
“It was smiling at both of us because it knew that we had really thought it was gone!”
“See! You do know what it’s thinking!”
“I’m just guessi
ng!”
“Well, maybe you should just go. Maybe you should go home and we can see whose house it shows up at. Then we’ll know who it’s after!”
“And then what?” I asked her, bringing my voice back to normal.
She stared at me, her eyes hostile now. She didn’t
answer, but I knew: If it was after me, she was saved. If it was after me, she’d be relieved. She’d rather me suffer whatever that thing had in store for us alone than for us to face it together.
I was young and idealistic, as my parents said. I would ha
ve done anything to protect her and if that meant dying in her place, then so be it. How could that feeling have been one-sided? How could she not have wanted to reciprocate such selflessness? The short answer is that her mind was on par with her physical
age; she was a self-interested teenage girl terrified to die before she could live. I will explain the long answer later.
“Fine. Face it on your own, then.” I muttered, stung by her words and what they meant for us.
I was ridiculously melodramatic in tho
se days. I stormed out, vowing never to go back. If I had been half as smart as I thought I was, I would have stayed. For the rest of my life, I will carry the fact that what happened next was my fault.
XXX
There was an ear-splitting whistling that cause
d me to fall to the ground, covering my ears. I
looked up to see others crumpling around me. After several painful moments, my ears were soothed with an ethereal silence, a calm before the storm. Then came the blast. For a too-short second, I saw the wave
of fire coming towards me. As it consumed me, my entire body burnt and I saw clearly my flesh being blasted from my bones…
I awoke, yelling out and slashing my arms in the air to hold off what could never be stopped. My entire body was dripping sweat and
I wiped at it furiously with trembling hands.
It had been so real. There had been no other reality, just the one where I met my demise. Unlike when we first saw the creature outside the window, I couldn’t rationalize the dream away. It was real and it wou
ld happen. But when?
I didn’t know.
My phone rang about ten minutes later, some obnoxious ring-tone that I can’t remember. I looked at the caller ID to see Alice’s name.
“What?” I asked abruptly, rubbing my eyes.
All I heard was her breathy sobs on the
other end of the phone and immediately, an alertness came over me that shook all thoughts of the most horrifying nightmare I had ever had from my head.
“Allie, what’s going on? Is it back?” I didn’t wait for her answer; I was already pulling my shoes on.
She continued crying for a moment.
“Alice!” I exclaimed, climbing out of my window with my car keys in hand.
“Quinn…” She whispered, “I let it in!”
XXX
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. Any
one 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 trying to make it through before the light turned red. The flash of the traffic camera provoked images from the dream to f
lash 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 tree 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.
D
espite believing that, I walked into the house, 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; 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 u
p 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.
“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 wa
tched 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 befor
e 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 who was stomping the ground now 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 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 wi
th 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, horri
fying 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 b
efore 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 k
illed 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 long
er 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 desperate 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 into the face of her mother.
XXX
The problem with living in a neighborhood where houses are practically
built right on top of each other is that the smallest disturbance, the smallest suggestion of something being out of the ordinary, alerts everyone. I don't think that Alice's neighbors would have seen the creature even if they
stared right at the house wh
ile she was outside. I know they didn't hear the loud, screeching noises that she made every night. But they did hear the blast of the shotgun. As I held Alice, trying to calm her down, I heard a knock on the door upstairs.
“Oh my God… oh my God…” Alice w
as crying.
“Babe, there’s someone at the door.” I told her softly and she pulled away from me, looking even more distressed.
“Do you think...” She hiccuped as new sobs took hold of her. “Do you think it’s my dad? Do you think he’s one of those things, to
o?”
“I don’t know. Just stay here.” I instructed her urgently, “I’ll be right back.”
“No! Don’t leave me!” She exclaimed, jumping up and grabbing my hand, “Don’t leave me with her!”
“Alice, you have to stay here. Just for a minute. I have to get this
person to go away. Just stay here. I’ll be five minutes. I promise.”
She nodded, but sat by the door, her back to the body.
I sprinted upstairs, ready to fight another one of those horrible beasts. Alice’s words hung in my head like a bad song I couldn’t
shake; what if her dad was one of them, too?
“Open up! Police!” A thunderous voice boomed from behind the front door.