Chapter Text
Liz sighed as she picked up her phone. It was Daniqa.
"Hello?" Her voice sounded angry, and it was obvious to the receiving end of the call.
"I'm super sick right now. Can you postpone the flight for another day? I'd really appreciate it..." Daniqa had a penchant for calling in sick for fun, but Liz didn't want to take the risk of dealing with vomit on a 4-hour flight. She had a weak stomach anyways.
"Sure" Liz hung up and proceeded to change the flight date, complaining. As she finished, she settled down for a nice, long nap.
Burning. Everything was burning, and falling. Falling and burning? She reached out her hand for Daniqa and the others, standing so close, but Daniqa's body was broken, her mouth was twisted into a silent scream, her joints all wrong. Everyone else's faces were blurred, as if they were falling and she couldn't focus on them. She cried, but no noise came out.
She woke up gasping for breath. Tears flowed down her face, as she processed her nightmare. She tried a grounding technique. What could she see? Her dark bedroom. What could she hear? Birds chirping, the ventilation running, her phone ringing.
She stood up to go answer the phone. Couldn't she ever get a break?
"Hello?" She asked, sleepily.
"Liz, the plane we were supposed to fly on just blew up!" Daniqa's voice quivered.
"Nice try Dani, but could we please not do this? I just had a nightmare and your teasing doesn't help" Liz muttered, yawning.
"Lizzie, it's not a joke," Daniqa's response was pleading and choked. "The news is covering it right now. Turn on the TV." Daniqa hung up, leaving Liz confused.
She trudged into the living room, tired and thirsty. As she poured a glass of orange juice out, she grabbed the remote and flipped to the news channel.
"Breaking News: An airplane heading for @#$&%&#@& has just been confirmed to have exploded mid-flight. Bits of shrapnel have washed up on shore, but no confirmed survivors have been reported."
Liz dropped the orange juice. The glass shattered.
She had come so close to death. All it took was one single little call, and her life was saved. Daniqa maybe not the smartest part of the friendgroup, but she saved their asses.
The group was scheduled to meet up for a shopping trip later, to put some normal back into life. Liz put on eyeliner and brushed out her hair, detangling knot after knot from her hair. Sitting on her couch eating an apple, the only thing that brought her back to her senses was the sound of her friends' SUV honking outside.
"COMING!" She gathered her essentials and ran out the door into the bleak atmosphere outside. Daniqa, Hunter, Leslie, and Cicie all were packed into the vehicle.
As Liz jumped into the middle left seat, everybody stared at her.
"You ok, Lizzie?" Leslie asked.
"Fine. Just tired, is all," was all Liz could say.
As the friends pulled into the parking lot, Liz could tell something was off.
Microscopic cracks formed in the road, which only Liz noticed. As quickly as they appeared, they retracted, their center of origin seeming to come from the mall.
Daniqa dragged Liz off to shop for clothes on the 3rd story, as the others waited at the ground level, snacking on pretzels and making bets on who would spend the most. Almost all bets were on Daniqa, as she loved buying clothes, and would try to find something cute for everybody in the group. Only Leslie betted on Liz, seeing as how Liz mainly only bought one or two things, but they were high quality and expensive.
As Liz and Daniqa joked, time went on and on. A few hours later, the girls' shopping spree had finished.
Daniqa was, unsurprisingly, the one to spend the most money. After checking out, the girls decided to lean over the handrails to get a good selfie with the ambient lights.
The metal rails gently creaked as Daniqa put her weight on them. Liz took her phone back, and playfully pushed Daniqa into the rail. That's where everything went wrong.
Small cracks had formed in the floor. With Daniqa's added weight as she stumbled backwards, the floor shattered along the fault lines.
Liz felt like she saw what happened next in slow motion.
Daniqa toppled backwards, sprawled in a glorious pose, reaching out for Liz in her final living moments. She fell through the air, past the second story, down to ground level. Metal railing hit the ground with a loud reverberating tone, like music at a concert, boosted to the maximum.
As Daniqa impacted, her body hit the floor with a loud thud covering soft crunches. Her limbs were sprawled out, her neck lay twisted to the side, far past what the living human's neck could do. Her knees angled at odd positions, and her ankles were broken.
The scent of pretzels wafted through the air, to Liz's nose, as she stared down at the lifeless mangled corpse of a friend who had just been alive seconds ago. The shock hit her, she was responsible for the death. Dani's blood was metaphorically on her hands, yet physically the blood poured from the corpse's broken form. Bone and flesh and blood was all that remained of her friend. Liz felt herself process it all. She had always been the sane one of the group.
She wondered how long that title would last.