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The centipede like horror monster stormed like a ravaging bull, shots pinged into his eyes like flicked coins. A deafening roar flew out and slammed into the walls, enough so to shake the scattered collections of glass shards hanging by the now empty window frames, then blast into their eardrums.
Logan calls out over the screeching of legs – about a thousand of them – on creaking, limestone floors: “Its left eye is out!”
Taylor moves with haste; her inner monologue must’ve turned to a mass chanting of action. Logan is close to being knocked upside of his head by the backside of Taylor’s rifle; she sweeps the instrument off of her back making a circular motion with her arm and yelling, causing alarm to the group as her calls rumble in their already close to damaged eardrums.
“Keep shooting. We need to injure it as much as we can,” her voice is so firm that it could come close to deceiving them into believing she was being ration rather than having made the decision off of a scrap of adrenaline and anger from last night’s pain.
Claps ravage the air, making it shake with motion. Logan matches the tone of Taylor, though shaky and most likely more with well-structured thoughts preceding his words. He breathes and pauses before speaking: “If the brain is located behind the eyes, then we might be able to at least paralyse it if we aim there.”
A storm of bangs and echo of pops run from Taylor and Logan’s guns, slightly behind them Ashlyn clutches her ear defenders with Aiden adding force from his hands on top of that, even then with her ear plugs, then ear defenders with the resistance of her and Aiden’s hands on top of that, she can still hear the warfare that is their guns. Taylor doesn’t let up, her shots slow like the last drops of rain after a storm, Aiden signalling that it’s probably fine to stop and trying not to denote that, though they were all thinking it, Taylor had finally gone mad. He speaks and offers a thumb up: “Yeah, uh- Tay, I think it stopped moving.”
She lowers her gun with a quivering arm, Logan taps her hand and talks with a cadence close to fear but sounding more like concern: “We need to hurry in case it recovers.” After, they all travel down the hall following after Taylor to the coach’s office.
They spread themselves across the room, everyone but Aiden being productive as they can. Ben was knelt to Tyler’s right hand side, pulling his bandages to fit better and adjusting the length with a pair of scissors that are clearly more well-tuned for cutting cheap paper than medical usage. Ashlyn covers the front end of the desk, Taylor the side, and Logan takes the metal cabinets behind, Aiden observes the scene from the door, occasionally leaning out the side to peer down the hallway, but more often, playing with his knife and trying to annoy Ashlyn rather than letting her focus. Taylor airs frustration at the missing keys they were looking for: “Coach must’ve moved them again!”
Ashlyn responds with a clarifying question: “Does he move them often?”
Taylor again shows her well just annoyances: “Yeah, because idiots like Jay and Conner keep messing with them!” the same people that picked up Tyler on the first day of the school year and threw his shoe into a wall, Ashlyn resists rolling her eyes at what she considered very predictable behaviour from the two, she had hears them often in school, usually yelling or making unnecessary noise during breaks and in between lessons.
Aiden feels a burst of dry humour and drops some true comedic genius, one (he and only him) might say: “I feel a minor sense of Déjà vu.” He references a few days ago when they had looked throughout Ashlyn’s house to try and find the keys to her parents’ jeep. He flicks the knife in his wrist.
Ashlyn tilts her head to talk in Aiden’s direction: “We have three minutes left.” She perks her ears, “Aiden, there’s a straggler.”
His eyes flick outward as he responds: “Yeah, I can hear it running.” He gets a grip on his knife and jerks his body, his arm slings into the phantom and tears through its jaw spreading black gunk onto the floor as well as up his sleeve and onto his blade, a small rush runs through him as he confirms its death in a sing-song tune: “Got it!”
Ashlyn looks forward doubtfully as her ears prickle, “Are there anymore?” Aiden leans out the door hanging onto its frame.
“I can’t see any?” he faulters for a second before the building rumbles and knocks him out of the room. All of them are pushed off their feet, Taylor is knocked into the metal cabinet, and Logan falls in the opposite direction, releasing a yelp. Ashlyn yells out:
“Everyone, get under something!”
The ceiling cracks like an egg into a bowl, caving into the centre of the room, Aiden was disadvantaged, he was too far from cover.
“Shoot…” He mutters under the commotion, only Ashlyn hears it, Ben can just tell he said something of the like as per his habit of almost swearing though the so called “inconvenience” he is usually reacting to is quite literally the same risk as him leaping off of a building. Aiden attempted to run, and he attempted to avoid it, more than he ever had done. He tried.
Instead, every drop of stone fell like hail, overwhelming his senses until the largest ones came. He felt it like a headache before losing his balance, he missed the warm trickle of blood, he missed the crackling sound, he missed the sharp intake of air after considering his regrets, he missed the solitude before going back home and claiming nothing had happened, he missed the usual adrenaline he craved after such an incident.
Ashlyn felt it in his place. She heaved the roof off of him after leaping to give aide as if the sky had truly fell, leaping through mountains of rubble and scratching at the table leg when she watched him crumple into a weak mess of flesh and cloth, buried as if he had already died. It must have been instant when she touched him the only warmth radiating from his body was the sorrowing, crimson mud produced by his head; all the rest was cold and blanketed in pebbles. Two crevices bore into his skull, one caused by rock, the other by thrill.
It broke her to see that smile.
Tyler had been disengaged in his pain and close paralysation, yet he watched and even strained to hear them from under Ben’s shielding arm, now littered with cuts the size of coins. Logan sat blind as his glasses fogged up almost entirely, a mix of dust and sweat. Taylor hauls him up knocking stray rocks towards either side of him, taking the lead in a rare moment of shock from Ashlyn.
Ashlyn renders what she had seen, his face was warped, more so than usual, somehow worse than how Tyler describes Aiden’s face. Black shadows had wrapped around him, and his smile had stretched so far it looked like it had been cut into his mouth. His eyes rolled back unnaturally to stare at her, they had fireworks of red vines pulling themselves through the previously white spaces. The shine of his eye was caused by teardrops instead of his usually gleam of happiness. The memory refuses to slip from her, she sees blood rolling down his temples, the same colour of his eyes.
Taylor’s yell strikes through the air, hurting more than the sound of the roof cracking:
“Come on! Get him under the table!"
Taylor strains herself to pick him up. She can hardly feel his head bobbing as she runs with him, the shift in his weight is completely unpredictable. She goes forward and his limbs – being completely limp – are swept up in the force of Taylor’s motion. Bricks pop against the floor each time replaying the cracking sound that they had all heard when Aiden’s head get struck by a bowling ball sized chunk of rubble.
In Aiden’s eyes there is nothing from both an inside and outside view, he was in that moment, dead. There was nothing that he could see or hear, say or do any longer. Aiden constantly craves to talk and to feel, but in what he enjoys he finds what he most feared, emptiness.
Taylor had only just pulled him under cover before the shift. Ashlyn couldn’t shake the image of him, Taylor was spared having never looked down to see his face, but she had felt his frozen veins and empty body and had his blood roll down her shirt. In only a day, Aiden and Tyler had both died.