All of the students clambered off the bus, passing Matt as he just sat there, still staring through the now frosted glass. A handful of bookbags slammed against the back of his head, resonating through his skull, but it didn’t faze him in the slightest. His smile widened as he slowly rose, passing the driver who didn’t even look up. Easing down the stairs, he stepped out into the snow. The wind ripped at him from around the bus, whistling between the buildings as he crossed the ice-covered parking lot and headed toward the main doors of the school.
Hundreds of other kids shoved past him, hurriedly stumbling to their lockers to situate themselves before the first class of the day. Matt just walked straight ahead, the grin etched crisply across his jaw. He could hear the voices of those who passed, taunting him, ridiculing him. The voices came from faces that he knew, as well as from those he didn’t, but the words didn’t even permeate the inner sanctum of his brain. He was impervious to anything they said to him, just turning to glance at them, a blank stare and a twisting smile his only retort.
The white-tiled floors were slick with brown, slushy footprints. Traction was tedious, but he just pressed on, walking slowly through the dimly-lit halls toward his locker, making eye contact with everyone and no one at the same time.
He was liberated. Not only could he not hear the words as they were thrown at him from every direction, but he no longer cared. He was of singular focus. Nothing mattered at all. His gaze just crossed them and he willingly accepted the fact that each and every one of these people was going to die. Many of them by his hand. They could snarl and shout and shove all they liked, but it no longer got beneath his skin. The words just bounced off as he entertained the mental visions of their demise, their bodies lying broken and bleeding in the blackness of his mind.
And it all starts today.
His smile widened at that thought. He popped open his locker and shoved his backpack inside, not even bothering to pull anything out or to grab any books. He just slammed the chipping, blue-painted door of the locker closed and headed down the hallway toward the courtyard. Pressing the lever on the door, he walked out onto the cement patio enclosed between the four separate buildings of the school. A cluster of students lingered in the center by a large metal trashcan, smoking and playing hackey sack. Killing time before the first bell that signaled the start of the day. He pressed past vacuous faces as they hurried to their classes; books tucked beneath their arms and cradled to their chests; heads down to keep the swirling snow out of their eyes.
Matt passed them all without even noticing as he crossed the courtyard, past the one lone deciduous tree that grew from a small patch of dirt in the middle of the concrete, and entered the building at the far end. Bounding down the staircase, he took the first right down a long, darkened hallway, heading straight for the door at the far end. He could see them through the thin, rectangular windows in the doors, huddled off to the side, a cloud of smoke lingering around them in the small cement cove, out of the wind and snow.
His heart began to pound in anticipation, his pulse thudding in his ears. Widening almost painfully for a moment, he forced his smile to fade and gripped the metal bar on the door. Shoving it with a clank, he opened the door and stepped out into the swirling wind.
They all turned to stare at him at once. By the surprised looks on their faces as they either tucked their cigarettes behind their backs or tossed them off into the snow, they hadn’t even seen him coming. There were five of them out there, just as he knew there would be. Scott leaned against the wall to his left; finally exhaling the drag that surprise had lodged in his lungs. Shane Corso was to his left, his wide eyes slowly narrowing. He pulled another smoke from his pack to replace the one he had thrown behind the building.
Jeremy Willis hovered straight ahead of him, looking him up and down. He produced the cigarette he had been hiding behind his back, cocking his head and clenching his jaw. Brian James and Tim Williams leaned against the wall to Matt’s right in their almost identical, matching black leather jackets, both wearing a look of surprise.
“Well, well,” Shane said, stepping forward and standing nose to nose with Matt. “If it isn’t the king faggot himself. What are you doing out here, butt pirate? I thought you knew better than to come out here where we straight guys hang. Shouldn’t you be in the bathroom watching guys peeing or something?”
Matt just looked at him and smiled. In his mind, he could see Shane’s battered body. Blood stained his dark blonde hair, matting it to his dented forehead. His tongue hung limply over the edge of his mouth, his jaggedly broken teeth punching through it as it swelled with the red fluid that ran down his chin and into the collar of his shirt. He could see his own hand, slicing at the flesh on Shane’s face as he grabbed hold of the lip of skin and started to peel…
“Come on guys,” Scott said, interrupting his thoughts.
“You standing up for Liberace here,” Shane said, preparing to step even further forward to bump Matt in the chest with his own. “Just because you…”
He stopped mid-sentence as Jeremy grabbed him by the arm. Shane whirled and fired him a look, and with a slight nod, turned back to Matt with a smirk.
“You know,” Shane said, taking a step back and throwing his arms out to his sides. “This has gotten a little out of hand. We all used to be friends here. Maybe we should, you know…”
“Let bygones be bygones,” Jeremy added, stamping the yellowed butt of his smoke beneath his heel. “I’d say it’s been long enough.”
“What are you talking about?” Brian interrupted. “Dude’s a pillow bit—”
Shane shot him an icy glare, and his words dropped. He just stared down at his snow-covered hightops.
“Jeremy’s right,” Shane said, a forced, toothy grin crossing his face beneath his lowered brow. “It’s been long enough.”
“Can I talk to you guys?” Scott asked quietly. He stared suspiciously at them, a puzzled look etched into his face.
“Don’t sweat it, Scott,” Shane said, his attempt at a pleasant, reassuring glance looking more like the wild-eyed stare of the deranged.
“What we need,” Jeremy said, stepping up, “is someplace private, where we can all just sit down and talk this through. I think enough time has passed that we should all just be able to put this behind us and move on.”
He gave Shane a quick glance, and the two smiled in unison.
“Really?” Scott said, carefully studying them, attempting to verify their intent.
“Oh, yeah,” Shane said, nodding. “After all, we’re going to graduate soon and then all go our separate ways. Why not make the last six months as easy on all of us as possible, and why not try to have some fun in the process?”
“Sounds good,” Matt said, his eyes thinned to slivers, his grin unflinching. “Let’s meet today, get this thing settled once and for all.”
Immensely pleased with themselves, Shane and Jeremy beamed. Tim and Brian looked at each other, definitely out of the loop on this one, but they were willing to go along with whatever, so they just leaned back against the wall and lit up another smoke.
The first bell rang painfully above their heads, echoing around them in the small cement cove. Tim and Brian turned and walked around the corner, heading around the buildings on their way to class so that they could finish their smokes along the way.
“How about we meet at Solstice around eight,” Matt said, staring through Shane and Jeremy, one at a time.
“That old abandoned house out by the convent? Sounds like a great place to meet,” Shane said, turning to Jeremy. “Sound good to you?”
“Perfect,” Jeremy said, his grin widening. He nodded slowly. “Perfect.”
“Eight o’clock then,” Matt said, whirling and opening the door.
He could see Scott’s reflection in the window in the middle of the door, staring quizzically at the other two.
Walking back down the hall, Matt shouldered through the clusters of students lazily lingering outside of their cla
ssrooms trying to take advantage of the last three minutes remaining before the start of the school day. Matt just walked by, refusing to acknowledge their presence with a single glance as he turned and ascended the staircase, bursting through the door into the courtyard. He walked straight through the thinning herds of students. There were only a couple of long-haired hoods in the smoking circle, finishing off the last of their butt as they lamented the start of yet another punitive school day.
Yanking open the door at the end of the yard, he walked straight to his locker and opened it, producing his backpack from within. Slinging it over his shoulder, he strutted straight toward the front doors of the building, tugging the zipper on his black leather jacket down. He turned backward into the door, pressing the bar with his rear end to open it.
“Where do you think you’re going, Mr. Parker?” the principal said, rounding the corner and staring at Matt, his hand on his hip.
Matt shook his head and popped the door open with a thrust of his hips. He placed three fingers above his right brow and saluted as he ducked out the front door and into the blowing snow, the wind threatening to rip his cap straight off of his head.
“Matthew Parker,” the principal snapped, following him out the door, his graying hair blowing straight up in the wind, the snow sticking to his thick gray mustache. “You get back here right now!”
Matt kept on walking, straight through the small, half-circle parking lot in front of the school reserved for the administration’s parking. He stepped up onto the snow-covered sidewalk and strode directly toward the long wall of evergreens close to a hundred yards dead ahead.
“I’m going to have to call your parents!” the principal raged after him into the storm.
Matt smiled and shook his head before bounding off the sidewalk and into the thick, uneven buffalo grass buried beneath six inches of snow, which covered his shoes and the bottoms of his jeans. Finding a small break in the line of foliage, he slipped past the sharp needles and onto a thin path that wound through the foothills, rising and falling as it made its way through Woodmen Valley.
He was getting to know this path like the back of his hand. Whenever things started to get really tough at school, to the point where he could no longer bear the thought of another second within those pale white walls, he just wrote a letter of excuse from his mother and split. He had learned to duplicate her handwriting faultlessly, and those letters had gotten him out of many days, especially recently. And as he had no car and was in the middle of the Air Force Academy, he had been forced to learn his own route home.
The woods were thick, pines and other evergreens pressing against one another, darkening the floor beneath, save for the small gaps of light that filtered through the canopy where the skeletal aspens broke the thick green of the walls of needles. The Rocky Mountains loomed over the tips of the trees directly to the right, the winding path heading straight up a steep, muddy slope.
He recognized this spot. His first time walking this route he had tripped and fallen straight down the hill, the books in his backpack jamming into his ribs from behind as he landed in a twisted pile of humanity at the bottom. Learning from the experience, he had figured out a pattern to the tree trunks, allowing him to brace his feet on one to leap to the other.
Reaching the crest of the hill, he stared down into the small valley below. There was a stream in the very bottom; the surface all but frozen solid, hiding the thin line of water trickling beneath. He was halfway there now; just one more large hill to surpass and he would be there, in the next valley beyond. It was this spot where the Air Force property met with the private landowners beyond. Cadets used this path to slip off of the Academy at night when they couldn’t secure passes, showing up at high school parties and hitting on everything in a skirt. At first it was more than annoying, these older guys showing up from out of nowhere and stealing their dates and what not. But he could understand the allure. An older, college aged, brawny-type guy had to be awfully appealing to a sixteen or seventeen year old girl whose other options consisted of a bunch of scrawny high school kids who drank Keystone straight from the tap, smoking pot from a crumpled tin can. But he hated them. Half of the girls in his school were wearing engagement rings their senior year, most of them destined for heartbreak after they graduated and found out that their rings were nothing more than a tool used by horny Cadets to get what they wanted.
Standing atop the jagged formation of rocks on the summit of the hill, Matt stared down into Woodmen Valley. The wind hummed from the mountains above, the snow blowing straight to his left as it raced down the slope. A white, sparkling layer of snow covered the pastures below, the road invisible in the middle. Off to his left, a small cluster of houses sat in the middle of the woods atop the hill, enormous piles of dirt every quarter mile or so as developers dug holes for foundations. Before long, the whole valley would be full of houses.
At the bottom of the hill, cradled beneath a cluster of trees, an abandoned white house beckoned to him. It was the house that they called “Solstice.” He wasn’t sure who named the house or why, but he speculated that it was the most menacing name some drunken buffoon could come up with on short notice, the only word he knew having to do with witchcraft. The house was said to be filled with evil. Rumors had it a family was hacked to pieces in there, and tunnels ran from the basement all the way to Manitou Springs. Devil worshippers supposedly used those tunnels to drag their sacrifices to and from the convent, which served as their base of operations for the evil they wrought.
All of those stories amused Matt, as the convent had been purchased by private investors and remodeled. It was now a nursing home, and the furthest thing from evil that he had ever seen. Granted, death was surely no stranger to the old castle, but more in a housekeeper-type role than as the sickle-wielding stalker of darkness.
Matt bounded down the hill, hitting the meadow at a dead sprint.
The muscles in his legs ached from dragging his heavy feet through the thick snow. He hadn’t slept at all since the night before last. He was growing increasingly weary, physically, with each passing second, yet his flesh tingled with anticipation. His heart pounded and his mind raced, already beginning to plan the night that he had waited his entire life for, the night where he would fulfill what he hoped was his destiny.
Standing in front of the house, he stared at the cracking paint on the exposed wood. One of the windows on the front of the house had been broken and boarded up, but all of the others were still in working order. There was a brand new lock box on the front door, making it impossible to turn the knob, but that really didn’t matter, as he and all of his friends knew how to get in anyway.
There was something about the house, almost a life energy, drawing its pulse from the land around it. It resonated darkness. The air about it always seemed a few degrees cooler, the wind not daring to touch its crumbling exterior. There was something inside of it, something that made his hands tremble and his heart begin to pound every time he got near to it.
He was filled with a brimming sense of longing. All he wanted to do was get in there and set things up the way he wanted them... and then bring on the night. There was someone, something behind the walls, waiting for him, watching him, or perhaps it was the house itself. Either way, he knew that there was something else around him, wishing for the darkness to fall.
The whole house emanated evil. It was a coppery taste on the tongue, a stagnant smell in the senses, a cold, yet fiery sensation that raised the hackles on the arms and caused the head to ache.
He was home.
Wandering around the left side of the house, he kicked at the snow drifted up against the bowing wood, clearing a path to find the small cellar window. Kneeling, he scraped at the ice surrounding the framed glass until he was able to pry up the window. Lowering himself to his belly, he slipped beneath the glass and into the pitch-black basement. He grabbed onto the sill of the window and lowered himself to the dirt floor.
Thin lines of water ran
down the cement walls onto the dampened earth floor. Drops of water echoed through the empty room as they fell from the cracked floorboards into the puddles eroded into the ground. It smelled like a combination of wet moss and mildew, the dust lingering only long enough to form the cobwebs that swayed gently overhead from the ceiling.
There was an ancient furnace next to a small hot water heater at the base of the stairs ahead. Neither had seen a spark of electricity in more than two decades the way he saw it, and somehow were coated with the dirt from the floor around them. A small circle of black beckoned to him from behind the furnace. It was a small tunnel, rumored to be the one that led straight across town beneath the city. Once, he had crawled inside and shimmied his way about five feet before being overwhelmed by the nearly paralyzing swell of claustrophobia and had been forced to hastily retreat. He always meant to bring a flashlight along, but until today, none of the stops here had really ever been planned.
Over the course of the last year he had spent a lot of time here, making it almost like a home away from home. No one ever bothered him here, leaving him to sit on the floor and read as much as he wanted, but his favorite past time was just studying the house. Every nook and cranny told a different story, every faded bit of graffiti dating itself. He often tried to picture exactly what was going on at the time of the writings, but every time he did, it was something different.
Feeling along the wall with his right hand, Matt eased toward the stairs leading up to the floor above. His footfalls echoed hollowly in the dingy room, the steps creaking, threatening to crack into splinters beneath his weight.
A thin ray of light blinded him from beneath the door to the kitchen as he ascended. Shoving open the door, he stood in the empty room. Piles of plaster lined the baseboards from where they had fallen in chunks from the walls. The wooden joists inside the walls peeked through every few feet, the frayed wiring visible within the recesses of the aging walls. Something moved within tattered gaps, something alive, scurrying through the piles of dust and debris. No one had ever seen them, anything living at all within this house, but they were always there, scraping at the inside of the drywall, powdering its chalky surface.
The Bloodspawn Page 8