Oh god! she thought.
The beast growled deep in the barrel of its’ chest.
Kimberly didn’t hesitate. She spun back around, sprinting headlong for the gym.
“You belong to Him!” it shrieked.
Kimberly mewled, terrified, taking two steps at a time. How can it speak?!? She prayed, once she was inside, safe, her tall, good-looking Samaritan would still willing to lend her a hand.
From behind, she could hear the hellish hounds’ nails scraping on the black top of the parking lot.
It was coming, fast!
Kimberly hit the doors, moving too fast to stop in time.
No, no, no, no, no, no! She fumbled for the over-sized door latch, smarting her knuckles in the process.
“You are HIS!”
It was close, too close.
Frantic, she pulled down on the handle, unclasping the latch bolt from the striker plate, tugging on the door so hard, she nearly popped her arms of out their sockets. Twirling like a ballerina, she whirled through the opening in the doorway, barely wide enough to admit her, striking her knee against the metal framing. Her textbook flew from her grasp, landing with a resounding Slap! on the tiled flooring of the vestibule of the gym.
With all of her strength, she slammed the heavy door shut at the last possible second.
The beast pounded into the door from the outside, rattling the entire egress in its’ hinges.
“Leave me alone!” she screamed, heaving to capacity.
The hound didn’t smack into the door a second time. Instead, over Kimberly’s gasps, it laughed anew. “You will love his cold embrace…,” it whispered like her lover.
She shuddered with revulsion.
The laughter continued for a long… long time.
~~~~~~~~<<<<<<{ ☼ }>>>>>>~~~~~~~~
~ 4 ~
Misgivings
Thursday, November 18th, 3:45pm…
Elena looked up from her packet of homework, her eyes searching the face of her older brother, Anthony. He was busy pounding the keys of his laptop, sitting in the chair next to hers, in the family’s office where all of them did their homework after school.
Although he was half-turned away from her, she could still make out his thin lips and prominent nose, nestled between the high ridges of his cheekbones. If he were facing her, she knew she would’ve seen the narrowness of his face, ending in somewhat pointed chin that, of late, was producing a decent amount of fuzzy, crinkly hair. He was seven years her senior and tall for sixteen. Already, his frame stretched over 5 feet 9 inches and still - as her father put it - he was growing like a weed. He was a long and lanky boy with broad shoulders, forewarning, when he reached manhood, he’d make him a formidable figure. For now, though, it seemed as if his muscles were stretched just a bit too tight. This, in turn, magnified his overall length and thinness, accentuating the largeness of his hands and feet in the process. He wore his hair long, combed back over his head. It was perpetually in a half-pony tail, exposing a large forehead, dotted with a number of pimples, belying the full-blown onset of puberty. Unlike Elena, Anthony wasn’t dressed in a uniform; the High School, he had attended since the fall, didn’t require that of its’ students. Rather, he wore a pair of blue, skinny-jeans and a long-sleeved thermal shirt emblazoned with a twisted dragon across the chest. Over that, he donned a light-blue colored jacket, matching his pants, but was otherwise plain. Upon his feet, he had put on a pair of partially unlaced Chuck Taylor, high-top sneakers, one of the newest to hit the store shelves this year. They were made entirely of shining black nylon with red eyelets and black nylon shoestrings.
“What do you want?” asked Anthony, obviously annoyed, once he’d noticed Elena was staring at him from the corner of his eye. He wasn’t willing to give her his undivided attention, because he had more important things upon which to waste his time.
“I was just thinking,” replied the girl.
“Well, think with your stare somewhere else.”
“How can you think with your eyes, dork?” she uttered indignantly, jutting her chin forward, stressing her point.
“Whatever, Ellie, I’m busy here, so go mooncalf in the other room,” was his answer as his fingers continued to play across the keyboard of his laptop.
“You’re not even supposed to be playing video games before doing your homework, anyway. I’m gonna tell, Dad,” challenged Elena, already making to get up, to do what she’d threatened.
Anthony breathed a huge sign of resignation, because pulling his eyes from the screen was such a great sacrifice. “Look, I called a quick clan meeting right now, because we’re gonna have to figure out a strategy when we attack that Raid Boss later on tonight. You remember, right, the one I was telling you about?”
She nodded.
“You know, if we don’t have a good plan, he’ll morph again and kick the living crap out of us. We’ll have nothing to show for it, except being massacred by that stronger version of himself that no one has ever killed.”
Elena quickly sat down, very interested, her threat forgotten.
“You do remember the last time?” he asked.
“Are you talking about the time that huge guy with the real big horns turned into that demon-wolf-man thing that killed your party in like three hits?” chuckled Elena, recalling how angry Anthony had been over losing the battle so quickly. It should’ve taken well over an hour to complete.
Anthony nodded his head, shaking it slightly from side to side. “Yeah that’s the time. I lost my +6 earring in the process. The freaking thing cost me like 12.5 million bones to craft,” explained the boy. “That sure pissed me off.” He face wrinkled ruefully at the memory.
“So what are you going to do this time?” she asked, genuinely interested in the massively online game Anthony played religiously. It was a game most of the males – and one female - in her family played year after year - Lineage II.
Anthony smiled and leaned closer toward his sister. “This time were gonna Zerg that fool,” he whispered conspiratorially.
To Elena, it was as if the monster within the game could overhear what they were saying about its eminent demise. Maybe it could make plans to counter the pending onslaught? This, despite the fact that he - the monster - was merely a sequence of code on a server somewhere in Korea. Or, maybe it was Texas. Elena couldn’t remember which.
“Zerg?” she bleated, having never heard a word like that before. “What the heck does that mean?”
“It’s game-speak. It describes a horde of four parties, each with eight players, working as a unit. Together, it’s called, a Zerg. Everyone bombs on a single monster, or mob of monsters, with a common goal in mind. In this case, it means our entire clan and a few of our allies are banding together to kill that Horny-headed bastard,” informed Anthony, as he resume his online chat with the other clan members. “If it works out as it should, then we should get some mad drops.”
“Does he drop only weapon enchants when he dies or does he drop other things?” inquired Elena, wanting to show her brother that she did indeed know some things about the game.
“According to some of the forums out there, he’ll drop just about any high-level item in the game, so the whole Zerg should benefit from it,” he answered. He quickly typed in a few more messages, smiling down at the screen of his laptop. “We could make a very decent profit, if all goes well. The extra cash will enable us to outfit all of our lower level characters. Everyone is pretty excited about that prospect.”
“What time are you guys gonna….Zerg that fool?” she asked, giggling at the strange sounding word, bouncing her pencil between her thumb and forefinger.
“I think around eight tonight.”
“Can I watch?” Elena tried not to sound too enthusiastic. She didn’t want Anthony to think she was pleading.
“We’ll see,” smirked Anthony. Suddenly, he reached out to tickle Elena on her side. “So, goofball, what were you thinking about with your eyes?”
Elena’s smil
e was broad and her laughter was heartfelt. Her brother might be a pain in the butt sometimes, but every once and a while, he let her know he really did listen to her. He made her feel important in those times. She knew, deep down, she was important to him also. He just hid it very well.
Typical!
“Well,” began Elena, “at school today, we had a new girl show up for our class.”
“What’s wrong with that? Did she have buck-teeth or something?” Anthony joked.
Elena couldn’t help but laugh aloud. “No! She didn’t have buck-teeth,” she replied, trying to stifle her laughter behind the back of her hand. She wanted to be irritated and mad. She didn’t want to laugh, but she failed, miserably. Anthony could always make her laugh, especially when she didn’t want to.
“Okay, she had one eye?”
“No.”
“She smelled like a camel?”
“No, it wasn’t anything like that. Now stop it!” blurted Elena slightly out of breath, her small chest heaving from her inability to stop giggling.
“Well, what’s got your panties in a bunch?”
“My WHAT?” exclaimed the little girl, her eyes almost popping out of her skull.
“Never mind, go ahead and tell me,” answered Anthony, shaking his head in resignation for the second time.
“Well, we had this new girl today in class, she came from Scandinavia –.”
“Her arms must be tired from all that swimming,” interrupted her brother, laughing himself, quite proud of his joke.
“Tony, stop it!” yelled Elena, her hands balled at her sides. She stomped a foot on the rug-covered floor.
He merely waved for her to continue.
“Anywaaaaay,” began the girl. “She came from that faraway country and was dressed kinda weird for school, you know. She wasn’t in uniform. She wore this funky ribbon-thing around her waist.”
Anthony thought on this for a bit. “That doesn’t sound all that bad to me. I mean, she come from across the ocean, so she’s gonna have different ways of doing things than we do, right?”
“I guess,” thought the girl aloud. “Her name is Nixy –.”
“What kinda name is that?” It was Anthony’s turn to exclaim.
“I don’t know… Scandinavian, maybe. Duh!” was Elena’s snide reply.
“Whatever. It still sounds pretty lame to me.”
“Yeah, most of the kids in our class were pretty surprised when the teacher told us her name, but they stayed quiet.” Anthony just nodded as Elena continued. “She talks different too. You know, she uses words that other kids don’t use and stuff like that. Plus, she said she lived on top of the hill.”
Anthony chuckled again at that. “At the top of what hill?” he asked quickly, in-between gurgles of laughter and bouts of furious typing upon his the keyboard of his laptop.
“On this hill, where we live,” answered the girl.
“You mean at the top of Milbur Drive?”
“I thought that’s what she meant at first, but when Mikalah and I asked her what street, she said that she just lived at the top. You know no street or anything. That’s what I thought was really weird,” offered Elena, shrugging, obviously confused by Nixy’s strange answers to otherwise simple questions.
“You know what makes that statement even weirder?” said Anthony leaning forward, his eyes locking on Elena’s own pair. He was no longer interested in making her laugh.
“What?” asked the girl somewhat tentative to know.
“There aren’t any houses at the top of this hill,” was the retort.
Elena didn’t even attempt to hide her surprise. “I know, so what was she talking about? But, if she does live up there, then what does she live in?” Elena’s voice gradually began to squeak as if her vocal cords had disappeared with each uttered word. She was losing resonance.
Anthony only shrugged.
“Hey, you guys, getting your homework done?”
“DAD!” yelled Elena.
Brother and sister alike jumped up as if someone had screamed bloody murder. They stared like idiots at the incredulous expression worn by the father, who was now half-in and half-out of the room, his hand on the door jam.
“What the hell was that about?” asked their father, a brief chortle escaping through the side of his mouth. “Did I startle you or something?”
“Hell yeah,” began Anthony, “we were just talking and you came in all Rambo and scared the crap out of us.” He picked up his laptop to put it in his backpack. It had been lying on the floor beside his feet.
“Okay. Well, ‘do your homework if you want to live,’” said their father, his face twisted in a caricature of that famous actor, right index finger pointed in their general direction.
“Dad, that’s Arnold Schwarzenegger not Rambo,” said Anthony tersely.
Elena laughed and returned to her pile of exercises.
“Oh,” their dad muttered absently scratching his baldhead. Still in thought, he turned as if to go, and then stopped abruptly. “And hey, Tony, stay off that damn game until you’re completely done with your homework and chores.”
Elena giggled, but kept her focus on the sheets of paper in front of her.
“You understand what I’m talking about, right?” asked her father. “I want it completely done – not half or almost or anything other than… done-done, you got it?”
“Okay, Dad. I got it.” Anthony typed a few last words on his laptop. Then he logged off the game and placed the portable computer to the side, pulling out one of his folders from his backpack and began to organize himself.
“Good.” For the second time, their father made as if to leave, but stopped once more. “Where’s Mikalah?”
Anthony just shrugged, but Elena offered, “She said she was going to feed the rabbit before she started her homework, but that was a long time ago.”
“Alright, thanks.”
Elena watched the retreating figure of her father for a bit, smiling at the big t-shirt, sweats, and slippers he always wore when he was relaxing at home. In the not too far distance, she heard him yell.
“Mikalah, where are you? You’ve got other things to do, so stop messing around with that damn rabbit!”
Silently, Elena hoped her sister wasn’t lolly-gagging too much.
~~~~~~~~<<<<<<{ ☼ }>>>>>>~~~~~~~~
~ 5 ~
Outside
Thursday, November 18th, Minutes Before…
Upon arriving at the house after school, Mikalah was suddenly struck by an errant thought. Instantly, it made her worry. With all the hustle and bustle at the end of the weekend and beginning of a new week, they’d forgotten to feed their pet rabbit, Mr. Patas.
Oh man, she thought uneasily, I hope Mr. Patas is okay! He eats like a pig, so he is probably starving by now.
As quickly as she could, she shed her sweater and threw it along with her backpack on the couch in the living room, adjacent to the foyer. She stood up straight, rubbing her palms on her navy “uniform” pants as her brother came into the house behind her. He immediately turned right, down the hallway, making his way to the office where they usually did their homework. Elena and their father had brought up the rear. Her Dad locked the door and engaging the dead bolt as he passed the threshold of their home.
“Alright, first order of business is to get your homework done and then we’ll have some after school snacks,” announced their father as he made his way down the same hallway as Anthony. He was headed toward the master suite the back of the house, though. Not the office.
“Okay, Dad,” answered Elena as she dropped her sweater on the same couch as Mikalah. She looked quizzically at her younger sister. “What’s wrong with you?” she asked with raised eyebrows.
“Nothing, you weirdie, I’m just gonna feed Mr. Patas. I’ll be back with you and Tony in a minute,” Mikalah replied somewhat testily. She was more than a bit anxious at the idea their pet rabbit might’ve been starved to death.
“What’s the big rush?
We always feed him after homework and snacks,” reasoned Elena. “And besides, he eats like a cow. We spoil him too much. He could probably have no food for like a week and still be the same old, fat Mr. Patas.”
How would you like not being fed for a week, you jerk?!? Mikalah thought, but didn’t voice her opinion. “Well, I don’t want him to be too hungry, and besides, he might be out of water,” Mikalah retorted, undeterred from her initial intentions. She’s only acting this way, because she doesn’t have anyone around to impress, the freakin’ brown-noser!
“Whatever, dude, just don’t take too long, because if Dad comes out of his room and you haven’t started your homework, he’s gonna get mad,” warned Elena with a snooty shake of her head. She grabbed her backpack and made to go to the office, after their brother.
Mikalah tilted her head slightly to the right, shrugging at the same time. “It won’t take long,” she uttered at Elena’s retreating back. Little-Miss-Know-it-all! thought Mikalah.
She made her way to the kitchen, down the same hallway, only in the opposite direction as the rest of her family. There, she went directly to the cabinet to the left of those underneath the sink. It was where they kept Mr. Patas’s gourmet-blended pellets, alongside the food for their fish and their two guinea pigs. As quickly as her small fingers could negotiate the ponderous bag of feed, she dipped a plastic, eight-ounce coffee mug into it and pulled forth a full scoop for the rabbit. Standing, she pivoted to her right and made her way through the dining room, then through the play room, and finally through the sliding doors, leading to the back yard. She walked across the covered patio straight toward the cinder block wall, marking the end of her family’s property. She strode up to the habitat of Mr. Patas, nestled against the wall itself. His cage - built by their father - was actuality a combination of a number of cages wired and nailed together until they forged a veritable rabbit complex. Wherein, Mr. Patas could hide or climb or run or jump. It was constructed to give him as much freedom of movement as possible.
The Unwanted Winter - Volume One of the Saga of the Twelves Page 5