Winds Of The Apocalypse

by Novak, Karina

  “I’ll call mom!” He said to himself, deciding to follow his mother’s orders. He reached for the handle and yanked it down but the door didn't open, Jon tried to open the door again and again but it was useless. The metal was bend in, jammed from the force of the blow it received from the road and yanking on it was completely pointless in the strength of a seven year old.

  “C’mon!!”

  Jon pulled harder, refusing to give up on the only thing that could help him.

  “Stupid door! Open up already! Agghhh!” He fell again to the ground, crying and frustrated. There was no use, he couldn't do it by himself, no one was coming for them and his father wasn't waking up to save him. He was alone.

  “What am I going to do now?” He asked, sniffing and trying to stop crying as he stood up again, looking around at the open road and the wind blowing through his shoulder-length hair as his body shuddered from the cold of the night.

  He slipped to the ground, waiting in silence, sitting by the ruined car while the wind picked up around him. The cold was becoming unbearable and Jon could feel the first drops of rain. He couldn't just continue to sit there, he would surreally die before morning, he was sure of that.

  Deciding to try again he got up and looked at the abandoned road behind him. He balled his fists and gathered his courage to go call for help on his own but as he began stepping away from the car, attempting not to look at his seemingly dead father he felt something grab at his ankle, pulling his back.

  Jon looked down and almost fainted in terror, screaming his lungs out at the sight before his little eyes.

  A skeleton hand had crawled from under the car and was now tightly holding onto his trembling ankle. Actually, it only resembled a hand because Jon knew that nothing human could ever look like that, it just couldn't, not even in his wildest dreams.

  The hand was long, brown and awfully resembled a cockroach’s feeler, a part of it anyway. The way it was moving and the lack of skin on it, it looked like it was about to snap at any moment. However it had a strong grip on him, and it was too strong for Jon to shake it off.

  Jon screamed again, making an attempt to run for it but the feeler-like hand yanked hard on his foot, sending his body crashing down to the cold hard ground, smacking him against the asphalt. Jon screamed again, his body hitting the cold ground. He felt hot, sticky leagued pouring from the side of his head as his vision clouded.

  At that moment, when the sound of the little body hitting the ground rang through the air, Greg stirred in his sit and had finally opened his eyes.

  With his half-closed eyes he saw a hooded figure lifting the unconscious body of his son and looking straight at him through the cover of darkness. It let out such a horrid sound that Greg feared his head was going to explode just from hearing it.

  Greg tried to move but the loss of blood and the blows to his body that he sustained in the crash overcame him. He unwillingly drifted back into nothingness, whispering his son’s name.

  The hooded figure carried Jon to the edge of the abyss, it looked down and then at the boy in its arms as he begun to stir, realization evident in his features. The creature watched him open his eyes and his mouth to scream and then with a high pitched shriek they were both gone, lost in the pit.

  After a while a truck driver that happened to be driving by in the early hours of the morning spotted Greg in the half ruined car and called for help.

  They came just in the nick of time to save Greg but by then all the blood left by Jon on the asphalt was gone, washed away by the rain. So were the monster’s tracks and Jon’s body, along with any clues to his whereabouts. He was never found.

  The police had of course labeled it as a car accident and said that Greg had hallucinated due to his head injury and that the rain and the slippery road was the cause to the crash; they didn't believe him when he claimed that a mysterious hooded figure had abducted his son and that he was still alive somewhere.

  The police assumed that Jon had woken up first after the crash, got out disoriented and half conscious and unfortunately didn't notice the abyss. They assumed that he fell straight into it, his body washed away by the current of the gashing waters below.

  Their parents tried to hide it from them but once Casey and Morgan learned about the death of their brother they went into themselves, shutting off completely from the world. For weeks they barely left their room, refusing to talk to anyone but each other. Not even the therapist that Lilith hired could get through to them. No one ever knew that they cried themselves to sleep, tucked together in Morgan’s bed and holding each other through the night for comfort.

  It went on like that for over eight months. Then, one afternoon around their eighth birthday Lilith took them to their annual visit at the barber. It was the first time in months the two siblings actually talked to her to tell her what they wanted to do to their hair. So surprised by their requests and so happy by them opening up to her she agreed to indulge them. Morgan came home with dreadlocks and Casey came home with her hair dyed black and cut short giving her the look of a little demon, completely different from her blond, long haired twin.

  They changed drastically in a matter of hours, almost the complete opposites of each other, one white and one dark, one with short hair and one with long. You could never have guessed now that once, not so long ago, they were two little sweet, blond, almost identical kids.

  At first their mother was worried, she didn't like the changes. But the second psychologist that Lilith had taken the kids to had told her that this is the way of the children to deal with their brother’s death, that she should not push them to talk about the pain they are feeling and that they will deal with it in their own time and on their own terms.

  A month passed and the siblings were slowly returning to their normal behavior, although their looks remained different, and they insisted on keeping it like that. They were starting to open up to others and even to laugh again.

  One afternoon, shortly after their ninth birthday, Lilith had finally broke and tried to talk to them about Jon's death. To her relieve and horror neither Casey nor Morgan showed any signs of knowing who he was.

  In an attempt to help her kids recover from the trauma of their horrible loss, and out of little selfishness to erase the pain she had felt, Lilith had removed all trace of Jon from the house. She took down his pictures and stored away his toys; she went even further and transferred the twins to a new school where no one had known about him. They moved to a different town and the fact that Jon had ever existed, was now a secret to the world.

  Lilith thought and hoped that it will be like that forever, but secrets have a way of getting out, and this particular secret was about to resurface and be revealed to the Tepes twins. When it does they will have to face their past together if they were hoping to have a chance to survive.

  Chapter one: Summer school

  'Casey's diary: age sixteen entrance eleven.'

  "So here I am again. The Second summer in a row, stuck up here in the middle of nowhere for three whole months with those insane freaks.

  Can you guess where I am? c’mon! I dare you! No? Ok, here it is: the all infamous summer school! Again.

  *Mental sigh*

  my lovely mother calls this torture a 'vacation', as if! I mean, what the hell is she thinking, calling it like that?! What the hell resembles a vacation here?! The repulsive food? The annoying teachers? No, no doubt it’s the company she thinks I would love to have with me, Morgan, the reason I am here in the first place! That boy….fuck, if he wasn't my brother I would have …ggrrr I would have bashed his head in already! Ok…I’m exaggerating, the boy does have my face….I doubt that I would want to see it all messed up and bloody…that would just be…well…disturbing much?

  But c’mon! See it through my perspective! Like the year wasn't bad enough to torment me. Morgan did every possible and impossible stupid thing his little twisted brain could come up with to get us both up here, don’t ask what; the page isn’t long enough
to contain that list. But I will mention some, starting with skipping classes, smoking on school grounds and actually kidnapping me. No, no, I’m not kidding. He kidnapped me off the stage in the middle of an assembly for a day of 'fun' in the local park which included: us in the park, smoking Colin's pot. (Actually, it was more like: he's smoking and I'm gagging, I could never get the hang of it, thank god.).

  Anyway, anger aside, I will hate to admit this but maybe it is a good thing for us to be away from home for the moment. This past week was …well…kind of flaky…I would call it unusual to say the least.

  Morgan, the other half of my being and by being I mean the complete opposite so being completely himself (confused? try to say that three times without getting out mindless gibberish)… Anyways my lovely brother had decided to play a little detective game when we were bored out of our ears one evening so he dragged me with him to the basement (with me kicking and screaming all the way there), while mom and Greg were out of the house on some grocery shopping or some shit like that.

  We were never allowed to go up there, ever since I can remember myself or anything else for that matter mom always said that the old stuff up there are dangerous and that they might fall and crash us under a pile of junk and boxes, but you know Morgan, no way are the words: 'dangerous' and 'not allowed’, anywhere near his vocabulary, provided he has one of course (which he doesn’t).

  So we got down there and started roaming through the boxes. It was really mostly old clothes and some decaying pictures but there was one box that coughs our attention.

  It was buried beneath a pile of Christmas toys all the way back by the window and it was labeled:

  'The kids, age 0 to 8' so we assumed it had to be us, me and Morgan, I mean, what other kids had grown up in that house, right? Wrong.

  When we finally got the lid open (it took some time, someone nailed the box shut and put tons of cello tape on it, I broke a nail!) we found loads of stuff from what was supposed to be our childhood, stuff that neither of us could remember having. And there was something else, too. Something creepy, like 'Chucky' creepy.

  A toy, a tiny furry broken ugly creature labeled:

  'Fluffy, the property of Jon .T.’ we were going to investigate the box further but that’s when mom came back.

  We tried to ask her who Jon was that night after she gave us the third degree about going down to the basement, but she got even more pissed at us, like the whole reason for us to not go down there was to keep us away from that box.

  I don't remember ever seeing her get so angry or upset before. It really scared us, we didn't dare ask again, and even Morgan understood that this is something we should not try to get into.

  So mom obviously grounded us (yay, more quality time with Morgan….like I don’t see enough of him every day) for going to the basement and then she locked the door and hid the key so we won't go down there again. She was obsessed.

  Morgan suggested Jon was a relative mom resented but I feel there is more to that. Why was his toy in our toy box? And why…"

  "Oh god! I hate this place!"

  Colin, a tall boy with long brown hair and one of the twins’ best mates had dumped his tray on the lunch room table, sitting down with a puff. They met him shortly after arriving to the new town when they were about nine. He ran up to them as the movers truck was pulling into the driveway and convinced them to go play with him in his back yard (The 'back yard' turned out to be his creepy basement and after a run in with a spider and a broken wrist on Casey’s behalf they became inseparable, best friends for life). Casey sighed and closed her diary, looking up at her annoyed friend, her brown eyes scanning over Colin’s enraged features. It was a typical 'Colin' afternoon mood, Casey chuckled, she had seen that look so often that she was already mentally preparing herself for what was about to happen next.

  Colin was the type of person that always had the need to tell everyone how his incredible day was, usually; it was filled with bad things, mostly. Although he would never admit it willingly and will try to blame it on someone else, the bad things would happen by his own damn fault (or Morgan's of course). But he still had the need to complain.

  "Why must I be punished by this evil witch?!"

  Colin asked dramatically, raising his hands up as if the ceiling was supposed to be the god that could answer his rhetorical question. Casey smiled, trying to hide her real commentary on the subject.

  "Mrs. Kafka again?" Casey smiled sweetly, an image of the old hag popping into her head as she said that. Yes, if there was any name for evil it would be 'Ms. Kafka' she would even make Satan run and hide.

  Mrs. Kafka was their English teacher and by pure coincidence (or just by her demonic need to torment students). She was also the head of the summer school, the grand puba of punishment in the body of an old hag.

  "It's her fault I ended up here!" Colin growled, remembering sadly the wonderful vacation he had planned for himself. This summer was supposed to be all about him, him and the beach and the red sunset (Oh, the girls, the alcohol, the parties, the pot and the girls….those wonderful girls)…

  Colin sniffled. “Those wonderful girls…”

  Casey smirked. “Colin, you’re drooling.” She stated out.

  “Sorry.” He wiped his mouth but the dreamy look remained plastered on his features.

  "Well, I hate to burst your hate bubble but if you hadn’t ditched every one of her lessons and weren’t showing up wasted to those that you actually made to…"

  "That was all Morgan's idea!"

  Casey laughed full-hearted; of course her dear brother was involved.

  "But you played along with it and you are not even in the same class! You are a year above us; you are supposed to set the example, to be the mature one!”

  Colin gave her an ‘as if’ look and Casey shook her head, deciding to drop the whole adult subject. You would actually expect such a behavior from a seventeen year old.

  “So what happened?" She asked. “I mean, how did Kafka land you here for the summer?” Colin sighed deeply and began telling his tale, something that Casey had already prepared herself for, pulling out the sympathy friend look on her smirking face.

  "Remember the trip to Europe that my parents had promised to pay for, the one that I was supposed to take for two weeks in the end of the summer before my final year in this hell hole?"

  Casey nodded. Of course she remembered, her ears were ringing just by the memory of Colin talking about it.

  "Sure, you have been waiting for that thing all year, couldn't shut up about it." ‘And how I wished you did.’ She added in her mind.

  Colin laid his head on the table, smiling bitterly at Casey.

  "Well, I need to wait no more, it has been officially canceled!"

  Casey almost choked on the slice of pizza she had just lifted off her plate and took a bite of, dropping it back to her plate and staring incredulously at Colin.

  "I'm sorry, but WHAT THE FUCK?! What do you mean ‘canceled’?! They can’t do that! They promised!!"

  Colin raised his face a bit from the table, pouting at his sympathetic innocent friend.

  "That's what I said, fat load off good that helped me."

  Casey shook her head, still not believing Colin’s parents cruelness. You can’t just get someone’s hopes up and then just take it away. It’s inhuman.

  "I just don’t get it, why is it canceled? We finish the summer school before the vacation is over, you will still have enough time to take that trip. Didn't you tell them that?"

  Colin's frown grew; of course, he knew that.” Of course I did but it’s not about that.”

  “Then…? What is the problem?” Casey threw her hands up.

  "Kafka, well, I have the witch to thank for that. Remember? I told you, it’s all Kafka’s fault, if it wasn't for her I would have still made it at the end of the summer…But no, she had to ruin it for me… That bitch…”

  Casey looked puzzled. "You have to explain it better because I just don’t get how
she could stop you from going. What did she do?"

  Colin let out a little laugh. "You're an idiot for not getting it but I like you anyway."

  Casey stuck her newly pierced tongue at him (oh, how she loved that thing. She did it right after the basement incident, right with Morgan’s lip ring. They decided that grounding them was a really horrible move and the fact that it messed with every boy she knew was an unexpected bonus).

  ”Oh Casey, if I start drooling over you Morgan will have my head.” Colin warned.

  "Then will you just explain it already?!" Casey burst, having had enough of the dramatic suspense.

  Colin shook his head. "Well…that bitch sent a letter to my parents saying that I'm a lazy bum that won’t amount to anything and that she suggests from the depths of her kind heart that my hard working parents won’t waste their money on a mistake like me.”

  He paused.

  Casey waited for him to continue but he didn't. "And…?"

  She urged him, trying to get him to go on with the story and at least get to the punch line of it all.

  "And they agreed with her!" Colin bumped his head on the table again, letting out a low grown at the behavior of his ‘loving’ and ‘understanding’ parents.

  “Hold the phone!” Casey’s mouth fell open. "What?!" She shook her head. "Holy fuck… I… sorry man… But nice parents." Casey stared at her friend, slightly amused by this outcome but feeling sorry for her grieved looking best friend. Colin let out a muffled sound that was in the area of ‘laugh it up spiky’ and then he raised his head again

  "Yes, no kidding. “

  He looked up at the ceiling as if he was still waiting for that godly answer.

  “I can't wait until I finally move out of their mansion, those stuck up assholes."

  Casey laughed. "You know you won’t, you will just wait until they crock and you will inherit the entire family fortune.”

  “That’s true.” Her friend agreed and Casey smiled. Colin's family had come into a large fortune in the past few years with his father's business taking off overseas. The day he moved out of their neighborhood was not a happy one but his friends were more than happy to wreak havoc on the small town he moved to and his new five story house.