A Project Human Story: A Dead One

Isabel clucked her tongue childishly while every passing second my patience grew thinner and thinner. I wanted to scrape her face against the pavement.

“Would you stop giving me that look?” She snapped and looked away. With a shake of my head I rolled my eyes and we walked across the street to the side where the park was. The feeling of the sun against my skin was foreign to me as it stood high above our heads and the heat burst off the pavement. Today was cloudless like every day in summer is and I wanted to peal off my flesh and burst into ashes.

This place was filled with half naked people clogging up all the shade and with their dogs woofing up the atmosphere. I’m all for parks, but the days I love them most is when the sky is gray and thick with a cold rain and its nothing but me and the silence of the trees. I would love for today to be one of those days, but like our moisture, my luck has run dry.

“So, how’s your nightmares been?” Isabel broke the ice burg between us.

I sighed and leaned against a tree with my hands in my pockets, “My nightmares are getting worse, more vivid. One of them bit me in the neck and I woke up to a bleeding wound.”

“Ew. Is it still there?” I lifted my hand and felt the fading scar of two bite wounds on the crook my neck.

“Yeah, but I don’t know if you can see them.”

Her dark eyes were narrowed and her eyebrows scrunched in as she looked at my neck with the worst feeling in her eyes. How often does your best friend get bit in her dreams and wake up with a real wound? Even I have this sickening feeling in the pit of my stomach nudging the back of my mind of a danger I can’t control. I can’t stop it from coming no matter what precautions I try to take.

I’m just as hopeless as last time.

“Well…” That’s all she could say before she fell to the ground looking as lost as I felt.

“I can’t even begin to describe how pissed off I am that this is happening yet again. I’m not sure I can even handle facing what ever is to come…whatever these dead girls are trying to tell me.” I spoke while watching the people in the park. Each of them minding themselves and moving from one scratch of shade to another. A large group of boys, very few with their shirts on, played the most pathetic game of foot ball I’ve ever seen in the field in front of us. It was then my breath hitched in my throat and nausea gripped my stomach in its hands.

Red eyes amongst the throng of people.

It reminded me a lot of the night at the fair without the blinking lights, the loud music, and the whiff of funnel cakes and fat food hanging in the air. And also, these eyes were attached to a face that was thinner, more menacing and strands of silver hair that swept across the side. There was a familiar smirk on his face as he caught my eye, I become the target, and he moves in like a hawk towards its pray.

“Isabel…” I squeaked out, sweating droplets of fear down my forehead.

“Is it bookstore boy?”

“No…it’s…”

“Well, hello ladies.” His voice had a tone that no where near matched the one Alex had. Yes, there was that hint of husky but it wasn’t velvety or smooth like melted chocolate. There it failed as it sounded like thorns and needles in my ear.

“Who are you?” Isabel stood before me with that shining confidence I will never have, but I admired her for it. She was my spinal chord and I was her heavily lonely rock.

“My name is Brian, and I would like to say what wonderful skin you have.” The way he said it and brushed his fingers against the bare skin of my arm sent the worst kind of shivers up and down my spine. Every cell in my body was screaming to run for the fear of danger was close to screaming out on the surface. Isabel swatted his hand away from me and threw a nasty introduction his way.

“By the way, don’t be a pedophile and go and touch my bestie without my permission, mkay?” She said while taking my elbow and leading me away from the man with the gauntly thin face that endlessly smirked.

“Neither of you will have the say soon.”

My body threatened to go comatose.

What is with everyone threatening my safety lately?

****

“Wow, that guy was quite the douche bag.” Isabel groaned while I remained fearfully silent.

I knew that tonight’s nightmare would be more different then any other I’ve ever experienced.

“Why don’t I stay the night at your house tonight? By that weirded out look on your face being alone is the last thing you need.” Or the only thing I need. I didn’t have the guts to say that to someone whose seen me go through the worst yet and endures it along side me like it was her pain to face.

“Sure…” I managed to say while we tried to quietly slip through the front door of the store. That familiar, suffocating energy wrapped itself around me and it was only now that I could understand that Alex's energy was softer and not like a thousand needles pricking my senses.

“Hello, Alex.” Isabel quickly purred before grabbing my wrist and attempting to steal my stunned dead body towards the stairs.

“Hn, what’s wrong with the anti-social?” Alex peaked from behind the Revolver magazine in his hand.

She quickly gave a questioning look at me before I finally had the courage to speak up against the cold sweat on my shaking body, “I’ve met someone with eyes like yours.”

Alex’s body fell tense, hell, I even felt his energy tightening up in the space around me that the cold sweat became colder and my abdomen hurt with fear.

“You mean…Brian?”

“That creepy, pedophile man?” Isabel asked…if it weren’t for everything else I might have laughed with her words.

“Did he touch any of you?” There was concern and hurry in his voice that broke the image of the cocky, asshole I had always thought him to be.

“Yeah, he touched Jade. Why?”

Silence…

A silence that gripped both the soul of Alex and mine in a hold so full of an emotion I’ve become a friend of sorts with…dread. I watched those red eyes fall to the kind of dread you only find in the eyes of someone whose been slapped across the face with the most painful bad news. I have felt that kind of dread standing in the middle of a hospital hall, stranded to grief and a lifelessly feeling. It was a pattern for me.

“So, what’s going on?”

“Let’s just say Brian can tear a soul apart with just one touch.”

I wanted it to be the last time today I wanted to scream and hear it echo against the walls…for it to go on for hours with people holding their palms against their heads. I wanted it to be the last time in my life that somebody would come in and fuck it up.