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This is a new project of mine...I'm planning for this novel to be around 30-35 chapters, but that could always change. It is VERY violent, but I tried not to go into gory detail...and emliminated the parts that were gory...because gore is agaisnt the rules, soo...there's no language that I know of. There is ONE scene that is very violent and I'm not sure whether it is over the top or not...The formatting is all funky and smashed together because I originally had this as a READ Word Document and wanted it to read as a novel would. And I'm officially a dork. *puts on her dunce cap*)
Prologue- Part 1“But you see, Meg, just because we don’t understand doesn’t mean that the explanation doesn’t exist.”
–A Wrinkle In Time, Madeleine L’Engle. (pg. 46)Consequently, the last things on Kayley’s mind were the blood stains on her smock, now a tapestry of maroon colors, darker as they blended, lighter as they faded. A perfect chance. A taste of freedom drip-fed as slowly as she had been drip fed in the past. It entered her mind slowly. Kind of as though her thoughts were a door only partway open, and the encounter of freedom was such a foreign concept it trickled in like ghostly wisps of dust motes.
The snow was bright to her—
Another new vision as well.
What’s wrong with you. Why do you talk to me like you hate me. I’ve never hurt you. I’ve never wanted to. I’m not like them. Why do you act like this. She padded onward, reserved. The only audible sounds came from the icy snow, crunching as her bare feet cracked into it. Head hung low, the only thing she could really see was that crystalline snow, aside from the rare splotches of bare damp sidewalk and soggy slush piles.
What’s wrong with you. I’m sorry. Don’t look at me like that. Tell you what, I can give you some money for a candy bar out of the vending machine. How does that sound. Kayley looked up. Ahead, in the yard of a quaint grey suburban house, a mother and son were playing. They frolicked, the son throwing himself down in the thin layer of snow to wave his arms and make a snow angel, displacing most of it, revealing the tufts of yellowed grass underneath, the mother giggling and telling him how nice it was. Kayley found herself beaming at them, or, rather, at the sight itself. Her eyes twinkled with longing.
Like that would ever, ever, ever happen to her.
Then they saw her. The mother glanced up from her son, tucking a clump of mousy brown hair behind her ear in bewilderment. She was still halfway bent down, and, in that position, placed a hand on the boy’s red jacket. Her mouth seemed to be twitching. No small wonder she was alarmed. What with a six-year-old girl in a blood stained smock only a few feet away, smiling at them like it was Christmas season. It was only October.
More like Halloween.
Kayley dropped her smile, cloaking it in a veil of grimness. Even her eyes seemed to fall, the blue color of her irises dimming, eyelashes drooping. She forced herself to look back down at the ground and run forward. Away from the mother and son. Far, far away. Faintly, their voices could be heard calling after her. There was no pursuit, however.
God. How her feet burned from the ice. How ragged her breath had become. Where the heck was she, anyway? It looked like just an average suburb in a snowy town. With a grey sky like soaked cotton balls overhead.
She grasped something in her left hand. Also blood splattered, if that made any difference. A crisp piece of paper, ever so crinkled, but ever so important. She would never let it go. They would have to kill her.
And she would be fine with it if they did.
I’ll kill you. I’ll rip your heart out. Don’t come near me.
What’s wrong with you, honey.
Why. You think I’m gonna let your boss company, whoever they are, find out where we live. We own your world. We o…w…n…it. I’ll dive this knife into your stomach, bring it up nicely into your heart…
What are you talking about.
It’s the imbeciles like you who we hang where we come from. You aren’t even trying.
Stop. Just stop. You don’t have to do this. You really think you’re going to help your people by killing me.
No. I’m just going to do it because it matters. Kayley’s feet stung so terribly awful— as though a multitude of sharp pins continued to seek the right spots and times to dig into rosy flesh.
And then I’m going to kill the rest of you. Dead. Bet you didn’t know how much I liked to see blood, did you. She reached down tentatively and gave her legs a good rubbing. They were practically petrified from the chill.
You’re six years old. You’re going to kill a bunch of people for the sake of one piece of paper.
The sake of a people. Clearest difference imaginable.
Well I won’t let you. Not for the lives of the staff, but for your own salvation as an innocent child. Shaking feverishly now, Kayley’s body rattled with tension, and her strides became more and more laborious as her legs drew in blood as deadweight.
You can try and see what happens. “Oh.”
She stopped. Her mind swirled like the flakes of snow in the air. Her lungs were so weak that even panting became a chore. Tears threatened to fall from the corners of her eyes. But the worst was yet to come, and she knew it from the way her thoughts grew more and more dark, and her vista continually blank.
There was something she needed to be warned of.
Kayley beckoned the Thought forward and it came. In a full force of heavy dread so terrible, it was inconceivable that she did not cry out. Her current sight was replaced with a new, clearer Vision, one a few miles away, streaking across both eye and psyche, drawing her in. What she saw there was no big surprise. A lone black Lincoln SUV traversed an empty suburban street at around seven miles an hour. Slush kicked up under the tires with a sickening sucking sound. Out the open driver’s window hung a lazy arm draped in the sleeve of a fine black suit.
That was all she needed to know. She snapped back to her present. The Vision faded the second she asked it to.
Then she darted across the yard of some unknown person’s house. Rude, perhaps. But necessary. Tucked in near to the backyard fence of this tan stucco house was a green dumpster, the large kind that shouldn’t really be there, yet was. A space behind it called out to her.
Without consideration, she ran behind it and ducked low before slowly inching downward so her bottom rested on her outstretched heels. Then she proffered the paper. It hung limply between two frozen pink fingers. Naturally, she still had no idea where she was. Kayley imagined it to be a small New Mexico town near the border, judging by the make of the houses in these suburbs, though this was the only part she’d had time to examine. She sighed. The action created a tiny plume of fog.
Here, the gravel had intermixed with the slush into a grotesque brown soup, choking down the tall yellow weeds that used to be what domineered the sides of the stucco. Directly ahead, droplets of melting snow fell down a tall wooden fence. There was a window here, one slightly higher than the level of the dumpster, small and blurry. Somebody’s shower window.
Kayley wondered whether there were dogs back there, behind the fence. Probably not. If there were, there would be a sign or something, right? Lord how she hated dogs. Animals in general for that matter.
She stifled a miserable sob, unwilling to cry even in front of herself.
Attempted to read the paper one last time before she burned it. Strained her eyes on the first try, mentally recoiling every time she passed over a phrase like:
past-to-future-ratio dehumanization and
relative possibility of demonic presence in race. Whatever had happened to the equal-rights struggle in America. This paper made the black segregations and enslavements of the not so distant past seem like simple misdemeanors.
She gave up on the second try, and, wondering if her Vision had turned out to be correct, scuttled crab like to the corner of the green garbage monster and dared to look around the side of it. Sure enough, like some warped prophecy, there was a shiny black Lincoln SUV driving tentatively down the suburban street, an SUV which just had barley made it over a speed bump and where a black-clad arm hung out the open passenger window.
Quickly, she returned to hiding position and slammed her head against the metal in frustration. She started to consider how to ensure the paper would burn, after all, she couldn’t set it down or the snow and water would put out her weak flame. She couldn’t hold it or her arm would burn off.
Really, it was too late to consider—she wasn’t going to stand up and move anytime soon. Kayley held the paper at an arms length. She stared it down like a mother stares down an impudent child. Flames sprouted from her fingertips out of nowhere. They were cold, cobalt, and painful upon spark, much colder than the slush, the icy water her bare feet rested in. They passed vigilantly over the paper, choosing to burn it with loving care.
Kayley paused in her thoughts of burning when she noticed the humming of the passing car had ceased. Deadening silence, broke only when car door slammed, jolting her. Had they seen her? Not possible. Well, they
had seemed like they were watching fairly close…
No-one came to discover her, though.
Instead she heard the sound of several pairs of feet as they splashed over a melt water coated sidewalk to the front door of the house to her left. The people in the SUV were going to ask the owner of the house whether they had seen any strange little girls recently. As confirmation, a second later, the doorbell echoed though the hollow rooms. Muffled talking followed the whoosh of an opening door. Kayley shivered. Her feet were so pathetically cold and frozen she was amazed she could still feel them. The toenails on her tiny pink piggies had turned white from shock. Or maybe frostbite. Or maybe nothing at all. Her breath now came very, very gradually, ragged and jutted with stabs of pain in the back of her throat.
The flames. Her flames. Flames she created from her power. They started to crawl up the length of her fingers and lap at the back of her hand. She wanted to scream. The bitter pain cut into her, a swarm of biting insects from the arctic north with fangs as sharp as razors. Yet she could not scream. They would hear her. Somebody would hear her. Kayley pressed her back closer to the garbage dumpster to keep herself from bolting, and dug her top row of teeth into her lower lip to keep any cries from escaping her mouth.
She could always just drop the paper.
But then it would stop burning as it hit the water.
Then it would still exist. Then she would fail.
Listening with intel for any new sounds, Kayley closed her eyes and waited. Still, it became a harrowing experience. Excruciating screams filled her closed mouth, and despite her managing to keep them fairly silent, they were awful nonetheless. By then, the flames had begun to work towards her wrist, and the rest of her hand throbbed with a mixture of pain and numbness so deathly it scared her.
Finally, when she thought she was about to surrender and scream out loud, the people at the doorway ended their conversation and whoever had parked in the SUV returned. Car doors opened and slammed once again. An engine purred to life quietly yet noticeable enough Kayley heard. It drove away. At last she pried her eyes open. The paper was slowly turning to ashes. Half of it was gone, the ragged other half waving precariously while it began to disintegrate.
Regardless of the progress, her hand and wrist were desperately calling for her to just drop it before they, too, fell to nothing. Dry bones. Not something she wanted. But the thing needed to be burned. Several moments (or perhaps only seconds of an inhumanely long nature) later the last ashy black fragments fell to the ground. Kayley looked at her hand—what was left of it. Luckily, it was still there. Most of it was shriveled and blistered, some of those blisters bleeding profusely, but at least the digits were discernable and still functioned when she wiggled them.
Kayley shoved her burned hand into the brown slush water with a passion. The shock bit her intensely and rawly. But she didn’t care. There wasn’t any
warm water around to speak of. She stood up, took a hesitant breath, brushed off her bloody hand on her already red-stained white smock, and turned to continue on her journey to wherever.
Waiting there behind her was a man in a black suit with an outstretched taser. It was of silver make, long and narrow, like a real, bullet-filled gun. She half expected it to be such.
And it was all she could focus on, seeing as how it aimed at her so pointedly. Not two seconds had passed before she hit the ground, hard.
Not three seconds had passed before her consciousness was lost to a black void.
Post Merge: December 15, 2009, 06:41:00 PM
(The next bit. Obviously, in the book all of this would be together as one chapter...pwease help?)
****
“And, she is, without a doubt in my mind, innocent of any actions they claim of her.”
“You have
no idea, do you?”
“I have every idea. Kayley is an innocent six-year-old child. Perhaps she misjudges her own power. There is nothing wrong with her.”
“She killed twelve people.
Slaughtered them, one by one, keeping their self-control at bay so they couldn’t stop the attack. She didn’t even let them have the luxury of running. What I see is a
psychotic six-year-old child who knows extremely well how to judge her own power.”
Kayley listened intently to the conversation, pretending to be dead to the world in the wooden chair she occupied, her hands tied to the arm rests with taut, gnawing wire. Her eyes darted behind closed lids, and every now and then her body twitched, as if it was still in shock from the ice and burning of before. Yet she pulled the act off well. She let her head droop and her shoulders sag. Even her breathing came rather patiently: one, two, one, two…
“So you’re saying you want an execution, Ken?”
“Don’t go there. Of course not. I just think you need to put more thought into just sending her back with nothing except a straight-jacket and the wings of prayer.”
Leisurely she worked at her binds. She wanted to just rip them off. After all, she could do so whenever she felt like it. But these things take time. Take consideration. Perhaps it wasn’t called for to be so reckless. Two against one was a tough situation; still, Kayley could probably pull an escape off, if she wasn’t too lazy to attempt it. Laziness is virtue to six-year-old sociopath with a taste for revenge.
The first man’s voice, the one defending her, was flat and to the point. It oozed with a hidden sort of sweetness as smooth as butter, as though he was dying to declare his love for the world and the finer points of life and persuasion but could not. The second man’s voice was equally to the point, but calmer and slower, comparable to syrup gliding over golden pancakes.
Kayley felt a pang of hunger during her metaphorical thoughts. When was the last time she had eaten? Three days ago? Maybe less, if soda from a vending machine counts.
She caught her head rising and her eyes opening, and managed to stop herself just in time.
They continued on without notice.
“I’m not saying she doesn’t need re-education, Ken, because she does if she’s to be trusted, but what I’m saying is you’re being too harsh on her. She’s really quite a sweet little girl.”
The second man scoffed. He said, “Prove it.”
Prove it? Honestly, where were these two getting off. She was the sweetest thing in the country. She could be very sweet if she wanted to. Maybe even act her age, be it called for. All a matter of situation.
Once more her mind drifted to thoughts of food…Sweet…very sweet…Sweet things like chocolate, or those little marshmallows she used to get in the vending machine that were dusted with pink sugar. Kayley hoped she wasn’t drooling. It was an embarrassing thing to be so hungry when there were things to be done.
To right herself she jerked her hands up against the wire binds. The pain sedated her for the moment.
The second man, Ken, the one who thought she needed more than a straight jacket, sounded as though he was going through papers. And he was sitting down. At least it seemed that way, judging only from the general direction and level of the noise. The first man’s voice seemed to stem from the other side of the room, if they were in a room, though, again, she was only judging by general direction.
Neither voice was familiar.
Post Merge: December 15, 2009, 06:48:40 PM
“It’s ultimately your decision, sir. You’re dealing with a very disturbed little girl either way you look at it. I have no idea how you could call her
sweet…No idea,” Ken said.
“Well, she is. She was the last time I saw her, held my hand and showed me every room in ‘Delta, pulling me along like any other kid showing their parent something exciting.”
Kayley didn’t remember that. She didn’t remember him either.
“Yeah, and according to file, she ended that day by trying to bolt out the door after you when you left, cleverly hugging your sleeve all the way up to it.
Pretending she liked you.”
A chuckle. “That’s very cold of you. Regardless of what you think, I like her, and that’s all that matters.”
Oh…that’s why she couldn’t remember meeting him. Likely, she was drugged into oblivion following the event. Punishment. Too many drugs in one tiny humanoid system tended to cause a person’s memory to slip, little fragments drifting away like they did not matter.
“Hey, I think she’s awake.” Ken’s comment was insanely nonchalant, and it took Kayley more than a few seconds to finally register it as a threat.
She tensed, internally and externally, coiling like a viper preparing to bite. Her stomach flopped bitterly. Her eyes stayed closed.
She felt like howling. Ripping free. Killing them both now and getting it over with. But she held herself fast.
Without warning, a hand alighted upon her own, the one hand she owned that was still untarnished. As for her burnt hand, it continued to throb impudently. She could feel drops of blood, or perhaps simply pained perspiration, dripping from and over blisters. She pictured the drops of
whatever flowing down her fingers, down the arms of the chair, pooling among coils of wire, falling silently to the floor…
The hand pressed down on her own, not harshly, but encouragingly—encouraging her to open her eyes and admit to a state of awareness.
It’s alright. Everything is going to be alright. God, why did she keep up this act after all? It was pointless. It was time to get own with the show. Stop sulking in your indolence. Right…now.
Kayley’s eyes flickered open. She let out a placid sigh, pretending to be awakened and brought back to the world in a confused, unknowing state. Recalling that they both knew exactly who she was and what she had done, Kayley followed up by plastering a severely annoyed look on her face:
Oh, no, you got me. How dare you. Slightly narrowed eyes helped add abject drama.
“Hey, hun, are you all right? You took a pretty big shot there.”
Post Merge: December 15, 2009, 06:53:00 PM
Post Merge: December 15, 2009, 06:53:58 PM
Topic: StarBorn (A horror/science fiction project) [PG-13] (Read 1611 times)