Sunny September, part thirteen. Monsters. Christopher.

  I wake with white bile erupting from my mouth, my body jerking as my lungs force it all out to make way for precious air. By the time I can breathe properly I’m half covered in their filth and my own ‘fluids’.

  Sitting up agonisingly, my vision starts to clear, and I find myself still in the garage. I had essentially drowned and I’m somehow still alive, I wonder how long I’ve been out for.

  Getting to my feet, I can’t see my gun anywhere around here, I guess they took it away.

  My eyes pan around scanning the dozens of cocoons, checking for the sisters.

  Wicked laughter grabs my attention and I see three disgusting mangled monstrosities huddling together in the corner. I almost scream at the sight. They look half human and half spider, four limbs like us but covered in fur with the heads of tarantulas. Their eyes no longer large but black, beady and way too close together.

  Growing up, I didn’t believe in ghosts or demons or anything of the sort. Yet I can’t in all my stupidity think of an explanation for everything I’ve seen today. First it was Chica and her shenanigans and now I find myself in the midst of this house of horrors.

  I slowly back up towards the door way and find it’s been thoroughly sealed by thick webbing.

  “Shit.” I curse, trying to pry it off.

  “You don’t want to go out there.”

  I gasp as I continue to pry at the webs in a futile effort, it’s now much tougher, much thicker than before. I don’t acknowledge the raspy voice as it’s right in my ear, her breath dampening my neck.

  She’s so close to me that I can’t do anything to resist, so what’s the point in looking the thing in the face?

  “Are you stupid?” She continues, “I said stop…”

  She grabs my arm, squeezing my bones into rice. My heart racing as my life starts to flash before my eyes.

  Now I look the bitch dead in the face. “Why don’t you just kill me already?”

  “Why would we want to kill you?” she asks. “It’s everyone’s dick that we want.”

  “What the hell does that even mean?” I ask disgusted.

  From beyond the webs an overpowering roar shakes the walls and sends me far away from the door way.

  The sister is already back huddling with the two others in the far right corner.

  A second roar thunders and the cocoons start to sway as they hang from the shaking ceiling.

  I look towards the larger garage entrance leading to the driveway. It’s shut but I’m sure there’s a way for me to open it and flee. I feel bad for abandoning Germain but what can I do? These creatures are beyond an ordinary person like me.

  I carefully navigate my way around the cocoons again, searching the left side wall for the mechanism to open up the garage to the driveway.

  “Don’t even bother with that,” a sister warns as if reading my mind, “the monster will just kill you before you make it to the main road. You’ll even attract it to the rest of the kids that still crowd outside leading to a blood bath.”

  You’ve got to be kidding me, there’s a monster in this house they’re afraid of as if they’re not monsters themselves. How the hell do I get myself out of this situation? I need to escape somewhere someway.

  “What the hell am I supposed to do now?” I sneer.

  Another one laughs, “our sisters are in the house fighting it. It wants to spoil our fun so we have no choice but to fight it to the death.”

  I hear three loud bangs coming from the right side wall. A fourth bang radiates and a portion of the wall rumbles down, a fourth sister being thrown out from the dust as it settles under the dim party lights.

  She crawls up one of the cocoons and onto the ceiling before noticing me and hissing.

  Within the dust I catch a glimpse of a hulking mass of fur that backs up into the shadows before grunting out, “you’re the kid from before… you must have been infected by now too. I’ll be sure to kill you painlessly.”

  That voice! It’s Fredrick. What the hell happened to him? Is this the end result of his infection? Why does he want to kill me I’m not infected in fact it seems I’m immune.

  “I’m not infected,” I yell back.

  “Bullshit,” he disputes. “We’ve all been infected now, we’re slowly turning into demons and I have to purge us all, even myself. It’s for the greater good.”

  If this guy thinks I’m just gonna stand here and let him kill me he’s gonna be in for a rude awakening. Since he’s fighting the sisters, I can just wait for them to engage him again then slip away unnoticed.

  “They’re in the corner, three of them.” I say pointing to the three hiding sisters.

  They immediately hiss at me and are upon me faster than I can blink.

  I jump then roll to the side dodging a blast of webs from one of them before another pulls me back to them by the hair.

  Before they can do anything the heavy mass thunders over to us revealing Trevor who’s far more terrifying up close.

  He sweeps his arm and the worthless skank grabbing me by the hair uses me as a shield to block the blow. My chest is compressed as I feel myself being hit by a truck, the wind escaping my lungs as my ribs crack.

  We all go flying, myself into a cocoon and the three others much further back until they hit the wall.

  I fight for air when I fall to the ground, my chest erupting with broken agony.

  Before I can get to my feet he grabs me by one of them, then swings me around sending me flying through the hole he left in the right side wall.

  I slam into the corridor wall with a thud causing it to tremble, my shoulder dislocating on impact.

  I can’t even describe the pain I feel as I struggle to my feet only to discover my left ankle is in pain even further beyond description. Looking down I see that it’s broken with the bone sticking out, a cute little cherry on top of my misery.

  Within the rubble of the garage Fredrick continues to engage the sisters. I see someone half through the wall beside me either dead or unconscious. Taking a closer look I recognise that it’s Trevor.

  If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  Fighting the pain, I pop my shoulder back into place before using the wall to support myself as I rise up. My body feels like it’s on the verge of shattering into glass, but my plan sort of worked so I won’t complain. I hop around to the living room only to come face to face with another sister as I turn the corner.

  “Please just let me go,” I sigh.

  Her pincers snap as she lets out a giggle. “Don’t leave so soon…”

  She grabs me by the arm and refuses to let go.

  Already knowing I don’t have enough strength to fight her off, I don’t even bother with resistance. I just take a deep breath and wait for her to do her worst. In my mind I wonder why I didn’t just go home after visiting Shakira. I start to beat myself up for being selfish remembering that Okimoto and Daqwan would be in this situation now. Actually how much of a difference did me coming here even make? They probably would’ve found a way out without me anyway.

  I weigh my options carefully, since trying to fight wouldn’t work I could try my hand at deception. What is it exactly that these things want? Didn’t that one sister say that they wanted…

  “Do you want to have sex?” I ask, resorting to hoeing around.

  She makes this disgusting expression I can only describe as a spider trying to mimic a human biting their lip seductively.

  I want to gag but If this stops her from attacking me and gives me a chance to escape I’m perfectly happy.

  “Before we do it I have to kill Fredrick,” she says.

  “That’s a real bummer why don’t I wait outside while you finish him off in here,” I suggest.

  She shakes her head. “You’re injured and it’s dangerous outside.”

  No bitch it’s perfectly safe out there compared to this hell hole.

  “I can manage,” I insist with a smile.

  “No baby,” she says, “I’ll keep you safe right here.”

  Dumb bitch!

  I want to yell out profanities but hold my tongue.

  “I’ll find a safe place to hide,” I say, eyeing the kitchen where the door to the backyard is still open, my only chance at freedom.

  All the while this exchange is happening, I continue to hear and feel the tremors of the fight in the garage.

  A massive bang jolts me into the air, pain shocking my body when I land on my screwed up ankle. The sister pulls me closer protectively as the wall starts to fall over.

  She moves like the wind, carrying me with her as we narrowly avoid getting crushed.

  She flips me over her shoulder emasculating me as she darts for the kitchen, hiding with me in the corner when she gets there.

  My eyes remain fixed on the open door as I overhear the battle that’s now progressed to the living room.

  The sister crawls along the kitchen cupboards back to the living room’s entrance as another one is sent flying out straight through to the backyard.

  To my horror the sister outside immediately covers up the back door with a torrent of webs, before doing the same to the windows. Bedevilment stupefies me as my only ray of hope is flushed down the toilet.

  At this point I just start to fucking cackle.

  I must have died right? When I passed out earlier I actually just died and went to my own Taylor made personal hell. These things are demons, they’re actually fucking demons!

  I laugh, noticing how much the protruding bone from my ankle looks like a bloody middle finger.

  I spend the next ten minutes sinking deeper into despair, waiting for the moment the fight finally reaches the kitchen. I had taken the sharpest kitchen knife I could find, ready to stab Fredrick in the dick the instant he comes to finish me off. If I die here today then I’ll see to it that he never fucks again as compensation for my mortal departure.

  For some reason I think back to when Andrew died. That boy had so many hopes and dreams. He wanted to be in the NFL. He wasn’t tall like me and Okimoto, and not particularly athletic, but he was slippery as hell when playing tag. I guess he wanted to be a quarterback, if only I cared enough to ask when he was alive. He was a nerd too, a sports nerd. Obsessed with football and constantly debating other football nerds in class about which players were better suited to different teams.

  He liked a girl named Abby, she was mediocre at best but he thought that Latina was the prettiest thing in the world. He was obsessed with her and asked her out again and again. As my last sentence implied she never said yes. He still loved her though, me losing half my respect for him because of it.

  He styled himself like a hood rat even though he was white. He always wore a durag over his fluffy brown hair and loved to rap, which he was actually quite talented at. He could rap circles around me and often got along better with the other black kids than I did.

  He loved his dad who wasn’t a good man but a man with hopes his sons would be. His death occurred at the hands of some random gang members is what the police said. The foster system took him and his brother but only the brother would live long enough to be adopted. One of the last conversations I had with him before the pier was about his dad. He knew our parents knew each other and asked if they were friends like he was with me and I said, “yes they cried for days when those gangsters took out your pops.”

  Why am I telling you all of this? Well I guess it’s because everything he was he suddenly wasn’t and would never again be the moment that trigger was pulled.

  It’s almost a little funny. A woman carries a baby for nine months, then the kid goes to school for around twenty or so years, learning, loving and developing their identities from the very beginning. They suffer and grow and fall and learn. They fail and succeed at different things in the process of chasing then changing then chasing their dreams, again and again. Years go by, each one with its own lessons. All that effort, an entire universe forming in their minds, their identities as solid and permanent as the mantel of the earth. Yet so unfairly it only takes seconds for all of it to just stop, Just end with no moving forward. When a train accelerates to full speed, it takes just as much time for it to come to a stop. When a plane takes off, landing takes just as much skill if not more. When a person grows up slowly death claims them in an instant. Life is slow and steady but death always wins the race.

  At times when I think of this I simply laugh at how unfair it is. I’m even doing it now as I think about how my own life is about to end.

  What dreams did I have? What passions? What goals? What kind of person would I have become when I grew up?

  I never cared about basketball. I’ve never had any real feelings for girls other than wanting sex. I was mediocre at everything except the most superficial aspects of life. Even martial arts was something I did purely for the sake of practicality. I never indulged in brawls for fun like Okimoto did. Unlike Shakira I had little empathy for others. I had never loved anyone with the same intensity that Markieff loved Shakira with, though that’s probably for the better.

  I never had any real aspirations for the future, I figured it wasn’t worth bothering with since I’d just become a monster like my parents regardless. I may have held a guilty conscience, but that didn’t make me good, plenty of other monsters have that as well.

  To be alive is to live and to live is to strive for something, without that you’re just surviving passively. I guess that’s all I’ve ever done. I’ve only ever survived and I don’t know what it means to live. So was I ever really alive?

  Maybe I was always just a walking corpse from the very beginning.

  I feel tired… what time is it? Should I even bother checking it? Maybe if I fall asleep he’ll think I’m dead. Screw that he’ll definitely sus me out. After all he’s beyond human ability now. The sisters too.

  I look at the knife, my body sliding down the wall until I sit on the floor.

  “What was I ever going to do to those things?” I laugh.

  Only a greater power can fix this fucked up situation. A greater power?

  In my mind a supernova explodes, banishing the darkness that surrounds me back into the corners of the world.

  I have her… I HAVE HER!

  I retrieve my phone from my pocket that’s only still functioning thanks to its case and screen protector. I call her and Chica picks up immediately just like the last time.

  “I hope you’re calling to apologi-“

  “-SPIDER MONSTERS!” I cry, not even giving her the chance to finish, “I’m around people who are mutating into spiders and on the verge of fucking death!”

  “Spider monsters?” She asks, her voice suddenly going serious which seems almost alien of her. “You’re not just trying to lure me in like last time right?”

  “They attacked me and my leg is broken!” I yell frantically, messing up by saying leg and not ankle and not giving enough of a shit to correct myself.

  “Listen to me,” she says warningly, “you better not be joking about this, I’ll be there in five seconds.”

  She hangs up, and right as I’m in the middle of texting her the address a white flash of light blinds me as it fills the house.

  The tremblings coming from the living room end abruptly, the light fading as a warm silence washes everything away.

  I hear two feet gently touch down beside me and when I look up to my left, I see her looking back at me.

  She has this faint aura of light around her, she’s ethereal.

  Her diamond eyes stare into mine with the warmth of a shower on a cold winter’s day.

  “Are you hurt.” She asks.

  “No,” I say with a frown, “as you can see my ankle bone is just casually peaking out to say hi.”

  She just had to ruin the moment by asking a stupid question. But I don’t care because I know I’m safe now. I can see it in her face and feel it in the air.

  She notices my ankle, her face that’s more beautiful than ever donning a veil of pity.

  She squats and hovers one hand just over my injury and a second flash of light catches me off guard causing me to flinch, then my pain is simply… gone. Not just the pain in my ankle, but the pain in my chest, where I’m sure a few ribs were broken and the pain in my shoulder too.

  I’m suddenly engulfed by an explosion of energy that makes me feel like I can run a thousand marathons, like I’m healthier than I’ve ever been before.

  She starts to stand and I beat her to it before asking, “what did you do? I feel amazing!”

  With the most genuine smile I’ve seen on her she says, “I made a wish.”