Bad Dreams
Say a prayer for me...
I'm buried by the sound...
In a world of human wreckage...
Sponge.
January 28, 2010...The one day that truly lived in infamy. Everyone remembers where they were, what they were doing, and where they were going at 3:11 p.m, on January 28. They never officially named it, never put up a memorial, and you won't find a calendar with that little box marked in red, but everyone knows it. It was the day the president came over TV, radio, internet, everything. He tried to look calm, and he tried to keep his tone even, but while he was a great politician, he was a horrible actor.
It was the day he told the us that we were not the only ones in the universe.
It was the day we learned about them.
My name is Erin Canaan. I'm a 26 year old little ol' southern girl who grew up on a farm and lived in a lot of places before moving to a small suburb of Cincinnati. Fairfield, to be exact, but nowadays everyone calls it the Epicenter. It's where they started everything... I used to call this place home, y'know. It was a nice place; a little boring, but a nice place to just live, and it was close to everything. Probably why they chose it.
But the story I want to tell starts a little bit before Black Thursday, as a lot of us call it. About a two weeks before.
I was leaving a bar with my roommate Danny and two of his friends after having a good time after work. Friday was my time to let it all go, and I abused it something fierce. I'd put back about six shots of tequila, god knows how many beers, and I was feeling wonderful, y'know. At the time, I had this job at an Acura dealership up on Route 4 as a maintenance tech. I like it well enough; nobody gave me shit for being a woman in a predominately men's field, and I did my job damn well, if I do say so myself. Plus, I'd just recieved a pay raise, so what the hell, time to celebrate!
But after Danny had to pull one of his drunken fool friends off of a waitress, the party came to a pretty quick halt. We had to hustle the drunk fool out before someone called the cops or banned us all from the bar, a punishment worse than death according to Danny, who wasn't much better off than his friend. The other fellow, Chris, I'd only just met that night, and he was a damn teatotaller, so he had the designated spot tonight. Honestly, I don't remember Drunkard's name anymore, and it wouldn't matter if I did. He's probably dead, and I know Chris is. Danny...well...he got himself a fate way worse than getting banned from the bar or death.
I'm sorry, I'm rambling. Remembering the good old days does that to me. Just thinking about when things used to be a little more simple. When things used to be more predictable.
When I used to be human.
Gotcha, didn't I? Heh, you'll hear about that soon enough, though.
Chris dropped the Drunk off at his house, and we waited until he staggered his fool self through the door. Cinci wasn't the kind of place where you fell asleep on your front lawn. You'd wake up naked or worse, assuming you woke up at all, if you were stupid enough to be drunk without friends around. But he got in fine, and Chris took us on our way back to my apartment.
I was laying with my head against the window, enjoying the cool glass against my forehead, just savoring the buzzing high I was on now that things were looking up a little. Well, the tequila probably helped too, but that's not the point.
"Hey Chris, turn on the radio, willya? It's too quiet in here." I asked, lifting my head off of the window and laying it back against the headrest of the passenger seat. He never even took his eyes off of the road, Chris the Careful. He just reached over and flipped the volume up a little. At the time, there'd been a spate of wild animal attacks in the area, and the news was all over it. Nobody could identify what the hell was attacking people in Fairfield, let alone what could be big enough to maul a fully grown man nearly to death, so of course, the news stations were throwing conjecture left and right, taking calls from any nutjob with some free time and a phone, and it just so happened that he had a local station on doing exactly that.
"...believed to be another related incident in a string of animal attacks spanning the Fairfield area. John Sobie, a 40 year old Fairfield resident, was found dead on Mullhauser Rd. at 4:00 this afternoon after apparently being mauled by a large animal. Police refuse to comment on whether or not some large wild cat has wound up in the Fairfield area, but they say they're conducting a full-scale investigation into the matter, along with the local Animal Control office. Residents in the affected areas are urged to stay in their homes as much as possible, and not to walk anywhere alone or unfamiliar. If you see anything, folks, the police request that you call the local police department as quickly as possible, reporting exactly what you saw, where you saw it, and where it was headed."
"Yeah, right." I muttered, closing my eyes and laying my hands in my lap, slowly slipping into that muzzy veil between sleep and waking. People were already scared out of their minds, refusing to leave the house unless they were armed. The cops already had about sixty-some arrests for unlicensed concealed weapons, but they'd let most of them go after confiscating these people's only method of defense.
"Erin! Let's go." Danny said, after patting me on the shoulder and startling me upright. We'd made it back to the apartment already, and my head was spinning. I made it out of the car, gave Chris a 'goodnight', and meandered my way up the front steps while Chris was unlocking the door. And right then, when my foot rested on that front step, the hair on the back of my neck rose. I have a sixth sense in a way. I can feel eyes on me. If you look at me, I just know it, man, and right then, someone was watching me really, really closely. Chris was already gone, and it was almost two in the morning, so who the hell? I looked around, doing a full three-sixty on the front steps, but I couldn't see anything amiss.
"Erin! C'mon! It's cold, dammit!" he grumped, holding the door open.
"Yeah, yeah..." I muttered back, shrugging the feeling off and assuming it was just the alcohol starting to work its way out of me as I was making my way up the steps and inside. It took me two tries to get the key into the lock, and when we got into the apartment, I just flopped on the couch, really starting to feel out of it. That nap in the car hadn't done me any good at all.
"I'm gonna go get some sleep." Dan yawned, stretching and pulling his shirt off. Now Dan wasn't a bad-looking fella at all. Had himself a nice flat stomach, and these big, sloping shoulders that just made most girls swoon. He was also half-Hawaiian, so he had himself a nice year-round tan too. Problem was, Dan was as queer as a three dollar bill, and he broke a lot of women's hearts when they found that little bit out. You'd never know it to look at 'im, but sure enough, I'd walked into the apartment to hear the sounds of two men going at it coming from his room quite a few times. It bothered me a little at first, to be honest, but really, he was a sweet guy, and a good friend, so I just called it a non-issue, and let it go.
"Mmmhmm." I mumbled, closing my eyes, all sprawled out on the couch and not really going anywhere at the moment. Dan just chuckled and turned out the light, heading back to his room. I think I was probably out before he closed his door.
I didn't really dream, I almost never do when I'm drunk, but I kept getting that weird feeling I was being examined, waking up a few hours later and casting my eyes around, but found nothing. "Damn tequila..." I muttered, curling back up on the couch with my face towards the back, just about to relax again when I heard Dan's bedsprings start squeaking. And they weren't squeaking like he was getting out of bed, either. It was way too rhythmic...and it was THAT rhythm, you know the one I mean. The rhythm someone uses when they're getting their rocks off nice and easy on another someone, taking their time at it. I groaned and grabbed one of the cushions of the couch, pressing it firmly over my head to block out the noise.
And the minute I did that, something pressed against my thigh. Hard.
I threw the cushion up, sitting up instantly, looking down at my leg, all traces of drunkeness gone from the surge of adrenaline. I saw something, like a black furry hand with these claws where the fingernails should be...and the arm it was attatched to, black as night and also fuzzy...the shoulder, and then a face... Time slowed down for a moment, and I saw the details of it in that angled light coming through the window from the streetlight just outside. It had these long, pointed ears, black fur everywhere, and this long, broad muzzle. And from that muzzle, that grinning face, these teeth. Long, wickedly curved affairs that fell behind a pair of gigantic sabers up at the front, poking down below the jaw. And the eyes...those eyes were solid green. They didn't have a pupil. They didn't glow, they didn't do anything except sparkle when the light hit them.
I couldn't scream as it looked up at me and cocked its "eyebrow", an expression so human on a face that...wasn't. I was frozen, but I could still hear those bedsprings in the back, and somewhere in the back of my mind, I realized that we'd come home alone. Nobody should be with Dan. Someone was..
I opened my mouth to scream, finally catching my breath, and then...the thing opened its jaws, those teeth all glinting, and that huge furry hand whipped around into my vision...
I woke up the next morning, wrapped up in a blanket on the floor, my head throbbing horribly. The sound of someone cooking something in the kitchen made me forget that for the moment, last night still fresh in my mind. I threw the blanket across the room, and stood up way too fast, the blood rushed away from my brain and made me stagger a little as I made a beeline for the kitchen.
Dan was in there, standing over a tray of biscuits and mixing up some gravy on the stove. He was whistling softly, looking up at me and grinning wide. "Hey Erin...holy hell. That's a hangover if ever I saw one. Here..." he chuckled, awfully happy this morning as he handed me a beer from the fridge. "Hair of the dog that bit you."
"More like 'hit me'..." I grumbled, looking at the beer and remembering last night, a shudder running up my spine. That was one hell of a dream...wasn't it?
"Made breakfast for ya, help yourself." he grinned, turning around to the fridge again. Dan wasn't wearing a shirt, and his back...that was the first time I saw his back clearly. There were scars on it, lines raking from the middle, down and out to his sides, must have been twenty or thirty of 'em. I was kind of surprised, but it didn't really register.
"Hey Dan, did you have someone over last night?" I asked, opening the beer and letting the bitter fluid trickle over my tongue.
"Huh? No, why?"
I shrugged, putting the bottle on the counter. "Thought I heard someone in your room last night. I was probably just dreaming though. Fucking weird dream."
He shrugged and took himself a long, leisurely stretch. "Yeah. Man, I feel really good today. Dunno why...wow..Erin, what happened to your jeans?"
I blinked and looked down. There, on my left leg, four long, jagged rips in the denim ran from mid-thigh to knee...