This is my first post in a long time. The story has been in my head for a while now, and this is my first successfull attempt at writing it... so here goes:
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Chapter 1:
The door opened, and the ten or so people in the room looked round. It was just the boy, well at least that’s what he was called. He was about fifteen, not short, but not tall either, his face was as cold as it was unreadable, his eye had dark patches under them, but he did not have the evil that so many other boys his age had. Nobody knew his name or had been able to find one to give him. He walked to his corner of the room where the sink is. The light caught flecks of white in his midnight black hair, maybe from shock, but no one knew.
Drake looked at his reflection in the mirror above the sink. His face was a mess, a bruise was eating his lower jaw, and blood trickled out of his mouth. He felt three teeth where they shouldn’t be, and cursed himself for being so slow as he spat them out. He had won the fight, but he had got hit, it was the third time.
Reaching into his pockets, he pulled out some gauze that he had stolen from the local pharmacy and shoved it in his mouth putting it in place with his tongue. He scanned the room with amber-green eyes, with slits for pupils, looking at the faces of men women and children. Faces he knew well, but not the stories behind them. This was how it was, everyone had a job to do, and no one knew much about anyone, yet he was the only one who wouldn’t talk to anybody. He didn’t quite know why.
Tonight had started out like any other night; he had gone out and waited to see how many people would try to kill him. Not many. Most had given up and lived in fear that he would go after them. But Drake felt apprehensive. There was a buzzing in his ears, the kind of buzzing you get when an insect is near one of them. But each insect has its own specific way of buzzing and this sounded like none of them, and Drake didn’t like it. He remembered very little form his early life: how to talk, fight, read and write a little, and his name, that was about it. But it seemed he had heard that buzzing before and it wasn’t a pleasant memory. He smacked his ear hard, hoping to get rid of the troublesome noise.
He closed his eyes and pressed his hands into them, fighting the long lost battle with his mind, to get his past back. But apart from random, meaningless, flashes, there was nothing. Everything he could remember was after he had knocked on the door for the first time asking for a place to stay.
“I’m afraid I won’t be able to pay you”, he had said.
“Don’t worry about it son”, the then owner had said.
That owner had died recently, but his son continued to rent the property to people who had nowhere to go.
An almighty crash shattered Drake’s musings. He felt wind and rain, heard screaming. Drake opened his eyes, closed them again, rubbed hard, reopened them, hit himself hard on the head, and finally accepted that what he was looking at was real. The roof of the room, along with the three floors above, had been ripped clean off; it was what had done it that Drake refused to believe was real. Whatever it was was about twenty feet tall, and a violent shade of plumb. It had four arms on its left side of its body, going from hip to shoulder, two on its right, and another three protruding from where the head and neck should have been. Instead, its face pushed its way out of the things chest, with the skin still over the features.
Two of the creature’s hands were busy holding the other half of the building up, the rest smashed down making wild grabs for people. Everyone lost their heads. They ran in all directions, some making for the door, some running in circles, bumping into each other, all of them screaming. The creature grabbed handfuls of people tossing them into the air, the lucky ones hit the road, but most fell into the creature’s mouth, the skin parting to let them trough. The thing threw down its arms crushing everything in front of it, splattering the walls with blood and bits of human filth.
Drake crashed into a pale eight year old boy, his eyes wild and streaming.
“Get to the door”, Drake yelled. But the kid didn’t seem able to move. A huge plumb coloured arm came crashing down. Pushing the wailing boy away as hard has he could, Drake grabbed onto the things arm.
Whatever it was didn’t even feel him hold on. It lifted it arms high and looked down at the misery it had caused, skin, entrails, half powdered bones, all covered in blood, caked the floor like some grotesque carpet. It felt no satisfaction, its quarry was gone.
Drake clung on trying to think. He had no idea what he would do if the thing found him, as it surely would, and he could not hold on forever. The arm passed in front of the things face. Drake heard a sort of grunt of surprise and pleasure, and the arm to which he was holding onto pulsate slightly. And then it burst into hundreds of orange tentacles.
He let go, and plummeted toward the earth. Orange tentacles raced after him, one of them struck him the moment Drake hit the floor. Except Drake didn’t hit the floor. He vanished.
