Warning: This work has been rated 16+ for language.
Wednesday
June 14th, 2016
At 2:12 am, Rubio Mendez was immediately awakened by his home security alarm. The persistent ringing was incredibly loud and a frighteningly new sound to him, seeing as the security system had only been installed two weeks prior.
He sat up in his bed and rubbed his eyes, trying to determine what exactly was happening. Without his glasses, he couldn't read the alarm clock too well, but he did notice the bright green lights were flashing. Sometime during the night, the power had gone out. Is that what had triggered the alarm?
Rubio stood up and left his bedroom, but not before he realized that his terroir, Isabella, was noticeably lacking. The bitch barks at everything, he thought. Where is she?
The alarm was alarming in every sense of the word. The loud chimes were extremely startling and unwanted, especially at this hour in the night. And he knew that his two young daughters, Eva and Lupe, would be waking up and crying now. Trying to get them to fall asleep the previous evening had been a nightmare and he had learned to appreciate everything his ex-wife had done before the divorce.
Rubio stumbled down the hall blindly and flipped on the lights into the hallway. The girl's bedroom door was still shut, but he could hear them talking between themselves. He made his way down the hallway and approached the stairs. Turning on the next set of lights, he was able to see down into the main living room.
Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Isabella still had yet to make her appearance, but he would worry about that after the damned alarm was turned off.
He stumbled down the stairs and rubbed his eyes again, clearing his vision for the small alarm system. He punched in his five digit code and the alarm went silent. He breathed a sigh of relief. The alarm system was pretty high tech to Rubio. Living in the lower east side of Los Angeles, he was advised to get a security system as soon as possible, especially when his daughters came to visit on the weekends. In the five months of living here, he had yet to experience any trouble with any type of crime in his neighborhood, but his ex-wife Maria insisted on the security system.
The screen was a touch screen, which made it relatively easy to locate the reason why the alarms were triggered. On the log, it stated:
2:12AM. FRONT DOOR OPENED.
Rubio frowned and looked down the hallway toward the front door. Sure enough, it was wide open. Panic struck his heart as he rushed down the hallway and slammed the door shut, making sure to bolt it as he did so. When he turned around, he placed his back against the door and breathed for a moment, trying to comprehend exactly what to do.
Was there someone in the house? He instinctively began making his way toward his girls' bedroom. Every step he took made him feel eerily on edge, like someone was watching him. The thought was absurd though. This neighborhood he lived in had a very low reported crime rate. There was a gate around the community, and while it wasn't impenetrable, it definitely kept the worst of the gangs out.
"Girls?" Rubio shouted up the stairs. "Girls, come down here!"
He waited at the bottom of the stairs. His right hand grasped the railing and he stood in silence as he waited for their response. He couldn't hear anything coming from upstairs, which only made him worry worse. He scanned the living room one more time before making his way up the stairs and down the hallway to their room.
"Girls!" he cried again and flung their door open.
"Daddy? What's going on?"
The two little girls blinked in the sudden bright light in their dark room. The light of the hallway also illuminated Isabella, who was apparently sleeping in the girls' room on the rug in the center.
"Was that the alarm?" Eva, his youngest daughter of five years old, asked.
"Yeah, it was," Rubio breathed, examining their room. Everything looked fine, and most importantly, his daughters were there. "Stay here, okay?"
"Okay," they murmured in agreement.
Rubio turned to walk out of their room again and the instant he did, the alarm went off again and the incredibly loud beeps filled their ears. Eva let out a high pitched scream and covered her ears. Her older sister did the same, her eyes wide and alert.
"Daddy?" Lupe asked, but Rubio didn't have time to answer her. He bolted down the hallway and down the stairs again, frantically scanning the room for any sign of an intruder. The house was just as he had left it a minute ago.
What the hell was going on?
Rubio approached the alarm system again and typed in his code. He glanced down the hallway and ensured himself that the front door was still locked. What in the world…? He looked through the log again and it read:
12:17AM. BACK DOOR OPENED.
"Jesus Christ," he muttered as he read those words.
"Daddy, what's going on?" Lupe was standing at the top of the stairs, looking down at Rubio.
"Get back in your room and stay there with your sister! Go!"
"But Daddy--"
"Go!"
Rubio hurried through the living room and made his way into the back part of his house, which included the kitchen, the door the garage and the back door, which was shut. He shook his head in disbelief and noticed the deadbolt was unlocked. He specifically remembered locking it before he went to bed that previous night. It had to have been unlocked from the outside with a key, which was highly unlikely. The other alternative was it had been unlocked by someone inside the house.
Had the intruder made a quick escape? Rubio flicked on the outside porch light, but the light didn't illuminate much. His backyard was not fenced off by any means. On one side of the yard, the neighbors had built a cheap vinyl fence, but that was it. The other three sides were completely exposed, meaning whoever had just escaped had done so successfully.
Rubio felt sick to his stomach. Had someone really been inside of his house only minutes previous?
He grabbed the landline phone, which was resting beside the dishwasher he had loaded the night before. He dialed 911, but before he even placed the phone to his hear, there was a loud and distinct knock on the front door.
Three knocks. Each one louder and more forceful.
Rubio froze in panic and fear. Was the intruder back? What was happening?
"Daddy?" Lupe called again. "Daddy, where are you?"
"Lupe, I said stay upstairs!"
"No! Daddy, there is a man in your room!"
"What…?" Rubio turned and looked up at his daughter, whose face was pale as could be. Rubio seemed to forget how to breathe for a second as his panic turned into a reality.
There was someone in his house.
Points:
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Canary word: Present
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125,018 Literary Works • 672,857 Reviews
Happy Review Day! It is happy, actually, because I really liked this little piece. I'm a horror/suspense fan anyway, but this is a good example of the genre.
What I liked the most was where the horror came from, because it wasn't something incredibly supernatural. It's certainly tense and mysterious, but it's not impossible to relate to. It's a real problem that could happen to anybody, and that makes the whole story easier to become immersed in. I also enjoyed the pacing of the story, and how it ramped up as soon as the threat was determined. Whilst it was a fairly hectic scene, it wasn't difficult to keep up with as you kept things short and snappy.
That said, I do agree that in the earlier part of the story you could have provided more character development, at least physically. Horror can be so much more effective when the victims are people rather than ideas, even if their personalities and histories are hidden. Based on your description of setting, you should be able to pull off a decent set of character descriptions.
Overall, though, this gave me an interesting read. There's something good waiting to be built on here, and you can certainly pull off a good story. Keep writing!
A very tension-heavy start - I like it. The slow pace helps it so, too.
I would suggest that you consider adding more physical descriptions to the characters themselves and their condition, though. While you give us plenty to picture the house, Rubio and his daughters are all faceless right now. Even if they've no special features, you should at least give us something: hair, skin, eye color, etc.
Furthermore, since the way you're writing this is very focused on stuff happening NOW, beat-by-beat, maybe consider writing in the present tense? People always assume you always need to write in the past but that is hardly the case. That being said, keeping it in the past isn't a problem per se.
On the technical side, I didn't find any problems with grammar or structure. I did turn my nose up at "the alarm was alarming in every sense of the word." I can absolutely see what you were going for, writing it like this, but I was still irked by how redundantly it read.
Maybe you could switch it to something like "The alarm was doing every justice to its name, the loud chimes[...]"? The way you wrote isn't wrong, of course, so it's purely up to you.
There is something I'd like to point out, as it struck me as kind of a plot hole. You've established that the dog is very agitated and barks at anything odd. Plus, you've established that the girls' room is in a single corridor which leads to Rubio's room and that the dog was with said girls.
How did the burglar(?) get to Rubio's room without Isabella flipping out? A dog's hearing and sense of smell would have, absolutely, told her that someone was out there. Or is this a paranormal story and we're dealing with something otherworldly? No need to answer if it's a spoiler, of course!
Regardless, you've a good thing cooking in here. With just a few touches here and there on giving us a sense of the characters' appearance and state, and you'll have a nice thriller.
Keep at it!
Hey there man , i would honestly say you had me hold my breath till the end .Totally engrossing story . keep up the good work