Young Writers Society

A/N: Our band director gave us a vague assignment to artistically express our thoughts/feelings/ideas about a piece we're playing called Angels in the Architecture. Here is a link if you want to listen to it (I think you should, it's amazing! Plus, it might help you understand my short story. Maybe.):http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVW_GQFGQUs

Also, I'm not really sure the genres are right, but they seem to fit the best.

Immaculate snow falls from a nebulous place as she walks without a purpose. After wandering around in a pleasant stupor and humming to herself for God knows how long, the sound of her own footsteps drags her back into consciousness. Heels scraping the pavement. White flakes sticking to unfamiliar trees. A single cloud threatening to float over the moon and block its light. Gradually, the peaceful silence and her blissful unawareness turn into a raw, anxiety-filled reality; she has no idea where she is, neither in time nor in space.

The more she walks, the more it feels like a death march. Her feet, knowing something her mind couldn’t, accelerate to the steady beat of a nonexistent drummer. Branches and streetlamps transform into incomprehensible blurs, and for a moment her heavy breath is the only thing that exists to her. In, out, in, out, faster than it’s ever been. The winter air bitterly bites her delicate skin, and suddenly, the distressed wail of a man in the distance stops her in her tracks.

Doubled-over, she tries to catch her breath as quickly and as quietly as possible, allowing her throat and lungs to burn. The silence that follows is not peaceful but deafening. Despite her lack of oxygen, she breaths slowly and deliberately, not daring to risk missing any out-of-place rustle or crunch.

Slowly cocking her head, she tries to hear any noise at all that probably didn’t belong. During the thick stillness between exhale and inhale, another cry pierces the night – a woman this time, closer to her than the man before.

The apparent closeness of whatever was coming sends enough fear down her spine to paralyze. Without warning, the silence is no more: the wind finds its voice, the branches rustle in reply. Then, another scream. And another. As if properly timed, the terrified shrieks of dozens chimed one after another, a shrill version of the brassy tolls of a church bell. The wind and the trees act as a countermelody to the cacophony of voices coming from all directions.

Run, she thinks. Run because your life depends on it.

From the ground between her feet oozes a black, metallic substance. As it expands, her heart races because her body isn’t allowing itself to get away from it. What is it? A poison? Some type of adhesive? Before she can come up with anything else it could possibly be, something lights up the road in front of her, and she can move her neck enough to see that there’s a small, iridescent only a few yards ahead.

The figure is that of a young boy – his skin, his hair, his clothes, everything of his glows silvery white. He’s too opaque to be real, but too solid to be only her imagination, she decides. Though she wants to ponder this shining silver boy further, her body decides finally that it needs to move. Her breathing is heavy again; the snow covered branches become blurs once more.

As she sprints forward, the boy floats so that he always remains the same distance ahead of her. Her lungs and the boy fight for her attention, but the boy wins it when he takes a sharp left into the bushel of trees. She slows down, but only enough for her to make the decision to follow the boy.

He speeds up ahead of her, but she’s determined to keep up with him. She hears a pair of footsteps behind her and wonders if she’s imagining them or not. Quickly, she glances over her shoulder to check; there is a man following her. This man has bright yellow eyes and is far too close for comfort, but that’s all she can make of him before turning back to see the boy stopped in midair.

A final push: she lifts her knees with every step to run faster and doesn’t dare to make the mistake of looking back again. The man gains on her and she feels something brush against her back, then a tug on her shirt.

No, this can’t be it.

Her lungs want to slow down but her body keeps going, refusing to let the man simply have her. Somehow, he manages to keep his hold on her while barely keeping up. She’s considering taking a sharp turn to throw him off when a poorly placed tree root steals her balance away from her. The two of them fall over each other, but she rolls over and scrambles back to her feet as fast as she can, hardly noticing the boy floating above them. Braced to run again, she pauses only because the boy shakes his head, looking almost solemn. Realization hit: the man wasn’t even so much as stirring. He lies facedown in the snow-sprinkled dirt, motionless as a rock. Curious, she gently kicks him in the head, thinking that she’ll have to kill him right here if he moves at all. She’s relieved when he doesn’t.

The boy floats next to the man, looking at her expectantly as he does so. She kicks him again, and the boy merely shakes his head again; his glow reveals a deep red puddle forming around the man. Disgusted, she tries to flip him over with her foot, but with little success. Abandoning that endeavor, she puts her hands on the man’s shoulders, pushing him over onto his back. This reveals a knife protruding from his abdomen – a knife that was intended for her.

Deciding it might turn out to be useful, she tries not to gag as she removes the knife from his body, avoiding eye contact with the yellow windows that no longer have a light behind them. The boy had vanished by the time she finished.

Finally, her senses catch up with her. A gash on her right shoulder, likely given to her by the knife she’s holding in her own hands, which are covered in someone else’s blood. An acute pain in the ankle that caught on the tree root. Sweat all over her body, freezing in the night air and likely to kill her if she doesn’t do something about it. She sighs, noticing the cloud her breath makes for the first time in what feels like hours, and removes the blood-soaked jacket from the man lying on the ground. Then she removes her own jacket and shirt, replacing them with the jacket that smelled of blood, smoke, and general must. The shirt she had been wearing before serves as a makeshift pillow, her jacket as a blanket. Without bothering to move more than a couple yards away from the decaying man, she curls up on the cold forest floor and drifts off to sleep, her final conscious thought being that the black, metallic substance was probably nothing more than a distraction, and that it had done its job well.