Chapter 8: Present Day

Smith pushed open the door to room 216B and remembered being a sophomore and having Algebra with Mrs. Anderson there. Every day, he would sit in the last row, pull out his book and position it in front of him just enough so that she could not tell he was pantomiming drum beats he had been dreaming up in his head. Should would bang on about X, and he would bang on… his desk. He escaped the class with a C- and a lot of tutoring from Nat.

It would be near the end of that school year that he would get together with Dave Sanivovich and Handro Espinosa, and they would talk about their mutual love for music and the idea of starting a band. They spent the entire summer before their junior year meeting up daily on Handro’s parents’ property. They had a better chemistry almost right from the get-go than Smith would have imagined, and every day it felt like their music got better and better.

It was progress, even if it wasn’t much. They would simply play covers of their favorite bands that first summer while they worked out how the three of them would write songs and music. They played around with the tempo of existing songs; they would speed most of them up, but Dave always thought they felt a bit cliche doing that. So every so often, they would humor him by slowing down others or simply tweaking the guitar riffs on some. 

Handro’s sister worked at a bar in her college town a few hours away, out towards Philly. She always told them that when she thought they were good enough, she’d have her boss bring them in to play on a Friday or Saturday night. Or a Wednesday night. Whenever; it would have been great for them no matter what. They would practice and practice and practice, and Smith could still picture her face: her mouth tilted to one side, her eyes turning up and to the right, where the wave in her black hair folded up. And then she would say “Not yet, but keep going. You have to be crowd-ready if I’m putting myself out there for you!”

Over the past summer, she had gotten a new job on campus as a waitress at an Italian place, and the restaurant definitely didn’t bring in indie bands. At least not the likes of Bad Joke, the name they had given themselves. Maybe if they started playing violins, but not as they were. The three of them had been over a year into playing together, and they still had not done a venue bigger than Handro’s yard. But it was coming.

Room 216B ended up being empty, and Smith wondered if Handro and Dave were okay. He had sent out dozens of texts while the six seniors checked the floor, but no one was responding. It hadn’t been but a few minutes, but still… someone would have written back, right?  But they hadn’t. Not David or Handro. Not the twins. Not his parents. Every message just sat there on the bottom line of his phone, listed as “Delivered”.

His stomach sank again thinking of Emma and Tiffany out there. 

“Anderson’s room is clear,” he called out. He had to focus on what was in front of him.

“Yeah, Goldman’s, too,” Nat chimed in from two classes down from him.

From far across the second floor hallways, the rattling sound of the metal gate—the small-barred security screen that was all that separated them from those bodies from the cafeteria—shook louder, and Smith had to shut his eyes and release a shiver from around his shoulder blades. He had to trust that Becky sealed it as best as possible and that it would hold. If it failed… or if they broken it down…

“So nobody has seen anything up here?” Aaron asked, an air of annoyance in his voice. “No dudes with axes. No hacked up bodies? Nothing?”

Smith shook his head to answer for the rooms into which he had poked his head. He looked around at the others and saw similar reactions.

“I think we can hole up in Mr. Farquar’s chemistry room. It’s the biggest room here. And it has, like,” Vinny started moving his hands as if he were grabbing and pouring things, “chemicals and stuff?”

“Are ‘chemicals and stuff’ useful right now?” Nat asked.

“Ms. Anderson’s rooms has cut-outs of geometric shapes. They’re probably more useful than that.”

“Mr. Han’s room has a bust of Shakespeare!”

They all waited for Gene to say more about that, but he only looked at them equally expectantly. Finally, he declared, “I thought we could make a list of what could be useful. I didn’t know if that would help. It’s heavy.” He made a motion as if he was swinging something around.

“So… chem lab?” Vinny threw his suggestion back out to them to get them out of Gene’s sidetrack.

“It’s probably—“

A feminine giggle cut off Smith’s response, and the six of them all jerked at the sound of it. There was an echo-y quality to the laughter, and he could picture the acoustics of the sound hitting tiled walls.

“Did anyone check the bathrooms?” he whispered to them. 

The giggle came again. Short and higher in pitch this time. Smith could see the face to which it belonged in his mind’s eye; a young face edged downward, belonging to a girl no older than he was, but with eyes looking upward to see straight ahead. A twisted smile. Maybe a hand twirling its owner’s hair just a bit too tightly. A slouched, but tense posture. The image in his head rallied another shiver.

Then she stepped out from the girl’s room doorway, and she seemed even more disconcerting than Smith imagined. Her thick black boots reached up to just under her knees, almost meeting the bottom of her plaid skirt. Above that, a green hoodie seemed inappropriate for the beginning-of-September weather. She held two butterfly knives, one in each gloved hand. Her hair was not as twirl-able as Smith imagined; she had it in tight braids against her scalp.

But her most noticeable feature was a smooth, featureless mask over her face. It was completely flat, with no bulge for a nose or her brow. And there were no eye slots, though she seemed to walk just fine, so he imagined she must have been able to see somehow.

“Yo, who the—“

Before Aaron could finish his thought, two others came out from the restroom behind her. They were both male, as far as Smith could tell. They also wore boots, but shorter up their legs than the girl’s. One wore jeans; the other, khakis. The one in jeans had a black leather jacket zipped up, again causing Smith to dwell on the weather of all things. Khakis had an unzipped denim jacket and a plain white T-shirt underneath. 

They each also wore a flat mask, though they must have added more flourishes to theirs than their partner. The mask of the first one had a smiley face carved into it. The eyes were detailed enough to have pupils, and they were wide. The mask’s smile was large and toothy. The jagged etching gave what should have been a happy expression a much more malicious intent. 

The other one’s mask just bore a large X, marked in what Smith desperately hoped was dark red paint.

“Is that supposed to scare me? You got any more of you in there you want to come out with? You’re gonna need them.”

The girl at the front of the trio shook her head slowly, teasingly, as if she was not impressed with Aaron’s threat.

“Did you do…,” Becky seemed to hesitate. “Are the responsible for the people in the cafeteria?”

Gene must have been unsure. “There’s no blood on her knives,” he pointed out.

“Are you hiding from them, too? We locked them out, so we should be all right here if so.” Smith felt Nat was perhaps being too hopeful with her question. “It’s all right,” she said again, reassuring someone as she lightly pressed her palms outward.

The girl with the butterfly knives stepped forward, and the two boys with her matched the pace. The two of them each pulled a military style knife out of the top of their pants;  it was the the kind that had the teeth on the reverse side of the blade. Smith imagined the blade going into him in as clean slice, then ripping back out, the teeth of the knife shredding him along the way. His hands started burning with nervous energy.

“Use your words, guys,” Vinny said, stepping forward in front of Nat. 

“Look, if you are going to try something, then get on with it,” a seemingly exasperated Aaron growled. 

“Do we know you? Do you guys go to school here?” Smith asked.

The girl twirled her head in a circle, then swung it to each side, causing a cracking noise from her neck both times. She flicked the butterfly knife in her right hand closed, then immediately swung it back open. She giggled again, ridiculing his question. It was the only answer she offered. 

“All right, I—“

She cut Aaron off by dashing forward. Her movement was not just sudden; it was lighting fast. Smith felt a warning or a cry or some kind of sound start within him, but before it pushed its way out, she had closed the gap of probably twenty feet between them and reached Vinny. 

The knife swung up into his midsection just as fast as her approach; every part of her seemed to move in unison. In a ceaseless motion, she followed all the way through, bringing her arm high above her head. Vinny’s gray polo shirt flapped off the edge of her knife. The rest of his clothes fell to the ground in a heap atop his shoes. But Vinny himself was gone. 

Smith and the others recoiled backwards, but he had no doubt that if she wanted to get more of them in that moment, she could have. As they stumbled away from her, she merely pulled the shirt from her blade and flung it disdainfully to her side. It lightly rattled the lockers against the wall as it flopped into them and then slid to the floor. 

“What did you do?” cried Nat.

“Did she evaporate him or something?” Gene asked, his breathing quickening.

“Holy shit,” Aaron muttered.

“What did you do?” Nat demanded again.

The masked girl’s response was yet another mocking giggle. She flicked her knife closed and then open again. The other two with her stepped forward to either side of her. The maddening giggle never stopped that time. It was no longer a threat or an intimidation technique. Smith could feel this was a laugh of pride in what she had done. It never stopped, even as she turned her head towards the discarded shirt. 

X-Mask kicked the rest of Vinny’s belongings out of his way. Smith’s classmate’s—his friend’s—shoes clanged the locker not far from where the girl had tossed his shirt. His pants, underwear, and undershirt spread out across the floor.

Smith somehow felt something to his right, enough to force his eyes from the trio. Nat was shaking, almost every inch of her. Her lowered head was almost at a full vibrate starting from her neck, and her balled fists were stiffly shivering her entire arms. He had assumed it was devastation over what happened to Vinny, but she made a sound… it wasn’t a sob or a choke or anything he would have assumed came with crying. It sounded far more animalistic.

Nat lifted her head like a whip. Her eyes were bloodshot, and she bore a twisted scowl that made her mouth seem warped or contorted or extended somehow. The color had drained from her face. Without a warning, she lunged!

Somehow even more quickly than the masked girl had struck Vinny, Nat pounced onto her. Tackling her to the ground, they slid two feet past her partners. Nat struck downward with what looked to be a headbutt into the girl’s collarbone, and she used her hands to keep the twin knives at bay. Nat was making an awful sound, somehow growling but also… sloppy? Smith couldn’t place of what it reminded him.

X-Mask and Smiley turned and plunged their knives into Nat while Smith was still absorbing what he was seeing, but it did not deter her at all. They pulled the blades out, the teeth tearing Nat’s flesh and splattering blood across the hallway lockers just like he had pictured happening to him, but she still did not react. She simply wrenched the girl’s wrists in each of her hands; the resulting snapping sounds sickened Smith. The masked girl did not utter a sound.

Nat pulled away from her and shot her left arm out with such velocity that it ripped through Smiley’s leather jacket, another flash of dark red littering the brick wall opposite the lockers. Smiley stumbled backwards, falling all the way onto his back as he frantically tried to hold his midsection together. 

X-Mask swung his knife again, but Nat caught him be the forearm. By this point, Smith knew that he and others had time to get involved if they needed to, but they were frozen in place. The blood was on more than the walls. It was pooling on the floor from the girl’s throat. And it was covering Nat’s mouth. 

“Holy shit,” Aaron murmured again, more quietly and slowly that time.

Nat twisted X-Mask’s arm as suddenly as she had the girl’s, and just like before, it resulted in a violent snapping sound. The knife clattered off of the ground, and he grabbed at his wrist in clear pain. But just like the other two when Nat attacked them, he did not make a sound. She let him go, allowing him to teeter backwards.

After a second of watching him recoil, Nat took a step forward. But Gene found his voice to call out, “Whoa, that’s enough, Nat!” His gummy arm stretched out past her and knocked X-Mask away from her and into the lockers. They rattled much harder than when Vinny’s shirt was swatted against them. He fell to the ground, still grabbing his apparently broken arm. “He’s done, all right?”

Nat let out a hard breath, like she had just gotten done with a jog, and her face morphed before Smith’s eyes. Her chin retracted slightly upwards to where he realized it should normally be, and the warping around her mouth faded back. Her fingertips, which he barely noticed were sharper and more defined, filled back out. Nat looked much more like herself.

But… like herself covered in blood.

“Nat, are you—“

Nat ignored whatever Becky was going to say. Even though she was normal (human?) again, she kicked X-Mask in his broken wrist. 

“What did you do to him? Where is his body?”

X-Mask lifted his head to face her, but he did not answer.

She grabbed the edges of his mask. “I said, what did you—“, but as she ripped the mask from him, the question died in her bloodstained mouth.

He had no face.

Beneath the stained mask, his flesh was as smooth and featureless as his disguise. He tilted his head in response to her shock, and then it was his turn to giggle, even with his lack of a mouth. The sound vibrated in his throat, lightly twitching his head. 

“Mother fucker,” Nat said, a sound of more shock than anger.

Aaron walked over to Smiley and reached down to his mask. Smiley tried to swat his hand away, but he was clearly weak from the blood loss from his stomach; his attempt was too slow and weak to stop even a child. Aaron pulled his mask away to find that his face matched X-Mask’s. 

“What is going on, guys?” Becky asked, leaning against a wall in shock. “Is Vinny really… gone?”

Gene looked around as if he might see Vinny hiding right next to them or something. Aaron looked down at the girl with the butterfly daggers. He seemed to be put off by the blood still spurting from the wound in her neck. 

“I’m not touching that,” he said.

“Yeah, yeah, I get it,” Nat sighed. “It’s not pretty.”

“Can we talk about why Nat is a vampire or something?”

Smith wanted to respond to Gene’s suggestion, but he realized it was a valid concern. It struck him as odd that with everything that had happened and everything he had just seen, the fact he just watched a friend he knew from elementary school drink a girl’s blood almost slipped by unacknowledged.

“Because we didn’t all get gummy limbs,” Nat answered without looking at him.

“You don’t think that’s weird? We’re being attacked by, like, monsters? And then one of us is also a monster?”

“She’s not—“ Smith started.

Aaron interjected to push on with his concern, “You involved in all of this, Natalie?”

“Aaron!” Becky cried. “She probably just saved our lives!”

“So she can eat us later?”

“I wouldn’t eat you on a dare, Aaron.”

“Is that racist?” Gene asked.

Nat defended herself, “No, he just probably tastes like an asshole.”

“Well you are what you eat,” Gene said. All the eyes in the hallway turned to him. “Wait, did that make sense?”

Nat sighed and steadied herself against a locker. She twisted her body away from them and moved her arm upwards; Smith intuited that she must not have wanted them to see her wiping blood off of her face. “I’ve been like this since this summer,” she explained without turning back around. “It’s not related to today. At least, I don’t think it is. I just figured it was my genetic alteration. Like I said… we didn’t all get gummy arms or fire hands.”

“I’ve seen videos of people who turn into, like, bears and stuff,” Becky stated, pointing at the bulge of her phone in her pocket. “They were tested and are just GAPs, too.”

“Are the people outside the gate GAPs?” Aaron asked. Then he turned and pointed at the girl on the ground. “Hell, are they?”

No one had any answer. Smith remembered the past summer when, one night after practice with Dave and Handro, he felt his hands getting hot. Not warm or uncomfortable, but somehow hot. Like they were burning, but they weren’t in any pain. He walked out of Handro’s basement and to the bathroom. As he soaked them in cold water, the water began to boil. He pulled them out to see the moisture sizzling off of them. 

Then the fire came.

He was frantic, terrified he was about to somehow burn his friend’s house down, even though in retrospect he knew the flames were so small. He threw his hands back in the water, and on the second go, the fire went out and the hot sensation passed. Once he felt safe, he rushed out of the room, called out a quick excuse to Handro’s parents about feeling sick, and ran out into the evening night panicking and unable to control his breathing.

That was his first experience with his alteration, and all he did was make fire. Really small fire. What the hell must Nat’s first time have been like?

“Do you have to sleep in a coffin?” Gene asked. His train of thought was clearly on a different track than Smith’s own.

“I’m not even going to—no. I don’t sleep—“

“Are you dead?”

Gene’s last question cut into her exasperation. “Am I what?”

“Yeah, vampires are dead, right?” Aaron backed Gene up.

“I’m not dead, I’m right here walking around—“

“Are they dead?” Smith wondered aloud, pointing lazily in the direction of the rattling gate noises. He saw how badly his whole arm was trembling as he did so. Nat was walking around, sure. But so were they. Was there a link after all? 

“Is Vinny dead?” Becky’s questioned shocked him back to the realization that his friend was gone. Smith was having a hard time focusing on any one thing at a time. Faceless assailants. Nat being… whatever she was. And, oh yeah, Vinny fucking disintegrated or something.