Aaron Pierce's Story

"Don't be afraid to die."

That's what their homeroom teacher said, a week into the school year. The class had written words on little bits of paper, and the stationary crumpled as she spoke. Crumpled into nothing. Gone. Like magic. "As long as we wish it, you cannot leave."

Her eyes raked over her twenty-something students. Swirls of ink appeared on their skin, manifesting as strange symbols on the children's bodies. Good. It seemed the rite was proceeding safely. Not much more time left until the eclipse. She opened her mouth to continue her 'explanation'. A true explanation, of course, would be given to the students who survived.

Martin listened as the teacher spoke calmly of death. Of floating islands and curses and using words to fight said curses. God's Blight, she called it. This had to be a joke. A reality scare cam, or something. Right? Right??

Then the island blocked out the sun, just like she said it would. A shadow fell over the school campus.

'Oh, shit.' He almost puked from the immediate sensation of wrongness. Like reality had just flipped right over on it's fucking head. It was that feeling of stepping through a stair that was never there in the first place, that feeling when his parents told him his aunt had been diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer.

Martin's chest rose and fell, each panicked inhale serving as a cold dose of actuality. Was this even the same classroom?

All the desks, all his classmates still sat in the same spots. But the colors were off. Darker, and smearing at the edges like a still life painted by sad and angry artist. One that didn't like to pay a lot of attention to people. Martin's wide red eyes trailed to Annabelle sitting next to him, and her face was just a little harder to make out than usual. Blurry and pale.

The teacher sighed under her breath, coolly inspecting her nails. "First one is always monsters. No surprise there." She glanced up at the petrified classroom. "What? If you just sit there, you're going to die, you know. They'll be here soon."

---

That's what their homeroom teacher said, a week into the school year. That's also how Martin found himself sprinting towards the library like the little bitch seventeen year-old he was. Not like he was alone. As soon as she had spoken, basically the entire class made a fucking break for it. Monsters? Monsters!?

'Please be LSD, please be LSD,' he chanted in his mind. Martin ducked into a side hallway, away from the thundering mass of hysterical students. 'Or any hallucinogenic, really, I'm not picky. A bad cocaine trip would be--'

The soles of his school-standard leather oxfords caught on something wet and slippery. The blond teenager's feet skidded on the ground one moment, and in the next he found himself ass-backwards on the hardwood floor. Damn. What a stupid move. Martin pressed his hand to the wall to help haul himself up, shuddering at the distinct sensation of the liquid soaking into his pants.

A coppery, metallic stench filled his nose and mouth. His palms left red smears on the wall and... yeah. Martin looked down. Yeah. It was blood. He just fell in a puddle of blood. Another person's bodily fluids.

There was that urge to throw up, again.

Fucking... fucking gross!! His stomach seized. 'Oh my god.' Martin stiffened, glancing about in disgust before numbly wiping his trembling hands on the front of his shirt. 'So... I hope I'm not going to die today.' His mouth twisted into a tight, panicked sort of smile. Nope. Probably going to die. Whole school was a deathtrap from the very beginning.

Of course, blood must come from somewhere. The source of the ichor, sprawled a few feet away, made Martin's fixated eyes prick with horrified, unshed tears.

No. Oh fuck no.

The dude's face had been cut clean in half.

Sliced horizontally, right at the jaw. Distantly, Martin's ears detected screams of terror echoing down the hallways of the building, but by then his entire body had clamped up. The bodies of animals, smashed to paste, that he'd sometimes glimpsed on the asphalt of the highways did not compare to this.

His spine. You could see it, sticking bone white out of the gory stump of a neck. Worst of all, worst of fucking all, was the tongue. With the upper half of the jaw entirely severed, the whole tongue just flopped limply out of what was left of the corpse's mouth.

The shrieks nearest to Martin escalated into full-blown wailing before snuffing out altogether.

Wait... that wasn't right. He could still hear the screaming, but only faintly. Like someone had clapped hand over the person's mouth, or shoved their face into a pillow. The teenager's mind was silent. Completely devoid of an internal dialogue as his head turned to the right, to look further down the corridor.

It was built like a spider, with fleshy skin and many human arms in the place of arachnid legs. Long fingered hands pressed to the floor, walls, and ceiling to keep the creature suspended in place. More hands, still, pinned a student to the wall. It busily stitched up her lips with a needle and black thread; the girl's eyes were already sewn completely shut.

The giant, sick-looking set of scissors grasped by a set of fingers did not escape Martin's attention.

If the world was now a painting, then the thing had a face like a portrait. It didn't move. Only bored into the young man with penetrating eyes in the way that certain portraits do. Its hands continued to tie off the thread at the girl's mouth almost absently, as an unoccupied arm bent at the elbow. Her muffled cries choked and died down further.

The monster pressed a bony forefinger to its expressionless portrait mouth. 'Shhh.'