Lydia Martin – California, United States

They were selling the lake house. It was their last property that wasn't their home; the beach house, the Manhattan loft, even the lodge in Oregon. It didn't all happen at once, it was a slow descent into a tortured financial suffering. It was her father's failing property development firm that started sinking the boat.

As Lydia looked out over the still lake from the end of the small dock, she felt a sizzling anger replace her sorrow – anger because the lake house was one of the few things her mum had been able to squeeze out of the divorce and now she was having to sell it while her ex was off with some bimbo from LA and- and now she was crying. Lydia knew it was pathetic. Far more people had it far worse off. Her whole world though, her whole world, was crumbling beneath her so, just for this once, she'd allow herself to feel miserable.

Between the gentle tears streaking down her face, Lydia saw a woman standing across the lake. Quickly, ashamed, she swiped away her tears careful not to smear away her foundation (which she was stretching with moisturiser) and flicked her hair out of the wetness of her cheeks. The woman was staring at her. Lydia opened her mouth to call out a greeting to the woman – most likely an interested buyer at the open house today – when she saw it. A gun.

It came swinging up in the woman's hand and then- then Lydia was in a warehouse and the woman was much closer now and-

Bang.

She stumbled back so violently she fell. The woman was gone.

Vernon Boyd – Kebbi, Nigeria

Boyd was never nervous. He supposes it had something to do with the knowledge that if he was caught, well, he could be no worse off. Pick pocketing and thievery was a rather viable career path in the slums of Nigeria and so far, seemed like the only career path.

A lot of the gangs wanted him - he was broad and tall but he had no stomach for violence. Drug mule-ing was too dangerous: it made you a target to other organised gangs who had no qualms cutting open your intestines on the street. He could try to find an in for the security sector for some rich white couple but none of them liked to hire street kids (too slippery).

So Boyd was stuck, lifting wallets and snagging jewellery. It got harder the bigger he got and yet also easier: he could cajole some street kids into it with small shares, pretend like he was herding them and apologising to anyone they 'bumped' into.

It was during one of these scams (of a sort) that he saw her. She was sickly and pale, blonde dirty hair and scarcely clothed in a nightdress. He went to move to her trying to pick his way through the crowded street. She looked like she'd been attacked, he had to help her, a white woman alone in a street like this? She'd be attacked again, Boyd had to help her, but before he could move more than a few feet a gun was in her mouth. What was she doing, oh God he had to help-! She pulled the trigger of the gun glinting in the sun light, and fell back into the crowd. No one jumped. No one looked around. No one moved to run either away or to her side. People just kept on about their business. Boyd shoved his way through the thicket of people to where she had been standing but - she was gone. No blood splatter, and no body. Nothing.

Allison Argent – Paris, France

Allison Argent was not a girly-girl thank you very much. She didn't loiter around the bottom of the Eiffel tower looking for summer romances or gaze of wistfully into the Seine. She could shoot crossbows and long bows and long range sniper rifles and handguns and throw Chinese ring dagger and was now dabbling in the art of swordsmanship. Allison Argent was a warrior of her ancestors.

This creep, this asshole though, he thought he could feel up her skirt and plaster her in pretty words and she buckle just like any other poor love sick bastard girly girl he'd tried it on. Allison Argent was not that kind of girl. So what she punched him in the face and broke his wrist? It was self-defence! How did she know he wasn't going to drag her into a classroom and hurt her? How did she know he wasn't trying to coerce her into something? The principle didn't seem to agree with her thought process, sexist pig.

So now, she was sitting outside the school office listening to her mother and father tear the principle a new one.

But then she wasn't in the school office. She was in a warehouse. It was cold, he skin breaking out in goose bumps. It looked like one of her father's storage facilities. (Was she dreaming? She never felt temperature in dreams) It was like her fathers warehouse, but much, much dirtier. She turned. A woman. She was lying on the mattress. Then she wasn't - she was sitting opposite Allison in the school office. A gun. (How did she get a gun in the school?). A gun. A gun, a mouth, a bang, a scream. Her scream. Allison's.

As suddenly as she had appeared she was gone and her parents and the principal came rushing out, "I'm... I'm sorry. I thought I saw-"

"Allison, don't be stupid." Her mother chastised, "It's just a rat." The creature scuttled out of sight of the group, "Which is another thing I will be raising with the school councillors. Good day." They left.

Miezcyslaw Stilinski – Lublin, Poland

Mieczyslaw – fondly nicknamed Stiles - was never the kind of boy to keep his nose out of other people's business. Specifically police business. His father was the police chief who sadly had a hard time disciplining Stiles which lead the boy to where he was now: pouring over the details of a serial killers profile. (The guy had been caught, he didn't see the harm, and it wasn't like he was sneaking into Eichen House like last time). Stiles was in the house, alone like he always was when he heard it. A kind of dripping. He went to the bathroom to check the tap, but it was fine, same with the shower and bath. He lazily thudded his way down the stairs to check the kitchen tap - fine too. It was infuriating, was a pipe leaking, was it a gutter, maybe the fridge was broken?

He went to check that it wasn't one of the bathroom pipes leaking in to the living room roof. As he stepped closer to the room it got louder. Not in the 'aha I found it' kind of way, but in the 'horror movie post death-montage' kind of way. Stiles faltered. He kept on slowly moving like his feet weren't quite getting the message to stop, leave it alone. It got louder, began to echo like it always did in the movies. His bare feet kept on stepping forward, hesitantly.

Stiles crossed the threshold of the room. A derelict building? A warehouse? Heck it could be some weird new-age church for all he knew, but what is was, was not his living room. On a mattress in the sea of waste was a woman. She looked like his mother. He was crying, his throat was thick, what was this, what's happening? No, why did she have a gun in her mouth, no-

Stiles fell back into the coffee table, blindly scrambled to the bathroom and heaved up his breakfast. He knew what was happening. He was too young to have the disease, his mother had been almost thirty when it happened, we wasn't even twenty yet this wasn't fair, he couldn't die now, his dad needed him, he… He was going to die.

Jackson Whittemore – London, England

Jackson hated London. Odd for a born and bred London boy like himself, but hey, it was it what it was. Maybe he hated it because it was so busy – so many people and he was still so alone. Jackson was always alone, so freaking alone, so alone. The part he hated most about London though was not the jam packed streets or the awful traffic or the annoying tourists, it was this freaking hospital. Was it sad he could recognise it from the ceiling panels? Probably. He awoke from his hazy stupor rather quickly, too used to this kind of situation now. "Hello again Jack."

"Ungh." He hated Dr Ford.

"Your parents found you fitting on the floor. Again. Good thing they found you too, or you might not have made it this time. You're not sixteen anymore so they can't make you go, but I do recommend it."

Recommended rehab. Ugh. Stupid Fizz and her stupid dealer gave him a bad cut. It was the worst trip of his life before he'd blacked out – presumably when he started fitting. He'd seen a woman kill herself in some grimy warehouse-like place. Not the oddest thing, he'd tripped and seen far stranger, but it was haunting.

He felt cold inside, the image lingering unlike it usually did, the echo of the bang ringing in his skull. Her brain matter flashed before his eyes and he choked back a terrified sob. The movements of the gun in her hand played out in his mind like twisted tableaux's. His eyes filled with tears. Bang. God, what was wrong with him?

(Well, lots of things really.)

Dr Ford left, and his parents bustled in. There was disappointment painted across their faces. He didn't have time to think about traumatising trips. Probably the last he'll have for a while anyway.

Erica Reyes – Johannesburg, South Africa

Erica was a thrill seeker, a rule breaker, a menace. More than anything though, she was a party girl. Raves were her scene – the thick palpable atmosphere, the music you can feel radiating through your very soul, the almost spiritual connection transcending through yourself to the bodies around you. God she'd never felt so alive.

There were no lingering touches of the apartheid, no haunting pains of poverty, no spiteful divide between those who had and those who didn't. Here, they were all just souls mingling in each other's bliss.

The music pulsed through her veins, puppeteering her body like a marionette. Then suddenly she felt the bodies supporting her drop away. The startling loss made her eyes jerk open. The warehouse was empty. No DJ deck, no coloured lights, no trace of a party. The jumping bodies blinked across her eyes before disappearing again. A woman. There was woman, sitting on a mattress. Erica looked around, slightly confused. She must have blacked out; the party must have long since moved on. Had her friends left her behind?

Erica stepped towards her. "Hello?" The woman locked eyes with her, "Are you okay? Do you need help?"

The woman raised a gun, and out of engrained instinct, she ducked.

Bang.

The bullet didn't hit her though. It was in the back of the woman's head.

As Erica fell back into the thrumming crowd, darkness engulfed her.

Isaac Lahey – Alice Springs, Australia

Isaac was running. He didn't like running, he just had to be good at it. The scorching sun beat down on his shoulders as his long legs carried him across the outback. He knew it was dangerous out in the heat with no water, but he'd long since lost any self-preservation. A chant in his head beating to the rhythm of his legs kept him going at such a pace: run, breathe, don't, look, back, run, breathe.

The ranch used to belong to his grandfather but the herd had long since died – it was their home now where his father bred dogs. Dogs he was scared he'd see chasing him if he looked behind. It wasn't his fault this time (it was never his fault, a voice whispered, it was always his fault, lulled another).

Isaac knew running would only make his dad angrier, make the punishment worse when he got back, but, if he left it long enough, he might be able to sneak in through his window, avoid his father for a few days and by then the drunk had usually forgotten.

Until then, he'd run across the sandy disused cattle fields and sing his life-long mantra. Run, breathe, don't, look, back, run, breathe. His Olympic pace stuttered to a faulting stop. There was a woman. He'd come across tourists before, but this woman didn't have the camera's they favoured; as a matter of fact she wasn't even wearing shoes (neither was he, but that was irrelevant). She didn't look aboriginal either. What she did look like was a woman holding a gun.

Before he could think of something inspirational to say, she raised it to her mouth, and just like that, Isaac found himself running again – for the first time in his life, he ran home.

Scott McCall – Mexico City, Mexico

Scott McCall's life was going well. He acknowledges that that was where the problem started. Nothing had gone wrong for a while, so of course fate would build up something spectacular to ruin his day/possibly the rest of his life. He and his friends had only been frisked twice or so at the border on their summer road trip into America. He'd been accepted onto the local football team. The local gangs had also given up on him, leaving him and his mum in peace. Life was good. He'd just been accepted into a save-the-animals project down in South America, his mum had thankfully scraped off the loan sharks, and he'd finally grown into his jawline, Dios bless. Life was good. Then suddenly it wasn't anymore. As was his luck of course things were going wrong, of course he'd be the one to be haunted by some abuela's brother's cousin's twice removed aunt's ghost.

These were things he would be thinking, if a woman didn't have a gun in her mouth.

These were thing he would be thinking, if this didn't feel so terrifyingly real.

These were things he would be thinking, if he wasn't sobbing his eyes out.

These were things he would be thinking, if he could form a coherent thought.

These were things he would be thinking, if his throat wasn't hoarse as he begged her no.

These were things he would be thinking, if his ears weren't ringing with a gun shot.