An Ugly yet Beautiful World
Chapter Two
Audrey was smoothing a piece of foam on the sander when the teacher sprang out of his seat. She was so startled that she nearly destroyed a good fifteen minutes of work.
"Audrey. Family emergency. I know you can handle yourself, right?" He asked.
Audrey nodded.
He bolted out the door and shut it behind him. Audrey continued to work silently. She looked at her work and decided that what she had done was enough, but her family wouldn't be home until late, but how long was it until school closed? She took out her phone to check.
YOU CHOSE YOUR FATE
Audrey stared at the screen for a moment, completely dumbfounded, until she remembered.
BYSTANDER
OR
CHOOSE YOUR FATE
Audrey's eyes widened as she realized how stupid she had been. My phone's probably infected! She thought. Frustrated and frantic, she began to pound away at the screen in hopes of seeing that there wasn't anything wrong with it.
For a moment, it remained the same.
YOU CHOSE YOUR FATE
Damn, Audrey thought.
And then the screen went blank.
Audrey thought for a moment that this was what the virus did, but then the screen went back to normal. Initially she was relieved, but an unsettling thought came over her.
Yeah, I know what happens next. You get to see anything and everything I do, you stupid hacker. Too bad I don't have anything to hide. Audrey thought triumphantly. There wasn't any information on her phone that would embarrass her or would be of any use to an identity thief.
But she noticed something odd. There was a new app on her screen.,
Some dude on the net sending people free apps…
No way. There's just no way. Audrey laughed, she was being so stupid. She looked more closely at the app, expecting to see one that had been installed on her phone for ages. She expected to be grateful that she was alone. The unexpected happened.
She didn't recognize the app.
It was of a strange pentagram-like symbol. The closest thing to an app associated to the occult Audrey had on her phone was her horoscope app.
Startled and with a pounding heart, Audrey looked closely at the strange pentagram. Normally pentagrams were upside-down star-like symbols within rings. This one was within a ring, but it was right side-up. In the ring strange words were written. Audrey had to turn her head, but she read the words Shin Megami Tensei.
Either gibberish or another language, she thought.
Between the points of the pentagram were odd, undecipherable markings. It was all black and white. It was all very strange.
Audrey felt sick.
Should she click it, or shouldn't she click it? Would she activate some sort of virus? Very few hackers had what it took to use a phone to hack let alone hack into a phone. Most of the warnings about fake apps that Audrey read about earlier were clearly made by amateurs that were simply applying their prior knowledge on suspicious downloads to phones.
Her phone vibrated and Audrey nearly dropped it from fright.
It was only a text message. Audrey calmed herself, embarrassed by the lasting effects of the small adrenaline rush.
YOU'RE IN DANGER
Of course the number is blocked, Audrey thought.
Another message arrived and Audrey accidentally pressed the "open" button instead of the "ignore" button.
YOU HAVE BEEN GIVEN GREAT POWER
Audrey arched a brow. This was getting weird. She almost wanted to save the text message so she could show it to Alex later.
THIS POWER IS YOUR ONLY CHANCE FOR SURVIVAL
Was this a part of the possibly viral app?
YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED
Audrey snorted. Definitely showing this to Alex. This guy seriously thought that he could freak Alex out like that? Was he one of the obnoxious boys in her Design Engineering course that found her taking the class seriously irritating for some reason? Ugh. Audrey had enough of this.
(…)
DO YOU DESIRE MORE POWER?
Yes, it thought. Yes, with all of my heart!
CAN YOU FEEL THE HUMAN NEARBY?
I smell that sweet blood!
TAKE HIS BODY AND USE IT TO KILL THE FEMALE NEAR HIM!
(…)
Audrey turned off her phone, packed her bag, put her work away, and went out the door. She guessed that she would be talking with her chat room buddies earlier than expected. Honestly, there were people out there that really needed to get real lives and do something productive. Why couldn't there be more people like—?
"Audrey!"
Edward Hartley. Tall. Blonde. Toned body. Tanned. Popular. Why was someone like him talking to the new girl?
"Hey Ed," Audrey replied. Everyone just called him Ed instead of his full name.
"Afterschool stuff still goes on for a while. Why're you leaving so soon?"
Audrey turned to look at him and noticed that he was in his Cross Country uniform, towel around his neck. As she walked, he jogged next to her, but backwards.
"I finished what I needed to," she answered.
"So are you doing anything tonight?" Ed asked.
Audrey stopped. So did Ed.
Did he just ask her out? Audrey's heart started to pound. She had always been told that despite her relatively good looks that guys found her no-nonsense personality a turn-off (even though in truth she loved to laugh.) Why would someone so popular that it seemed that he had no enemies want to hang out with a girl, fresh out of the suburbs, like Audrey?
"M-my parents aren't going to be home until late."
"Sweet! Party at your place!" He joked.
Audrey asked him to stop joking about things like that, but that's all it was. He was joking around as if they were good friends. He was just that much of a friendly person. Audrey was a little jealous. She used to be like that…before…
"AAAAAAAAAAAAUUUUUUUUUUGH!"
(…)
It reached into the heart of the golden-haired human boy. The boy's mind was sickeningly pure and innocent. When it reached the boy's heart he was immediately faced with a wall of pure goodness, but no normal human could fight him off. He broke through the nauseating wall and seized control of the child.
(…)
Ed fell to the ground screaming and thrashing. Audrey dropped her bag and came to his aid.
"Ed! Calm down!" She cried. "Calm down and tell me what's wrong!"
"GET OUT OF MY HEAD!" Ed screamed.
"Ed! Just hold on! I-I-I'm going to call an ambulance!"
Her hands shaking to the point where she could barely grip her phone, Audrey pressed the three numbers that always brought hope to someone in distress.
"What is the nature of your emergency?" A woman calmly said from the other end of the line.
"Y-y-yes! It's my friend! He's on the floor thrashing around and screaming and—"
"I DON'T WANNA KILL!" Ed screamed.
"Having some kind of mental breakdown! We need an ambulance—"
Audrey stopped short. She stopped short because she couldn't breathe. She couldn't breathe because Ed had gotten up and was strangling her with his bare hands.
"Ma'am, ma'am, I need your location. Please give me your location!" The dispatcher said.
Audrey could only utter a small grunt as she dropped her phone and began to claw at Ed's hands.
Time slowed as Audrey realized that she was in danger. She felt that rush that she hadn't felt since the accident—the rush of adrenaline seeping into her veins. As her body's self-defense mechanisms took effect she was able to think clearly at an incredibly fast rate.
Ed was far more athletic than she was, so clawing away at his hands wouldn't do a thing. However, Ed's stance was strange; he could easily be toppled. To top it all off, Audrey was a large, and her legs had been supporting a large for a very long time now. The legs were more than twice as strong as the arms; in a fight between someone with the strength of an average person's legs versus someone with the strength of an athlete's arms, average legs would win.
Audrey brought her legs up and kicked out at Ed with all her might.
She fell to the ground, gasping and coughing. Ed staggered across the hall gasping in what seemed like gibberish, but Audrey noticed something odd about the curses.
Several languages.
Before the accident, one of Audrey's favorite pastimes was to search the web for cool songs in different languages. She had managed to pick up a few phrases in everything from Japanese, to German, even to Latin. And everyone in the school knew that Ed was terrible at learning new languages; he was so bad that he took the absolute bare minimum foreign language classes required for graduation, barely managing to scrape past with his credits intact.
"Y-you're not," Audrey coughed, "Edward!" She finished with a gasp.
"Smart little human girl, aren'tcha?" Ed said. But it wasn't Ed. His voice was totally different. Deep, dark, and menacing. "I'm borrowing the kid's body for a while. Now sit tight and lemme kill ya!" He cackled.
(…)
The dispatcher both loved and hated her job. She got to help a lot of people out and give them a reassuring, calm voice in their time of need. On the other hand, she heard so many heart-wrenching stories. In a city like New York, she heard everything from wives being beaten, to children calling about their drunken parents, to old husbands begging her to get an ambulance to their seizing wives.
This time was something similar to that. Judging by how the girl described her friend's actions, he was in some kind of seizure—probably epileptic. The city was the last place someone like that should live.
Then the screaming came from the other end of the line. Screaming like that of a madman.
And then it all stopped.
Damn it, damn it, damn it! The dispatcher thought.
It didn't look like she was going to tell the dispatcher where she was.
"I need a trace on a call ASAP!"
(…)
Audrey, phone in hand, had abandoned all of her other possessions and ran for cover.
Deep down, she knew that there was no way that a normal person could take Ed on with the way he was. Dark marks began to appear all over his body. His blue eyes had turned red. Black streaks appeared in his blonde hair. If he was at all human, he had lost at least part of his humanity.
Audrey ran into a small classroom and shut the door behind her, thankful for the automatic locking system most of the doors in the school had.
The monster that Ed had become pounded on the door relentlessly.
Audrey grabbed a desk and pushed it against the door, screaming for the monster to go away.
It was like some horror movie. Terrified, she looked around the room. And there was no exit.
No…
Whenever the victim got caught in a corner or some sort of dead end… in the movies… they always died. Brutally. Painfully. Pathetically. Sadly.
She didn't want to die. Not like this. Not like them. Not like the accident!
Audrey crawled into the corner of the room opposite the door. Her hands were shaking even more than when this entire ordeal had started. She pressed at the screen, stopping to yelp every time the monster managed to make a big crack in the door, never managing to press the right button. Audrey pressed the wrong button, and then had to go back to the home screen, over and over again.
The door broke off its hinges.
"HELLO!" The monster hissed.
Audrey pressed. She didn't press the dial pad button. She pressed the weird app she accidentally downloaded earlier today.
"NO!" The monster wailed as it burst in the door.
Audrey's phone lit up and a strange symbol, seemingly made out of azure light, appeared above the screen; it was made of many geometrical symbols and markings, all rotating above the screen. An orb of light rose from the symbol. As Audrey took hold of it, she gripped a handle and a ring that she put her right index finger through.
A pistol.
It was silver, old fashioned, and coated in ornate markings. The barrel was massive for a handgun—Audrey had seen something like this on TV once before—at least fifty caliber.
The monster leapt at her. Without thinking, Audrey pointed the gun and pulled the trigger.
A normal gun would have created a small explosion within the barrel. A normal gun would have recoiled. A normal gun, since Audrey was aiming at the monster's shoulder, would have destroyed the joint without killing the body the monster had taken hold of.
This was no ordinary gun.
Marking similar to the ones that brought the gun into existence surrounded the barrel. There was a massive flash of light. The monster, and Ed, were gone.
