Wade gasped for air as his eyes widened and he found himself holding himself against the window and looking down at the ground fifteen floors below. Instant adrenaline kicks in and he quickly backs away from the window, his heart pounding against his chest like a hammer, and he jolts in pain when he slides his finger across a wooden table and pricked his finger on a splinter. He looked at his splintered finger and removes the splinter and sucks away at his index finger like a binky.
"Will you please hurry up?" His eyes turned towards Bryce as he urged impatiently. "There comes a time where we won't be younger anymore."
Wade gasps in terror and watches the group walk up to the same guard that he saw from earlier. The conversation that he heard next made his stomach turn inside out.
"All IDs must be shown before entry." Even the tone of the voice was identical.
To Wade, it felt like a movie was rewinding to a part that was already played and he knew everything that was going to happen.
Wade caught Bryce smirking as he mouthed Bryce's next words: "Nothing to worry on that score big boy."
The six friends took out their ID, but Wade put his hands over his mouth and slowly backed away in horror. The vision that he had was coming true and he knew that once he stepped through that door, then it's a one-way ticket to guts and gore.
"We gotta get the fuck out of here!" he shouted desperately at the top of his lungs. "The fucking building's gonna collapse!"
The six friends looked at him like he was crazy, out of his mind. Bryce just nonchalantly said, "What have you been smoking? I want some of it."
"I'm not fucking kidding; the fucking building is going to collapse!" Wade shouted louder, hoping that his voice would reach inside the nightclub and warn the others. "We gotta evacuate the whole building!"
"I may be the chain smoker of the group," Bryce began as he took another drag from his lit cigarette. "But you are the one who is high."
Jackson walked up to Wade with an angry expression and shoved a finger to his chest in a threatening manner as he stared him in the eyes. "If this is your fucking idea of a joke, I'll kill you myself." He was saying this threat of out fear rather than anger and he could not let his girlfriend down by keeping with his worrisome demeanor.
Wade shoved Jackson out the way and turned towards the security guard. He began rambling the first thing that came to his mind so he would be kicked out of the building. "The IDs are fake! We are fucking teenagers trying to get high! Call fucking security on us, kick us out of the fucking building!"
"Sir," the guard warned as he put a hand to his waist, implying that he was about to take out a gun or a taser of some kind. "Step back or I will be forced to use violence to subdue you."
Wade acted off of instinct and he punched the security guard across the face as hard as he could. His knuckles ached from the pain and he groaned. The security guard fell to his knees and used his radio to call for backup. Two security guards came rushing out of a nearby room and restrained Wade by the hands and dragged him towards the elevator.
"Kick me out of the building!" Wade shouted, offering no resistance as they took him away. He looked at Jill and realized that he was about to leave her behind. "Come on, Jill! We gotta get out of the fucking building!" A third security guard ordered the six friends to come with them to check their IDs.
Jill looked down and started to think and rationalize the situation before them. Her boyfriend was rambling on about the building about to collapse. She thought that maybe he just dozed off for a second and had a bad dream or maybe it was something else entirely. Either way, she trusted her instinct and went with the security guard willingly to check on Wade.
The three security guards took the seven kids down to the fifth floor and to the building owner's office. The office was a big room with a couple of antics here and there like samurai armor in the corner, an old cannon near the window, and something of a sharp blade that looked to be at least a thousand years old. But one thing he found to be creepy was the skeleton behind the desk where the owner was sitting.
The owner was an elderly man with gray hair, a monocle on his left eye, and a gray suit with a red tie on. He spun around in his leather brown chair to face Wade with his hands laced together. "Care to explain?" One of the security guards walked up beside him and whispered into his ears before he spoke out to the teens again. "Deacon here says that you have been rambling on about a building about to collapse and that you and your posse is actually a group of high school teenagers. Are you trying to dig your own grave? You could spend one year in jail for possession of fake ID."
Wade rambled, trying to speak as clearly as possible, but he could barely contain the terror that was slowly rising up within him. "The fucking building is going to collapse. I saw it, we have to evacuate the entire building." He looked at the owner's stern face and realized that the owner didn't believe him and was probably not going to buy anything that he said. He kneeled down to his knees and made a begging pose. "Please," his voice cracked in sadness as tears started to roll down his face. "People are going to die; you have the power to evacuate the building, please listen to me. Choose life."
The building shook violently and Wade fell forward to the carpet. The three guards and six friends fell to the ground and looked around the room as if they were lost. The owner fell out of his chair and landed on his knees. "What the hell was that?" the owner asked in astonishment. The building shook once more and the people found themselves falling to the floor once again. Once the rumbling was at a minimum, the owner looked at the glass door leading to the balcony and he ran outside to see what was going on. Wade and the others joined with.
Jill holds Wade's hand as the two look up to see the floor seven stories up go up in flames. The building shook one more time and once again all eleven folks fell to the ground. Wade landed on his back with Jill's head on his chest. He looked up to see the upper half of the building started to fall over just like it did in his vision. His eyes widened, heart beating fast with terror he has never felt before (in real life at least). He screams in terror. The upper half of the building falls forward and lands horizontally on the roof of the building across. Debris from the ninety-degree angle building started falling from above. A desk from one of the rooms fell and crushed the owner like an ant.
The screaming body of the security from upstairs came falling down and right on top of one of the security guards, both of them perishing in the process.
"Oh my god!" Jackson exclaimed survival instinct takes over.
"Run!" Damien barked and he grabbed Tara and hauled her away, the others following. Jill staggered back from another rumble in the building. Wade looked above her to see a door - the same door that killed Jill in the premontion - falling and was about to land right on top of Jill.
"Look out!" Wade shouts before he acts. He rushes for Jill and tackles her but turns his body so he lands on his back with her on him. The door slams down onto the ground just inches away from Wade's feet and he was laughing over the fact that he just saved her life.
The seven friends and two security guards make a run for it, taking the stairs down. Just as they were in the lobby with a whole crowd of people trying to run out through the main floors, the building shook once more and the nine fell to the ground again. Wade landed on his knees but Jill helped him up. He remembered exactly what happened in the premonition and if he was going by the timeline, then this would be the part where the big cracks would start to form on the ground. "Hurry up!" he screamed at the top of his lungs. He grabbed Jill firmly by the forearm and ran off with her. The glass doors at the front entrance shattered from a slight tremor in the building.
Wade and Jill stepped out of the building and ran as far away as they could from the building just as the cracks in the cement expanded like water on the paper and the two buildings shook. Damien was the last one out of the building just as it started collapsing, but one of the security guards didn't make it through the door in time and sank with the building into the sinkhole.
Wade and Jill dive towards the ground, the others behind them copying their examples. The last security guard with them that was running stopped suddenly and arched his back forward as a piece of debris that went flying from the building came impaling him through the back and out the chest. He collapsed over, dead before he even hit the ground.
The whole world seemed to shake for Wade as he covered his head with his hands and laid in a fetal position to protect himself from the gray dust and debris that was coming towards him when the two buildings sunk into the earth. It sounded like a growl in the wind as the dust spread and swallowed the survivors. To Wade, it sounded like a growl of anger, almost like something was mad at him and his six surviving friends for making it out of the collapsing building in time.
Wade began coughing from the dust as he finally stretched out his limbs and sat on the bottom of his pants to look at the enormous hole the size of the Great Blue Hole. He put the collar of his shirt to his mouth and squinted his eyes as his optics stung.
"Oh my god," he heard Hannah whisper in a shaky voice.
"What the fuck just happened?!" Jackson panted. "We were in that building!"
"But we got out," Wade spoke through his shirt and reassured his traumatized friends. "We got out and we are here right now living and breathing. But first, let's get out of this dust."
A couple of minutes after police, fire, and emergency medical services arrived, Wade sat down in the back of the ambulance with a blanket wrapped around him. The gray dust from the building was slowly starting to clear out but his cheeks and forehead were chalked grey and he was coughing every few seconds. He coughed into his fist when he looked up to see Jill come to sit down next to him. He scooted a few feet over and wrapped his blanket around her and touched her cheeks softly, making sure that she was okay.
"How did you know?" Jill asked, looking at Wade in the eyes. Wade's eyes lit up like he was brought out of a trance. "How did you know that the building was going to collapse?"
Wade shrugged, not knowing what to say, or at least not knowing what to say that would make his friends still look at him the same way. But Jill was not like that. When she started dating Wade, it was mostly out of revenge for being dumped but she actually began to fall for Wade. He knew from the start that she was just using him, but he has always had a crush on her since seventh grade and he wanted to spend as much time as possible with her. That's how they became boyfriend and girlfriend. He went with his gut and told her the truth, knowing that even if she didn't believe him, she would not call him crazy.
"I saw it…" he said slowly. "I saw the building collapse."
"What do you mean…" Damien said quickly as he walked towards Wade and Jill with the rest of the survivors behind him. "You saw the building collapse? How?"
"I already said that I don't know," Wade almost shouted back. "I had some sort of vision of the nightclub collapsing in a sinkhole. I had a premonition or vision or something; whatever the hell you want to call it. It was like I saw the future."
"You had a vision? What the hell?" Tara scoffed. "You saw us all die in the vision? In that nightclub that we were just in?"
"We all died in the vision," he answered with a slow nod. "I can honestly say, I have never felt more scared before in my entire life. I still have the feeling that something bad is going to happen."
"How did we die?" Damien asked. "Were our deaths brutal?"
Wade remembered how they all died. Although, he did not exactly remember how Jackson and Hannah died in the vision. He gave them the vague description of "The deaths were indeed brutal if not painful."
"How did we die?" the chain smoker asked.
"I don't want to know how I died," Jill told as she buried her face into her hands with her elbows resting on her knees.
"Does it really matter how we died in the vision?" Tara asked. "We all get a second chance because of Wade."
Jill leaned into Wade's personal bubbled and was curious as to how Tara died in his vision. Wade told her that a cork from a wine bottle or something killed her. She nodded, a slight smirk appearing on her face. "And how did I die?" Wade told her that she was the first to die and it was a door that claimed her life. "Damn." She remembered the door that almost killed her and how Wade saved her life. "You saved me from being killed by that same door."
"Let's not dwell on this anymore," Wade insisted. "We all get a chance of a full life because of me."
"I don't think so," Damien said nervously. "I don't think that we are all meant to be standing here."
Bryce lit up another cigarette and turned to Damien after taking a drag. "Shut up you asshole. We all get to live another life because of Wade; be grateful."
"It's not that I'm not grateful," he explained. "What if we were meant to die in that building?"
This statement definitely got the entire group's attention. All six of the survivor friends stared at Damien in shock and horror, unable to believe anything that he is saying. Wade started panicking and put his hand on Damien's shoulder. "What you're saying is bullshit. We just got our life back and you are saying we were meant to die in that building? What the fuck man? What if I was meant to have a vision of us dying so we can escape and live another fifty or sixty years?"
"Do you believe in destiny, Wade?" He didn't wait for him to answer. "If you had a vision of us dying in that building, then maybe it was something that was supposed to happen? What if none of us were meant to be standing here right now? What if we were all supposed to be lying dead in the grave instead of standing here on this street in front of an ambulance?"
"If you don't shut up," Bryce warned with venom in his voice. "I will make sure that you are dead right here and now."
"What I'm saying is what if it is not over? What if it still is our time to die?"
"What the hell are you saying?" Jill asked. "What, is the Grim Reaper going to come back to haunt us?"
"Not just haunt us, but kill us."
Bryce put out his cigarette, stomped on it under his Nikes, and punched Damien across the jaw. The young man fell to the ground with a bruised lip and Bryce jumped on him and began pounding on him. Jackson and Wade grabbed Bryce by the arms and throat and yanked him away from Damien before wrestling him down to the ground with Wade pressing his knees into Bryce's spin to incapacitate him. The authorities around them were too busy helping out the wounded to notice so they had to take him down themselves.
Hannah sat down next to Damien and put her fingers to his bruised lip to make sure it wasn't bleeding. "Are you okay, honey?"
Damien grabbed her hand softly and smiled at her. "I'm fine. Thanks a lot."
Wade leaned over to whisper into Bryce's ear in an angry voice. "You let my friend speak or I'm going to do some real damage to you."
Bryce spat out bile that had welled up from his stomach to his throat. He sighed before saying, "Whatever you say."
Wade and Jackson let go of the chain smoker and they turned to Damien, who was still sitting on the ground. "Say your piece."
Damien licked his lips and looked a Wade as he spoke. "This is not the first time that this has happened."
"What do you mean?" Wade questioned.
"Twelve years ago, on Flight 180, there was this one kid who had a vision of the plane exploding and he and a couple of others got off the plane right before it became a reality. The seven lucky survivors thought they could get away with it until one by one they all started dying. They were dying in the order in which they would've died on the plane. One year later, on the same exact day, a girl has a vision of a pile-up on Route 23 and she and several others died after escaping the pile-up. It took four years later for that same girl to meet her demise in a horrific woodchipper accident. The same year that the Route 23 visionary died, another girl had a vision of a roller coaster accident and she died during a train derailment. Her and two other survivors. Five years ago, there was a yacht accident in Florida and the visionary of that accident was left horribly disfigured and ran over by a bus like some time later. Four years ago, this one deranged serial killer tried killing several celebrities based on the six senses and when he was stopped, the celebrities still died, along with the visionary of the killing spree. The latest premonition was at a speedway where the whole stadium collapsed and cars blew up. The visionary of that disaster was killed when a truck rammed into the coffee shop with the friends he or she was sitting with."
"That doesn't mean anything!" Bryce snapped. "You really think that Death is going to come to get us because we were supposed to die in that nightclub?"
"That is exactly what I am saying!" Damien snapped. "It was our destiny to die in that nightclub and we cheated death. Death is not happy and he is going to come back to kill us in the most painful ways imaginable."
"Even if that was true for a single second," Hannah started. "What can we do?"
"There's basically nothing we can do. Death is just going to come and kill us in the order in which we would've died." Damien looks up at Wade with wide eyes of terror, slowly climbing to his feet and forcefully grabbing the young visionary with fear. "Who was the first to die in your vision?"
"It was Jill," Wade answered without hesitation. "I told her that when the nightclub fell over, I caught her before she fell and a door cut through her face and killed her. She was the first one to go."
Jill suddenly felt sick to her stomach upon realizing that she was going to be the first one to die. She climbs into the ambulance and sits down, hugging her knees to her chest tightly. She refused to cry because if she was the first to die, she was going to accept it with dignity. Sure, she was terrified to death of dying, but she was going to die with her dignity.
Wade came up to Jill, sitting down next to her and trying to comfort her in any way that he thought would work. "Don't worry, I will be here to protect you. If Death is going to come to get you, then I will be there to save your life." Jill leaned her head on Wade's shoulder and he gently massaged her head. "Damien, why did it take so long for the Route 23 visionary to die?"
"I have no clue. We could ask her ourselves but she is dead."
"So, if we are supposed to die in the order in which we would've died in the premonition than that means that I'm the last one to go."
"It's almost like Death has an agenda of those who are supposed to die."
"If we figure out how Death's agenda works or whatever, then maybe we could intervene and save the person who is the one to go?"
"That's how I heard what happened." Damien turned to the others. "We all know that Jill is the first one to die, but we have to make our houses as Death-proof as possible."
"What your saying is bullshit," Bryce berated before he took out another cigarette to take another drag. "To show you how ridiculous your theories are, I'm going to walk around in the open and spit on the Grim Reaper's name. I would be daring him to come after me and eat me alive."
"I think I'm going to have to agree with him," Jackson spoke out. "What you guys are saying is incredibly farfetched. Death coming after us, really? You have to admit that even though it makes sense, you counted only six incidents, all happening several years apart. Maybe we get a lucky break."
"I'm not going to let some wild goose chase theory take control of my life," Tara snapped. "Even if I'm going to die, I'm going to die an old woman."
"How do we know what Damien is saying is true?" Wade spoke. "What if what happened to those survivors of Flight 189, Route 23, Coral Clipper, or rollercoaster were just freak accidents?" He turned to Damien with a look of regret on his face. "This may seem to fit your mantra of Grim Reaper theories, but I don't think the Grim Reaper is after us. I'm not letting this one accident ruin my life. If the Grim Reaper really was after us, then why doesn't it just make our hearts stop beating?"
"I don't know," Damien shrugged. "Maybe that's not how he operates."
"Give me an example of how these people you listed died in freak accidents."
"I got a couple. One of the survivors of Flight 180, the visionary actually, got killed when a dislodged brick hit him in the face. A Route 23 survivor died when he was crushed by a huge pane of glass. A rollercoaster survivor died by a nailgun. A Coral Clipper survivor died when they were hit by a subway train. And one of the celebrities in New York died when they touched a live cable. And one of the survivors of the speedway disaster died when they were dragged across the street by their pickup truck and set on fire."
"I will admit, that those are freak accidents but how can we know for certain that Death is going to come to get us?"
"I don't know. I read a lot of newspapers and every time that this story about a kid has a vision of a disaster appears, I write down my findings. I'm not obsessed, but just observant."
"If you are wrong," Hannah spoke behind Damien. "Then you're going to pay for scaring us."
"If Jill survives an entire week without facing anything strange, then I know that I'm wrong." He held up his hands up and backed away from the vehicle. "That's all that I got to say."
"Can we go home now?" Jackson asked impatiently. "I just want to go home."
"That seems like a good idea," Wade responded. He looked at Jill and told her that they were leaving. As he looked into her eyes, he could tell that she was scared of even walking out that van. "I promise whatever is out there, it's not going to hurt you as long as I'm standing near you. In my vision, you were about to fall to your death, but I caught you. And when that door was about to crush you, I pulled you out of the way in time. I promise that everything will be alright."
Jill was slightly comforted and removed the blanket wrapped around her and stepped out of the van. Together, all seven friends walked back to their van but as they were walking, a tall African-American man with a bald head and black uniform on walked right passed them but eyed Wade with a smile on his face. "Everything is premeditated," he said softly.
Wade looked at the mysterious man with a confused expression and he looked at Jill before looking over his shoulder to see the man gone. He looked all around for him because he had some questions he wanted to ask him. "What the hell," he whispered to himself. He looked at Jill and whispered in her ear. "Did you see that man who walked past me? He told me that everything is premeditated."
"What's that supposed to mean?" Jill whispered back.
"I have no clue. Was this nightclub accident planned or was he referring to something else?"
"I don't know. Let's not dwell on it too much though." Jill grabbed Wade's hand just as they were at the car. Just as she took her seat next to Wade in the far back, she whispered, "Can you come home with me tonight?"
"Why?"
"If there is one person that I feel safe with, it's you. Plus, I've been meaning to call you for a visit."
Wade stuttered nervously, confused as to what she meant. Without even thinking for too long, he said, "of course I can come over. Anything you want or need, I will be there for you."
"Thank you. It really means a lot to me."
"And as soon as I get to your house, I'm going to look up these disasters that Damien mentioned, seeing for myself if there really is a connection."
"And you'll be there to protect if Death tries to kill me, right?"
"Right." Wade looked down at her bare knees and put his hand on her left knee affectionately. "I caught you when you fell, I pushed you when you were about to be crushed."
Just as Wade was rubbing his hand across the smooth skin of her knee, a song played on the radio. The song called Uncomplicated by Elvis Costello was playing. Wade narrowed his eyes at the radio as the song played and wondered of all the songs, why was that song playing?
Note: The owner and the three security guards died in the same exact way as they died offscreen in the vision. They were never put on Death's list and therefore, not survivors.
Also, if you liked this Final Destination story, please 'Favorite/Follow' it and leave a review. A review would definitely motivate me to keep updating.
