2: Enter Ashley Pasquale

When the horror finally reached the young Ashley Pasquale's neighborhood, the death toll was in the hundreds. It was so high, and millions still had no idea that anything was going on at all as they slept the early morning away, their alarm clocks silent and dark, their electricity cut off nearly half an hour beforehand.

Usually around this time Ashley would find herself waking up to David, her boyfriend, rolling off the bed begrudgingly to go to work. This had become so routine that she had begun to wake up even after he had moved down to Pennsylvania. Every time she woke up she'd smile to herself a little. "Good fucking riddance," is what that smell so contentedly proclaimed. She didn't know how long she had been fucking John before David finally figured it all out and left, hoping to leave her with too much on her plate. Bills to be specific. The house she inhabited still three months later was too big for a single person and too small for a family of three or four. It was sized just right for the two of them. Now it was too big and she needed to clean it all by herself weekly. Now she had to pay electricity, cable, internet, etc. all by her lonesome with a measly job. Not to mention rent. She was lucky to have lasted for as long as she did. Two weeks later she would have been forced to move out and into a smaller house.

All of this hadn't been so bad with David finally gone and out of her life. The drug addicted, sex obsessed, lazy fucker had been quite basically living with her just to say, "Wham, bam, thank you ma'am," every night. Now that he was gone, she would try her best to smile as she strode uphill with the weight of the world on her back with no real end to the arduous trek in sight.

Ashley opened her eyes and looked out at the world, illuminated by the early sun. Beautiful, tranquil, silent, and seemingly completely oblivious to all suffering of any kind.

She needed to be to work at the electronics shop soon. There she would work an eight hour shift as a clerk, dealing with assholes and cunts and mother-fuckers and all other assortments of bad names for pieces of shit with a few gems of kindness shining through that made it slightly easier to get through the day. When she came home she would maybe surf the internet or flip channels for an hour before attempting to find a friend to go out somewhere with. Usually she would be left all alone to the silence of her house and eventually fall asleep, finally not needing to deal with a raging hard-on beforehand.

Ashley went to the small, second floor bathroom and stripped off her white nightgown. She flipped the light switch, but the bulb remained dormant. She tried twice more and then put it on her to-do list to replace the blown-out bulb. Shyly she urinated and rubbed her knees, feeling as though a thousand eyes were watching her and not understanding why she felt like that. The morning air felt very chilly.

She examined herself in the medicine-cabinet mirror utilizing the growing amount of sunlight. Doing this she began to criticize herself. She grabbed a small amount of fat at her stomach and glared at herself. She didn't like being fat but she had been for the past ten years since puberty began. Only in recent years had she been doing something about it, but the fat was still there. David had said that it was hardly noticeable, but she could notice it. She stopped cursing at herself for still being fat because she knew it would do no good. She wouldn't become bulimic or anorexic because she wasn't that obsessed with her less-than-perfect appearance, and she wouldn't change her diet or increase her exercise level either.

Aside from some embarrassing nose hairs and her train-wrecked, greasy, brunette hair there was nothing much wrong with her face. Her green eyes were slightly blood shot with bags under them. Humorlessly, she smiled at the mirror. Poorly kempt teeth bared themselves as her lips pulled back and away. She never flossed and usually brushed once a day. This resulted in slightly yellow teeth that required braces for realignment. She had never had braces before and wasn't about to get them now. She grabbed her aging toothbrush and turned the faucet on. The water didn't come. She tried a couple more times, slapped it, and decided to brush without water. Quickly and haphazardly she brushed her teeth with some cheap, generic toothpaste and re-examined them as if expecting them to have become pearly-whites. Needless to say they hadn't improved a bit. And now she had chunks of toothpaste in the cracks of her teeth which made matters worse. She sighed and gave up the cause temporarily.

Then she took a few small steps back. She believed her boobs to be too small… B-cups. There was a mole on the right one that she wished wasn't there. Stress was catching up to her. Suddenly all she wanted was for David to be there to caress her again. Her pace was slowing as she trudged uphill with that pesky world on her back and her smile disappearing. She decided that she needed to shave her pubic hair. Her legs were too fat for their length. There were too many calluses on her feet, her legs were too hairy, her ass too small, her nipples too large. God she wanted to just fall back asleep. All tranquility was gone from her mind. She stepped into the shower and turned the water on. It didn't come. She turned it off then back on again and it still didn't come. She hit it in frustration and put her nightgown back on. She felt her legs breaking as she struggled to keep the world up. Struggled to reach the nonexistent end of the road, not fooling herself that it was there and not admitting that it wasn't she trudged on.
Inside her room that seemed so empty all of a sudden with all of David's traces eradicated she got dressed. She put on a bra, panties, a black, baggy T-shirt and baggy jeans, held up with a belt. All of her clothes were a size or two larger than necessary. This way she looked skinnier.

She put on white ankle socks and tears began to form at her eyes. Three years ago she had given it the good old college try to kill herself. She had slit her wrists. There are lots of people who slit their wrists horizontally. These people are either stupid, insincere about suicide, or just looking for attention. Ashley was none of these. She had taken a kitchen knife and slit her arm open from the wrist to the elbow on both arms, the blood practically spraying out. The dam had been broken.

A couple minutes later David had found her near a small pond in the middle of the woods. Ashley had first gone skinny dipping in the pond on the same night she lost her virginity, which is why she chose that secluded area to die in. She cried as she remembered looking at him, dressed in pure white and bleeding profusely and as he called for his friends to come help. The tears and sobs flowed as she recalled the first time she met the man she would come to yearn, come to hate, and then come to yearn again.

Then it was over and she stopped crying. There was no slow trip to the end of her crying… it just stopped. She wiped the tears away from her cheeks and put on her gym shoes. She would go walking is what she would do. No, not walking; jogging. She would jog down the street and back. Fuck that! She would jog down the street, up the street, and then back. Then she would call in sick to work (her last sick day of the year) and do it all over again. Then she would take her old, beaten up car and sell it. Then she would visit to her mother's house ten miles away, walking to it and then back from it. She would use the money from her car and prolong her life in this large house and her search for a smaller apartment. Her pace quickened and the world began to feel lighter. She began to smile again. Fuck David. Fuck him up the ass with a two-by-four. She didn't need him.

Running down the stairs she felt happier than she had in a very long time in a way that was not stimulated by sexual pleasure. Petty things chewed fruitlessly at her mind. She needed to find out why her shower wasn't working and why her sink wasn't working. She needed to bathe in one way or another. She needed to replace the bulb in the bathroom. Cheerfully her mind extended a giant middle-finger at these petty problems and laughed.

She got to the front door and paused, her hand hovering inches away from the door handle. Her no longer bloodshot eyes squinted as they tried to make out what they were seeing through the veil over the front door's small window. Orange and yellow light was traveling across her porch. Ashley assumed it was a torch. Suddenly she felt like she was fending off villagers in Resident Evil 4 again. Except she didn't have a gun and this wasn't a videogame.

The phone raced through her mind. She decided to call 9-11 and report a man standing on her porch with a torch. She turned around and walked quickly into the kitchen, where the blue, cordless phone was layered to the wall. She pried it off its base and held it to her ear to listen for a dial-tone. There was none. She began to trail the wire and stopped. Suddenly everything clicked together like two speeding trains colliding head-on. The shower, the sink, the light, the phone… she had no electricity.

"But I paid the bill!" she whispered to herself gruffly. "I paid the fucking b"

More things came together. A torch on the porch and a lack of electricity. A riot must have been in progress. She felt a moment of panic before realizing that things were far too silent for a riot. No screams, explosions, or gun shots. Everything sounded just prance-through-the-field-of-dandelions dandy. So what was going on?

She went back to the front door and pulled the veil partially back to see if the light was indeed a torch on her porch. It most certainly was not a torch on her porch… it was a floating skull with razor-sharp teeth and horns… on fire of course. Ashley shrieked and jumped back from the door. The skull hadn't seen her as it went about existing. It seemed to not appreciate its own eccentricity. Its own ridiculousness and impossibility.

Continuing to back up she began to breathe more rapidly. Almost hyperventilating. Apparently it had heard her scream because it shot through the glass of the front door's window, sending shards in every direction. Without slowing down or being disoriented by hitting the pane of glass it came for her. She moved her head to the side out of instinct, and shrieked as extreme pain coursed through her face. Warmth followed. Blood. It had torn a chunk out of her right cheek, forming a ragged hole.

"Oh my God!" she screamed and grabbed her torn cheek. That only made it hurt more, which made her squeeze the skin in her hand tighter, closing the hole in her cheek and momentarily stopping the flow of blood. She doubled over in pain and felt blood seeping through her fingers as she screamed. Her grip hurt it and her screaming hurt it, but she couldn't stop either.

The skull came back at her… this time off-target. It sailed over her head, close enough to cause extreme heat to course over Ashley's scalp, and hit the wall hard. It turned back around to face her, apparently pissed off that she had managed to evade it. Ashley tried to stop screaming as she looked into this skull's eyes of flames. Her mind was in overdrive, fueled by adrenaline, and she thought of Ben Stein talking about Clear Eyes.

Her skin… her skin was roasting in its mouth! Burning to a crisp as the fires of Hell licked away at it.

She spun around on her feet and ran with one arm pumping and the other still holding her cheek tightly. Pain and fear were all that she knew. She lifted her foot up quickly to run up the stairs, just not high enough. She toppled forth and rolled back down the stairs, groaning as she tried valiantly to overcome the pain coursing through her body and boiling her blood.

The skull gracefully floated around the corner into sight and Ashley got to her feet and ran up the stairs. It raised directly upwards and launched itself at her again once she reached the top of the stairs. She dodged it and ran for her room, not noticing that it had exited the house through a window and was across the street.

She fell into the bathroom and slammed the door shut behind her. The white floor became red as she let loose of her cheek and grabbed for the medicine cabinet on her knees, leaving bloody handprints on the sink as she used it to pull herself up a bit more. She grabbed the handle of the medicine cabinet and swung it open. Of course she wasn't any sort of nurse or doctor, but she knew a little bit about what to do. Her mind on autopilot she stood up and grabbed a bag of cotton balls with shaking hands. Suddenly she wanted nothing greater than to kill anyone and everyone who said, "No pain, no gain."

One cotton ball went in and stuck to her wound, turning red from white. Another went in followed by a third and a fourth. She dropped the bag and a couple flew out and scattered on the floor. Her fist pounded the sink multiple times before she clutched it and moaned in pain. She was trying to force the pain in her cheek to the back of her mind and it wasn't working.

"Fuck!" she attempted to shriek with a muffled voice. Her tongue licked the bloody cotton balls and suddenly she wanted to throw up. Nothing would have brought her greater happiness than upchucking into the toilet.

Now it sounded like a riot was going on outside. A bigger one than this side of town had ever seen before. More of that fiery light was filtering in through the windows of the house. The world was on fire. In that aspect it was not unlike Ashley's mind.

Her fists began to pound her head. This did nothing to ease her pain, but, again, she couldn't stop doing it. She began to whimper, helpless to stop the pain from coming. She stood up and looked at her face in the mirror, red cotton balls filling her cheek and blood streams gleaming down her neck. Her heart was pumping so hard it felt like it was going to explode. She had no Tylenol or Aspirin to relieve the pain (if they would've worked on this extreme amount anyway) because she had always been scared of inadvertently taking an overdose and dying. She may have wanted nothing more than a slow and painful death a few years ago, but that's one of the last things she wanted now. She wondered how she could disinfect the wound, something she would need to do soon. Maybe the floating skull had rabies!

Ashley laughed at her ugly face in the mirror. Cotton balls in her cheek, nose hair in her nose, greasy, messy hair, Jesus she looked in no way presentable! By God that laughter hurt.

Ashley began to sift through the items in her medicine cabinet, flinging the few useless items over her shoulder where they would contact with the floor and become in some way damaged. Iodine was the last of the few things she saw in the cabinet and she immediately applied it and screeched something that sounded almost inhuman as even greater pain swept through her, threatening to knock her out and leave her at the mercy of whatever other nightmarish entity decided to float, waltz, slither, swim, fly, or whatever else on in out of the cold and shout, "Lucy I'm home, NOW PREPARE TO DIE!"

Luckily she overcame the need to ebb out of reality and descend into the confusing, inane world of dreams. Her head was pulsing and a vein in her head was popping out as she gritted her teeth and glared at her undesirable image in the mirror. A bruise was spreading, and her cheek was already swelling. Shit.

This is about when she began to think of things outside her personal little world of pain, misery, suffering, and any other negative word you can think of. She'd need a weapon. A kitchen knife was a bit clumsy and she had bad memories of them. Her baseball bat from childhood would work better… that is if she had three hours to search through the dark, bat-infested attic to find it at the bottom of a musty box buried under a dozen or so other musty boxes. No, the kitchen knife would have to suffice unfortunately.

She went back downstairs, not looking out either of the two shattered windows and trying her best to ignore what felt like a red hot poker impaling her cheek. She veered into the kitchen and went to the cutting block and retrieved the largest kitchen knife. An eight inch blade with a four inch handle.

After this she went back upstairs and looked outside through her broken window. Complete chaos.

A couple of houses were burning. People were screaming from inside their houses as they were tortured and killed. A few people were running up and down the street from creatures that were almost unbearable to look at. Two-headed creatures and tall brown creatures roamed the streets, the latter tossing fireballs about. In the sky there were a few flying skulls, one of them doubtlessly had a certain annoying bit of skin stuck in their teeth.

She heard above the screaming and crackling of flames what seemed to be a piggish growl. Her eyes trailed to a little girl running down the sidewalk directly across the street from her. This was six-year old Victoria, a little girl that had befriended Ashley not too long ago. Ashley muffled a shriek for her to run faster once she spotted what was giving chase.

The creature had to weigh in at a ton at least. At first she didn't understand anything about what she was looking at. A moment later she compared it to three things simultaneously in her mind. A pig because of the sound it was emitting, a bull because it was charging like a bull, and a dog because its pig snarl became something similar to a series of barks. Its folds of fat stretched as it ran full-speed towards the three foot girl who was a fraction of its size. Its front feet had small claws that dug up the sidewalk. Its mouth was lined with millions of teeth as it extended from underneath a fold of fat. Then she realized that its hindquarters were mechanical. Its hind legs propelled it more rapidly through the air than any biological legs could. In moments it was on top of Victoria and she was screaming.

Ashley ran away from the window screaming and crying with a muffled voice. She ran into her room and collapsed on her bed with the knife clenched in one hand. Her cheek was swelling so quickly. She could barely open her eye on that side of her face.

She wanted to pass out. Unfortunately for her, the world did not yield to the other world. She laid across her bed and cried, waiting for the dream world to take over. It never came.