A/N- Thank you very much, Guest1, Judging All Day Every Day, Guest2 and Ronnie H for reviewing!
Chapter Three – Fight or Flight
We all just kind of stared as Kelly rushed up to the doors and locked them, exclaiming, "Shit!" as she did so. I dropped my cigarette on the floor and quickly stepped on it to stub it out. I was starting to panic. What was going on?
Nathan, meanwhile, was obviously not worrying as he laughed at her and said, "Nice entrance, very dramatic!" while giving her slow, patronizing applause.
"The probation worker's gone mental! He's just attacked me!" Kelly said frantically. We all looked at her in complete shock. "Somethin' really weird is happenin'! I'm hearin' these voices in me head! It's like I can hear wot people are finkin'!"
"Have you been sniffing glue?" said Alisha tauntingly.
"The storm, the lightnin'! I dunno, it's just done somethin' to us!" shouted Kelly.
"Okay. If you can hear our thoughts," said Nathan, wheeling himself in front of her. "What am I thinking now?" He put his a finger to each side of his head.
"You think it's bullshit?!" she declared angrily.
"Course I think it's bullshit, you don't need to be a mind reader to know that!" Nathan scoffed.
"Why are you in a wheelchair?" she asked him.
"It was the storm!" Nathan put on a voice that made him sound all vulnerable and innocent. "The strange tingling sensation in my anus has spread through my body and now…I can't feel my legs."
"Correction," I said, holding up my hand. "He's in the wheelchair because he's a complete bell-end."
"You always make me feel so loved, Blakey," he muttered as Kelly kicked him in the shins. "Ow! Jesus!"
"Wait. What do you mean, the probation worker attacked you?" Curtis demanded.
"This does sound like complete shit," agreed Alisha.
"Sorry, but it kinda does," I concurred.
"He is out there and he chased me!" yelled Kelly.
"Something's happened to me to!" Simon suddenly piped up.
"Did you pop your cherry?" Nathan asked in a falsely cheerful voice. "Ah, we're all very happy for you!"
"Oh my God, Nathan! Will you please just shut the fuck up? Please?! Just for once!?" I shouted at him before turning back to Simon. "What're you on about?"
"Earlier on when we were in the locker room…I was invisible!" he stated. "I turned invisible!"
"Oh, bullshit," I said dismissively.
"So…she's psychic and you can turn invisible? That seems likely," jeered Curtis.
"Yeah, did anyone witness this miraculous disappearance?" asked Nathan.
"You were all there!" insisted Simon.
"Er, I think we might have noticed you vanishing into thin air!" sneered Alisha.
"You didn't! I was standing right there! You didn't see me!"
Didn't see Weird Kid? That's no different to most of the time, I thought.
Kelly glared at me. "Why you being such a bitch? I thought ya were nice!"
"What? Did you just…holy shit!" I stuttered. She really could read minds! Holy crap. What in the fuck was going on?! Now, I feel the need to point out that while this had happened, Nathan had wheeled himself over to Simon and commanded him to turn invisible. Simon leaned his head back and made some really stupid straining noise. Instead of turning invisible, he just looked constipated.
As if this wasn't humiliating enough for the poor guy, Nathan made it worse by announcing, "Oh my God! He's disappeared!"
Simon looked around at us, then waved a hand in front of Nathan's face. "Can't you see me?"
"No," Nathan said in hushed tones, before throwing his empty Coke can at Simon's head. "You're invisible!" Alisha laughed cattily, and even I had to fight not to let out a small giggle. "You two are hilarious," Nathan continued, wheeling himself towards the door. "Really, keep takin' that medication!"
Kelly stood in front of him and seized the wheelchair arms to stop him going any further. "Don't go out there, he will kill you!"
"Of course he will, cause he's such a badass!" he snorted.
"Don't!"
"She's telling the truth!" Curtis declared all of a sudden. We all turned to look at him in disbelief. Oh God, what was wrong with him?
"And you know this how?" Nathan questioned, turning his chair to face Curtis. "I suppose you're psychic now, too?"
"All this! It's already happened!" said Curtis urgently, panting. "I opened that door. The probation worker…he killed you," he said to Kelly, who now looked terrified. "You were right there. You were dead. Everything froze. You were all just standing there. Time went backwards!"
"What are you saying, what, you turned back time?" demanded Alisha.
"If I could turn back tiiiime," I sang. Everyone looked at me with various looks of WTF. "Sorry," I said sheepishly. "Not the time."
"This just gets better by the second!" Nathan said mordantly, getting out of his wheelchair and walking over to the door.
"Nathan! Think about what you're doing!" I exclaimed panickedly, fear beginning to rise in my chest. I tried to grab his hand, but he just shook it off.
"Calm down, Blakey, everything's gonna be A-okay," he said smugly, still heading for the door.
"Everything happened again! Exactly the same!" Curtis insisted. "I'm telling you, do not open that door! No!"
"Nathan, don't!" I yelled just as he opened it.
Exactly two seconds after this he slammed it shut, bolting it as well. "He's right! The probation worker's gone mental!" We all screamed as the great hulking shadow of Tony appeared at the door, slamming against it, trying to get in.
We all huddled together in the middle of the room. Fucked. That's what we were. So completely, utterly and amazingly fucked. I was going to die. I was twenty-two and going to die.
"Maybe he's on crystal meth," suggested Alisha. "I mean, that stuff makes you crazy! My mate Chloe did it, she nearly shagged her brother! And he's really ugly!"
"I'm not being funny, love, but at the minute we really don't care about Chloe or her ugly brother!" I snapped, earning me an Alisha-glare. Tony was still outside the door, trying to bust it down.
"The graffiti! 'I'm going to kill you'! He wrote it!" said Simon fearfully.
"What did I say? I said there was a hidden meaning!" Nathan said exasperatedly just as Tony threw himself at the door again. "Or not!"
"Did anything happen to yous two?" Kelly asked me and Alisha.
"No!" Alisha said worriedly as I shook my head. "We should call the police!"
"He took our phones!" Simon said twitchily. "He's got all our phones!"
"Fuck everything!" I almost shouted. "It's like he planned this!" It was then that we realised Tony had stopped trying to break down the door, and his shadow outside the frosted glass was gone.
"He's stopped," said Curtis, like we hadn't noticed.
"You dickhead!" Alisha snapped at Kelly. "Why did you come back here? You shoulda gone for help!"
"What d'you know, bitch!" said Kelly angrily.
"Shut up, you chav," Alisha sighed, rolling her eyes.
Kelly rounded on Alisha. "D'ya know if ya call me a chav one more time, I'll kick ya so hard in the cunt your mum'll feel it!"
"Her mum'll feel it? How does that work?" Nathan seemed to seriously be deliberating on this.
"Look, can we cut to the bitchfest later?" I ordered.
"He tried to kill me!" Kelly said furiously. "I came back here to warn yous lot and I coulda left ya!" She pointed around the group. "I'm sick of every single one of ya judging me, you can all fuck off!"
"Look, stop!" I shouted, still shaking I was so scared. "We need to find a way out of here, now!"
"Whatever!" said Alisha, turning round and running. Curtis and Simon were right behind her, then Kelly, then Nathan and surprise, surprise, I brought up the rear. Fuck me, I hated running. It always reminded me of school PE lessons. But as we rounded the corner, Nathan slipped in something on the floor. He reached out to grab the nearest thing to steady himself, and that thing happened to be me.
But instead of keeping us both upright, I slipped too, and both of us plummeted down to the floor, both of us landing in the puddle of whatever it was. Something red…something sticky…something that smelt of salt and rust…
"Is that blood?!" Kelly shrieked. Nathan and I scrambled to our feet, looking at each other in horror. We were covered in the stuff: our hands, our arms. Nathan started frantically rubbing his hands on his jumpsuit, shouting, "Oh fuck! Jesus Christ! Fucking…get it off me!"
I, on the other hand, just stood there. I couldn't breathe. I just stared at the puddle of crimson liquid on the floor, stared at my bloodstained hands. I felt faint. My stomach twisted and I retched.
"Blake? Oi, Blake?" I heard Kelly say as if from far away. "Are you alright? You look like you're gonna spew."
I tore my eyes away from the blood puddle and looked at her. "Yeah. Yeah, I…I'm fine." I followed the streamline of blood up one of the lockers, where it was trickling out of the vents. "Is that locker…bleeding?" I pointed to it before rapidly backing up until I was standing next to Nathan.
Curtis approached the locker tentatively, reaching out and withdrawing his hands a couple of times before finally taking hold of the locker latch. I could hear Alisha behind me. She sounded like she was going to cry. Curtis pulled the latch up and wrenched the door open, backing away hastily as a body fell out. We all screamed.
It was Mr Stabby. Poor, butchered, aptly nicknamed Mr Stabby who now resembled one of those hacked-at pigs that hung in a butcher's window. Now I really was in danger of puking my guts out.
"It's Gary," Simon said quietly. Oh so now I got to learn his name.
"I did wonder what had happened to him," Nathan said meekly, repulsion etched upon his face.
The walls started to spin around me as I stared at Gary's limp, bloody form. I was fainting. "Oh God," I mumbled as the room lurched. I grabbed hold of Nathan's arm to stop myself going down.
"Hey, hey, easy, easy," he said gently, wrapping his arms around my shoulders and propping me back up, allowing me to lean against him. "I've got ya, Blakey, you're alright. It's okay."
"It's...it's not okay..." I said weakly, closing my eyes and pressing my head into his shoulder.
"He's gonna kill us!" sobbed Alisha.
"Please stop saying that," I mumbled, opening my eyes again and attempting to stand unaided as the feeling returned to my legs. "I'd rather my last moments be spent in complete delusion."
"Turn back time!" Nathan ordered Curtis. "Stop this happening!"
"I dunno how it works!" Curtis said anxiously.
"Oh, great! That's really useful!" said Nathan sarcastically.
"Okay, let's not freak out-" I tried to say. In retrospect, given the reaction I'd just had, me telling anyone not to freak out was a tad hypocritical.
"Easier said than done, Blake!" he spluttered, looking very pale.
Alisha, meanwhile, looked like she was going to burst into tears as she stared at Gary's remains. "Come on. Don't look at it," Curtis said gently, taking her hand.
Suddenly, Curtis' face changed. He looked like he was in a trance as he started pulling at Alisha. "I've gotta have sex with you right now!" he announced as Alisha struggled to get him off her. "You're so beautiful. Let's go! Let's do it right now, raw!"
"Get off me, you freak!" she shrieked, finally getting him off her. The second he let go of her arms, his face fell and he looked dazed and confused.
"What?" He looked at us all. Alisha went to slap him, but he caught hold of her by the wrist, and his reaction to the skin-to-skin contact was exactly the same. "You're so hot!" he proclaimed, trying to pull down the zip at his crotch. "I'm gonna bone you! I'm gonna shag you senseless!"
"Let go!" Alisha screeched, prising him off her for a second time.
Again, the second he let go of her arms he was fine, albeit left with that same moronic expression. "What did I do?"
"Er, ya said you was gonna shag her," Kelly stated bluntly.
"And you were gettin' your chap out!" Nathan added gleefully, pointing to Curtis' half-down zipper.
"Honestly, dude, it looked like you were about to force yourself on her," I said awkwardly.
"Shut up!" Curtis gasped in disbelief, looking down at his private area.
"It's when you were touching her," noted Simon. We all stared at Alisha, who, like I had been, was staring at her shaking hands in terror. Before he could react, she pressed a hand to Simon's neck.
It wasn't pretty. All the veins near where she had touched seemed to grow even more purple as Simon twisted his head to look at Alisha hungrily. "I'm so hard for you! I wanna rip your clothes off and piss on your tits!"
"What is happening to me?" Alisha shouted, dropping her hand from Simon's neck.
"Holy motherfucker. That…is so wrong," I said disgustedly.
"You sick bastard!" Nathan said with revulsion. Nathan and I having the same thought; at least one thing in all of this mentalness was somewhat normal.
Before anyone else had the chance to voice their opinions on Simon's fucked up sexual fantasies, Tony burst through one of the windows, the glass shattering around him.
I screamed at the top of my lungs. He was making rabid noises like some kind of insane bear. His eyes were wide, bloodshot and full of hatred. Hatred for all of us. He was going to kill us. Everyone backed up instinctively, but I was too busy staring at Tony to move. It was like I was rooted to the spot. I was his clearest target.
Tony threw himself at me. I had no time to move, so I stood there and squeezed my eyes shut again, bracing myself for the impact and my impending death. Only...it never came.
Tony had launched himself at me Superman-style, fist first, but the second that fist connected with my stomach, there was an almighty sickening crunch sound, followed by an animalistic howl coming from the probation worker's mouth. I had felt no pain.
Eyes flying open, I looked and saw Tony gripping his wrist with his hand in the air. His fingers were pointing every which way, clearly very broken. Had...had I done that?! "W-what the fuck?!" I whimpered, my hands clawing at my stomach. Everything felt completely normal. I turned to face the others and all of them looked completely aghast, mouths dropped open.
"Blake, look- BLAKE!" Nathan suddenly yelled, and the next think I knew I was on the floor, skidding halfway down the hall. Another scream of pain had followed, but it wasn't from me; not only had Tony broken his hand when he punched me, but this second tackle had done something to his shoulder as he flailed around clutching it. When he moved his non-broken hand, I could see part of his shoulder was popped up much higher than the rest. He'd dislocated it. The weirdest fucking thing?
I. Hadn't. Felt. It.
Was I paralysed?! No, that couldn't be it, I was walking, talking, moving around like I was totally fine. Only I clearly wasn't. Connection with my body had just caused an eighteen-stone man to break his hand and shoulder. It was like this morning, when I hadn't felt my fall from the window. It was like I was made of stone or something...like I'd become Thing from Fantastic 4.
Scrambling to my feet, I wanted to be ready for when Tony inevitably went for Round 3 of Let's Kill Blakey. Only this time, Kelly beat me too it. Tony lunged for me yet again, but she appeared from around the corner and clubbed him in the back of the head with a paint can as Nathan darted forward, hooked his hands under my arms and dragged me away from the carnage.
The club from the paint can had caused the probation worker to collapse to the ground mere inches away from the group of us, not moving. I removed myself from Nathan's grip and stared at Tony's…body?
"What did you do?" whispered Nathan. I looked from him, to Kelly, to the dented, bloodstained paint can, then to the dented, bloodstained skull of Tony. Oh holy shit, this was bad. Very…very bad.
"Is he dead?" Alisha whispered, he voice a few octaves higher than normal.
"Well, I'm no doctor but…you see the way the back of his head's caved in like that?" groaned Nathan.
Tony suddenly opened his eyes, his hand shooting out for Kelly's ankle and screamed out, "Chav!" In response, Kelly started mashing his head in with her foot while shouting, "I. AM. NOT. A. CHAV!"
We stared, wide-eyed and horrified, at the now most certainly dead probation worker. Kelly had done some serious damage, enough damage that meant his head now resembled a flattened cat on a road.
"That should do it," Nathan said weakly, his hands gripping his head.
"Oh, I am definitely gonna puke now," I moaned, but all I could do was stare at the body of Tony. No…not the body. The corpse. OH SHIT. Fuck! It was a fucking corpse! He was dead! The probation worker was dead! I had been an accomplice in a murder! Oh shit. Oh fuck. Oh bollocks! THIS COULD NOT BE HAPPENING. But it was.
"You killed our probation worker!" exclaimed Alisha, like Kelly didn't already know.
"This is very, very bad," said Nathan, voicing my earlier thoughts exactly.
"I feel sick," gagged Alisha, covering her mouth and turning away.
"He woulda killed us!" Kelly tried to sound defensive, but instead sounded close to tears.
"We should call the police! It was self-defence!" Curtis said hopefully.
"Yeah. Yeah! We show them the dead boy in the locker," said Alisha. "They'll do some CSI shit and figure it all out!"
"They won't believe us!" Kelly shouted hopelessly.
"We tell them the truth!" said Curtis. "We stick to our story!"
"And what's our story?!" she demanded. "That he can turn invisible and you can turn back time?! It doesn't matter what we tell 'em, they'll say we're lying! They'll say we killed 'em both!" She pointed at Curtis. "No one's gonna believe ya, not anymore!"
Kelly's knowledge of the justice system really caught me off guard. Not that it calmed me down, of course. "Shitting hell!" I cried. "This seriously can't be happening!"
"Well, you better believe it Blake, cause it is," said Nathan, now looking like he might cry as well, but he did place an arm around my shoulders. I wrapped my arms around his waist to try and get some normalcy, to try to feel something other than the complete and utter terror I felt at A) becoming an accomplice in what was essentially a double homicide and B) finding out that apparently every nerve ending in my body had decided to shut down.
"If there's no body, there's no crime!" Simon said. We looked at him. What was he saying? That we just bury the bodies and forget about them? "We should bury them under the fly-over." Yes, yes he was.
"You can't be serious!" I yelped. "How obvious will that be if we're trying to drag two corpses up there?"
"Yeah, how do we do that?" whimpered Alisha. "Someone's gonna see us!"
"No, no, no!" said Nathan quickly. "Right, we just give 'em a quick-" he made a whistling noise to indicate we should clean them up. "We put them in those wheelchairs, we wheel them up there and if anyone sees us, we're just a bunch of young offenders taking a couple of specials for a walk in the sunshine!"
"That might work," I said. "But I'm telling you right now that I am not touching any form of dead body."
After that, it was like we were all running on automatic. The boys cleaned Gary and Tony up as best as they could and stuck them in the wheelchairs, hoodies over their bloodstained clothes. We wheeled the bodies up to the fly-over as if it was the most normal thing in the world to be doing, like pushing a baby in a pushchair.
"I can't believe this is happening," I muttered again, staring at the corpses in the makeshift grave we'd dug.
"I'm pretty sure this breaches the terms of my ASBO," joked Nathan feebly, leaning on his shovel.
"We don't tell anyone about this, yeah?" instructed Kelly. "About the storm, or what it did to us or anything."
"We're about to bury our probation worker, I don't think we need to be drawin' any attention to ourselves!" said Nathan in about the most serious tone I'd ever heard him use.
"Mate, there is seriously nothing else we can do," I said, throwing a shovel-load of mud into the grave. "It's all or nothing, man. I'm in. Fuck it."
"I don't want anyone to know!" said Alisha fiercely, starting to chuck dirt over the corpses as well. "I cannot be a freak!"
"Bit too fucking late for that one, darling!" I said heatedly.
"What about you?" said Kelly, pointing at Curtis. There was a poisonous silence. Oh, fuck no, he was not going to tell anyone about this!
"There's no going back now, man," Nathan said to him. "You're just as screwed as the rest of us! You're black and famous, you're probably more screwed!"
"I shouldn't even be here!" he spat, also starting to bury the bodies.
"Yeah? Me either! Yet here we both are!" I snapped, so sick of his self-pity. "So get over it and get on with it, yeah?" This earned me a glare from him that would of had me floored if looks could kill.
"Just then. When he was touching ya," said Kelly to Alisha. "How were ya doing that?"
"I don't know," Alisha said quietly, again looking on the verge of tears.
"What about you?" she directed at me.
"I haven't got a fucking clue," I said, running a hand over my chest again. "I don't get it. It's like...it's like I couldn't feel anything that tried to hurt me."
There was a few moments of silence as we continued to bury the bodies. Then Nathan looked at Simon and asked, "Didn't you say you wanted to piss on her tits?" Simon looked completely mortified. "It's probably best to keep that kinda thing between you and your internet service provider!"
"Leave him alone Nathan!" I reprimanded. "It weren't him, it was Alisha's weirdo power thing!"
"Are you alright?" Curtis asked Alisha, who just gave him a look that said I don't want to talk about it.
"So hold on," Nathan said, pausing his digging. "All of you have some kind of 'special power'! Everyone can do something except me! He can do something-" he pointed at Simon. "He can do something and I can't! That's ridiculous! Look at him! Where does that make any sense?!"
"Maybe you can do something," mumbled Simon. "You just haven't found out what it is yet."
"Yeah! What if…what if I can't feel pain!" There was a hilarious moment as Kelly and I both swung our hands out and smacked Nathan either side of his head. "Ow!"
"Did ya feel that?" shouted Kelly while I just laughed.
"Will the two of you stop hittin' me!?" he exclaimed, rubbing both sides of his head.
"Apparently I'm the one who can't feel pain, moron," I reminded him. "Best we keep on looking for your power, what say you, Watson?"
"I say stop fucking talking like that 'cause you sound like a right wanker."
Once we'd finished burying our dirty little secret, we all dispersed in opposite directions to go home. I jogged behind Nathan and grabbed hold of his arm. "Hey Blakey," he mumbled. "What're you doing?"
"Need to get my car, don't I," I said quietly, and for once, the two of us were completely speechless. Once we reached the community centre car park, I finally found my voice. "What...what happened back there?"
"I was hoping you'd be the one to answer that, Supergirl," he feebly joked.
"I don't know. I- I really don't know," I said hysterically. "It makes no sense! Do I not feel pain?! Am I invincible?! If I jump off a building, will it kill me?! I don't get it! I don't get any of this! I should be dead. He should have killed me back there...I should be dead..."
"Hey!" Nathan grabbed hold of me, his fingers digging into my shoulders. I felt pressure, sure, but the biting feeling of fingernails embedded in my skin? Not even an inkling of it. I truly felt nothing. "Don't fuckin' say that! You're not dead! You cannot be dead! I need you here, with me, to stop me fuckin' everything up and to remind me to put trousers on in the morning! It was you or that psycho wanker, and I'm glad it was him." He gave me a small shake. "You, dead? Don't be fuckin' stupid, Blakey. Don't even make that joke."
I just stared at him, tears in my eyes. "Stay with me tonight? Please? Please don't make me go home alone. I'm so fucking scared. Please don't leave me."
He leaned forward and pressed a sloppy kiss to my forehead. "Got any pizza?"
"In the freezer, probably. Beer in the fridge as usual."
"Then count me in."
A/N – See, Nathan's not that bad...sometimes. I appreciate this chapter is a tad shorter than the last two but I was really on a roll with the writing on this one and it seemed like an apt place to end it. I got a great amount of feedback on the last chapter so I'd love for that to keep going! Xx Gee xX
Chapter Three Playlist
Going to Hell – The Pretty Reckless