The Freakshow Massacre

6.

In an instant and coinciding with Stanley's demise, Marcia's heart dropped down to her stomach as she saw Stanley fall. Her knees and ankles weakened as they became paralysed.

"Stanley!" Marcia screamed.

She practically lifted and propelled Claudia away, towards Marty's direction, before running over to Stanley. Marty stumbled and nearly fell over as Claudia was tossed onto him. Fortunately, he was able to regain his balance and managed to hold up Claudia. At which point Claudia's eyes flickered open. At first her emerald coloured eyes appeared to be neutral and disproportionately groggy. But as she saw the horror unfolding, her eyes widened and she began to panic.

A baleful calamity of clowns walked up to the helpless four, with evil grins plastered on their twisted sinister faces. Like indolent predatory carnivores, they were clearly content at the thought of more defenceless prey having freely entered their dominion. Given her almost comatose situation, Claudia let out a deathly chillingly ear-popping scream before racing towards the curtain as fast as she could. She'd forgotten her surroundings; that Marty, Marcia and Stanley were in that same tent with her.

She'd only got a glimmer of the conniving clowns and knew at once, that she needed to escape as Todd, one of her closest friends, had been killed. Right at that juncture, her own life was at stake; (unquestionably and unknowingly to her, Marty, Marcia and Stanley were also in grave danger). Everything was such a perplexing blur and seemed to happen so fast. Instead of running out through the curtain opening and to ultimate escape (like she had hoped), Claudia unwittingly ran into Pinky. Her euphoric hope of escaping, disintegrated before her eyes.

As she gasped and started to back away slowly, Pinky's maniacal laughter rung throughout Claudia's entire body and mind as well as penetrating the depths of her soul. The other clowns joined in unison. Their hostile laughter only getting louder and louder with each second that passed by. Its echoing seemed perpetual and relentless. Claudia covered her ears trying to block out the endless laughter. But her attempts were futile and in desperate vain.

She'd no idea what the twisted, demented clowns wanted from her. Realistically, what could they possibly want? They weren't friendly...my god, (she thought), they'd hung humans around the tent! She'd no idea if the humans were alive before being hung up or had been killed prior. Either way, it was barbaric and unequivocally sadistic. Did the crazed clowns want to execute her? Perhaps torture her to an inch of her life or just see her slowly slip into insanity.

"Leave me the fuck alone!" Claudia shrieked in a shrilling manner.

With a flick of the wrist, Penny pulled out her pocket knife. Claudia, who upon seeing the smelly, maladjusted neurotic clown walking towards her, was at a loss as to what she could do to defend herself. Fight her? (She thought), that'd never work. She was still in unexplainable chronic pain, plus there were too many clowns.

The only thing Claudia could do, was to keep backing away, hoping that the psychotic clowns would show some semblance of mercy and leave her alone.

Deciding to take action, Marcia raced over to Penny and aimed a convincing martial arts round house kick. Her foot hit Penny's stomach causing the clown to curse loudly before roughly driving her pocket knife into Marcia's ankle. Marcia shrieked loudly as the knife pierced her flesh. It was painful and caused a severe stinging sensation to travel up her leg as she was tumbling to the ground.

She landed awkwardly as blood seeped down her foot. Even so, Marcia placed her cold sweaty palm onto the handle of the pocket knife and pulled it out before letting it drop. She then used both hands to stop the bleeding. Her vision immediately went blurry. Volumes of tears precipitated around her eyes.