You Put My Finger On The Trigger

Chapter Eight: Run

   Red. Red. Red. It was everywhere, blinding her, suffocating her, choking her. Hell, she was choking on it. Giant waves washed her in circles, dunking her head under the sticky red sea every time she thought she could breathe again.

Above her loomed Mami's face, twisted and contorted in pure agony, and she was screaming. She was screaming, so loud, non-stop, so loud, so freaking loud, so full of pain. The noise just went on and on, as her glassy eyes stared straight ahead into nothing. There was nothing except Mami's face, her body was gone. Mami was gone.

  Crack. A piece of bone floated near her swimming eyes, snapped clean in half.

Then, bones started coming from every direction. Faster and thicker, they poured in from the North, gruesome and hollow, haunting, and licked clean as though found by dogs. They began to batter her face, over and over again, and she joined Mami, screaming as the bones in her skull cracked and splintered painfully under the force. Her face was nothing but mush, and still they came. Bones and more bones, surging from new directions as they attacked the rest of her too...

                                                              RIIIIINNNNNNNNGGGG!!!!!!

Gracie  jerked her head up, gasping for breath. Her hand shot out and slammed down on the alarm clock, taking note that it had been ringing for over ten minutes already. She lay there, exhausted and drenched in sweat, tears drying on her cheeks and soaking her pillow through.

She swung her legs over the side of the bed, rubbed her eyes with shaky hands, and stumbled out the door. She threw on a light coat and her shoes, then slipped outside and began to run. It didn't matter where she was headed. Her breathing still slightly irregular from the nightmare, she focused on the pound of each foot. She ran, and ran, and ran some more, until her sides begged for mercy and her head was pounding from the jarring motion. Until her legs were limp and jelly-ish, and her ears were freezing from the cool air, and she could no longer feel her feet, she ran.

Finally her last shred of reason stopped her, close to three and a half miles from the house and barn. She was rather in the middle of nowhere, dying grasses and a few stark black tree stumps were the only company she found around her, as well as the constant singing of the lonesome wind.

  Perhaps it too, was running, far away, just because it could. Perhaps the wind also has a broken    heart, has nightmares. Perhaps she wails from the terrible pang of hurt and alone-ness, the     terror she has seen that she can never escape from.

She sat there a while, alone in the grass, catching her breath. She didn't bother to gather herself together. She let it hurt. No tears were shed; there were none, so she just sat and felt  her hurt, deep and festering, broken knowing there was absolutely nothing she could do about her pain.

Minutes blurred into hours. Gracie found herself in a numb daze, not caring what happened to her out there alone on a chilly morning, and stretched out in the grass she couldn't feel on her skin. She drifted in and out of sleep as the sun rose higher and higher in the sky, the soft pink of the beautiful sunrise fading quickly and giving way to a warmer wind that lulled her, calling to her to put away her troubles for a day; singing her softly to sleep and far off into the lands of dreamers. That is, dreamers that dream of good and delightful things. The lands where the weary find true rest.

   

      Avery Layne:

"Avery!" Ma called me from the barn door where she was leading Star out of the barn.

  "Yeah?"

"Come here please, I don't want everybody to hear."

I led Timber over, keeping him a ways back from Star, since the two did not under any circumstance get along. They were both stallions, and Star was a particularly fiery one when it came to rivals.