The night was black as death itself, as if someone had choked out the stars with a wool blanket. cold air wisped around me as i walked down the old cracked side walk. It was so black that I couldn’t see my own hand waving in front of my face. Lucas had told me not to walk around town at this time of night. I know it’s dangerous and that gangs lurk all over around here, but I had to walk home from the library. I had no other option. I heard the sound of shuffling leaves behind me, and I turned in the direction that the sound had originated. The action proved to be pointless however because i could not see anything. So I turned back and continued to walk faster to my house.
The shops I passed all looked old and worn down, but they all had unique pieces that made their personalities shine through. One had a huge crack through the front window help together with packing tape. A sign was also posted on the window that I could barely make out until my nose came in contact with the cold glass. The shuffle came again, louder this time and it sounded more like footsteps this time rather than leaves.
I turned again, but the night only grew darker my the second and i felt like a blind man trying to cross the street with a silent semi truck approaching. I took a deep breath and began to walk again. My walk was about to paces less than a run and the roar of the footsteps grew louder and erupted through the night surrounding me. The semi is approaching, said the blind man inside me, brace yourself for the pain on impact. I silently cursed myself for not bringing a flashlight. Then the rushing footsteps stopped, and so did I.
I felt hot breath on my neck, and I had forgotten how to breathe. Then a slow tap came on my shoulder and I slowly turned around to face the figure that was haunting me. I turned and faced a large black man whose eyes towered about a foot above my own. I looked up at those white eyes as they glowed into the night and shivered and this brought a smile across his face. The smile glowed just as menacing as his eyes did. The shape of his body was almost impossible to make out as he blended into the night like he was a part of it.
“Hello,” he said. I couldn’t remember breathing once after I had set my eyes on him because the fear was too strong. I didn’t notice my lightheadedness until I tried to whisper a hello back to him. It came out in a desperate hiss. The man chuckled a bit then tilted his head and fixed his eyes on something that was behind me. I felt sick as he stared over my shoulder. Seconds passed feeling like hours and the man never broke his gaze from whatever was behind me and slowly I gathered enough courage to turn and look behind me.
I never got a good look at what was behind me before I saw a white hand wrapped around a bat. The bat swung and connected with my face with a loud crack against my jaw. Pain mushroomed into agony as my jaw fell out of its socket in pieces and hung sickly down rubbing against my neck. The pain became too much for my body to handle and I began to slip into the dark abyss of unconsciousness. Another crack of the bat sounded throught the air and soon pain founs its way down where my knees were and they now hurried my fall to the ground because thy now bent the wrong way. The taste of was thick in my broken mouth. My head met the concrete and I was no longer conscious.
I awoke to six fully grown men around me. Two were holding my arms down far away from my body, but none of them though to hold my legs as they were already broken and throbbing with agony. The black man was focused on my sweatshirt now. He was rolling it up and it exposed my soft white flesh. My skin glowed as if it was reflecting the sun itself. I tried to cry out but the sound came out muffled because I had lost control of my mouth and jaw. The black man above me mocked my poot attempt at a protest and the men surrounding him laughed at the same time as if they had all heard a silent cue. To my suprise he stopped rolling up my shirt just under my bra but I still felt naked and venerable laying there.
The black man pulled out a knife from somewhere in the black hole of his pocket. He flicked out the switch blade from its sheath and held it above my face and pushed his finger into it. Blood dripped from his finger onto my face and tears began to flow down my cheeks like rivers as I began to realize what he planned to do with the knife. The blood gleamed by the light of a distant flashlight. The light intensified every action the man made as if it was a spotlight. My crieds, although pathetic, grew louder and louder as the knife approached my stomach. The black man’s eyes are two things that I know I shall never forget. The crazy expression they held along with the sick twisted hunger for my flesh.
The knife collided with my flesh as he dragged it slowly across my stomach. blood flooded away from the knife in either direction like Moses parting the sea. I cried silently the sobbing shaking in my ribs. The men surrounding the one with the knife all wathced intently all smiling with the same crazy expression reflecting in their eyes.
The pain was a sharp but not powerful enough to overpower the pain in my jaw and knees, and then suddenly without warning he stopped cutting. He pulled the knife up and closed it up putting it back in its sheath. The cut he had placed on me had only crossed half of my stomach and then he stopped. I let out a premature sigh of relief. everything grew slightly hazy as more and more blood soaked into my clothes.
Suddenly without warning the man that had held the blade now thrust the hand into the cut breaking through anoy the skin that still remained intact. I could feel his hands moving around inside my body, and all the internal organs being shoved this way and that. Fire burst within the cut and an inferno was created inside me. The burning felt like hell was hiding in me, and the devil was slowly torturing me until he got bored and ended my miserable life.
The man then shoved his other hand into the cut and they both moved to each side of the skin next to the cut. He moved his fingers grinding his thumb on top of the skin into the rest of his fingers inside me. The burning grew stronger and I couldn’t bear it. My head started spinning faster as tears spilled from my eyes quicker than ever, incessantly. Then just when I thought that nothing could get worse, he pulled the hands away from each other.
An audible tear erupted through the night holding hands wiht my screams of pain. Until this point I couldn’t scream, I was afraid to. Now fear proved to be no barrier. At the sound of my fleash a couple of the witnesses standing around grew hard enough for it to show through their pants. He ripped me slowly open and I did everything i could to get loose from the men that held my hands down far at my sides. I shook my head side to side and screamed, but mercy didn’t feel the need to present itself. I looked up at the black sky and cursed God as he refused to even allow me to die. The sides around my sision became hazy either from tears or from my inability to focus.
After this man had finished tearing me to pieces he pulled his hands slowly out of my stomach. His hands were drenched in my red life essence and they glistened under the powerful flashlight, and mercy finally came in a low voice in the distance.
“Scarlet?” the voice sounded familar enough, but i could focus on nothing more than the pain. “Scar, Scarlet are you there.” I looked up into the black man’s face and for the first time in the smallest bit of pleasure flooded to into my mind as I saw his expression turn from joy to fear. Then the angelic voice came again, “Scar!”
This time the voice was sure of itself. Whoever the voice belonged to knew who I was and was coming to my rescue quickly. Just as quickly the black devil got to his feet and all the people around me fled with him, but my vision was failing fast. Suddenly Lucas’s face was above me crying.
“How could someone do this to you, who the hell did this to you?” I reached up touch his face one last time before I slipped into permanent blackness. The last words I would I would ever hear were, “Somebody call 911.”
Lucas didn’t know how to live with her gone, and so he didn’t. He took a switch blade out of his own pocket and gathered Scarlet into his arms, and slit his own throat. Together they layed in a pool of blood wrapped forever in eachothers arms.