Extraterrestrial

Chapter 1: boom

My ears are ringing. Blood trickles down my temple. My eyes are blurry and the throbbing, dizzying sensation in my head does not help at all. I'm seeing double. No, triple. My surroundings blend in and out of each other, swerving and diving. My body shakes in the memory of seeing the bodies. Dead. They're all dead!

I stumble down the stairs hurriedly, hearing sirens and car doors slamming shut somewhere in the distance. Grabbing onto the railings for dear life to steady my movements, I see my veins in my arms through my ripped sleeves. They're glowing.

Blinking in confusion, I squinted hard at my hands. Trying in vain to focus my sight but it only made the pounding pain in my head worse. I trip on the steps in my state of disorientation. Landing the last few steps of the stairs. I struggled to breathe as the pain seemed to double. Fear and adrenaline made me push further. I limped as I tried to quicken my pace. Fighting and pushing the pain into the back of my mind, I can hear them storming the building. I've got to get out of here now and fast.

***

(30 minutes earlier)

Laughter echoes throughout the empty, dilapidated, eight-year-old building. Boisterous and rowdy, the lot we are. "What dya' think? The angles are just right, aye?" "Damn dude. You got skills."

I stopped spraying, my index finger leaving the nozzle. I turned from my work of art, glancing at my friends. A grinned crept up my face as I watched them. "Yo, Aaron! Quit braggin', you only improved a bit. Jeff, don't egg him on. You know how he gets!" I joked with them.

The beauty of an abandoned, crumbling building is that you could do whatever the hell you want to it and nobody would care. The stench of aerosol spray paint hangs heavily in the air. Paint covers most of the wall in front of me and some of it is even on the ends of my sleeves and shoes. Thankfully, these are just some of my old clothes. Plus, I don't really mind if the paint got on my converse, the colours just add more character to it.

I turn to my right and I see four of my friends all covered in paint with beer and spray cans littering at their feet. Jeff is just sitting at a corner watching us, contributing to the huge pile of empty beer cans. "And Jeff! Make sure you pick up after yourself. I ain't cleanin' up after you! Ugh, just look at the mess you made!" I yelled across space at Jeff. Rina and Trish snickering at my remarks, joining in with snarky comments.

"Nah, who cares if I left it here? Nobody comes here anyway." Jeff nonchalantly retorts. "No one except us but well... Fine. Suit yourself, you punk." I sighed in surrender, giving up all thoughts of argument with the guy. There's just no changing his mind given how stubborn he is by nature.

This old apartment building has been our go-to hangout place since we first met in our first year of college, some of us even since high school. Traces of us are all over the walls, tags, graffiti and whatever "art form" we could get onto the walls. The once well-fenced property was in fact really easy to scale over and get into. We knew the place like the back of our palms.

"Aight. I'm gonna head out for a bit. It stinks here. "I point towards the other side of the car park where the roof ends.

"Cool, guys let's all take a break." A chorus of agreements rang throughout the space. There's a limit to the stench we can endure. 

I set down my can and went to stand at the railing overlooking the rundown compound below. Weeds and living critters entangling with the abandoned like it was trying to bring it back to life. Apartment blocks and houses seemed to proliferate like cells in one's body. One abandoned and another one rising up simultaneously.

"Hey, Angie whassup? Something on your mind?" Aaron pipes up, casually joining me at the railing, interrupting my thoughts.

"It's nothing. Just enjoying the view." I said turning to the side to look at him.

Aaron has jet black hair with the greenest eyes and a lean figure. He's a good-looking guy with a laid-back attitude. A sight for sore eyes. All the time. Every time. Yep, I kind of have a crush on him but I've never acted on it. I'm cool with us being just friends and guys like him don't do dates. They fuck around. And I don't.

Besides, I have an act to keep up on. I'm the tough, badass girl that nobody messes with. So they'd be well aware to stay away from me as much as possible. The pals I hang with? They're the only people other than my family members that I trust with my life. Heck, I don't even trust my own family members sometimes. But it's different with us. We always have each others' backs no matter what. Even if we don't seem like the loyal type sometimes.

They say blood is thicker than water. That quote is almost always wrongly interpreted. What it really means is that the bonds that we choose for ourselves are more significant than the ones we were born with right from the start. It's what we make of it not the ones that we didn't have to choose. I say amen to that, Sir Walter Scott... or whoever wrote that.

"You know, you have a little paint on your nose." He says suddenly as he steps closer.

"Oh, really? Oops." I blushed thinking of how goofy I must've looked to him. Or them. My friends, all of them.

"Here let me wipe that." He leans closer, using the base of his thumb to rub off the smudge. I could feel the warmth radiating from his body. His scent of mint and a hint of paint engulfing my senses. My shoulder grazes his chest and I tried my best not to flinch away. Feeling self-conscious all of a sudden, I froze. Our eyes met after he's wiped it off. Everything in my brain moves in slow motion.

Oddly, he doesn't make a move to back away. It felt like a long time has passed before the joke in his eyes left for something else to be replaced. Something I've never seen expressed towards me before.

That was the last time I saw him before everything came crumbling down. Literally.