Night Angel

Chapter Seven (Sample)

There was a night, I'd say maybe six months ago, Adam and I had decided to curl up on the couch in his parents basement and watch a movie. We huddled under a blanket with a large bowl of popcorn between us, sodas on the coffee table, lights turned down and the pleasure of each other's company. It was perfect. The movie we'd chosen wasn't some romantic chick flick. Not that I had anything against a good tearjerker but that sort of film wasn't really Adam's speed. We'd agreed on something that both of us would enjoy which happened to be an old zombie movie.

It wasn't a bad film, some parts were a bit cheesy, but overall, it was pretty good. There were a few jump scares, a decent plot, and what it lacked in actual frights it more than made up for in gore. My one complaint though was the total absence of reality. I know, how realistic can a zombie film be? Reanimated corpses eating the local townsfolk wasn't exactly something that happened on a regular basis but that doesn't mean there can't at least be some common sense on part of the humans fighting off the undead.

Horror movies are a major staple in our generation. Even going so far back as silent films, monsters of every kind have thrilled us, shocked us, and made us shit our pants. Personally, I loved horror movies. I'd seen enough of them in my eighteen years that if there was suddenly a zombie apocalypse I'm positive I'd survive. If I moved into a haunted house and started noticing things flying around my house or my cats going bonkers, I'd realize that there was a fucking ghost in my house. The same thing goes with witches, demons, creepy possessed dolls, and furry little critters you never feed after midnight. These things may not be real as far as we know (with the exception of witches as I personally knew one and dabbled in the occult myself) but we still know about them. We grew up with them, have read about them, and anyone with half a brain would be able to spot one if it were chasing us down main street.

So, it really annoys me when the characters in a movie are standing around discussing the thing trying to kill them and no one has a fucking clue what it is. Seriously? Do they not have scary movies in whatever universe they live in? I'm really surprised the zombies didn't starve to death with the apparent lack of brains in their particular fictional town.

I remember joking with Adam about how stupid these characters were and had I been in their situation, not only would I recognize the creature stalking me, but would also know exactly how to kill it. That's teenage arrogance for you.

I wasn't totally clueless but it was one thing to have a rotting, blood drooling, incoherent, corpse trying to eat you and quite another to be faced with something so subtle and inconspicuous that rather than slapping you in the face it dances around your subconscious causing you to doubt your own sanity. I knew what I was seeing and logically it made sense, if I were in a horror movie, rationally though my brain kept telling me it wasn't real. It couldn't be. What I was suggesting was just...not possible.

I was standing in front of the sink, my hands splayed out over the marble countertop, staring into the oversized, lighted, mirror mounted to the wall in front of me. I looked bad. Really bad. I looked so bad in fact that if not for my ability to maintain rational thought, I'd have wondered why I wasn't roaming the streets looking for brains.

The bath hadn't done much for my appearance but I was calmer now, more awake, and the fog in my head slightly less thick than it had been earlier. It was as if I had been brain dead and slowly, bit by bit, my brain was coming back to life.

That's when I started to really analyze what was going on. Memories of something horrible were coming back in short, violent, bursts and just when I though I'd had a handle on them, they were gone again. I remembered feeling terrified and helpless. I remembered the look on Adam's face and then pain.

Most of all though, I remembered blood. There was blood everywhere. Not like in my fevered dream of the cafeteria, no, this was real. The warm, sticky substance flowing down over my head and coating my face. That was real. I remembered laying on the ground, someone above me, blood in my eyes and mouth, and then...nothing.