The Vanished

Part Eleven

     I hear footsteps running down the stairs, a hand fumbling the locks on the cellar door. Imani is in the corner sobbing, Kit is bracing himself against the cellar door, pushing all his weight against it.

     Out of nowhere, Kit falls back onto the floor, hitting his head and falling unconscious. Jagger throws the door open and finally takes in the brutal and bloody scene before him.

     Imani takes the opportunity to use her heavy sock and swings it at Jagger's head. Time seems to slow down.

     Jagger brings his hand up and catches the sock. He rips it out of Imani's hand and swings it at me, striking me in my knee, bringing me onto the floor. I use my knowledge from soccer and turn my fall into a slide tackle. 

     Jagger falls onto the floor, I take the opportunity to get up and make a run for it. After all, Jericho told me I needed to be the first one to escape. I stand up and I can immediately feel the sharp scalding hot pain in my knee. 

     I break the chair I was going to use into pieces. I use one of the legs to brace myself as I hobbled up the stairs. But all of a sudden a hand snags me around the waist and we topple down the staircase, the other body landing on top of mine.

     I realize it was Jagger. I try to shove him off of me, but he throws an arm around my neck and pulls me onto my feet into a standing position. Now I was terrified, I knew he didn't want to hurt me, but I knew he was capable of it if he got out of control.

     Apparently, Kit had been in the middle of coming back into consciousness when Jagger had drug me down the stairs because he had taken a piece of my chair and stabbed it into Jagger's lower stomach, causing him to drop me.

       I was about 99% sure that when Jagger had landed on me, because as I was trying to regain my breath, it was impossible to take a deep breath.

     I tried to crawl up the stairs, but it hurt so badly that I just collapsed onto the first step. At the way my head was angled, I could see everyone in the cellar. 

     Kit is tackling Jagger, or trying to tackle Jagger. He's a lot larger so Kit isn't having an effect on him. Jagger picks Kit up by the neck  and begins to repeatedly bash his head into the wall. Over and over again, bits and fragments of his skull flying like bullets, multiple pieces embedding themselves into my legs and face.

    Jagger drops Kit's lifeless body onto the floor in front of me, beside Imani. She does that movie thing where the character has a moment of rage. And she rushes Jagger and uses her heavy sock to bash him in the head.

     I'm vaguely aware of Jagger's body hitting the floor, Imani's voice screaming at me to run. But right now, I can only think of when I had first met Kit.

*****

"Hey, everyone else already has a partner, so you wanna be partners? We're the only ones left." I look over to him, the coding competition had started and we needed to have a group of at least two people and all the 7th graders has chosen each other.

     His name was Karter, but everyone called him Kit for two reasons. One being he loved to eat KitKats, and the other being that he got tired of everyone spelling his name with a C instead of a K. 

     He was pretty good at coding, ranked 3rd in our club, beneath me and my girlfriend Amalia. But she wasn't able to participate this season, so it was just me and Kit.

     We sat down and worked on our project for weeks. Both of us had discovered we had a lot in common, we both liked Marvel. His favorite character being Cyclops from the X-Men, mine being The Winger Soldier. We both played a dozen sports and we both loved doing plays and musicals at our local theatre. 

     We advanced into the semifinals and then into the final round. The results has taken a lot longer than usual to come out so both of us had kind of forgotten about it. But then out of nowhere I received an email from our coding teacher, saying we had placed 3rd. 

     Our prize was a free tablet, including the case, a stylus, a charger, and an instruction manual. We were both so excited to have won that he invited me over to his house where we played video games until the sun rose.

*****

     I'm barely aware of Imani trying to drag me up the stairs, my legs not cooperating. She drags me to the top and tries to help me stand. We stumble through the dark living room and into the kitchen where Imani grabs a kitchen knife. 

    She loops an arm underneath me and we hobble over to the living room. She props me against the wall as she uses the top of the knife to pick the doors locks. She is just getting the door unlocked when I hear the sound of a gun being cocked.