in which...angelina alvarez finds out that surviving with a terrified, useless priest during the apocalypse was nothing compared to 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘮.
OR
in which...the hunter falls for the predator.
...
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THE church bells rang once twice, three times, echoing around the walls of the small secluded church symbolizing the start of the weekend mass.
The few pews were filled with families and loved ones waiting eagerly to hear what their beloved priest would say this week. Not a sad face or frown was in sight. It was a beautiful sunny day out, but someone's mood did not match. If you looked really closely towards the back of the room, in one of the pews by the exit, someone's face looked out of place.
A family of three stood close to each other as if one of them was going to try to escape. And one of them surely thought about it.
Angelina Alvarez was silent. She was silent when they arrived, silent when everyone started praying, and silent when Father Gabriel entered the mass.
("Stop being disrespectful Angelina, pray with everyone.") Her father said looking down at her in a hard whisper.
Angie didn't meet his eyes that were boring into her brown ones. Instead, she just focused on the front of the room and watched the man ahead move from the candles to the altar.
"Mija." Her father was losing his patience with the woman ignoring him. He grabbed her wrist with his rough calloused hand, fingers wrapping around her frail bony arm. Still, she did not dare to meet his eyes.
"Pick up the hymn book and start praying. Now." Her father's long rugged fingernails dug into her arm, leaving little bloody crescent moon shapes lining down her hand.
"Martin stop!" An older woman with a tiny frame cried out in a whisper at her husband from the left.
Tears pricked the corners of Angie's chocolate eyes as she looked straight ahead. It took everything in her power not to say or do something, but she couldn't. She learned not to. She just kept looking ahead.
"Please everyone sit."
Those words took her father's eyes off of her and trailed to the priest standing at the front of the room.
Martin's harsh demeanor and furrowed eyebrows changed into a bright smile as he met Father Gabriel's eyes.
The brown-haired girl ignored her mother's worried glances that kept coming her way. Father Gabriel's words drowned out along with everyone else's replies. Soon the only thing she could hear was the sound of her labored breathing.
She sat there plucking at her cuticles with her fingers causing them to bleed.
What has her life come to?
She found herself asking this question a lot throughout her whole life. Angie thought of herself as useless, since birth.
She was supposed to be a twin. But, her mother had a problem four months into her pregnancy. Her twin didn't make it, but she did. And her father made sure she remembered that every day. Angie forever felt guilty that she made it and not her twin. Who decided she could make it and not her brother?
She grew up alone. Her father's resentment towards her growing stronger each day. He wasn't the nicest to her and her mother. Angie felt that she needed to protect her mother from the cruelties of everything. It was them against the world...and her father.
The brunette was never good in school, she never got good grades and was always getting into fights for being different. She was always taken advantage of for her kindness and it never worked out well. She went to college for about a year but then dropped out when she got a frantic phone call from her mother one night. She knew she shouldn't have left her alone with Martin, but her mother wanted her to have a life.
She always wanted what was best for her daughter because she never got that opportunity.
But seeing her mother beaten to a bloody pulp lying on the cold tile floors of the kitchen that were once white, now stained red, did she finally snap. The sight wouldn't leave her eyes. Blood dripping in the grooves of the tiles. Her father drunk and passed out on the couch, knuckles cut up with the dead flesh of her mother's skin on them. The weeks it took for her mother to recover.
Angie decided it was enough. She was done not being strong enough. Being too weak to ever do something. Being pushed around and hurt every day. Not being in control of her life. She hated it.
The brunette started secretly taking self-defense lessons with her very little college savings. She learned how to fight, survive, and even use a gun. She was quite good. And when the time came, she would get her mother out of there.
But it was pathetic really, her story. Still living with her parents to protect her mother. A college dropout. She always knew her life was pointless, she would never make it. Walking around hopelessly taking wasted breaths with each step.
Nothing eventful or exciting ever happened to Angie. There was nothing to tell, nothing to cheer or clap about. She had nothing to live for. Her life was made out for her.
The brunette had a one way ticket to death, and she was just waiting to get off at the stop.
A single tear dropped from her eye onto the bloody mess of her fingers, the red tears being replaced by salty ones. She quickly wiped her eyes and then and there every sound came rushing in at once, ending her daydreaming, the only time she had peace.
"...God proclaimed of an evil coming to us. An evil so strong it will battle us to our last breaths. It will be different, harder to resist because we can already have it in us. We must not succumb to it, never do we succumb to the shadows! We must follow what our lord has said and save each other the right way. We will not hide from the monsters, but instead face them head-on! They will not win, they will never win. We are stronger together than apart. We will win."
Out of the corner of her eye, Angie saw her father with a proud smirk on his face hands clapping fast next to her at the priests words. Father Gabriel walked off the altar with a nod, and back out of the church.
And what the Alvarez girl didn't even notice, was that the once bright sun that shone through the church windows illuminating the room, was now replaced by heavy rain drops pounding on the roof one by one. It sounded as though the drops would puncture holes through the ceiling.
Everyone rushed to get out, using their jackets over their heads to block the rain. The brunette sat there. Listening to each drop turn harder. And a strike of lightning hit to close to the building for her liking.
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⋆✴︎˚｡⋆ CALLIE SPEAKS ! ⋆·˚ ༘ * Okay I've never been more excited to write a story. We'll learn more about Angie soon and I'm actually so excited to share this with you guys!
