Killed Killers (NaNoWriMo 2015)

Chapter Twenty

Ere opened her eyes and found herself in the middle of a wasteland. The ground was flat dirt as far as the eye could see, and it wasn't the wet dirt that Ere loved to sink her toes into in the summer. It was dry sandy dirt, the kind that you choke on when the wind blows it up in your face. The sky was gloomy, a grey so dark it was almost black, and not at all like the sky that Ere liked to look at out of the windows of her health room.

She turned full circle, hoping to see some signs of life or really any clue as to what was going on, but to her disappointment she found none. Only dry dirt stretching out to meet a dark and threatening sky.

"Hello?" She called out timidly. When no one answered, she sighed. She began to walk, in no direction in particular, not sure what else she was supposed to do.

She looked up from her feet after she had been walking for a while, and she caught movement off in the distance.

"Hello!" She yelled, and the figure off in the distance stopped moving. She upped her pace, first to a speed walk and then to a run and finally giving up on restraint and full out sprinting. As she drew nearer, she saw that the figure was in fact a human. She upped her speed, making her legs go as fast as she could make them. She had a feeling that she needed to make it to this person before they took off in the other direction.

"Hey!" She shouted at them when she got a little bit closer. She could make out a little bit more of them now, and she found that the short blonde hair that she could make out was somehow familiar. She shook of the feeling of fear that was growing in her stomach, and kept running towards the form. She found that her legs weren't tiring, which was strange because she was not a runner and usually even a short jog.

She finally found herself close enough to see that they weren't looking at her; instead they seemed to be gazing at something far off on the horizon in the other direction.

"Hey!" She shouted, hoping to draw their attention towards herself. They didn't move, standing stock still right where they had before. She didn't even see them twitch. She urged her legs to go faster, hoping that whatever mysterious power that was keeping them from tiring out would keep it up until she could reach them.

She ran until she was within yards of them, and they still didn't move, even though Ere had made no attempt to make her footsteps quiet. She was absolutely sure that they heard her approaching, presuming that they were not deaf, but they showed no interest in finding out who she was.

"Hello?" She shouted, trying o assure that he heard her. Again, he did not turn around, just stared off into the distance, as though he could see something there that Ere could not.

She slowly circled around him, making sure to keep away from him just in case he turned out to be unfriendly. As she made her way around him, she was able to make out more and more of his facial features. He had blue eyes, which struck Ere as odd after she had been in a facility with strictly grey eyed people for a few days now. His sandy blonde hair looked like it had once been kept up and taken care of very well, but recently it had been neglected, hanging ragged an limp down to his ears. He had an odd look to him, like an artist had spent a lot of time making a mouth and then a nose and then two eyes and cheeks, but when he had put all of the beautiful pieces together, they hadn't quite fit, making it look like something was off with his face. Ere stared at him, but even when she came to a point where she was sure that he could see her, he did not turn his head to look at her. He continued to stare straight ahead, unblinking and unmoving. She gazed at him, not sure whether she could trust him or not, and not sure whether he was hostile or any danger to her. She walked a few more steps until she was directly in his line of sight, so that it looked like he was staring right through her.