Ashes to Ashes

Ｃｈａｐｔｅｒ Ｔｗｅｌｖｅ

Chapter twelve

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"your bones are blue too"

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***

I can feel the laughter bubbling inside me as I run, dragged by Caitlyn who's sprinting in front of me. My heels are clutched in my right hand.

"Oh my gosh!" Caitlyn squeals, coming to an abrupt hault at the end of the street and turning to face me, her face flushed from the excitement. "did you see their faces?"

I laughed, feeling so light I might float away. "How old are you?" I mimicked the man from the start of the night, and Caitlyn burst out in uncontrollable giggles.

"Did you get it?" she asked, once they had subsided.

I smirked and held up my wrist triumphantly, a watch hung there, miles too big, but sheek and expensive. "Just too easy."

"It will get a lot though," Caitlyn smiled, "We might not have to go out for a while, just to the markets maybe."

See this was what we did; stole to live. With no one left to support us, what else were we meant to do? Anyway, it's not like anything we took would be missed- the man was much to drugged to even remember that the watch glittering on my wrist used to on his at the start of the night.

Caitlyn laughed then, high and full of life, still shocked that no one had come after us, and I joined in, happy because  she was. But then her face fell.

"What?" I asked, trying to figure out what was wrong.

Caitlyn was gazing over my shoulder, and I turned to look as well, but saw nothing except the empty street.

"I don't know. It just feels weird. Can you hear anything?"

"Um... no" I couldn't work out what was bothering her. But, then I stopped. That was it. I couldn't hear anything. The street was completely silent.

Waiting.

No distant noise of traffic on the main street, no music from the bar, round the corner. No tick-tick-tick of the street lamp as it flickered on and off from age. Not even the faint sound of the water from the afternoons rain trickling down the gutters.

Or maybe they were still there, I just couldn't hear them. Because I was focusing on something else.

You know that moment in horror movies, just before the 'thing' is about to kill the protagonist. Everything stops. All the music that has been building up the tension. Even the faint sound of the character breathing slows. You subconsciously hold your breath as well, knowing that the moment the character moves, they're dead.

You beg them in your head not to go forward, to go back. Turn and run. But, of course they never do.

I stood motionless, gripping Caitlyn's arm. Willing something to happen. Something big, like a natural disaster. An earthquake maybe. A hurricane. Anything to distract me from the growing sense of foreboding and feeling that this was going to end badly. A cyclone I could deal with. Anything to break the icy silence that was holding us captive.

And then something did happen. Caitlyn screamed.

***

The blood on my face has dried now, and I can feel it caked all over my cheek, dried in a trickle down from my temple. The chains around my wrists are much too tight, cutting into my skin and bringing fresh tears of pain into my eyes.