Changed

Chapter 3: Gone Mental Or Is It Just Me?

High rises burned down to ash, cars exploded, and the vampires walked on stacks of the dead. And I staggered thought it like the last victim of the Apocalypse. No one hooked up with me and if didn't make an effort to take on a sidekick or become one. So I kept skirting the crazily burning buildings in my tattered lace, the red in my hair bleached by the sun and covered in dirt. I showed people the photograph of him I always carried in my coat pocket. No, Kayla, no Kayla, no, Kayla, no, Kayla, no no no sorry, loser. 

I kept waiting for the fires to burn down, burn out. The smoke took a toll on me, the air smelled like someone barbecuing rotten hot dogs, I felt it congealing in my lungs and coating my skin. Five days after by birthday, I was so tired I could hardly breathe anyway, which was sort of a blessing because maybe I would die and then everything could stop. Escaping the bad was also one of my habits. If a vampire tried to suck my blood, it would properly find nothing but red powder. 

I really thought that the time had come for me to die. I thought about my parents, and my friends but I mostly thought about Kyle Michaels. He had been her first and only love, before he had realised he was gay. I still loved him, I would always love him, no matter what form his love for me would take. Brain, brain, go away, obsess again some other day... 

He was crazy-mad for Edann instead and I hoped.... 

No I couldn't even think that. If I went anywhere near praying for something to happen to Edann... 

You are evil, Kayla, and you deserve to die. 

Beneath my coat, I fell asleep and dreamed of Kyle, and Edann, because in the summer after tenth grade that was who we were, like one person, the person I hoped Kyle would become. But once Kyle found his other half they had come to my house almost every day, because they could hold hands there. 

They could brag about their skills on their skateboards and video games like any other teenage boys, and they could flirt with each other and sit on the couch with their arms around each other while my mom brought them sodas and grilled cheese sandwiches. They were amazed and delighted at the acceptance in my house. Tolerance, in my house, came after a hard struggle, won by determined parents who never let go of me, even after I ran away with a biker, shaved my head, and told my shrink there were no bones in my hand. 

It was all crazy in a new way, taggers wrote VAMPIRES SUCK all over every surface there was, and people tried to share whatever information they learned about them: they had no minds, they were super smart, they had a leader, and it was all random. I saw plenty of them. White-faced and leering, they darted down streets and stared out of windows, like terrible horror movies.  

I didn't know how I hadn't been killed yet, with all the near misses. One thing I did know, they were more like people than beasts. Just very evil people. Their birds were mindless attackers, but the vampires themselves listened to music, went joyriding on motorcycles and kept the subway people alive so they could go on rides, it's a dead world after all.  

After another near miss, a vampire turned a corner just ahead of me, I turned on my heel and ran, hard, I broke down weeping, my thin stomach contracting and then God must have taken the hint, or felt guilty, or whatever, but He/She/It/They did something miraculous.

It began to rain. Hard. Buckets poured down from heaven like old lady angels washing their door steps, gallons and rivers tumbled onto roof tops like all the tears of us, like all of the blood that had gushed out of the necks of the dead. 

The rain downed down the fires just enough that me and my soaked coat raced through the fire line, arriving on the other side of some kind of hellish otherworld, everything was covered with grey and white-bone ash, trees, cars, rubble. I shuffled though layers of powdery death. 

And there is was. There is was, Kyle's house.

A/N I apologise for not updating, hectic week but i will try my best to update today or tomorrow.