What Lies In Me

Chapter 6

After driving a few more miles, Jackson stops at a small convenience store. We grab some food and a bandage for my neck, which I accidentally injured a bit more than I meant to. Luckily our encounter with the freezing cold was short, so none of us were affected that badly by the ice, but this cut still needs to be cleaned. We all get into the cab of the truck and continue down the road. I begin to bandage the stinging wound on my neck, sighing as the cooling salve touches the cut. In the meantime, Sadie and Tony debrief Jackson on all that we discussed, including the idea that I had melted the ice. Jackson listens attentively as he moves through traffic, nodding at points, but offering little comment.

"So, Jackson, do you have a destination in mind yet?" I ask.

He shrugs his shoulders and answers. "I can take you anywhere you want to go, but for now, I'm just cruising toward more remote areas. You know, toward my home."

"Sure, we can go with that for now." I have no idea what we should be doing. Our lives, no, even our world has just been turned upside-down. Though none of us know what comes next, I'm certain we can't just go back to school and forget it ever happened.

Tony reaches forwards and turns on the radio, flipping through stations. Clips of songs and sales pitches rush by as he scans the channels.

"What are you looking for?" I ask.

"Shh, I'm trying to find the news... Ah, here we go!" He zeroes in on a station. I hear the voice of a female reporter come into focus, and everyone in the truck listens attentively.

"-damages are still being assessed in what is considered to possibly be a terrorist attack. The damages to the campus are considerable, and students and teachers alike are being taken in for physical and psychological examination. Is it a massive psychological attack? An elaborate attempt to instill fear in us? Or a divine event? What kind of secrets are-"

Jackson turns the radio down, and the reporter's voice collapses into an indeterminate mumble. I certainly don't object, and nobody else is making a move to complain either.

"That wasn't a terrorist attack. It wasn't human," Jackson states with certainty.

Still, nobody responds. We all know what we saw, despite the reporter's random suppositions. But what now? I've never read a handbook covering extraordinary circumstances, and as a child, I was never taught any appropriate responses to a mythical attack. Nothing comes to mind.

Opening up one of the grocery bags, I pull out a package of jerky. I haven't had anything to eat all day, and I've been through a lot since I woke up on that bench. The others, seeing me, wordlessly pull out their own food and we begin to eat, lost in our own thoughts.

I look out the window of the truck. The scenery flies by as it always does, and as usual, I couldn't care less about the beauty of it. I'm looking for some change, something different about the world outside this window, but there is nothing to see. The world just goes by like it always has, as if nothing has changed. Surely, if the events today were leading up to some worldwide disaster, or a war, or the apocalypse, more places would be affected. The world would be panicking, mythical creatures would be attacking everywhere, and chaos would-

"Hey!" A thought pops into my head. I reach forward and turn the radio back up, listening for the voice of the news anchor.

"What?" Jackson jumps at my sudden movement.

"Shh, I need to know something." I say, then turn my attention back to the news. They are still covering the event, or as they are calling it, 'The Freeze'.

We all listen for about ten minutes, but it is as I suspected. There is no mention of any continuing damage or further sightings of monstrous creatures. Everything that happened this morning happened so quickly that there are few witnesses, and apparently it was all over after we left. The snake and the flying creature were just... gone. Vanished. None of the reporters on the radio even believe that there was a giant serpent. I knew I needed to clarify this to myself, but I'm even more confused now.

I turn off the radio and spend a few minutes explaining my thoughts to the others. Jackson seems surprised, and Tony seems interested, but the most interesting reaction comes from Sadie. She gives me a knowing look.

"It's like I said! It was after you." She points at me. "Once you left, it had no real need to stay."

"How can you not be surprised by this?" I reply, ignoring her point. "Things don't just vanish like that!"

"After all we've seen today, how could you be surprised by anything?" Tony interjects. "'Things don't just vanish?' This is not a normal 'thing'. This is a monstrous serpent made entirely of ice! And it being able to vanish is... surprising?" He raises his eyebrow.

He has a point. I don't actually feel surprised, so I shouldn't expect anyone else to be. I shrug, acknowledging his sound reasoning.

As we speak, we draw close to Jackson's house. It's a good place, I think, to stop for a bit, until we figure out what we should do next. We haven't really got any direction, and until we do, driving around the countryside is pointless. As we pull into the driveway, my bandaged neck starts to itch. Jackson's large family home stands over to our left. It's a beautiful two story brick house, with a back deck and a pool, standing alone on acres of land. Through the open garage door, I can see a car and various tools for working with metal.

"Well, here we are!" says Jackson, turning his truck's engine off. "You guys can crash here for a little bit. My family is gone for the week."

I absent-mindedly scratch my neck. "That'd be good. We can talk about where we'll go from here, and whether we should even stick together or not."

"Of course we should stick together! I'm not going back home." Sadie is, of course, the first to object. Her eyes flash with defiance. "You can't really expect me to leave," she says.

Tony simply ignores the idea of us disbanding. "First, we should get online and see if we can find some information on the creatures we encountered. Maybe somebody got video of the snake. There has to be somebody out there that knows more than we do."

"Good idea," I say, "We can also get a full meal while we're here." Now my neck is beginning to feel really uncomfortable, so I pull the bandages off. As I touch my neck, what I find surprises me. As I climb out of the truck, I look at my dim reflection in the window, and simply gape, dumbstruck.

"You're all welcome to see what I have to eat. After all, it's my family's foo-" Jackson trails off, looking at my neck. The others follow his gaze, noticing the change.

My skin doesn't even have a scratch on it.