GONE One-Shots

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(IMPORTANT AUTHORS NOTE: this one shot was written for a thirty day challenge. I am only posting one entry here to get the word out about the other one shots. For more GONE fanfic please check out my "30 DAYS" folder.)

"I'm sorry, Sam." But if Astrid truly was, it wasn't certain. The concern in her eyes was such a convincing counterfeit. "This is for your own good."

And Sam was inclined to believe her beauty. They shown stellar, but her eyes were so frigid with intelligence. Sam was made to feel like a single snowflake in her cold stare. She was barren and calculative, more analytical than anyone. Back when grades mattered, Astrids top marks easily belittled Sams.

Despite this, Sam did his best to catch her eye, even if such low temperatures were dangerous for him in his t-shirt and shorts.

Sam resigned all will, realizing too late that he should've known better than to trust the ice queen. Still, he accepted her offer. He knew of little more awful than her coldness in the face of such trauma as Sams.

And yet, he was about to meet the thing in that deep dark basement.

A pebbly finger prodded, harder than it meant to, into Sams back. The stairs continued to loom, a starved mouth, but Sam took a decided step into the blackness. A lot of things were eating him alive, but he decided to focus on the most carnivorous; fear.

"Duck." At the bottom of the stairs, Orc grunted, his voice rattling around in his gravel throat. Sam did, and a board came splintering away from the door frame, a boulder of a fist demolishing the barrier. Then another. Sam swallowed a knot working its way up his throat and stepped over the last two. The line between keeping Sam out and that thing in blurred.

Sam turned to Orc in that moment, the sickness of fear that ravaged Sams insides now apparent on his face. "I'm sorry, there's nothin' I can do." And he realized that Astrid had Orc under lock and key, just as much as she had Sam.

As Orcs gravel body slushed up the groaning stairs, Sam turned to face the blackness. It, the unnatural, undead thing, was out there. A wall found his back in the void and he pressed against it, the creak of a closing door and thump of a dead bolt swallowing him in the dark.

Some part of him didn't want to see, it wanted to curl up somewhere between the wall and the floor and weep. As the warm glow of a Sammy sun appeared in his cupped hands, he told himself he wouldn't listen to that part again.

The shadows drew back, and took some of Sams fear with them for themselves. The dank of the basement crept around the edges of his light, but didn't dare come for him anymore. He almost let himself feel safe.

"Hello, Sammy..." He was a raspy voice with pearly teeth bared in a grin, and eyes, opaque in their reflected dullness, that declined to even blink. Sam had to swallow bitter vomit.

"Drake." The statement was shaken. The Sammy sun blinked in and out, as he near feinted, but it returned with new ferocity. Sam could see Drakes body now, propped up against a pipe connecting the floor and the ceiling. Honestly, he looked better in the dark.

Drakes skin was sickly, a pale green not caused by Sams light. His eye sockets were sunken, hallow crevices. His arm, coiled behind him, had lost its bloody hue, and was now oddly fleshy. He smelled like death. And Sam was compelled to destroy what ever this thing was, it was so sick, so beyond personhood. He would do it almost out of pity.

Sam held his arms before him, not caring for the shadows that crept in from behind now. He was going to kill it. Astrid had been right all along to send him down here, but of course, she was always right.