Hegemon

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What had happened the night before should have given Kira nightmares; it should have made her terrified of the dark and forced her to stay awake. It should have made her terrified to go outside or paranoid about what would happen when she did.

Instead, when she woke up, she felt nothing but excitement. Despite the fact that she almost died the night before, she finally had something exciting in her life. Whatever that thing was, she wanted to know who it was, and the boy as well; how did he even get there? Or for that matter, how was it that he disappeared? She almost doubted that it had even happened, and maybe it was just some illusion or hallucination from being tired. But how likely was it that Jess would have the same one?

Something did happen; she knew enough to be sure of that. She got out of bed, still dressed in the same clothes as the night before. She threw on a t-shirt and jeans and headed downstairs. Her mom was sitting at the table eating cereal and reading the paper. She looked up when Kira came down but didn’t say anything.

She’d been in trouble the moment she got home but managed to convince her mom that it was just a mistake, and that it wasn’t her fault. Her mom still seemed angry, but not enough to put her under house arrest.

“I’m going out for breakfast,” Kira said, picking up a sweatshirt from the banister. Her mom nodded, still reading the paper.

“Don’t go too far,” she said. Kira nodded though she doubted her mom was even paying attention to her at that point. She wasn’t really a morning person.

It was colder in the morning than it had been in a while, and she had to wrap her arms around herself to keep from getting cold. A plan had already started hatching in her head; she wanted to figure out what that thing was, and she was going to get answers.

The alley wasn’t that far from her house and the walk home the day before had seemed much longer. She stopped before rounding the corner, trying to flush the memories of the night before from her mind.

She walked around the corner seeing only the average stone walls of the buildings on either side. She walked down the narrow gap slowly but when she got to the spot where the bones used to be, they were gone. There was a black circle on the ground where they used to be; she knelt down on the ground next to it and ran her hand over the spot. It came off covered in black, something like soot or ashes.

She stood up, looking around. There was a splat of black on the wall behind her and drops of the same greasy looking fluid on the ground.

She sighed, putting her hands in her jacket pockets and walked back down the alley. If she was going to get any answers, she needed to wait until after dark. The streets had more people on them now and not many noticed when she slid out of the alley. A woman looked down the dark pass that she had been in to check for graffiti.

She went out that night, armed with two knives and a flashlight and trying to remember exactly what the boy had done to kill the thing. The streets were deserted that night, and no one was out, beast or human, and they stayed like that for the next three nights.

No one knew what she was doing, not her mom or Jess or anyone she knew. It was all her secret. She and Jess had both put the incident behind them, though they were still on edge. There was an unspoken law that neither of them even mentioned going to the movie that night. Neither of them really understood what happened, but Jess wasn’t like her; Kira was adventurous and fantastical and she wanted answers.

There had always been something in the back of her mind, whenever she watched a movie or read a book or even looked at some online picture, it took her so far away into whatever universe it was that it took place in. The world was a boring place compared to the stories in the novels and television shows. She wanted a superhero to come and catch her if she fell from the sky, she wanted to bend the elements and use them to fight the forces of evil, and she wanted a war of vampires and werewolves to break out in her backyard.

The world was such a boring place compared to everything that went on in her head. She knew that somewhere back there, way in the recesses of her mind, in the secrets she never told anyone, that she wanted something like this to happen. She wanted this to have some mythical answer, like something out of a fairy tale. She didn’t want to risk her life again, but if that was what it took then she would happily do so; she wanted answers.

That was the thought in her head when she went out the third night, out to the gates in front of the graveyard. She was one of those people who wasn’t afraid of the things she should be; the dark, demons, ghosts, zombies in horror movies, or graveyards at night. She had gone to a different place every night, searching for the same kind of demonic creature that had attacked her. She had tried the libraries first for any information they might hold on the thing, and had told her mom that she was “working on a project for school, and that’s why she was out every night until her curfew.”

The first night had been the alleyway, where it began. It had been illogical, she concluded by the end of the night, seeing as there was no reason for one of those things to go back where one of them was killed. The second night had been behind a set of old pubs and motels, back in the cemented area where they had all the trash cans. There was an old ghost story that a man had been murdered there way back when and that his “ghost still haunted the place.” Another thing she wasn’t afraid of; haunted places.

After that, she tried to go outside the abandoned hotel at the edge of the city. There were too many ghost stories to count back there, all going back to the same original story; someone gets murdered and they haunt to seek revenge. She had never believed in any of the ghost stories that flew around the town, because that’s all they were, stories.

The graveyard was her last chance. The “project” was due at the end of winter break, but she told her mom they were finishing up tonight, and unless she wanted to lie further, she had to come up with something that night. It was almost hot that night, a sticky, humid layer coating the air. She walked in front of the gate, not wanting to go in. The graveyard at night was still creepy to wander through; it wasn’t the ghosts or the zombies that scared her, but the amount of dead people there. It just wasn’t right. There was a slight wind stirring the air and the night was so clear you could see every single star in the sky.

She twirled the knife around in her hand. It was one that her dad had given her a long time ago, a large Swiss army knife that had a button on the side to open it and a multi-tool on the other end. It made a clicking sound when it opened and the sound seemed to come out muffled in the heavy air.

Somewhere in the distance, off in front of her down the driveway, there was a sort of rustling sound. She opened the knife again, but this time she wasn’t listening for the clicking of the knife.