The Dark Side of the Moon

Chapter 44: Florence

-Florence’s P.O.V-

“Your sister?” I stammered out, my brain trying to wrap itself around the idea. If Laura had only been Kyle’s sister, then that meant I had been freaking out over nothing. I’d been giving him the cold shoulder and the fight we’d had too!

“She’d be a little younger than you now,” his face adopted a look of nostalgia as his eyes stared at the far wall. A sad smile played on his lips and he looked back to me, apologetic. “It’s a bit of a touchy subject for me.”

Guilt soared through me and I threw my head in my hands. I mumbled numerous apologies and Kyle sighed, then I felt his warm hands envelop mine as he dragged them away from my face. I couldn’t look into his eyes; I’d made such a fool of myself! How could I not hear the whole story? I’d pushed him away before he could explain and now I was the bad guy.

“Don’t apologize, I should have told you sooner. You have to stop tearing yourself up because of it okay?” He was crouching in front of me now, gazing sincerely down at me that I felt as if he could see my soul, as cheesy as that sounded. I nodded mutely and he returned to his chair, the void between us growing silent.

After a long internal debate that seemed to stretch for minutes, I finally gathered up the courage to speak. “What happened?”

Those two words spurred an instant reaction into the torn young man across from me that I wished I could turn back time and swallow up the question. His muscles tensed as his hands gripped the arm rest, the wood audibly creaking in complaint as he did so. He stared over my shoulder, his eyes cold, hard. He stayed in the same position for a minute, before he looked at me and shut his eyes.

“Three years ago I was infected. It was not too long after my eighteenth birthday and I’d been invited to a friend’s party a few blocks down from my house. I was a young man and my suburb was fairly safe so I walked there alone. The party was a blur, and I had been drinking a lot. I'd decided to walk home again, alone. It was then that it attacked me,” his eyes remained closed, but a frown decorated his brow. “The shadows were pitch black, and I struggled to notice the animal stalking me until it leapt out of the shadows and tackled me to the ground. Its eyes were crazed, I had thought it was a feral dog that had escaped and attacked me but it was too large for any domestic kind. As soon as it bit into me I blacked out,” as he spoke his left arm reached up to trace a semicircle across his right shoulder, supposedly where he was bitten. A part of me yearned to see if it had scarred, but I stayed silent.

“I woke up a while later, bleeding out on the street. I struggled home and my parents rushed me to hospital, where they took me in overnight and recorded the accident as an animal attack. It took about a week before I was able to go home again, and then was when I knew something wasn’t right. Everything felt weird, and I started to notice the changes. The doctors had kept me for so long because they had found traces of an unknown mutated cell inside my blood, but they later dismissed it as harmless. By the time I was let out, the cells had attacked my system and a week later on the full moon I encountered my first shift.”

My mind flickered back to my first shift less than week ago, and I shuddered at the memory. At least I didn’t go through it unaccompanied; Kyle had been there to ensure that I didn’t harm anyone. By the sound of it, he had been alone himself and it was hard to imagine how terrifying it would have been for him.

“It happened when Laura and I were playing in the yard outside. My parents weren’t home – thank God – but Laura was so scared. It hurt so much and I completely lost control and sprinted for the back gate. I was so uncoordinated that I barreled right into it and cut myself, and that send me into frenzy. I think that I must have thought she was attacking me, so I lashed out and bit her in the calf.” Kyle paused, his face twisted into pain as he stared in a melancholy manner at the far wall.