Broadwire

2: Death And Destruction

I started running towards the direction Dakota was being thrown but after a mile I realized I couldn't catch up to whatever had took him. It wasn't human, that was all I knew. I started back towards Jasmine and Sarah and saw them standing there, shocked by the night's events. I looked down towards the body and noticed an unsettling feature, the body was decomposing at a much faster rate than a normal. The back of his head was head was already white as bone. His blood had soaked the ground and he was shrinking down and before I knew it, the body was nothing. We walked towards the car and I saw the wretched piece of wood and the planchet. Without thinking I asked Sarah for her lighter that she had for fireworks and I lit the board on fire. I watched it burn and when I was satisfied that it was unrecognizable, and walked to Sarah's car. Both of their eyes were puffy from crying I noticed when the car's lights illuminated our surroundings. I sat in the back and let Jasmine and Sarah have the front two seats. I heard the three beeps from 911 being called and the voice of an operator.

After an hour, I heard the sirens of an ambulance and saw the flashing lights of a police car. I opened the car door and stepped out of the car, followed by Sarah and Jasmine. The police questioned us and we answered everything as truthfully as we could, leaving out that we used a ouija board and that we did fireworks, and the body. After an hour of investigation, we were free to go and they were going to find our friend. We got in the car and Sarah drove us home, dropping off Jasmine first then me. I walked in and my mom, who had clearly been bawling her eyes out, hugged me and asked if I was alright. I lied and said I was and she said sorry about Dakota, which didn't help. I walked in my room, turned on music, turned off the lights and laid down.

A few days later, I woke up to an alarm going off on my phone. I got out of bed and got ready for school. I walked outside, towards my car, and when I was connecting my phone to my car, a notification sound chimed. I looked at it and it was from a local news station.

"Three Cops Found Dead" was in big bold letters at the top of the screen. Interested, I opened it. The cops were found brutally murdered at the edge of some thick woods. The same woods that Dakota went missing in. I opened the picture to disprove my theory to myself, but my theory was correct. One of the cops was the one that investigated us, it was our fault. I opened my car door and threw up on the ground, then threw up again. I hadn't eaten more than a bag of chips in the past few days, so it was more dry heaving than anything. I sat back up and started my car, and let my phone play music to make my mind stop thinking about anything.

I drove to school and when I got there, I immediately found Jasmine and Sarah and showed them the news article, and the blood drained out of their faces. The bell rang, but we stood there frozen. Kids walked past, some looking at us with sadness or disgust in their eyes. They either thought that it was sad because he ran off while we were with him, or they thought that we did it and blamed it on him running away. I didn't like either personally, didn't want pity or to be blamed, just to be normal again.

"Do you think it was whatever got Dakota?" Sarah asked, the terror coming back from the night. Jasmine stood with her eyes wide.

"The cop, he was just alive, it's our fault," Jasmine said, coming to the same realization I had.

"I'll talk to you later, I've got first period," I said, trying to get out of that conversation and also needing to get to class so I wouldn't be late. I walked towards the classroom and sat down and laid my head on the empty desk behind me, not caring what the teacher had to say, and started to think.

I woke up to a bell at the end of the day in my last period and got up. I walked towards the glass doors at the front of the school and a police officer was waiting in the office, and the principal waved me in.

"Hello?" I said towards both the police and the principal. I noticed Jasmine and Sarah were already in there.

"Come on, you're coming with us," the taller cop said. I would have asked why, but we all knew exactly why. We were being convicted of murder.

"Do you think they think we did it?" Sarah asked, obviously terrified to be in the back of a cop car. The glass was closed so they couldn't hear what we were saying.

"Of course they think we did it. All of the evidence points towards us," Jasmine said, slightly frustrated.

"They don't have enough evidence at all. It's not there, our fingerprints won't be on the cop's bodies because we didn't do it, and Dakota isn't confirmed dead, and probably isn't. From what we saw, well, I don't even know what I saw," I said, thinking back to watching him get dragged away in mid-air. Then we were silent. Silent until the passenger police window opened and a hand materialized and came through the window, not alarming the passenger. Well that was, until the hand unclicked his seatbelt. It didn't seem he could see the hand, just the actions of the hand. It grabbed a pen from the console and stabbed him in the throat. Then the hand pulled it out, grabbed him by the throat and and pulled him out the window, his body bouncing on the asphalt road. The three of us were screaming in the back, and before the driver could swerve the car, the same pen used to kill the first officer stabbed the driver in the eye, this time the whole person appeared. It was the dead body from the woods. Sarah had passed out when the body appeared, but Jasmine and I were still screaming. Before the driver took his dying breath, he hit a button on his dashboard, sending a distress signal out.

We sit in the back of the cop car. The car went off the road, but only into the grass. The officer's lifeless body lay in the front seat, frozen. Sarah was passed out in the left window seat, and Jasmine was sitting wide-eyed, not able to believe what her eyes had seen in the moments before. It wasn't long before the sound of sirens and flashing lights appeared behind us. A cop walked up to the wreckage of the car and unlocked the back doors. He woke up Sarah while Jasmine and I slowly stood out of the car. They had picked up the body of the officer who was pulled out of the car, but the ground was still stained with his blood. There were cops everywhere, and one walked up to us, presumably to investigate us again. We most definitely looked suspicious now. We were involved in the disappearance of a minor and deaths of five police officers. Sarah walked towards us with dead eyes. We were all there, but we weren't "alive". I was shaking with horror from the past day's events. They asked us questions and we answered as truthfully as we could, which was hard because we had to leave out the monster that killed them both. Our story was that the driver had a mental break and lashed out and stabbed his partner in the throat, pushed him out the window, but before he was pushed out, he stabbed his partner in the eye and hit the distress call. It all worked out minus the part where we've been involved in all of the strange occurrences.

They tell us we're free to go and they give us all a ride home. I get home and again, my mom asks if I'm okay and hugs me. I lie again and walk to my room. I pull up the contacts on my phone and search for Jasmine's name. I hover above the call button, contemplating whether or not I want to drag her back into this mess after she's most likely been blocking it out, which is what I should have been doing. I decide I need to talk to her and she answers on the first ring.

"What's up?" she asks nonchalantly as if we hadn't witnessed the brutal death of two officers earlier in the day.

"You saw it didn't you? I'm not crazy?" I asked, not knowing if it was as a joke anymore. The silence over the phone was deafening. Every few seconds I could hear a forced breath.

"You're not crazy. It was that body, the dead one from the woods, the super fast decomposition body," she said, exhaling a huge breath afterwards, as if getting something off her chest, which she was.

"He killed them, do you think he killed the other cops, do you think he kidnapped-" she started to ask, stopping mid-sentence, remembering what she was going to say.

"I think so, definitely the cops at least," I answered, not wanting to hurt her feelings by saying Dakota's name.

"Bye," she said, rushed with tears coming to her eyes. She hung up the phone.