Broadwire

8: People Are Monsters Too: Brie

I drove home in silence, not listening to the music I normally did. It would be much too upbeat for the sadness I felt. I was alone with my thoughts for too long. I couldn't stop thinking about my childhood friend capturing another childhood friend and keeping him alive until he could get Jasmine to come back. I was shaking with fear the entire ride home, not scared of anything in particular, just everything as a whole. Every time I got everything out of my mind, the image of Dakota's decaying body with gunshots wounds in the head and shoulder or Jasmine's body, graying a dried blood on below her nose, dripping onto her chest. They would snap into my head and I would be jolted back into reality. The cold sad inescapable reality we lived in where people you thought you knew were horrifying monsters. Monsters scarier than fictional characters like the boogeyman or Jason Vorhees, but people that could commit unspeakable acts of violences to either friend or foe.

I pulled in slowly to my driveway, shaken from the day's horrifying events. I walked into my house and Cayden immediately embraced me, Carli closely following. I hugged them both back. Carli didn't understand what had happened, but I explained what had happened the best as I could.

"The evil man's been put away now, he won't be getting out now," I told her, not knowing what emotion to feel. Sad because they were dead, but happy because he was put away in a mental hospital. The sadness almost definitely overwhelmed the happiness by a long-shot, because Trenton had also been a friend. Even if he had secrets, terrible, dark secrets, he had still been a friend.

"What did he do?" Carli asked me, in her curious little kid tone all little kids seemed to have.

"He- well, I don't exactly know Carli. I just saw the aftermath of his actions," I told her, trying to be vague because I knew I couldn't tell her. He had slept on our couch. Talked to our little girl, all the time, plotting murder. Who knew could have been next. Us maybe even. It was already mid-day at this point, after the investigation and question and driving, it had been four hours. The worst four of my life.

I slid my jacket off and laid it over the couch, and sat down, comfortable, for the first time that day. Cayden came and sat next to me, and we were silent for seconds, before he started asking questions, which I knew he would eventually.

"What did he do to them?" he asked, trying not to bring me back, but the curiosity got the better of him. He couldn't hold back his questions any longer.

"Well, I found a more or less shriveled version of Trenton, most likely trying to starve himself. The bodies of Dakota and Jasmine were decaying, laying around a fire. Apparently Jasmine had been hit by a car, her back was broken. She suffered until she internally bled out, dying slowly.
Dakota had multiple gunshots wounds, one in the top right corner of his head. They think he died instantly. It was terrible, he was screaming at me about a monster or something. I don't really know though," I said, trying to think back to what he had said. But in turn, I remembered something else. The orb of light that flew from his body to the pile of ash. I couldn't even begin to comprehend that, along with everything else I had seen today. So I shut my eyes and drifted off to sleep.

I woke up late at night to shuffling in front of the couch, by my jacket. I saw Carli reach into my jacket and grab something out of my jacket. I assumed it was my phone because she had little games she played on it, or watched videos. So I sat up and watched her run to her room. I sat up and noticed that my phone was still lying face down on the coffee table in front of the couch. I guess she just grabbed something off the couch instead of out of my jacket, and I didn't really need to know what a nine year old was playing with. I grabbed my phone to check the time, and it was 3:30 in the morning. I walked up to her room, now concerned more with why she was up this late, but when I walked in there. She was fast asleep oddly enough, and I went to check to make sure she was actually asleep, and it seemed she was. I walked back down stairs, not tired anymore, and looked in the fridge. I hadn't eaten in almost 24 hours, but I didn't have much an appetite from the death I had seen in the previous hours. I turned around and saw the gray, dead, decaying body of Dakota standing, staring at me. I didn't scream, but I slid to the ground. I blinked until the hallucination went away, and after a few seconds, he was gone. I sat on the ground for at least an hour, understanding how this would be my new life. Instead of going back to the couch, I walked upstairs to my bed, being it was more comfortable than the couch. I walked by and noticed that Carli's night light, which was normally on, was replaced by a flickering light, a candle I assumed. I walked in and saw Carli now asleep on the floor, with a small corner of a piece of a wood sticking out from under her bed.