The Taken

15

Warning:
This chapter references themes of self mutilation and suicide

***

1 Year and 214 Days Ago

Ramona weeped quietly in the bathroom stall of her high school.

"Oh my god! Are you crying again?"

Three girls mocked her outside the stall, laughing hysterically at what was considered humor to them.

"Just leave me alone," Ramona mumbled.

"What are you gonna do? Go cut yourself again?" one girl scoffed jokingly

"Yeah, why don't you just go kill yourself, emo bitch."

The girls laughed in maniacal unison. One nearly crying because she was cackling so hard. Another girl kicked the locked door and yelled 'Emo'. They finally left, getting bored with Ramona's lack of reactions.

"Just go die," Ramona said to herself.

Ramona heard a hysterical shriek from the hallway as the intercoms blasted on.

"All Highland High School students prepare to evacuate the building. Find the nearest exit from you and run as fast as y-"

The deep voice of her principal was crazed yet focused. He seemed frazzeled but was determined to help whoever was in trouble. Then the intercoms were left with static.

"Someone help me please! Oh my god, I don't want to die! Oh god!"

Ramona could tell it was one of the girls that had been bullying her. She thought this was just some fantasy her brain was putting on. Imagining an impossible fate for her attackers.

The screaming stopped but Ramona soon heard a horde of children from outside the restroom and she was now curious as to what was going on.

"Run!" She heard someone shout.

People were screaming now, and a panicked sum were flooding into the bathroom to hide. Ramona's wide eyes didn't know where to fixate themselves in her cramped stall as her whole body shook.

Something was actually happening.

Shivers ran down Ramona's cold skin as she realized what was occuring. Piercing screeches could be heard from outside her stall as a pool of blood moved its way to the front of the stall door.

"Oh my god just fucking kill it!" a child yelled.

Ramona took a shaking hand to the bouncing door's lock and analyzed its form slowly. She twisted the round jutted protector and the door swung open, knocking her wrist aside and nearly swatting her face.

A boy of tall stature was falling back first onto Ramona with another body on top of him. The unnamed teen fell on top of Ramona who was sitting on a white porcelain toilet, fortunately with nothing of her's exposed. Her back met the toilet's external silver pipes and her front was greeted with a screaming child.

Ramona swore in her head and swiftly and clumsily slipped out in between the heavy body and the toilet, shifting her torso to the left side of the ground. She landed on her butt and her converse shoes met the pool of blood.

Ramona's eyes met with her first trauma which was an older woman who looked to be a teacher, clawing and munching on what seemed to be a face. The teen layed slumped on the bloodied toilet as an adult sat on his lap completely oblivious to Ramona or the audience of students behind her.

Just then a girl with the angriest face, moth agape, lunged onto the teacher's back and pryed her off of the lifeless and mangled teenager. The teacher screeched, nearly bursting everyones eardrums. The girl tugged on the woman's hair, in the process of unintentionally ripping off her wet and yellow scalp. The woman's greying and ooze seeping arms tried to grab for the girl on her back but failed miserably.

The whole scene looked very primal as if some kind of spider was violently attacking its prey. But in this case the adult was the predator.

As Ramona scurried under the stall door to another stall, the woman stumbled back and fell onto the ground back first in contact with the girl. The winded youth layed on the floor surrounded by her shocked and clueless peers with another diseased, writhing being on top of her.

Some of the students took advantage of the teacher's position and ripped her off the now unconscious girl. A smaller boy with a buzzcut checked her breathing and pulse, while other students pummeled the teacher into the tiled and dirtied stone floor.

The screaming wouldn't stop for as long as they would remain alive, or until they took in their reality.