Grayson's Body

Deranged

Chapter 6: Deranged

Deranged

[dih-reynjd]

adjective

1. Insane

2. disordered; disarranged.

Grayson Clark, my best friend for a little over a decade, was staring at me.

Have you ever watched one of those animal channel programs that shows predators hunting their prey in the wild? It's like one of those programs that want to showcase the circle of life, to demonstrate how cut throat the wild really is. I kind of felt like that as I pressed my back against the sink's hard base.

He was not moving his eyes at all.

And it was freaking me the hell out.

"G-Grayson?"

Have you ever seen The Night of the Living Dead before?

I mean, the one that's all black-in-white and from the 1960's. The director, George Romeo, was inspired by Richard Matheson's apocalyptic horror novel I Am Legend. For some reason I was thinking about that while his eyes bore into mine. I read that book when I was thirteen and had given it back to the Kettle library right after I was done. Neville dies at the end of that book. I hated it. I hated that I imagined Matheson sitting there at his typewriter in the 1950's and thought killing off the protagonist, the one that I had been rooting for the whole time, was a good idea.

But Neville had to die. I knew that as the librarian smiled at me when I put the hard book into her waiting hands.

It couldn't have ended any other way.

I don't know why that crossed my mind as I looked at Grayson Clark standing in front of me in my kitchen that Friday night. I just did.

"Hi."

That was what I said. My heart was pounding in my chest.

Because he was staring at me. And he wasn't saying a single word.

But that wasn't it.

He looked like a total mess.

His light gray jacket was torn at the left sleeve. The material, pulled at a rough angle, exposed part of his arm. It was filthy: dirt, ash, and what looked like, to me, blood stained the material. His joggers were of the same condition and I saw the glaring red, dark and smudged and tainted, right on the thighs. His shoes were also filthy. I glanced quickly to notice some of the wet, clotted dirt on the kitchen's smooth tile floor that led right up to him. I looked at his black Nike workout shirt. They looked as though they had been wet and then dried. It was kind of crinkled, kind of wrinkled. There was a tear right in the center and there was-

Blood.

It was dripping onto the floor, it was dripping, and I looked down at his foot, the wetness of it in the dark.

"Grayson," I felt myself say as I looked back at him.

But his face was what terrified me the most. He was paler than normal, unnaturally so, and there were dark circles under his eyes, almost purplish. His eyes were slightly bloodshot, like a person who had pulled an all nighter for school or something. His hair was a mess, I could see the crusted red of blood right at the edge of his temple, stuck there. It looked like his nose had been bleeding as well, there was a bit of it under the nostrils.