drown

One

I swung the door open listlessly, the same tired familiar faces I saw every homeroom filled the room. They paid me no attention as I shut the door behind me and dropped my books onto one of the tables. The room was quiet aside from a few voices asking about what classes they were going to go to today.

I pulled open the lid of my laptop, tapping my fingers on the sides. After typing in my password, I mindlessly scrolled through the announcements for the day.

A ritual I followed every morning before my friends arrived.
-
It wasn't long before the grudgingly boring school day ended. The walk back to the bus stop was grossly humid and warm, flies constantly pestered me. The cool, air conditioned school bus was a relief and I hurried to claim the seats at the back for myself.

Vivian and Ann Nguyen would soon get on and try to take the seats like usual, and as usual, I didn't try to stop them.

Vivian and Ann were in the same grade as me, grade eleven. They were both twins and half cast. Half Vietnamese and half Chinese. Sometimes they told me they had a tiny bit of English in them because apparently their parents were swingers.

Ann said it was possible but we were 12 and I just laughed.

Ann was an average student, excelled in some subjects over others- nothing special. Unlike her dull sister, Vivian was a skilled debater and could probably persuade you to slice off your own arm.

She participated in a national debate and speech competition a year ago and received a second place award. I was told she debated about why government should be run by younger people, something about having an youth representative council. Aside from being able to pull an entire speech out of thin air, Vivien was also as ordinary as ordinary can yet.

Ordinary people in an ordinary world.

The bus halted and came to a stop, the two dark haired girls climbed the steps and walked to the back. They sat across from me and I gave a half hearted smiled before returning my focus to my phone screen. I pulled my headphones from my pocket, untangling them.

What was today's playlist?  I was in mood for something cheery so I chose an ABBA album and clicked shuffle. My music blasted in my ears and I sunk into the seat. I hoped Vivien would tap on my shoulder and talk to me about some obscure topic for the rest of the bus ride but she didn't.

I rubbed my eyes and sighed. The afternoon sun shone through the window and glared at me. Three more stops before I reached my destination. I wished that would mean ten minutes at the most but living in the country means half an hour of sitting on a sticky bus just to see your friends.

Out the window were faded fields of greens and browns, the remains of a passed farming season. Empty paddocks stretched to the horizon, void of any lifestock except for a few scattered black sheep. They were all lying in shade, escaping the hot summer sun.

I wondered if sheep could sweat. I sure was.

I felt the bus slow down and come to another stop. This one was by another secondary school. A mediocre private school with barely half the amount of students as the public one I attended. The school was full of snobs who were proud of going to the only "rich" school in town.

They all wore their same dull green uniform like some sort of ugly plaid trophy. But they were no different to us, mostly farm kids who's parents wouldn't mind skipping a meal for them to attend a private Catholic school.

A few uniformed boys boarded, looking not much older than me. One blonde boy was visibly sweating, his hair hung to his brow in clumps. His light coloured uniform was not doing his sweaty pits any favours. I didn't want to imagine how he smelled. They headed to the back, holding onto the railing just in front of the twins. I noticed a couple seated a few seats in front. The guy continued to scratch the girl's back awkwardly. The girl tried to reciprocate but the guy pushed her away.

The bus started rolling again and I turned my gaze back to the repetitive scenery. I was stopping by the disused Hospital. A nearby road would take me down to a dirt track which lead to the massive estate owned by the Cross family.

I was good friends with their children, most of us attended the same high school but we're scattered across different grades. Their eldest daughter was Fatima who was finishing her final year of schooling. There was also their sons Blake, Mathew and Antonio. Blake was in the same grade as me and Mathew and Antonio had finished school not long ago.

They had invited me to visit their lake house this afternoon. It was by a small resevior a short walk through the bush from their house. Lake Cobain, as it was formally known as.
-
The last time I visited the lake was when I was young, when the rented houses where still being used and when the water wasn't noticeably disgusting. Now we can't swim in  the water because of said pollution.

The locals call it the "death lake". 

Farmers are also prohibited from collecting water from the lake in fear of contaminating produce. A few decades ago, there was a tuberculosis outbreak in the town and the hospital was found dumping all the dead bodies into the lake. The government soon caught on after the tourist found a washed up finger on the shore of the lake. They managed to fish out many decaying and soggy bodies but who knows how many are still lying on the bottom.
The tourists complained and wanted to fill in the lake but it was too expensive as it was such a massive area to cover.

The hospital soon closed and now sat in the town as a skeletal reminder of the bodies that laid rested in their once popular lake. The nearby farmers and small businesses were piping their dirty water into the lake. The pesticides and fertilizers mixed into the water and caused massive patches of toxic algea blooms to overtake the entire lake. With the toxicity of the water, the lake became a dead zone and no longer could be used for fishing.

The lake houses were soon abandoned, left to rot. What was the point of having lake houses when no one could swim in its toxic algae water?

Where corpses once soaked like hot dogs in salt water.
-
I finally reached my destination, scanning my bus card before I left. The bus doors quickly closed behind me, not letting the throbbing heat enter. I adjusted my backpack straps and started to walk past the abandoned hospital. There were no trees along the dirt footpath so I stayed close to the building for shade.

The old hospital was somewhat still intact, covered in obnoxious graffiti and littered with debris and mostly likely full of heroin syringes. Many drugged up hobos slept in the building at night. I would explore it, but I was too afraid to be bitten or attacked by some crack addict with rabies.

I did find it funny that an old hospital became a meth house. The streets where virtually empty, I only had the best of my footsteps to listen to. Not that this was unusual, even in the blaring heat—we still had a population of under one thousand.

I turned the corner and approached a large metal gate next to a letterbox that had the words "Cross Estate" in fancy lettering. The gate creaked loudly as I opened it and let myself in, heading up the path towards the large home.

The Cross family owned many, many hectares of grape crops and had a local wine industry which was famous for selling expensive hand pressed wine. The vines looked bare as usual, either it wasn't the right season or they had recently harvested the crop.

Their house was a large, Gothic Victorian double story building. It was building from white stone and was painted a warm heat colour with dark slate tiles which I noticed where broken in some sections. It looked it belonged in England, and not in rural Australia.

The home was surrounded by trees of all different varieties. Tall pines hovered over the front yard, covering the home in a cool shade. I stepped onto the white, wooden porch and pressed the door bell. It chimed loudly and I could hear it travel through the lonely house.

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Author's note: Vote if you're enjoying the story! I know I've said I would start this story again but I've gotten inspired again and hopefully this time I can have the motivation to make this a completed story. A lot of the names have changed but the general plot is still the same.

Check out D007 if you're into adventure type stories. It's about an inventor that needs to deliver a hugely desired artifact. It's going to be longer than this story as I have multiple characters planned out. I've been creating many unique characters that I'm excited to write about.