A Perfect World

Chapter 16

Once Emory, Emma, and I had been able to stop laughing and walk a straight line again, we went to our cars, Emma and I taking upon ourselves the task of driving everyone back home, where we were planning to plan our trip. It’s a long, quiet drive, at least in my car. I’m driving Ty, Dan, Jaydia, Meg, and Claire, and Emma has Emory, Jake, Jack, and Matt, who finally gets shotgun since I’m driving my own vehicle, and Emory is in the back with her brother, otherwise, she probably would have taken it.

When we get home after a 20 minute-or-so drive, we all disperse to various locations to study. Everyone goes inside to work, except for me, Emory, Jack, and Meg. I sit in the back of the blue van with the back doors closed and the seats folded down and my papers organized into neat stacks based on information content and usefulness as I sit marking, annotating, and correcting things with various markers, pens, and other colored writing utensils.

The doors’ latch clicks, and I instinctively reach for my knife hidden in my jacket pocket, drawing it and flicking it open quickly when I see who it is. I close my computer and set it down on my side further from the door so I can slink out of the van to meet my intruder.

“Hello, Aydin. You’ve been working hard, yes?” He says, his gold eyes twinkling with hidden knowledge.

“Hello, Lewis,” I say in a dark tone, “Yes I have. Now I have a question for you. How did you find me and what do you want?” I growl, holding my knife firmly in my left hand, feeling the sharp imperfections on the handle dig into my palm.

“I have more power than you’ll ever know, girl.” He says, mimicking my dark tone, “And I’m not Lewis either, I’ve just been using him for the last hundred years, and once I’m finished I’ll put him out of his misery, but that’s irrelevant to the situation. I’m here to protect my hard work you’re so dead-set on destroying. Come with me easily and I’ll let you off easy, put up a fight… Well, you don’t really want to know.” He says, reaching for my wrist. I jerk away from him, carving a deep laceration into his forearm.

“No. Leave me alone,” I say, taking a step back and holding my bloody knife out in front of me, “Jack, Meg, Emory!” I call out to the three I know are out here still, Emory in the back of the other van, just behind Lewis, or at least, Lewis's body, and Jack and Meg out on the front lawn, just out of my sight.

“Oh, they can’t hear you. I’ve made sure of that.” He says with a grin, reaching for my arm again. I step around him, suddenly afraid of what he may have done, and give him another incision along his arm, almost parallel to the first. He puts his right hand over it momentarily, pulling it away to reveal skin that looks as if it has never been touched by a blade, “You can’t overpower me.”

I make the mistake of stepping towards him, trying to hurt him, and giving him the perfect opportunity to trap my wrist and change the landscape entirely. My house is gone, as well as the sky and the vans, and now we’re in a dark, broken down hospital, it may even be a prison, but I can’t see well enough to tell. I step back from him and he allows me to, no longer having to worry about me escaping from him.

“Where am I?” I demand, panicking slightly.

“It doesn’t matter since you’re never leaving. Get used to it,” He says with an evil grin, and vanishing into nothing before my eyes. I run through the rooms, trying to find anything to figure anything out about my new situation, but find nothing. I hear voices down one corridor and sneak silently to the corner where my hallway and the two speakers’ hallway intersects. I recognize one of the voices as Claire and risk a sneaky a glance around the corner. I see my little sister, her knife gripped tightly in her right hand, her knuckle white with tension, talking to Lewis, not two feet from where I stand, hidden from their view, though I have no doubt Lewis knows I’m there. A second later Claire turns the corner, almost running straight into me, her knife still open in her hand.