SCRATCHED

Chapter 1

2020.

Woodland was not a bad place to die. The cemeteries were beautiful, the graves sparse enough for the spaces to brew grasses and colorful flowers. The wrought iron gates were big and wide, the names glistening canopies under the eastern sun. In this town, the dead were the most peaceful.

At night the lights were on, traveling and crawling to the dark corners of Mary's Alley and beyond. The air would often bring with it the cheers and gossips of the teenagers who lived just across the road. The sporty ones would kick, run and shout under the floodlights, and they would all whisper prayers for the dead when walking home.

For these reasons Woodland had never been a bad place to die, so when the scientists heard the creatures coming for them in the dark, they focused on finishing what they had long started with the little time they had left.

Dr. Golovan scurried across the lab, having no intention of creating what might have been a life-saving silence. One more. "Just one more," he said it out loud unknowingly, to the hearing of Dr. Scoffman, who was looking into the microscope.

"Physostigmine," they said at the same time, then looked at each other and smiled with cold sweat on their anxious faces.

Dr. Golovan pinched in a drop, then looked through the microscope himself. Slowly, despite their awful shortage of time, he dropped the substance into the venom, then looked up at Dr. Scoffman with a satisfactory smile. He grabbed a mini tube and poured it in.

"This is the only test we can do," he said sorrowfully, giving his friend the tube.

Dr. Scoffman nodded with a frown, then hurried to the safe. It was like walking through the tunnels; hasty, full of fear of what lurked in the dark lifeless corners, full of self-doubt regarding the project. He remembered when they had brought in the chemicals and equipment, and how he would feverishly look up, wishing they hadn't been too engrossed in element deduction to install motion sensor lights.

The substance would survive at room temperature, but he still hoped it would remain refrigerated to avoid any mishaps. With a last look at the tube, he closed the safe. A liquid barely filling a ten-milliliter tube had taken them precisely 186 days to make. The nature of the element was unique and reactions heartbreakingly unpredictable. On days when they were non-reactionary, they would look into their microscopes during the day and look up only to find the sun's dim rays slowly fading, like their hope. That they would know through the Albert Einstein clock hanging on the other side of the room, since the lab had no windows.

Now, roughly four thousand hours later, the steps and grunts were getting louder, and their hopes rested on someone finding it and by any means possible, opening the safe to retrieve it.

The steps got faster, more powerful, more desperate.

"In the old town of Woodland, up North, in a science lab a hundred feet below the ground, inside a safe secured with a code, do you think it will ever be found?" Dr. Scoffman asked, seeming calmer than most people would have been in the same situation.

Dr. Golovan chuckled. "Well then, I suggest you write the code on the safe. Make things easier."

Dr. Scoffman shook his head, looking towards the door. "That's one hell of a risk, isn't it?"

The last sounds they heard were the bulbs dying - the sharp spark which had generously brought with it pitch blackness. And then the hungry grunts coming through the door they had decided to leave open.

They had their eyes closed and breath calm. Dr. Golovan slipped back into the shadows of a summer nightmare, when those glowing red eyes had dragged the reins of darkness into his quiet domain. He had seen them, shining like brand new chandeliers and moving with the swiftness of a wounded cheetah. The walls resounded the vibrating grunts, like the sky resounded the violent roar of a midnight thunder, like the quietude of St. William's cemetery resounded his cries when he stood over Amanda's grave the very next day.

Dr. Scoffman had put his wife to rest long before the creatures had crawled out of the shadows. It was on a rainy July afternoon that he had set down the soaked flowers on her grave. They were the ones by the side of her bed at the hospital. He didn't have the sanity to get her new ones. Not until they had returned to Dermich three years later, when the angel she brought to life had grown into a beautiful young girl.

He gave her the flowers.

"Mummy, Daddy bought you flowers," she knelt by the grave, "The yellow ones. He said you love yellow, and it always looks good on you. The woman at the flower shop was really nice. She said I was beautiful, and that my hair looked nice. Mummy, when are you coming home? I want to see you wearing yellow. I want to see your hair. Daddy said it looks like mine. Will you come home soon?"

The image remained, even after the tears cascading down his face mixed with a sudden splash of warm blood. He heard her sobs, sounding sorrowfully beautiful under the pale sunlight. They faded when he felt the sharp claws grip his throat, after which he heard nothing but silence.

A forced, brutal silence.