𝐖𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐞 𝐭𝐨 𝐑𝐚𝐧𝐤 𝐒𝐮𝐛𝐦𝐢𝐬𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬

Trust Issues

I screamed and launched myself off the toilet's seat. The pitch-black disregarded our situation and preferred to stay dark and void. I banged my head against the stall door as my back, curled and defensive, landed uncomfortably against the floor.

Cold surrounded my shoulder as my clothes around my shoulder became sodden and fuzzy. I reached for my shoulder and grasped it firmly, feeling the utter pain and blood that had soaked through my school uniform and the ripped holes. I quickly dug my hand under my shirt to feel the gushing holes in my skin, the size of slim fingers.

This bastard had put his fingers through my skin! He didn't have to grab my arm that hard!

I didn't have time to do much more though, because something slammed me up against the poor door, grabbing my neck and pressing its fingers against my windpipe. I gasped and looked into its witless orange eyes. I'm not sure how I never noticed them before, but they were certainly bright and intense. It was the face of something from a horror story; the eyes, looking like small light bulbs, and face, ghoulishly daunting and thin. A few pinched layers of skin was all that was holding its body together. Otherwise, it was just a mass of sharp bones, desperate to cling to my life force.

It starred at me as it choked me, for some reason expecting something to happen. I thrashed and kicked until I hit its robed leg. It seemed to not feel the pain, but that didn't mean that I couldn't knock it off its feet. It tumbled to the ground as I slammed myself back into the stall door, fighting for that ever so pleasant air. I coughed for what seemed like an eternity and my shaking hands fumbled to undo the simple lock. I stumbled out of the stall as I flung the door shut, not putting in a good amount of effort on keeping the monster away, for I was too busy hoping I wouldn't die from suffocation.

I rolled along the wall and banged my fist against the stall that the other boy was in. He had wisely remained silent in hopes of the creatures not noticing him. "We—we got to go! Dude, let's get out of here before the thing does something freaky!" I called to him. I heard shuffling before a small click sounded from the other side. He cracked the door open for us to share eye contact, his crystal grey meeting my green grass-like eyes. That seemed good enough for him because he opened the door fully and stepped out into the open.

He unbolted the door quietly to where he had left the girl, but it would've been wise to just leave her. Two monsters stood to her sides, one the same as the ghoul-like creature I encountered, seeming to have her completely and utterly captivated by its gaze, and the other gas-like animal, layers of colours starting at the tips of its vapour fingers and fading out at the elbows where the bright pink had started to build up. The thing was slowly eating a hole through the girl that I didn't even know the name of. As it ate, pigment thickened and climbed up its arm slowly, like those glass bottles that you filled with sand when you were younger. And just like those glass bottles, when it reached up to push her head to move the hair away, the rosy colour spread up its body in spidery veins before moving back down with the arm and mixing itself with the other hues, barely a tincture of pink remaining it the combined mess.

The boy and I looked at the gruesome state of the bathroom stall, with blood smeared across the black walls and the steady scarlet drips that fell from her delicate and pale fingers. That was all we needed to get the hell out of there. We slammed the door closed before we scrambled for the exit, something we should've done as soon as the beasts were distracted. We rushed into the open hallway, where only the deafening silence that was pierced by screams and the luminous lights that glared down at us resided. The other boy grabbed me by the arm and dragged me into the classroom, tumbling into the room with a certain inelegance. I softly closed the door before looking around the room.

I was an average classroom; the only thing that was out of the ordinary being the blonde-haired boy that jumped up from the shadows and practically hollered, "Aiden," scaring the live daylights out of both of us. The grey-eyed kid who's name was supposedly Aiden looked at him before relief filled his tension occupied face.