The Shell of Casper

- 1 - The Grave's Bouquet

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Bodies. Everywhere.

Rose Lowery stared at the boy in front of her with a sickened horror. A dozen people laid around him, flat with their feet inwards, like they were the petals of a gruesome flower. The boy at the flower's center turned to her, his head down and eyes closed. To a stranger, he might have looked calm. Relaxed, even. Perhaps even dozing off on the spot. But Rosie knew him well enough to sense that he was in a full-blown panic. As he should be. He had a bouquet of the dead cupping his toes. Once warm skin and limbs were now cold, sprawled around him. Lips that were moments ago set into fearful snarls, were now slackened and blue. His chest rose and fell in deep heaves. 

Casper June had just killed them all.

The plan had worked, but it was still equally devastating. The guards were dead. Grey and green uniforms enveloped the series of corpses left in their wake. Rosie tried to ignore the unsubtle name tags, humanizing the people she hated so much. She had known some of them, gotten close to them. Bile pushed into her throat, but Rosie drove it back down.

Casper's blindfold was lowered over his eyes once more. The tight fabric pinched over his eyes revealed them flickering back and forth, urgent behind his lids. Rosie led her best friend by the arm, her frame much smaller next to his lanky, towering body.

Pushing back her black, curly hair, Rosie dodged down another hallway. They needed to make it to the door in the storage room. It was there that the janitors had a spare key. Weeks of monitoring the security tapes had revealed that life-saving detail to Rosie only four days ago. Now it was time.

But they didn't make it to the storage room. Casper held her back, his arm pulling out of her grip to clasp around his own chest. The alarms had yet to sound, and Rosie knew that once the blaring sirens began to howl through the hallway like lonely wolves, that the guards would spew from every doorway. Rosie and Casper would be a drop of blood in a pool of sharks.

"Casper!" Rosie hissed dangerously. Casper's feet planted to the group as he doubled over. Rosie grabbed him by the wrist and dragged him along to a closet. They pressed into the small space, bumping and disturbing sloshing buckets of discoloured suds and poorly placed brooms. Once the door clicked shut, Casper started gasping.

"Relax." Rosie ordered, trying to be strong. "You need to calm down."

"I can't," Her best friend whispered, his voice breaking. "I can still see them."

    The bodies were still branded to her own mind, the blue lips, the darkened veins, the washed out skin. Her stomach churned.

"I know." She said, placing her small, dark-skinned hands around his. "I'm sorry." What she was sorry for, she didn't quite know. It wasn't her fault. It wasn't entirely Casper's either. Maybe she was just sorry for what the world had become. What it had done to the boy she knew so well.

    Casper squeezed her hands back and she watched him as he flexed his jaw. He sucked in a deep breath, the darkness of the closet and the old, sour smell of cleaners made the air in the small room like an oily liquid itself.

"I'm ready." He ground out, not sounding convincing at all. It broke her heart, to see the person before her wear the same face from the one in her childhood. It was him, but in a way... it wasn't. The Casper she grew up with wouldn't be in this green, camouflage uniform, but in a loose t-shirt and jeans. The boy in her memory wouldn't be in a prison-like institution that designed him into a weapon, as if they were given a shred of metal and carved it into a cruel blade with a mind of its own. 

The real Casper would be in her living room, slung over their single-seat sofa with his legs sprawled over the edge, his nose in a book. He wouldn't be crying in a maintenance closet with a navy cloth bound over his baby blue eyes, ones she was so used to seeing brighten as he smiled, or roll when he'd had enough. He'd be ranting about his novel or singing along to the radio as they drove or making stupid jokes about people they didn't like. He would be anywhere but here, and anyone but the person across from her. But this is what she had left of him. So she would get him the hell out of here.

    "Okay." Rosie broke out of her reverie. She locked her hand around his forearm and shouldered open the door. The halls were barren, the nearby guards obviously absent. After working here for a year now, she had crafted her plan perfectly. A security guard in training, assigned to cameras, boring desk work, and hours-on-end monitoring. Exactly the opening she needed to master and study the routines and ways around the maze-like facility.

Overall, she had Casper wipe out the guards at the checkpoint, and occupied some others by inducing a fight in the cafeteria. No one had to know that the note tucked under Mason Cowl's pillow, promising a fight for competitive reasons that she knew were personal to him, was not placed by Benjamin Green... who also may have had received a similar note, but coming from "Mason" himself. Under so much scrutiny, intense training and mental exhaustion, wasn't it so easy to start a riot?

So, yes. The hall was clear as she had planned. The map of the building was in her head as they rounded each corner and snaked down every hall. Casper's quick breaths hit the back of her neck as he jogged blindly beside her. She was his eyes, and he was her weapon, more lethal than a gun at her hip or a ruthless knife in her hand. Sweat slid down her brow and she rubbed it off in annoyance. The halls were stuffy and unending. Rosie glanced back to check on Casper in tow. His face shimmered with a layer of sweat as well. His coffee brown hair stuck to his skin and curled in the humidity, only at the ends, like it always did when they were kids.

    He continued to look alert, but kept his head down. Probably praying to avoid any... accidents. If his blindfold were to slip.

"Are we getting close, Rosie?" Casper said under his breath, clutching her hand.

"Yes," Rosie replied, pinching her lips. "I―"

"Hey!" A voice cleaved through the stale silence.

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Thank you for reading the first chapter! It means a lot to see people interested when I put so much time into my writing  ♥

If anyone has any suggestions or sees any grammatical/spelling errors, please let me know!

Anyways, thank you again! I hope you enjoy my second official Wattpad story (still in progress)!