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| Marked by Blood; The Kills of No One | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: Mar 29 2012, 02:14 AM (128 Views) | |
| Alison Summers ♪ | Mar 29 2012, 02:14 AM Post #1 |
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All Hail the Crimson King
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[align=center]First Blood Date: About two years ago Location: Unknown [/align] You only live twice. Once when you are born and once when you look death in the face. IAN FLEMING, You Only Live Twice The girl with no name sighed softly as awoke to warm, red, afternoon sunlight filtering through the lids of her closed eyes. There was nothing quite like a lazy spring evening when one could wake up slowly from a long nap. She enjoyed naps outside. In fact she enjoyed spending most of her time outside but after running, climbing or wrestling with her brothers there was nothing as pleasant as laying down in the tall grass or under a tree and dozing off. What had she been doing? Try as she might she couldn’t remember. Something about this nap felt strange but she couldn’t quite figure out what it was. It seemed like years had passed since she had closed her eyes and now as she teetered on the edge consciousness many questions began to flood her mind. There was only one way to answer them of course so the girl cautiously opened her eyes and glanced at her surroundings. She was lying on her back in the grass looking up at the fading sunlight drifting through the leaves of a tall tree. It was her tree, the old oak in the field behind her house that she had climbed so many times before. There was a bird’s nest just in view on one of the lower branches and a momma robin was busily feeding her young oblivious to the girl’s questing eyes. She felt a ladybug crawled slowly over the fingers of her right hand and looked at it. It tickled a little. It wasn’t enough to make her laugh but she sat up to brush it off and in the process knocked a book that had been lying open on her chest to the ground. A book? That’s right she had been doing her homework while she waited for her father to come home from work and must have fallen asleep. She rubbed her eyes to clear her foggy mind and suddenly her memory came flooding back to her. She had gotten in another fight today. This time one of the boys in her class wouldn’t let her play catch. He said she threw like a girl so, she decided to show him exactly how hard girls can throw by hurling the ball at his face. When she had left the principal’s office later that afternoon the boy had still been crying. The bruise that was spreading out from his eye, where the softball had hit, down the right side of his face was already starting to turn a sickly shade of bluish purple. It had been stupid of her of course but what was done was done. Her father wouldn’t be happy but he would understand, he always understood. Granted she would still get in trouble but at least it would be worth it. She wasn’t looking forward to the trouble part, that’s why she was waiting out here, but she had resigned herself to her fate nonetheless and would take whatever punishment she had earned. She did deserve it no matter how justified she felt her actions were. If you couldn’t handle the consequences of your actions then you didn’t need to be doing them. The thing that confused her though was no one had come to get her. It was almost dark. Her father should have been home by now. A scream coming from the direction of her house interrupted her thoughts and suddenly the girl was on her feet and running. Something was wrong, horribly wrong. She could tell by the sound, could feel the desperation in it but was confused as to what might actually be the cause. The scream had come from her mother but what would make her so afraid? She had to get back to the house, she had to see what was wrong, she had to…The girl reached her house and stopped dead in her tracks. Something had caught her eye and she cautiously crept back to the edge of the window she had just passed to peer in. Her eyes took in the scene before her. There through the window she saw her oldest brother and her mother kneeling on the ground. A man stood over them brandishing a gun. Another man with a gun held her father against a wall. A thin trail of blood flowed down from her father’s mouth, nose and several other injuries. He had been badly beaten. She saw her oldest sister and younger siblings peeking out from a closet. They hadn’t been spotted yet but chances were that they would be soon. The girl saw all of this and as she began to comprehend what was happening an overbearing, almost immobilizing sense of fear crept over her. Who were the men with the guns? She didn’t think she recognized them but she did. At this moment with her mind seized by fear she didn’t remember them but she would later. Their faces, their names, everything, she would remember it all with crystal clarity once she had a little time to think. Right now however, the only thought that her mind would process was that the situation was bad and she needed to do something. She could save her family, all of them but she couldn’t mess up. She couldn’t be stupid. She couldn’t let the fear beat her. If she let it beat her she would stay here staring through the window like a dumb animal and eventually she would be seen and then everything would be over. She had never been a very imaginative child and would have never been able to come up with some grand rescue plan like you would see in a movie but she was smart and able to think on her feet so it was probably good that she decided to act purely on instinct because her instincts had always proven to be very successful for her. Her instincts told her that she needed to move and so that’s what she did. She moved around the house carefully checking around corners and being sure to stay absolutely silent. She paused at the door to the family garage that her father had converted into a workshop, checked through the window and once she saw that the coast was clear silently pushed her way inside. The workshop was attached to the house but more importantly her father kept many things here in storage. She was going to need a weapon and this was her best shot at finding one. The girl glanced around the room, her eyes quickly moving over tools, supplies, everything and then quickly dismissing them all. Finally they came to rest on an old army supply crate, her father’s things from his time in the military. She crept over and opened the box. In the back of her mind she was aware of more screams, shouting and crying. They had found her other siblings she was sure but at this moment she couldn’t worry about that. She dug into the crate not knowing what she would find. Her father kept his guns locked up. There was no way to get to them so she would have to find something to improvise with. If she was lucky she would be able to distract the men long enough for her family to overpower them and turn the tables but luck was fickle and she wanted to be ready for anything. It didn’t take long until her hand found the leather sheath of her father’s old combat knife probably long since forgotten. The girl grabbed the blade and quickly drew it from its leather incasing. The blade with the jagged serrated teeth gleamed bright in the fading sunlight and she saw that it was still sharp, very sharp. It would do. It would have to do because she was running out of time. Moving as quickly as she could the girl rushed over to the door and the two steps that led into the house. Slowly she pushed open the door and stepped into the kitchen. The house itself was long but straight and even from her position at the door she could clearly see what was happening at the other end where her family was being held. Her father was on the floor now with the second man she had seen was standing over him. The other sounds were there too, the sobs and noises of her mother and other siblings, louder now but barely recognized. There was a startled ‘Oh’ expression on her father’s face. He had seen her when she came in. He was about to call out to her but the girl moved into action knowing instantly what she needed to do. She reached and grabbed one of her mother’s large skillets that was laying out, her mother had probably been getting ready to cook dinner, and prepared to throw it. It would make noise, it would cause a distraction and…the gunshot sounded like a thunder clap, the skillet, half thrown, fell to the floor. For a moment she thought the bullet had been meant for her but her mind told her what she didn’t want to believe. Her father was gone. There was blood…oh so much blood. How could one bullet probably no bigger than her pinky finger make so much blood appear from nowhere? The girl felt weak, her legs buckled and she was stumbling back towards the door. Then she was falling backwards because she had forgotten about the steps and at the end of the fall a cracking sound and pitch blackness. She blacked out then. She didn’t know for how long but it couldn’t have been more than a few seconds because she was dimly aware of the man that had shot her father shouting at his companion to go get her. The girl blinked and she saw stars, she blinked again and the first man was there with his gun. It felt like something was leaking from the back of her head and it sounded like someone was blowing a whistle right next to her ear. ’Why are they doing that? Who is stupid enough to do that to a person who just fell like I did?’ She thought to herself and then as her mind began to swim back to the surface… ’The knife…I dropped the knife. Where is the knife?’ She turned her head to the side and mercifully saw it laying there on the floor just within reach. The girl wasted no time. She grabbed the blade and was on her feet before the man even thought to come down the steps. She held it out in front of her defensively, weakly and tried her best to glare at the man. However, due to shock, surprise and the fall the only thing she could muster was a wounded expression of bewilderment. For some reason the man thought this was funny. He laughed at her, said something that she couldn’t hear, oh how she wished that whistle in her ear would stop, and began to approach her. The girl backed away until she bumped against some unmovable object and tried to tell him to stop. She didn’t hear it over the whistle but she must have said something because the man laughed again and turned back down the hall to shout something like “I’ve got her.” The girl saw her moment and survival instinct combined with pure adrenaline pushed her forward. She lunged at the man with all the force and weight her scrawny little body could muster and drove the blade in up to the hilt in the area that she associated with the heart. She must have been correct because the man groaned, her hearing was starting to come back now, slumped and began to sink to the floor. The gun he held fell from his grasp and was forgotten as the girl felt something warm and sticky spill out over her hands and onto her shirt. She collapsed on top of him, his body twitching, the blade between them and from somewhere at the other end of the house she heard the other man calling. “Lloyd? Lloyd?!?” She had to get up, she had to run, the other man was coming and if he caught her it would all be over but she couldn’t get the knife. It wouldn’t take the man two minutes to get to her and she knew she had to act fast if she was going to get away but she oh how she wanted that knife. It was all she would have left of her father now. Pulling with all her strength and probably a little extra given to her by the adrenaline she twisted, most likely finishing what the initial strike had begun, and pulled the blade free with a sickly slurping sound that made her stomach churn. She had to fight back the urge to wretch telling herself that she couldn’t get sick now and won…barely. The she was running out the workshop door and back the way she had come. She had to get to the forest behind their house. She could hide there and would be safe so with all her energy she ran. The man who had shot her father was shouting behind her and something scalding hot flew past her right ear. She guessed the man turned around then because nothing else flew at her. There was the rest of her family to deal with after all. Whatever the case it didn’t matter because the girl just ran. She didn’t know how far she ran or even where she was running too because her eyes had been blinded by tears. She just ran until she could run no more and when she finally did collapse in a dry river bed she was too tired to even drag herself under cover. She laid there gasping, sweating and miserable and fell into a dark, haunted sleep. With a clap o thunder that reminded all too much of the gunshot that killed her father the girl known as Amber Vaughn jolted awake. She lunged forward and stabbed at the darkness but nothing was there…nothing was ever there when she came out of her old nightmares. That’s all it was an old nightmare from a past that was long dead. She didn’t know what had caused her to dream about that dark time but she had and now as the images that had been burned into her mind began to fade again she sat back down on her cot. She drew her legs up to her chest and sat there quiet, cold and alone while outside a thunderstorm passed over the shack where she trained. Her left hand still clung to the hilt of the knife she had fought so hard to save. Another one lay hidden under pillow easily in reach but it was to this one that her hand always flew. It was her knife and it would taste blood again just like it had many times before but maybe this time not for a while. That was fine with her. She could bide her time, she could wait. The girl slowed her breathing, calmed her mind and slowly lay back down on her cot pulling the blankets up over her head to fight back the cold night air. She closed her eyes and said her silent prayer of death. The names she recited were burned into her memory as much as the scene of that first day, the day her life changed. There were more names now than when she started but then again the list had changed since that first day. When she finished she brought the knife close to her body for the comfort it gave her but even with it there it was a long time before she was able to drift back to sleep. |
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12:13 AM Jul 11