Pitch

CHAPTER FOUR

I ran. I left my best friend behind and I ran for my life. The screams chased me. They seemed to come from every house I passed. Horrible, gut wrenching screams for help, for mercy, for death. I stayed off the street and ran through stranger’s back yards. I ducked under clothes lines and crawled over fences, skinning my knees and ripping my hands apart with splinters. I tucked the pain and the fear and the terror away in some distant, dusty corner of my mind and allowed only one thought to circle round and round inside my head. One goal: get home, get Dad, and get Travis.

Halfway across a neatly manicured yard I heard the back door slam and I dove into a cluster of bushes just in time. Helpless to do anything but cower in silence, I watched as a woman dressed in red jumped off the side of the porch and went sprinting across the lawn.

Something was chasing her. Something fast. Something dark. It grabbed her arm and swung her around like she was a rag doll, slamming her into the side of her own pool. She crumpled to the ground, motionless, ten feet from where I hid behind a rose bush.

Overhead the moon shifted free of the clouds that had been binding it, allowing a trickle of silver light to bathe the fallen woman and I saw, I saw even when I squeezed my eyes shut and covered my mouth to keep myself from crying out, that she was not dressed in red clothes. She was dressed in blood.

The thing that had chased the woman stopped and sniffed the air. It was human yet not human. A girl yet not a girl. She could have gone to my school. She could have sat next to me in math class. Her hair, brown and sleek and swept over one shoulder, was normal. Her clothes, blue jeans and a gray sweatshirt, could have been worn by any teenager the world over. But her piercing blue eyes… and the blood that dribbled down her chin… That was about as far from normal as you could get.

Her head swung towards me. Those unnatural eyes searched the bushes, traveling leisurely back and forth across my hiding spot. I held my breath. Just go inside, I begged silently. Just go inside and leave me alone.

“I smell you little human,” she said in a sing song voice. “You smell like sugar and spice and something quite nice.”

My right foot was cramping up. I flexed my toes, fighting off the pins and needles. The tiny movement nearly made me lose my balance. I wavered to the right and managed to catch myself. My fingers touched something hard. Something metal. Slowly, silently, I pulled it from the ground and clutched it to my chest. A horse shoe. The big, heavy kind people threw in sand pits. No, not a horse shoe. A weapon.

“I want to play a game.” The girl pouted. She nudged the bloody woman. Sighed. “And now I’ve broken my toy. Come out, come out, wherever you are. I promise to be much more careful with you.” She started to walk in a big, wandering circle. When she turned away from me I attacked.

Holding the horse shoe tightly in my right hand I launched myself at her legs, just below the knees. She went down instantly and I swung the horse shoe without pause, striking her head again and again and again until blood splattered up and coated my face and chest. She tried to fight back but surprise and a healthy fear of not dying had given me the advantage.

I straddled her waist, pinning her down beneath me. With a strength that defied logic she managed to flip herself over and her nails, filed to points, raked out and whipped across my cheek. The cuts burned like someone had poured acid in them and I screamed, but didn’t stop. Couldn’t stop. Instinct had taken over, and I was more animal than human as I fought for my life.

Her nose shattered, then her jaw. Her eyes bulged and I jammed my thumb to the hilt in the left one, just like Mrs. Hamilton had taught us to do in self defense.

The girl howled like a wild animal and bucked her hips, trying to throw me off, but I clung to her with the knowledge that if I didn’t knock her out – or worse – I wouldn’t be leaving this backyard alive.

“I will kill you for this,” she snarled, glaring daggers at me with her one good eye. Her teeth snapped an inch from my face and caught my hair. She ripped a chunk of it out by the roots and spat it in the grass beside her.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” I kept repeating the same words over and over, not realizing until they come out all choked up that I was crying. I brought the horse shoe down again. And again. And again. So many times I lost count. When the girl went limp and her head fell back, mouth open, eye closed, I leaped to my feet, ready to run. But something stopped me. Something pulled at me.

I stared down at the girl I had beaten with a kind of horrified fascination. With her mouth open I could see her fangs. Like the man’s they were silver and looked like daggers, slightly curved and deadly sharp. I wondered if they were natural, if they were real, or if the girl was just part of some crazy cult that had decided to attack the entire town.

The horse shoe dropped to the lawn with a soft thump. Slowly I knelt down beside the girl’s head and reached out with one trembling hand. If I could just touch the fangs… If I could just feel them… They really were quite beautiful. The way they glistened in the moonlight… It was unlike anything I had ever seen before.

My fingertips brushed against one fang and it happened in an instant. One second the girl was motionless and the next she had her teeth clamped down on my hand and was shaking her head back and forth like a dog worrying a bone.

I screamed and fell back. She released my hand and I clutched it to my chest, expecting to see it ravaged beyond repair, but the only visible damage were two small pinpricks of blood where her fangs had entered the skin. Yet it burned. Oh, God, my entire arm was burning and I was screaming and the girl was laughing.

She sprang to her feet, nimble as a cat, and sauntered over to where I was rolling in the dirt, frantically trying to put out the invisible fire that was consuming my body inch by inch.

“Peek a boo, I got you,” she giggled before her lips curled into a deadly snarl and she crouched over me, a predator covering it’s prey. I stared into her eyes, glittering with malice. I looked at her face, a face that had healed itself in a matter of seconds.

And I knew I was going to die.