She turned her head and pulled back the blind to check outside.
A black hand burst through the glass, grabbing her by the mouth and all she could see with her wide eyes were the long, yellow teeth behind it.
She jumped, opening her eyes and slowly letting her head rest back against the door. Sighing, she turned her head and pulled back the blind to check outside. A leaf blew across Xander’s front yard into the Johnson’s, but other than that there was no movement.
She laughed at herself, then took a step toward the stairs.
She stopped after one step and listened, her ears perking. The house was as silent as a tomb, without so much as a heater hum or a vent rustling. For a moment she thought she heard something, but at the same instant she thought that the more rational side of her brain was arguing the difference.
She took another step onto the stairs, then another. Her pace got faster and faster until one of them finally squeaked under the pressure of her weight and she bolted into an all out run. She ran into his bedroom, taking only a moment to regard the shattered computer screen and general shambles of the room, then collapsed onto the bed. She didn’t cry, she didn’t even sob. She just wrapped his warm covers around her body, then slowly drifted off to sleep.
Again, Mike Harris looked up at the building before him.
This time, however, it was distressingly less inviting. It was charred on the outside, a victim of many careless bonfires, and the heat had left the plastic siding melted and black. The stench of marijuana was thick in the air and made him want to vomit onto the step as he assumed many other people had done before. This area of town wasn’t known for being good... Still, it was by no means the ‘bad part’ of town either. That was what made its presence here even more gut wrenching to him. All around him were quiet suburbs painted in tranquil greens and off-whites. Places where you’d expect to see little girls and boys running around their lawns, playing baseball and climbing trees and not worrying about anything. But they couldn’t. That slowly dawned upon Mike as he glared at the black door that must have once been red, judging by the chipped paint between graffiti, Tee gang symbols and profanities involving the reader’s female ancestry. The kids in those houses couldn’t do what they were supposed to be allowed to. They couldn’t play hide-and-seek so late that their parents would have to come find them, or splash in the mud by the road, or even stop to admire the ravishing brunette that just moved in across the way, as he had at that age. They had to stay inside, away from the gaping maw of hatred that was this house, and more specifically the morons that resided there. Morons that didn’t think twice about what they did to Julie Peterson. They did it like it was a part of everyday life, a step in the routine, and would probably do it again, maybe to any one of the little girls and boys that they found playing outside ‘their’ neighborhood.
It’s not right, he thought bitterly, clenching his teeth. Children shouldn’t have to be afraid in their homes, around their friends... at school. He took a step toward the ramshackle house, then another, until finally he was on the concrete stairs and only inches from the door. I won’t have it.
“And just what do you think you’re doing?” came a voice from behind him.
Mike closed his eyes and sighed. He didn’t even have to turn and look. The sheer anger and frivolousness of the statement, the way he said it as casually as though he were asking someone to check the mail for him. The almost child-like joy he took in the danger of the situation. It could only be one person. “Get out of here, Xander,”Mike said with a cold voice, then turned around to face his friend.
“Why would I go and do a thing like that?” Xander asked. He leaned carefully against a rotting fencepost, one knee half-bent, and looked up at Mike. His face was cut through the middle, it seemed, with his eyes deadly serious and ready to kill, but a sly grin spreading its way across his face like butter onto hot bread.
“This isn’t your fight,” Mike argued. “How’d you get here, anyway? I’ve got the lead.”
“True,” he nodded. “But I have something better.”
“Oh yeah, what’s that?”
“A friend who has a lead and doesn’t know enough to know when he’s being tailed,” he quipped, stepping up next to Mike and pushing his index finger into the taller man’s chest. “You’re not going in there to get yourself killed, you got that? I don’t care if you feel the need to crack open rapist skulls after what happened to Cathy. I respect and understand it, but I really don’t care. You wanna get killed? Fine. Go grab my dad’s handgun. Feel free to blow your own head off,” Xander said, meeting his friend’s angry gaze with equal amounts of fury. “But don’t expect me to let you go in there and let the enemy do it for you.”
“There’s only one problem with that statement, Xander,” Mike spat, his voice like venom.
“What’s that?” Xander asked, mimicking the way his friend had said it a moment ago.
Mike pushed his own index finger into Xander’s chest, giving him a little shove. “You are the enemy.”
Xander took a deep breath, letting the words cut as deep as they could. It didn’t matter. There was nothing Mike could say that he hadn’t already told the person in the mirror. “I’m going in. If anything happens, I need you to bail me out,”
