Dropping Like Flies ~ Chapter 1

SYNOPSIS:

A month shy of graduation, Kiralyn Jacobs should have the world at her feet, but when she’s chosen as the new keeper of The List and people around her start dropping like flies, she discovers the spinning orb on which we all tread is anything but a step stool. It’s more like a hell…from which there’s no escape…no escape but death. Others before her, much stronger, braver and smarter than her, gave in to self-destruction. As broken as she is, how does she stand a chance and how can she save the one guy she loves from reaching the top and being lost to her forever.

CHAPTER 1:

Even with the two days’ rest, my head still didn’t feel right. Sometimes when a person awakens from a coma, even a thirty-seven-hour one, things can be all out of wack. They told my mother it didn’t look promising, but I do love to surprise, and here I was, standing, getting ready for school besides. I wouldn’t claim to be wrecked exactly, no need to whip out the veggie dip or sponge bath supplies, but at times, I found myself spacey and/or frazzle-brained.

A Grade-3 concussion afflicted me, along with a hideous, stitched-up abrasion on my forehead and its good ole neighbor, the most resilient zit ever to plague a face, having survived three weeks of chemical warfare and looking no closer to obliteration. Die already!

I promptly laid waste to a huge chunk of frontal locks, killing two ugly albatrosses with one proverbial stone. I puffed and fingered my new honey-colored fringe, examining the evenness in my mirror. Not perfect but better than giving a peepshow to the hell I was in. The zit—oh joy—was as an added cherry, like some nasty maraschino blob that wishes it were real fruit. Most people love the cherry, it’s the extra oomph, but when I speak of those synthetic sundae toppers, it means I’ve just been jerked down another level in the Inferno and some Deity is probably laughing about it.

The wound resembled an oozing bug carcass, held in place by butterfly tape. Funny, since butterflies signified renewed life, while squashed bugs…just didn’t. That yin and yang now hid behind a shroud I fixed with a few more scissor snips. Though that served to shut up the window to my turmoil, no makeover in the world could alter my new identify: the senior chick with the psycho best friend who’d bludgeoned her in a jealous rage with a rusty pipe from her garage. She’d walked in when her boyfriend was raping me, assumed the worst. Now I have a bug on my head and too many holes in my soul to count. Let them think I’m a “skank” too, I don’t care. Well, I mean, I do. But everyone knowing the truth would be so much worse. I’ll take chastisement over pity any day. Maybe they’ll stay away from a traitor. Maybe. Hopefully.

Dreading the radio, with DJs spilling tidbits about the…uh, event, as though they knew the real scoop and cared, I embraced the sounds of morning instead while finishing my habitual rituals.

My Oriental ceiling fan buzzed, its chain chinking against the exotic bird globe, while the box fan in my window harmonized with an alto’s hum. Yeah. I like fans, okay? What an especially warm spring anyway. Not like there’s central air in this old farmhouse.

Random birds tried to outperform a soloist songbird and its backup whippoorwill. As if. And a lawnmower roared and munched a neighbor’s grass, hopefully Ms. McKenzie’s because her black cat, Jinx, kept getting lost in the treacherous jungle of weeds. The sweetness of freshly hacked greenery and gutted wildflowers tickled my nose.

Curious, I peered out. Hunch confirmed, I cheered and pumped my fist. Johnny had returned to take care of his ever-ailing aunt. For my joy, it’ll be weeks this time. Shirtless, California bronzed and beautifully lustrous with sweat, he braved that overgrown thicket with the ancient, sputtering chopper. He makes me so weak, with his raven hair and eyes two shades above mist, but refers to me as jailbait. Twenty is not much older than seventeen really, and I’ll be eighteen in two months, but I’ve quit balking.

Now the bearer of black, thorny roses instead of blissful dreams, for once, I didn’t mind that his affection didn’t bounce back.

A bizarre sound shattered the melodious synchronicity I was enjoying: the click and static of an intercom coming on and a woman paging Dr. Grant Taylor. I surveyed my sun-drenched neighborhood. No utility trucks grumbled in orange-cone surrounds. No cars rushed this way. Rarely did. Johnny still pushed the grumpy mower. Grant Taylor…Sounds familiar. Oh. That’s the coach…Facing the Giants. Totally a cheat. Way more religion than football. I am messed up. And I have a painful dead bug on my head to prove it.

The intercom sounded again, the woman’s summoning more insistent this time. “Dr. Grant Taylor…Dr. Grant Taylor? You are needed in the E.R. Stat.”

I turned every which way, trying to determine the source. It unnerved me. The unnatural intrusion. The kind of noise you’d hear in a hospital. So alien on a country road. In an otherwise empty house. Though I knew it was off, I checked my radio anyway, shifting it on and off again. It could’ve been a walkie-talkie or whatever. But whose? Where? I pinched myself and winced. Then I whirled around and around until dizziness nearly toppled me. Definitely awake. I palmed my head and groaned. Um, I don’t recommend spinning if you’re fresh out of a coma. Not brilliant.

A footboard creaked outside my door, suspending my fascination with the page. Goose bumps broke out all over me. I turned and nearly shrieked when someone, or something, passed by the sliver of openness. My stomach lurched and pulse sped, filling my ears with rapid percussion. The dark—yes, dark—presence outside the door pressed as the biggest concern right now. The undeniable stench of evil filled my nostrils and I nearly vomited. Not that I’ve ever smelled evil before, but when you do, you just know. Every inch of you knows it.

I seized the Louisville Slugger from my closet and stood poised by the door, ready to strike. I waited. Nothing happened. My breaths morphed into wheezy huffs. Someone malevolent was here. I had no idea who. My body shook, teeth chattered. Brody? I should’ve told the doctors, the cops, my mom. I shouldn’t be allowing a rapist to roam free, but I was too ashamed and horrified when I woke up in a very-real nightmare. I feel so ugly, used and broken. Sharing all that with probing professionals? With anyone? I don’t think so.

A piece of blue paper drifted before my eyes so featherlike. I didn’t see where it had come from because my focus had been glued on the door, but it snaked down to my floral area rug.

“Kiralyn Jacobs,” a masculine—if you could call it that—voice behind me said. I screamed and spun, finding no one there. “Your predecessor is gone. You’ve been chosen as the new keeper of the list,” it added with the slobbering snarl of a Doberman, if one could talk.

Quaking and muttering words I normally don’t say, I fled down the stairs with the bat, hacking the air with machete swings to strike down anything that got in my way.

“Stop!” the voice boomed.

When I reached the bottom, pain sliced down my calf. A clawing grip tripped me and I collided with the wood floor. Cries erupted from me, shrill and broken, as I scampered up and fidgeted with the doorknob that, of course, chose this moment to be stubborn. Victorious and free, I departed the house in a blaze without eating breakfast, without snatching my backpack, without dropping the bat. I just ran, surely breaking world records with my streak. The fans still whirred back in my room. I may or may not have locked the door. I couldn’t recall if I’d actually turned the brass diamond but had no desire to go back and check.

Johnny waved to me and shouted a jovial hello when I raced past him toward the stop I hadn’t used since tenth grade. His face had scrunched up, as he probably wondered why I was running with a bat and maybe why I hadn’t waved back. I reached the correct knoll and bounced anxiously on my heels. Come on. Come on. Doctor’s orders, I couldn’t drive for at least two weeks, but being this rattled, taking my car wouldn’t have been a good idea anyhow.

The voice spoke again, “There is no declining, no escaping, no rescinding. Kiralyn Jacobs. You are the new keeper of the list.”

I covered my ears and squeezed my eyes shut. The message repeated in my head. I was crazy. Brain damaged for sure. An agonizing five minutes or so later, the bus finally rumbled down the road. Thank God!

The golden chariot arrived just in time to whisk me away from madness. When I swept my gaze upwards to take in my imminent rescue, something on the ground caught my eye. I jolted. At my feet lay what looked like the piece of paper I’d abandoned in my bedroom. Pale blue parchment. Singed, wavy edges. Folded. I picked it up and scanned it. It held ten names, written in the rickety scratchings of an arthritic hand with a plume ink that so looked like blood. Maybe it was. And was it a good thing or a bad thing that I knew two of these people?

Fiona Liquori, some cheerleader at my school, ranked in at number two, and Johnathan Blackwell, my beloved crush, waited to rise from the ninth spot. I had no clue what it meant. I didn’t want to know. I crumpled the thing into a tight ball and chucked it into the spindly fingers of a fire bush.

The bus squealed as it came to a halt. The door folded open, promising me safety inside. Two more riders bolted for the bus, their sneaker-covered feet slapping the pavement, and boarded behind me. My legs wobbled like Jell-O as I made my way to the back. I wilted into a vacant seat and filled my eyes with hot Johnny down the road, still tackling green tangles. I also saw the list, the same names, like phantasm letters, nearly etched and glowing on the pane. They wouldn’t disappear, no matter how I moved my head or how much I tried to wipe them off with my spit-laced thumb. The list wouldn’t die nor would the dread that invaded every cell in my body.

A sting continued to bite into my calf. To prove to myself it was simply phantom pain, I yanked up the left side of my jeans. I gasped, finding perforations in the faded denim and three glistening, vertical scratches a half-inch apart. The two-inch marks scored over the yellowish-purple bruises of yesterday. I had no clue what was happening or what anything meant, but I quaked with the certainty I’d just descended into my worst level of hell to date. Cherries…They totally suck.