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Keith couldn't help himself.

He finished eating moments after the six of them exited the building. Anticipation speeding him along, all he could do was watch as the six of them hustled around in the lot. Two of the three teens had approached the large man and, from what Keith could tell, had given him a piece of their minds.

What a glorious day for Keith! Nothing Of real interest like this had ever happened right in front of him! Sure, he had heard his father tell stories from all around the world. But his own adventures would start today, if he could help it.

Standing from his table and wiping his mouth. Keith tapped a boot's toe against the marble. He felt himself sway against his own weight as the liquor finally did it's magic. Ironically he regretted drinking it now. He didn't need to get his mind off the pain now. Now he had other ways of getting away. Now he could chase after other's evil doings and forget about his own.

To live in hypocrisy, yes, but who said hypocrisy was filled with sorrow?

Keith inverted heels and tapped before taking a dorky, half-assed moon-walk towards the trash-can where he placed his tray. Slamming the tray rather harshly against the trash-can, he succeeded in getting the preppy clerk's attention. The same one he had bullied earlier.

Spinning with a wink, he smiled at her and stepped behind the counter to give her a peck on the cheek. Exiting through the employee-area door.

He heeled it across the parking lot and waved at the girl as she half-scowled at him before giggling and closing the door. His charm had always gotten him away with stuff. Though he never knew why.

Coming to the corner of the building Keith peered around and saw the older man and David walking in his direction. They seemed engaged in conversation. Keith couldn't hear anything but listened closely anyway.
The two of them finished talking and walked back to the group which had moved to the curb.

Keith took this opportunity to imitate his favorite ninja movies. Darting behind a car as soon as Challings an David turned around. Following a route hidden by automobiles, Keith made his way closer to the curb.

At last he was close enough to hear them....


RrIiNnGg! RrIiNnGg!

"Oh shit!"

His half-breathed scream exclaimed. He fumbled for his phone and answered it to his sister's usually-disgruntled voice.

'You're fucked.'

"Don't I know it!"

He said, far too scared shitless to look over his shoulder to see if they had heard.

'Uncle Tom says that the season is passing, you're out of work.'

"Fuck!"

'Back to mom and da-'

"Hell No!"

Keith interrupted with all he had, his voice was loud but he didn't care. His life back home wouldn't continue the way it was, for everything he was. He'd rather have that guy's henchmen make him into fish-food before he would go back to them.

'Then find another job!'

"Fine!"

He slapped the cellphone shut, eager to beat her to the punch.
Not a second passed before he realized what he had done.

"What was I thinking?"

He thought, sitting against the blue mini-van that shielded his figure from the others.

His hand came to his face as a tear dripped to the pavement.

"What's wrong with me today?

His head jerked back and bumped the van as that awful image shot into his brain. The image he had seen every night since he could remember. Insomnia haunted him from that image. But no matter what he tried, he couldn't escape the fear that it instilled in him. Something told him, etched away at his soul, that that mark was bad.

He came back to earth and looked around. Shaking his feelings of distress off and rubbing his eyes.

"I guess they heard me, but to hell if I'm moving if they don't call me out. "

Keith dropped down to his stomach and rolled under the van. He stayed far enough that they'd have to kneel to see him.

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Josie watched the scene in the carpark intently as it played out between her classmates, the elderly gentleman and his associates. When the cashier had finally managed to count the loose change she’d used to pay for her meal, Mark and his companions had already left the building, leaving her without a chance to take him up on his offer to join them. As she’d made her way to an empty window-side table, she’d wondered if she actually would have done it. Probably. He’d made her angry, furious, and her inhibitions tended to fly out the window when she was in that state. He’d known exactly what to say to wound her.

You look like shit.

The words were still ringing through her head on an endless loop. She tried to tell herself that his opinion wasn’t worth the air he used to express it, but she was a girl with little to no self-esteem and other people’s thoughts mattered to her. He’d been wrong about one thing though. She would never bitch slap him. Stab him in the hand with a plastic McDonald’s fork, maybe, but never slap him. It was too cliché, too unoriginal. And it wouldn’t hurt enough.

She sat sideways on her chair, her bare feet propped up on the low windowsill and her chest pressed against her bent legs, popping chips into her mouth like popcorn. Reaching for another greasy chip, Josie’s hand paused. Outside in the carpark, the new girl was verbally attacking the well dressed gentleman and, what appeared to be, his bodyguard. However, it wasn’t the words that had her mesmerised, it was the other girl’s eyes. She tried to hide it behind her anger and determination, but Josie could see it flash across her visage every now and then.

Fear.

A slight frown of confusion creased Josie’s brow and she examined the older man. He didn’t look overly threatening, though she knew looks could be deceiving, her own father was a prime example. But she had the feeling that there was more to the girl’s attack than met the eye. Finished with her assault, the girl retreated to the curb and Josie watched her in silent fascination. Neither girl seemed to hear the man’s retort.

One thought occupied Josie’s mind.

Could this be the person to understand my pain?

Drawing one long finger across her lips in contemplation, she stared at the young woman on the curb for a few moments before she visibly snapped out of her thoughts and quickly scoffed down the remains of her meal. She shoved the spare paper serviettes into one of her many pockets and made her way out the door.

Josie lingered at the entrance to the fast-food restaurant, trying to decide how she should go about things. She’d seen fear in that girl’s eyes and, curious by nature, she wanted to know why but she wasn’t blunt enough to just go up and ask, so she decided on a subtler approach. Advancing on the smoking girl like a predator stalking its prey, Josie was oblivious to everything else going on around her. In the back of her mind she knew Mark, his friend, the man and his associates were still talking nearby and she heard the shrill ring of a mobile phone from somewhere among the parked cars, but she was focused on one thing only.

Taking a deep breath she took a seat on the curb not too far away from, but not too close, to the new girl and softly asked the question that she had always hated being asked herself.

‘Are you okay?’

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Out of the corner of his eye, Mark noticed the old friend he had so rudely shrugged off just moments before becoming friendly with exactly the person he had intended for her to meet. A small burden had been lifted from his conscience, in some kind of backwards, roundabout way, he felt he had done a good deed. Those two Cub Scout meetings had really paid off. He’d give them a moment or two before he barged in on whatever conversation they could be having. He watched as she sat down by Lil with a short, basic introduction.

Before Lil could reply, she was interrupted. An inhuman howl of anguish filled the air, followed by a chorus of screams, laughter, and shouts. They came from the public that was only one McDonald’s away. Mark’s heart skipped a beat; he’d heard a scream like that before. For the first time in what seemed like a decade, he panicked, and didn’t know what to do. That scream would have been all too familiar to anyone born in the town of Westriver. Like a hereditary trait shared by all of its inhabitants, each member of the community had the capability to let loose that exact, hellish, scream, and when they did, it meant pandemonium was realized.

As he stood frozen, his mind flashed to the last time he had heard the scream. Second grade, he was, perhaps, the most innocent of his classmates. The reality of his family life clashed with the reality at school, and he could never figure it out. In the morning his caring mother would make him breakfast and take him to school, and the very same afternoon a little boy would set a deep bruise in a little girl’s face, and demand to know “ What the fuck are you looking at?” at Mark. The little girl would say she tripped and fell, afraid for her security, and that night, he would be at family dinner discussing how tricky the word “ aardvark” was to spell. The capital punishment he received from his teacher would be offset by a trip to the zoo during the weekend, and a soft pat on the head would offset the boys explaining to each other, in gratuitous detail, what the word “Fuck” meant. Those were the golden years. Shortly after Christmas that year, his parents became much busier, and he began getting much more expensive playthings. It got to a point in which he wouldn’t see either of his parents, in their place a mildly irresponsible babysitter. And the newly ushered financial success brought on a move to a much cleaner place, Westriver.

A new kid at the end of the school year, he kept to himself, and his small-town neighbors let him. He watched from the outside, and found a much calmer place than he left. However, he also noted, the kids were the same kind of people he left behind. They were simply much better behaved.

May 2, just a few days from the end of the school year, was a day he would never forget. Recess had begun, and shortly after the whistle, a small crowd formed around a little marker drawing on the slide of the playground. There were murmurs among the crowd as to why someone would draw what everyone saw when they closed their eyes. A little girl spoke up, and asserted that it was drawn incorrectly, producing a crayola marker, a drawing the ‘correct’ symbol next to it. Some in the crowd agreed, while some in the crowd asserted that the original was correct. Mark was confused, it was the first time he had seen either of them, but the didn’t say anything.

What followed within the next few seconds was a waking nightmare. What had seemed to be a common argument was interrupted by a crunch, and then a scream. The classmate who had drawn the second symbol was on the ground, spitting out her teeth and spitting out blood, half of her face a mess of exposed tissue and collapsed bone. The culprit stood still, smirking, with the jagged rock in his hand, almost too big for him to lift. For a few seconds everything was silent, save for the horrible, gratuitous, gurgling scream coming from the victim, and then, chaos. It was as if the children knew that their little fists and legs would be ineffective, as each sprawled for weaponry. Stunned, Mark watched the orgy of violence before him, too frightened to interfere, afraid that his classmate would turn on him in an instant, but astounded as to why he was the only one not fighting, laughing, or bleeding on the ground.

The scene ended shortly thereafter, and the next day, the rain washed the symbols away. It was the first, but not the last time Mark had heard the scream. He twitched his arm to get feeling back into it, and forced himself to begin to walk. He wanted to see exactly what the scale of the problem at hand was.

As he walked he glanced back at the group of people, and ducked around the corner. There, flying on a pole, was a flag embroidered with the a familiar symbol, and on a flag pole opposite, a symbol that was just as familiar. The flags flew tall outside of town hall, fluttering in the breeze in the place of the regular symbol of patriotism. Just moments before, he had descended the steps between them, coming out of the library contained in the building. His mouth was dry; that was it, that was the end of Westriver.

__________________
There will be a time for words.

A Study into Evil and Corruption

Anticipation shook Keith as he tried to wriggle far enough under the minivan to see what was going on at the curb. After a couple of seconds of thinking about how stupid he probably seemed to the group, he exited the pavement and crouched beside the minivan.

Before he could think of anything to explain his demeanor, Mark up-and bolted shortly after the strangest sounds had echoed the block. Instinctively Keith ignored the others and shot to his feet and followed after to find a group of people gathered together near the library.

before a moment passed, Keith realized that the flags before the building had been replaced with two new flags. One was a whisping terror in the wind, beholding the symbol of nightmares and unrest, while the other simply enraged Keith.

He didn't understand the feeling at first, but the more he stared at the opposing flag, the more he was drawn to rip it down and destroy it. Not that the familiar symbol was his loyalty, but that he simply 'didn't like' the latter of the two.



Completely dumb-struck, Keith turned to see that mark was out of sight. The cunny bastard knew when to disappear, obviously.

Keith stumbled back a few steps and fell back on his behind, staring up hard at the two flags. Out of the corner of his eye, Keith noticed a person in the group of people turn to his direction, an angry look on their face. This was Keith's incintive to jump up and run like his breath's were numbered.

Arriving back at the MacDonald's, Keith burst through the door and slammed it behind him, twisting the lock and jumping over the counter. Automatically collecting all the eyes in the building.

__________________

She’d never seen anything like it, a rain of utter silence washed across what could have been the entire town, Lilith could have turned and breathed and she’d have been the only one who even bothered to bat an eyelid, let alone inhale. In the wake of a great scream people had flocked to its location, they rose out of their cars, walked out of restaurants with food still in their mouths, they hung their heads out of apartment windows and stared at a pair of flag poles like there were decapitated heads spiked atop of them. And for the life of her, whatever it was that everyone else saw no matter how many times she blinked or how long she stared – she simply couldn’t see it.

Of course, the eye saw more than the brain could conceive, memories faded, eyes wore out and minds lost their spark but pictures lasted forever, true, unaltered and honest. She lifted her camera out of her bag and snapped a single shot of the billowing flags and just like that – like a gunshot through the crowd, chaos erupted.

In the next few seconds her entire day seemed to wash away, her meeting with Mark by the photocopier, her greasy lunch and even greasier new ‘friend,’ the Doppelganger of her father and even the girl by the side walk, it was all so inconsequential. She wasn’t sure of what happened, of who struck her and with what, all she was sure of was that she was on the pavement and that she tasted blood.

Stop it.

A small internal monologue erupted between her ears and Lilith was suddenly aware that her eyes were tightly closed.

Stop it!

She felt her body rouse, her fingers twitched but still her eyes remained closed.

I said stop it!

And with that abrupt scream she awoke as if from a nightmare, a high pitched ringing in her ears and her cheek pressed to the cold cement. Her eyes took a moment to focus and once they did she rose very slowly, off her stomach and to her knees where she sat and simply stared.

It wasn’t like anything she’d seen in the movies, it wasn’t absolute destruction nor was it pandemonium, it was simply fear, out of control terror that had broken some, these people laid shivering in the street, to others it had sent them into a frenzy, these were the ones with glass in their fists and blood on their boots. Then, there were those in between who seem caught between each extreme and finally – there was her.

Lilith, who sat in the midst of it all with a streak of blood running from both her hair line and her lip, Lilith who’s blood red coat hung limp off her pale shoulders, Lilith, who’s silver eyes searched for only two people in the haze, who somewhat detached from the discord grasped the strap of her camera and began to stand and stumble with the face of the girl on her mind and one name on her lips.

“Mark!”

__________________

It was just shock, he realized, nothing more. His brains started to work again, started to belive the situation he was in. He took a moment to get his bearings. The symbols made people crazy, but they wouldn't brutalize anyone who didn't see one. That was just an assumption, they could have left him alone for any number of reasons, but at least, he remembered, they would be too busy attacking each other to attack him. But if there was no one else to attack? Maybe, he didn't know, that incident was in his distant memory, and on a much smaller scale.

He didn't know what was happening, and he didn't know what to do about it, that was the situation. There was only one real option, and that was to leave. That was settled, he would leave, and let this recent turn of events work itself out. That was the simple part, the hard part was safely leaving the square. He didn't want to know what these people were capable of, as long as they were crazy, he might be an unfortunate casualty.

He scanned the area with impunity, walking amidst the chaos flippantly. The first thing he saw was a rape of sorts, one woman with another, and more for humiliation than for pleasure. A few hard kicks to a downed man from a group. Police sirens. He didn't register them until the cars were upon him, forming a sort of perimeter around the largest mass. Mark bolted just before the canisters of tear gas went off. It was hard to tell whether the cops were acting based on their job, or based on the symbols.

The situation was unreal, and he realized that he was treating it as such. Would a normal person calmly glance around the scene of multiple acts of violence, and simply shrug them off as details? He knew it probably wasn't healthy, but he couldn't help it. It was like a horror movie, and he was sitting safe in the theater. He heard some gunshots, but didn't bother to turn around, more pain, that's all they were. They didn't use lethal rounds in Westriver.

He looked down, and found he was back to where he had started. Looking down, he saw Lil in a bloody mess, and a few yards away, half or a brick. He looked back over his shoulder for the offender. Just some construction, and a random tangle between two middle aged men. He looked back at Lil, and had the distinct feeling she wanted to see him. Well, obviously, but the joke wasn't fitting of the situation. " Hey Lil, this place is a mess, I'm leaving. Can you walk?"

__________________
There will be a time for words.

A Study into Evil and Corruption