Winds Of The Apocalypse (2 page)

Jon sighed and looked out the window. He knew that Greg was only teasing him so he had decided to just ignore his over easy stepfather on their way back.

The visit was as horrible as always. Actually, it went exactly as it was expected and Jon sat now, relaxing at the back seat of the car, playing mindlessly with the sit belt and listening to the sounds of the road.

Only half way there he had realized that Morgan was the one that was supposed to go and he unknowingly went in his place. He was already planning a revenge on his ‘lovely’ siblings for making him go like that and listen to his grandmother’s 'Life improving lectures' That she never passed
the opportunity to gladly give.

Every two weeks, when it was time to go visit their awful grandma, it was the same story. Two of them were allowed to stay home while the third had to go and take one for the team and ‘suffer’ a day at their grandma’s house. The visit, among other unimportant things, included the followings:

Sickening and horrible food, grandma’s medicine in order to prevent them from getting sick in the first place, lectures about everything from appearance to education and of course the infamous cheek pinching routine.

“Well, next time its Casey’s turn.
The Poor kid.” 

Jon smiled to himself, thinking about his baby sister. If there was a black sheep in the family, in his grandmother’s eyes it would defiantly be Casey.
 

“Can’t wait until grandma checks out her new drawings.”
He chuckled to himself, imagining the look on his grandmother’s face when she sees Casey’s gore drawings and lyric words; she always complained that Casey was too much like her brothers and didn't act like a proper lady. Jon was already planning to sneak Casey's notebook into her 'Grandma Visit Bag', which their mother had always prepared for them before these horrific trips.

The calming noise of the rain that had started earlier and the steady ride in the car against the black asphalt had soon made Jon doze off and close his eyes, his head falling sleepily to the side against the back seat.
 

It was a long day after all and he was tired, so in his clouded mind he thought that he would allow himself to sleep all the way back, not worrying h
imself with his planed revenge.

For what seemed like a good amount of time everything was calm and quiet, but then there was a sudden loud crack under the wheels and the car literally jumped into the air, tittering Jon to the side and making him scream in horror.

“Wow! Dad! What’s happening?!”

Jon cried from his seat, panic evident in his voice and features as he grabbed onto the seatbelt that bound him, terrified of the possibility of falling out of the deranged car.

“It's okay, honey. Calm down. We’re fine.” Greg told him, obviously scared but attempting to remain calm for his stepson and holding to the wheel as tightly as his hands allowed him. He didn't know what was wrong with the vehicle, he didn't see anything on the road that might have hit them but he didn't want his son to worry. He was the grown up in this situation so he had to take control and make sure that his son feels as safe as possible, even if he himself felt completely distraught.

Greg steadied the car and kept it on the main road, slowing down and attempting to stop completely so he would be able to get off and see what exactly happened to the tires. Just as he thought the worse was behind them and he had just ran over a rock or something of that sort the car jumped again, higher, swirling on two wheels, almost flipping over and off the road.

“DAD!”

Jon screamed, terrified. He almost flew out of his seat, his little hands clawing into the leather interior, the seatbelt painfully digging into his skin.

Jon heard the horrible sound of the tires as they blew under the pressure of the swirling vehicle, and then the car flipped over twice. His screams got lost in the noise of the wreckage. When the car did finally came to a stop it landed on the dirt path at the side of the road right on the edge of a bottomless black abyss, the noise of the crash still echoing in the distance.

Jon was the first to wake up, his head aching. He could smell the smoke that was coming from somewhere in front of him. He growled in pain and raised himself to a sitting position and that’s when he saw it, a black cloud over the hood of the car, streaming the toxic fumes up into the dark sky and hissing in the creepy silence that seemed to spread around them.

“Da…d…DAD!”

Jon crocked in pain, tears wiling their way out of his eyelids. The little boy was scared and as far as he knew, completely helpless. He couldn't come up with a plan on his own to come out from this predicament, he needed his siblings and the only one that could have helped him wasn't answering his frantic cries.

Greg was lying unconscious; his body leaned against the wheel. He was alive but Jon didn't know that. In his seven-year-old mind and from the shows that he saw on TV late at night with Morgan (Casey was too afraid to watch), his father looked dead, because that’s how dead people looked in the movies, quiet and bloody.

”
Aaggh...” Jon looked down at his own bloody hands. “Dad…" He whispered as he tagged at the seatbelt. “Dad…” Jon manage to unbuckle his sit belt with his trembling hands, and crawled to the shuttered door and kicked it out, his weak body falling to the dirt as he leaned over the edge of the back seat interior.

“Daddy…” He cried, getting weakly to his feet and stumbling to the front door where his father still lay unconscious against the wheel.

”Dad?” His eyes rested on Greg’s cell phone. He knew that if he would call a grownup they would be able to help him, that’s what mom told him to do in case of an emergency and this was defiantly one.

“I’ll call mom!” He said to himself, deciding to follow his mother’s orders. He reached for the handle and yanked it down but the door didn't open, Jon tried to open the door again and again but it was useless. The metal was
bend in, jammed from the force of the blow it received from the road and yanking on it was completely pointless in the strength of a seven year old.

“C’mon!!”

Jon pulled harder, refusing to give up on the only thing that could help him. 

“Stupid door!
Open up already! Agghhh!” He fell again to the ground, crying and frustrated. There was no use, he couldn't do it by himself, no one was coming for them and his father wasn't waking up to save him. He was alone. 

“What am I going to do now?” He asked, sniffing and trying to stop crying as he stood up again, looking around at the open road and the wind blowing through his shoulder-length hair as his body shudde
red from the cold of the night.

He slipped to the ground, waiting in silence, sitting by the ruined car while the wind picked up around him. The cold was becoming unbearable and Jon could feel the first drops of rain. He couldn't just continue to sit there, he would surreally die before morning, he was sure of that.

Deciding to try again he got up and looked at the abandoned road behind him. He balled his fists and gathered his courage to go call for help on his own but as he began stepping away from the car, attempting not to look at his seemingly dead father he felt something grab at his ankle, pulling his back.

Jon looked down and almost fainted in terror, screaming his lungs out at the sight before his little eyes.

A skeleton hand had crawled from under the car and was now tightly holding onto his trembling ankle. Actually, it only resembled a hand because Jon knew that nothing human could ever look like that, it just couldn't, not even in his wildest dreams.

The hand was long, brown and awfully resembled a cockroach’s feeler, a part of it anyway. The way it was moving and the lack of skin on it, it looked like it was about to snap at any moment. However it had a strong grip on him, and it was too strong for Jon to shake it off.

Jon screamed again, making an attempt to run for it but the feeler-like hand yanked hard on his foot, sending his body crashing down to the cold hard ground, smacking him against the asphalt. Jon screamed again, his body hitting the cold ground. He felt hot, sticky leagued pouring from the side of his head as his vision clouded.

At that moment, when the sound of the little body hitting the ground rang through the air, Greg stirred in his sit a
nd had finally opened his eyes.

With his half-closed eyes he saw a hooded figure lifting the unconscious body of his son and looking straight at him through the cover of darkness. It let out such a horrid sound that Greg feared his head was going to explode just from hearing it.

Greg tried to move but the loss of blood and the blows to his body that he sustained in the crash overcame him. He unwillingly drifted back into nothingness, whispering his son’s name.

The hooded figure carried Jon to the edge of the abyss, it looked down and then at the boy in its arms as he begun to stir, realization evident in his features. The creature watched him open his eyes and his mouth to scream and then with a high pitched shriek they were both gone, lost in the pit.

After a while a truck driver that happened to be driving by in the early hours of the morning spotted Greg in the half ruined car and called for help.

They came just in the nick of time to save Greg but by then all the blood left by Jon on the asphalt was gone, washed away by the rain. So were the monster’s tracks and Jon’s body, along with any clues to his whereabouts. He was never found.

The police had of course labeled it as a car accident and said that Greg had hallucinated due to his head injury and that the rain and the slippery road was the cause to the crash; they didn't believe him when he claimed that a mysterious hooded figure had abducted his son and that he was still alive somewhere.

The police assumed that Jon had woken up first after the crash, got out disoriented and half conscious and unfortunately didn't notice the abyss. They assumed that he fell straight into it, his body washed away by the current of the gashing waters below.

Their parents tried to hide it from them but once Casey and Morgan learned about the death of their brother they went into themselves, shutting off completely from the world. For weeks they barely left their room, refusing to talk to anyone but each other. Not even the therapist that Lilith hired could get through to them. No one ever knew that they cried themselves to sleep, tucked together in Morgan’s bed and holding each other through the night for comfort.

It went on like that for over eight months. Then, one afternoon around their eighth birthday Lilith took them to their annual visit at the barber. It was the first time in months the two siblings actually talked to her to tell her what they wanted to do to their hair. So surprised by their requests and so happy by them opening up to her she agreed to indulge them. Morgan came home with dreadlocks and Casey came home with her hair dyed black and cut short giving her the look of a little demon, completely different from her blond, long haired twin.
 

They changed drastically in a matter of hours, almost the complete opposites of each other, one white and one dark, one with short hair and one with long. You could never have guessed now that once, not so long ago, they were two little sweet, blond, almost identical ki
ds.

At first their mother was worried, she didn't like the changes. But the second psychologist that Lilith had taken the kids
to had told her that this is the way of the children to deal with their brother’s death, that she should not push them to talk about the pain they are feeling and that they will deal with it in their own time and on their own terms.

A month passed and the siblings were slowly returning to their normal behavior, although their looks remained different, and they insisted on keeping it like that. They were starting to open up to
others and even to laugh again.

One afternoon, shortly after their ninth birthday, Lilith had finally broke and tried to talk to them about Jon's death. To her relieve and horror neither Casey nor Morgan showed any signs of knowing who he was.
 

In an attempt to help her kids recover from the trauma of their horrible loss, and out of little selfishness to erase the pain she had felt, Lilith had removed all trace of Jon from the house. She took down his pictures and stored away his toys; she went even further and transferred the twins to a new school where no one had known about him. They moved to a different town and the fact that Jon had ever existed, was now a secret to the world.

Lilith thought and hoped that it will be like that forever, but secrets have a way of getting out, and this particular secret was about to resurface and be revealed to the Tepes twins. When it does they will have to face their past together if they were hoping to have a chance to survive.

Chapter one: Summer school

'Casey's diary: age sixteen entrance eleven.'

"So here I am again. The Second summer in a row, stuck up here in the middle of nowhere for three whole months with those insane freaks. 

Can you guess where I am? c’mon! I dare you! No? Ok, here it is: the all
infamous summer school! Again.

*Mental sigh*