Rejection on the Alpha #1

21. The Final Countdown

(New and edited)
CHAPTER 21: The Final Countdown

The orange blur moved differently, the faster I ran for it, the more the image blurs and I watch the sinister veil of a white door peek open, much like Alice in Wonderland, it's white glow was more alluring than a dark path behind me. I flew straight through it. Not thinking about how I was going to land when I drop through worlds, like a time continuum of some sort. I was falling through time.

It struck like lightning bolts through my stomach, pulsating and pumping my blood through my veins before the view of black pine snaps before me. Like an arena of death with no colour, black and white, even my blood looked tainted on my fingers. I screech as I fall through branches and leaves that scrap blood, cutting through skin and tapping bone before I roll down a muddy hill and straight into a bottomless field of dead dirt and bones that scattered it.

I gasp out, holding my side at the sound of heavy breathing. I still where I am, unable to catch my bearings when that single second of air. The inhale and exhale of my lungs moving with every breath, it was becoming harder and harder to do when the humidity clogs my throat. When had the air turned from cold and eerie to a dried up desert of bone and ash.

That low growl, yet again. It tickles the air at the nape of my neck, I turn freakishly slow, feeling the thrumming of blood in my veins run their course and due to the tastable scent of fear, I turn slowly, rotating to the enlarged cave that looked like it plagued enough nightmares of those around it. I tense, staring at it like it itself could breathe, the walls—spiral-bound and moving closer until I was swallowed in its wake.

I shiver at the heated magma air that brushes my cheeks, moving without knowing I had moved my limbs, they were doing it involuntarily. One by one, step by step, I moved with a silent dread in the soles of my feet as I follow the walls to a large structure. A creepy hole down the middle, the edges are supported by thin spikes against the walls and looking ready to snap the closer I get.

There's white light shining down the middle, but it's not bright enough for me to see the bottom.

AH!

I flinch at the sound of a masculine scream, and then a dark roar that I knew off-by-heart because I use to snap awake at night as a child in fear this creature was in my room, under my bed or in my closet, maybe behind the ruffling curtains by the window. This was where Kade had always read to me before bed, no matter my age of eleven to twelve, still young enough and scared enough to want that bedtime story. To want him to chase those shadows away.

The Chimera.

A mythical creature of fire, features of a Lion and a Sphinx combined. I close my eyes at its teeth crunching on bone, I don't think, I spin around and run for the mouth of the cave, screaming when something swipes my feet out from under me, bloodied vines that pulls me from my face in the ground, ripping me straight towards the centre. I scream my lungs out, "NO! NO! HELP! PLEASE!" I scream for no one because all there is...is me and the mythical creature I could never eradicate in my dreams.

I snatch a leg bone from the dirt and whack at the vine, looking for any kind of sharp objet, any possible way to get out of this. Something sinks into my leg, I cry out at the spillage of my blood on the floor, before I'm thrown sideways.

I felt the clock tick.

Was it my time already?

Three.