THE VAMPIRE UNDERGROUND

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

“Is he still inside? Is he inside?” Anaya screamed as she rushed past the other four across the dirt road, all the way up to the burning van.

Brin didn’t move. She could only watch in horror as the van fell backward against the ground, the jailhouse crumbling for everyone to see.

“Oh my God,” she said.

“Sawyer! Sawyer!” Anaya covered her arm over her face as she stopped in front of the burning vehicle. It was raging with fire.

“Maybe he fell out,” Lavender said, as she and Chace walked up to the van.

“Yeah, and maybe he’s just unconscious,” Chace added.

“Or maybe he’s dead!” Brin said, louder than she expected to.        

“He’s not dead!” Anaya screamed from afar. “He can’t be dead!”

Dylan appeared beside Brin. “What do we do now?” he said.

Brin grabbed his hand, and they walked over to meet the other three. The van was completely destroyed, as was the jailhouse behind it.

Anaya was in tears. She kneeled down and wept.

Sawyer wasn’t in the van. He was sprawled out on the ground a few feet behind it. 

“Sawyer,” Anaya said, taking a few steps forward and kneeling down. “Sawyer… please say something…”

His body faced the burning jailhouse, and nobody could see his face. He wasn’t moving, he didn’t appear to be breathing, and his left arm, the only body part Brin could see, was bright red and burned to a crisp.

Brin stepped past Dylan and put a hand on Anaya’s shoulder. “Anaya,” she said, “he’s gone.”

“He’s not gone!”

“We need to get out of here. We need to get an ambulance.”

“He’s fine! He’ll be fine!” Anaya jumped back up and faced the crowd. Her eyes had doubled in size and the veins in her forehead looked ready to explode.

Brin turned back to Anaya. “We need to get help—”

“We haven’t gotten our last shot,” she said, turning away from the roaring fire and wiping her tears away. “We can’t do anything until we get our last shot.”

Now it was Brin’s turn to get angry. She couldn’t take it anymore. “Forget about the damn movie, you crazy psycho! We’re in trouble here! We need to get help!”

“Not until we finish.”

“Are you insane? Sawyer’s dead! A member of our group is dead!”

“I know!” Anaya shouted, a tear rolling down her cheek. “And it would be a waste for his death to be in vain! Without that last shot, we don’t have a movie! And then Sawyer died for nothing!”

Brin shook her head. Anaya appeared to have lost all sense of human decency. “You’re sick,” she said. “I didn’t even want to come here. I told you we shouldn’t come here!”

“You little pansy,” Anaya said, turning to the group. “You’re all pansies!”

Everybody by now had tuned the director out. They all knew from the get-go that the girl was ambitious, but nobody thought her to be this insane.

“Will someone just knock her teeth out?” Dylan said, boldly.

“My pleasure,” Chace said, rushing up to Anaya.