Thin Ice

Chapter 1 - The Tragedy

I hang up the discord call with my friends and slip under the covers of my bed. I think about the many stupid topics my friends had talked about before drifting off to sleep. I wake up to my annoying brother Lucas screaming my name and banging on my door "Ben, Ben wake up, Ben, Ben." "WHAAAT?!" I yell back annoyed, I get no reply and I try to go back to sleep before he calls my name over and over again. 'Jesus christ this is starting to piss me off' I think to myself, "Lucas it's too early for this, would you knock it off?". I get up to open my door and Lucas shoots me with a nerf gun. I grab it and throw it back into my room and walk downstairs, Lucas bugging me about his nerf gun.

I ignore him and proceed with my regular schedule, then leave to hang out with my friends. As you heard from my irritating brother my name is Ben, and I'm about to be a senior in high-school. It's summer right now so I want to hang out with my friends as much as I can. The only problem is they all live pretty far away, luckily my friend Faith who lives a few states away is finally visiting so we're all going to hang out for around 2 weeks.

I pull Into the park where we said we would meet up and turn off my car. I get out and see a short girl with dark brown hair and glasses reading at a bench accompanied by another girl with long black hair on a call. I walk over to them and I'm greeted by my friend Kaylie who was calling her boyfriend Robert.

"Heeyyy, how are you?" Kaylie asks walking over to me.

"Okay, and you?"

"Good, Robert's picking Faith up from the airport right now so they should be here in like 10 minutes." She continues to talk to Robert as I sit next to Luna. She is fixated on her book but I know she knows I'm there, she's incredibly perceptive as a side effect of being more paranoid than Stalin. "What are you reading?"

Right as she is about to respond she is interrupted by Kaylie yelling Robert's name and running towards him as he gets out of the car. Faith gets out and we all exchange welcomes, it's a bit weird because I've known her for around 10 years but have never been around eachother in real life.

We all pitched In to get Faith a hotel room to stay in while she is here as no one else's parents would allow a random person over. We all talk about plans like what we are going to do the time Faith's over until Luna, who had been pretty quiet the entire, time stood up. "I have to go" she says bluntly.

"Aww come on, you can't stay for one more minute?" Faith says.

"I'm sorry but my mom told me I have to-" "but you hardly said anything the entire time, it's like you aren't even here. Come on, I just got here, please just stay?" Luna sighs and sits back down. "Hey have you guys heard of that freak accident that happened a few days ago?" Kaylie randomly says. "Yeah, I heard that a lot of people died." Robert replies.  "What are you talking about? What happened?" I ask as it piqued my interest.

"Well, you know about the demon core right? Crazy name I know, but it's this big ball of radioactive metal that killed a bunch of people because they were fucking around." "Yeah I know, and you shouldn't say that, it was a tragedy and they knew what they were doing, it was an accident." I say "what about it? Did something happen again?" "Well, basically they started mess- doing experiments on it again and it killed another person and will kill a few more, radiation poisoning you know?" Kaylie responds. "Jesus. . . I didn't know they still had it" Faith says. "Yeah why wouldn't they have it?" I say.

"They should've gotten rid of it, or put it away somewhere, people died for what? More people to die?" Luna buds in. "It's science, of course people want to learn about radiation." I say. "I'm sure it's probably for protection or something." Kaylie says trying to comfort her. "Yeah. . . Sure pal" Luna says bluntly. "Let's change the subject" Faith says and I think we all agree. "What about the new game that just came out?" Robert says. "Hey pretty boy you know that's really vague right?" "Yeah my bad, I'm talking abou-" He is cut off by the ground shaking and a feint noise from behind us. We don't get a chance to look around as the last thing I see is everyone's scared faces as everything is drowned out by a bright blue light.