The Outlands

Chapter 2: The Upcoming

   After a long night from coming back from his snowboarding trip up in Colorado, Steele found himself stuck in the same dream, or so he thought, with the great blazing of a city off in the distance. He tried diverting his attention somewhere else, but could not take his eyes off of the winding road leading towards the massacre further off. The city slowly disappeared as a blizzard continued on, restricting Steele's vision towards the blaze.
    He turned his head over to analyze his surroundings. A stinging pain made his head jolt down, revealing a bandage over his arm uncovering a bloody scar, so deep it was too terrifying to look at.
To take his confused mind off the pain, he peered onto the snow-capped trees surrounding the vehicle as the rickety old rusted metal banged around every bump in the road.
   "Where am I?"
   "What is happening?"
   "Who am I?"
  As thoughts swarmed Steele's mind, a hand, cold to the touch interrupted Steele as he was mindless about the situation he was in already.
   "Everything's going to be okay.." An ambiguous voice said, in a light but serious tone. Steele glanced at the hand, leading to a beautiful, yet unfamiliar figure, too blurry to make out who it really was. A slight grin somehow soothed Steele's rushing thoughts, calming him down.
   All of a sudden, one by one as like everything started disappearing into a dark cloudy mist, Steele found himself trapped in a dark, murky room, unilluminated of all light that he can see.
   Water filled the ground inch by inch, making a minor splash when he walked. A small cry behind him filled Steele with a conspicuous confusion as he crept over to a dark, shadowy figure, with an almost unnatural body shape, lying on its knees.
Its limbs in an unsettling shape made him stand still in fear as the pale white figure rose to its feet. No thoughts entered his mind as Steele froze, not making any slight bit of movement. Its back was scattered with spikes and other sharp objects sticking out from the spine.
    The creature stopped crying, filling the room with silence. It had slowly pivoted its head in the direction of him, giving chills all throughout his body until it locked eyes with him, as if it were staring straight through them. 
The creature lead off an ear-piercing screech as it leaped onto Steele, who was too shocked to react fast enough. A sharp pain spreaded down, through his shoulder to his stomach, but only lasting a few seconds of a sharp painful sting.
    Sweat dripped down his forehead as he slowly rose up from bed. Wet drips of rain pattered through the open window, wind blowing through the curtains next to his bed, cooling the room. He quickly moved his hand to his shoulder, where he had been stung in the dream.
Shockingly, dark red blood poured down his hands, dripping onto his blankets. He jumped up and darted straight to the bathroom where he washed off the blood.
   Inspecting the swollen area, he covered it up with bandages to conceal the bleeding. His mind raced once again, figuring out what had just happened as it seemed the nightmare was real.
   Concerned of the situation, he unwrapped the bandage on his shoulder, revealing two gushing teeth marks, as if he was bit by a snake. Steele wished this would all end, just being a bad dream and waking up to the sweet smell of pancakes and the warm sensation of the fireplace in the living room.
           
                      Lexi
Hearing the sounds of laughter and a scattering movement behind her, she immediately turned around, unveiling her brother, Luke carrying her radio that she apparently used to call her boyfriend each night before the week-long snowboarding trip up in Colorado for the break.
Furious, Lexi gave out to an outbreak of emotions to her infuriating brother, with her radio in his hand, along with some other of her possessions she favorited. Chasing him down the hallway, both of the siblings stopped to a halt as their dad blocked the way out to the living room.
Letting out a humorous chuckle, he reached out his hand, indicating Luke to hand over the items.
"Give them, you don't want to cause anymore drama right now.. everyone's tired so might as well give them up.."
Luke let out a sigh, gawking straight at her face as he handed the objects to her dad.
"You're no fun." he said exceedingly loud, in a nonsensical tone, running back into his room, peeking out and making a face at her one last time before he disappeared back into his room.
Now her dad had never liked or disliked Luke, he simply just thought he was untrustworthy when talking to him. Luke had a serious case of ADHD, making him do childish pranks to his siblings and in some cases, acting out in immaturity when he doesn't take his medications.
Lexi on the other hand thought of herself as independent and self-appreciated. She enjoyed the beach and preferred surfing over anything else she could think of and most importantly, she was way overly-obsessed about her boyfriend. He was almost like the models she had crushed on t.v. when she was younger.
They would always take any opportunity to be able to talk to each other over the phone or the radio she had. A mysterious power outage in the household phone a few weeks ago had cut off any communication other than Lexi's handheld radio, so she would hide it whenever she was done talking to her admirer.
There was only two days left of winter break, so Lexi wanted to take any chance of seeing her boyfriend again before the school came back into season again.
Without hesitation, she snatched the radio, remembering to thank her father before hiding back into her room once again. She sat back down at her desktop, looking at her appearance in the mirror. Letting out a small giggle at her horrible tan lines from the trip, she covered her mouth to conceal the outbreak of laughter she was holding in.
Small stickers from magazines she recently had gone through were all scattered throughout the mirror. Pieces of models and movie characters revealed her phase at this time of going boy-crazy.
She grabbed the brush and started to unknot the frizzy sun-bleached hair leading all the way down to her shoulders, humming her favorite song she heard on the car radio.