Thalia

Chapter 29: The End

Coming to, I see Ryan a good ten feet away and backing up with a blue glimmer in his eyes. It's not his usual blue eyes but maybe an offset color. It can't be Ryan. It isn't. "Ryan?" No more than a few moments after his name leaves my mouth, the ground shakes and from random spots, bodies burst through the cement like demonic flowers in the spring.

Dust spreads everywhere, concrete chunks are littering the street, and I'm alone. The bodies are rising from the floor slowly, but fast enough to scare the poop out of my system. I'm not even sure I have anything to poop from anymore; they scared that away, too.

I stand still, silently conjuring up a plan to escape this mess and am coming up with nothing. The dust clears and in front of me are hundreds of bodies. The same body. They're all Ryan. Hundreds upon hundreds of Ryans file up and down the street, out of line.

For brief moments everything on the road is silent; the only sound is coming from the hidden speakers. This isn't a game anymore to them. Their goal still remains the same: kill Rose. And they're doing a heck of a good job at it. If it weren't for my competitiveness, I'd let them kill me. But I hate to lose and I'm not going to start now.

One Ryan to my far right takes a step towards me. "Isn't this what you want, Rose? Me? You've always wanted me. Now look," He motions all around with his arms outstretched. "You can have as many as you want and you won't take the opportunity? We all knew you were ungrateful." One Ryan scratches like a hologram and when it's stable again, it's not Ryan, but Cora. The same process repeats almost simultaneously across the whole road; each Ryan transforms into another person that's been in my life: Zoey, Emily, Mom, Junchi, Mindy, Johnny, Mr. B, Damien.

This can't actually be them. Everyone I know can't be in on this. They just can't. All of the duplicates wear the same familiar smirk etched on their faces and there's only one person who's face I don't see and one person who's face fits the smirk.

Misty.

"So I figured this would be a little harder, but you're such an idiot, you decided to believe me when I told you I had changed the first time." I whip around and there stands Misty in all of her confidence, leaning against a shop's worn down brick wall. I knew someone with a head as big as hers had to have been lying somewhere in the mix.

"But who could blame you, right? It's not your fault you were born with an idiot of a father." She pauses and watches my eyes for a moment before continuing. "Or a freak of nature like your mother." It's not a secret on what she wants, but she's not getting it. She wants a reaction-something to feed off of to motivate her.

"You know, your silence and determination to not show me you're actually getting upset is what's telling me you're upset. You know it bothers you, Rose, so why're you taking it?" Her steps towards me just give me a better view of the demon in her eyes. She stops when's she's less than a foot from me. "Is it because you know that such a mentally disturbed family would never work out or want anything to do with you?"

Okay, the line is drawn here. Take a mental photo of this moment and save it to your scrapbooks to show your children in the years to come. Because this is the most likely the last time you'll see Misty Harper, the chick who deserves to have all of the roaches shoved up her nose and into her pea-brain, in one piece.

I bring my arm forward and plant a firm punch into her gut followed immediately by my other arm throwing a punch at her cheek, which gets a great reaction of splattering droplets of blood and a grunt. She fumbles backwards, struggling to find her balance, clutching her jaw and hunched over looking no less like the Hunchback of Notre Dame. Her already tired eyes find mine. "You psycho!"

I step forward to finish her off but she disappears along with all of the duplicates who were, just before, littering the streets. The music cuts off and the wind stops blowing. It's almost as if time literally stands still. The only indication that I know we're still moving on is from the raindrops still finding their way through gravity.