To Whoevers Listening

Seven : The Worst

My hands go up and Obie crashes into me, his dirty, cracked fingernails reaching for my face as we both fall back into the snow. I land with a hard smack on the less-than-soft ground and Obie pins me, his face inches from mine.

Its lying like that, my heart pounding a thousand beats a minute inside my chest, do I realize that it is not Obie trying to claw at my arms and bite off my fingers.

It's a man in his mid-forties wearing a simple suit that has been dirtied and ripped, spots of blood leaking down from the massive chunk ripped out of his exposed throat.

He should be dead. He should be very, very dead.

I scream and throw out my foot, kicking the man in the stomach as I shove his head as far away from me as possible. He snarls like an enraged animal and snaps his teeth at me, frothy spit dripping from his bloodied gums.

I scream again and put all my energy into throwing him off of me. Surprisingly, it works and he goes rolling into the snow as I scramble to my feet.

Oh my god. Oh my god. Oh my fucking god!

I back away from the man towards the station as he rolls onto his hands and knees and begins getting back to his feet.

When he tackled me, the keys along with the things I had gathered from the storage room had been thrown in god knows what direction. I imagine making a grab for the torch that's lying on the ground a few feet away and knocking him unconscious with that, but somehow I think I might need something a little harder than that.

He has a massive hole in his neck, for Christs sake, a hit over the head with a plastic torch isn't going to do shit.

The man is up now and I make a bolt for the door, praying that it didn't lock behind me when I walked outside. It did that pretty often and I remember getting myself locked out in the cold a couple times before. If it hadn't been for Obie or Maggie inside, I probably would have had to go home or sit in the car to keep warm.

I grab the handle and twist.

It's bloody locked.

I spin around and press myself up against the door, trying to get as far away from the psycho cannibal as possible. He stumbles on uncertain legs in the snow, but he's coming in quick and I know any second now he's going to be on me again.

My mind suddenly flicks to the memory of Obie trying to grow his own garden during the summertime. Of course, despite his desire to make himself a veggie patch, all his plants died within days of being planted. Maggie said he watered them too much. Obie said it just wasn't the right time of year.

He had decorated it nicely though and got so excited about it that I kinda felt bad when it didn't work out. But I remember spying on Maggie from inside as she watched him positioning rocks in a rectangle shape on either side of the doorway into the station, knees in the grass and hands covered in dirt as he prepared his doomed-to-be garden.

When the plants died, he had left the rock borders behind. They were big rocks too, the size of both my fists. And they were right down beside me, just buried in the snow.

I drop down onto my knees and shove my hands into the icy powder, digging it away as the gargled moans of the deranged man grow closer. My fingers hit something solid and I wrap my hands around the rock, ripping it out of the ground as the man comes up behind me, reaching out with dirty fingers.

I stand and swing the rock at the same time, putting as much momentum behind it as I can, and crack it under his jaw with a wet smack.

The monstrous man goes down in a heap, his moan cutting off short. His eyes are closed. He's not moving.

I keep the stone raised in the air.

When his eyes pop back open and he roars, I screech loudly and throw the rock down on his head.