Adrenaline works in strange ways. You haven't slept in four days, you're running on empty, your stomach is dying for a bite to eat yet you're not truly hungry. Then, the next minute it feels as if you've eaten an entire energy bar with a energy drink as dessert. Ou feel like you've got all the energy in the world, when in reality, it's your body's last reserve to keep the body going when you need it to. Kind of like when you're running away from someone with the intent of kidnapping you, or even worse, murdering you for what you've seen.
You're so pumped up on adrenaline you don't even realise where your feet are taking you, you're just running, nonstop. You feel like you could throw a car, jump fifty feet into the air and land without an issue. You forget about your surroundings yet you're on high alert for anything that could potentially step from the shadows and swallow you whole. Your fear gives you even more of the adrenaline you need to make it through the day, to get away. Blood rushes to all ends of your body, your skin is on fire, and your lungs burn as if you've swallowed hot charcoal, but you keep going. Because you know that's all you can do, you know if you get caught you're done for, if you slack off, you lose it all.
My feet had never collided so hard with pavement in all my life, one foot skipping ahead of the other as sweat dared to trickle across my cheek. Sweat, or tears, it had become too difficult and too risky to try and decipher the two. Both tasted of salt when they hit my open lips, seeping in through the chapped flesh as the cold winter wind against my face brought nothing but pain. Thanks to adrenaline and shock however, everything felt numb. I guess it was better that way, besides the ache of my lungs quickly inhaling icy air better left untouched by myself in particular.
Walls seemed to blur together, my scarf slipping free from my neck to flutter away in the breeze caused by that of my speed. Which wasn't very much. His footsteps behind me seemed to grow closer no matter how hard I seemed to run, my chest continued to grow tighter, my legs beginning to wobble as my quick breathing turned into dreadful wheezing. Damn my lungs, infested ever so perfectly with inflammation and allergies. Asthma and running were most definitely not a match made in heaven.
Adrenaline, my drug if not really choice but need, was quickly running thin, the shock of what my eyes had seen settling in as well as reality. This man chasing me had killed my Father, was now after me in attempts to 'keep me quiet', and my stupid lungs were daring to give out. Turning the nearest corner I made every attempt to lose the man in the maze of the city, the tiny city which only held a total of two hundred people, who all went to bed before nine o'clock every day of the bloody year.
To scream would be pointless, to call for help while dodging through the city's allies would be a waste of the breath I was struggling to inhale. Finally, the footsteps behind me fell silent as I turned one last corner. My body heaved, my back slamming into the nearest wall as my hands desperately fondled through my pockets for my trusty inhaler. But it was never found. "Shit." Was all that I could manage to say. I must've dropped it while running, and now I was breathless, without my life-saving device, and probably about to be murdered just like my Father. But why? Why?
My Father has been a good man, one of truth, of honesty. Why kill him? Questions seemed to be no good at the moment seeing the answers were going to be much harder to find that just staring at a brick wall, awaiting the world to tell you out of generosity. "Come now, Calen." That voice sent every hair upon my arms upwards, my lips sealing in attempt to silence my heavy breathing, but my asthma was quickly winning over. Lightheaded and dizzy I remained around the corner, not moving, attempting not to make a single sound. "It's me, you know who I am. I'm the boogeyman."
Tears, that's what those salty droplets were that were currently streaming down my face, daring to freeze. My body shook, my eyes wide in terror as I attempted to remain conscious. "That's impossible," I blurted. "The boogeyman isn't real. He's a silly character made up in a story to scary children into being good. Doing their chores." The fact I was able to speak as my airway was closing up was rather impressive, my mind racing a million kilometres a second. "You were a nightmare, nightmares aren't real."
Laughter seemed to echo, growing closer and closer, yet my body refused to move. My mind screamed at itself, at me, to pick up my feet and take off, run until I was either unconscious or dead. Then, the laughter stopped, but the sound of feet did not. Out of the corner of my eye as my head dared to cant, There he stood. Tall, inhuman, covered head to toe with crimson red, a hatchet in one hand, and a heart in the other. A blood curdling scream left my chapped and busted lips, for the only person that heart could belong to, was that of my Father.
"They are Today, Calen Pines. They are today."
