Elementals: Entwined

Prologue: The Boy in the Street

The irony of a so-called "safe" place is that it's not exactly... safe.

Relaxed in their secure homes, people don't always hear a person running for their life down the busy street. They miss the sound of pounding footsteps, the hurried gasps. Those in the richest houses even have gates- making it difficult for someone to bang on a door for help. And the worst part is, because they're in a "safe" place, they don't expect any danger.

But the truth is, if someone wants to get to you bad enough, they'll usually find a way.

In their safe and cosy homes, nobody heard the sounds of gunshots as the members of one of the richest families in the area dropped like flies, their blood staining the imported cotton rugs. Or at least if they did they pretended they hadn't. This was a nice place. Bad things like that didn't happen. Not here, never here.

Nobody noticed, or acted as if they had noticed, the one member of that fallen family, back from a friends', as he walked down the road- and froze at the sight of the unrecognisable cars (and his family had a lot of cars) in the driveway. He alone was the one that noticed them walk out of his house, wiping the red stains off on their black pants as they did so, like the law didn't apply to them. And maybe it didn't, if they could blatantly get away with murder? They were speaking as they left.

"Hey, aren't there supposed to be five of them?" asked one of the men to the group in general. He was holding a photograph -a family photograph, from the mantelpiece, the boy noticed, recognising the frame. He should know -he passed it every day when he left the house to go to school. "There's the father, the mother, the two girls -we got all of those. But then who's the boy? Don't they have a son?"

 "Paranoia much, Brooks?" That was another member of the group. He was shorter than the first speaker, and wearing gloves. Despite his height, and the fact that the first man was clearly more muscled, this man looked to be in charge. "Let me see that." He grabbed at the photo.

The boy knew he should move. Any moment now, they would both look at the picture, register what his face looked like, and then look up to see him standing near the gates as they approached them, but he was frozen, feet glued to the ground. His mother, his father, Lauren and June were all gone. He'd never see them again and -

He froze, wiping away the tears that had appeared in his eyes. The men on the path had looked up, and were staring at him the way a wolf might look at an injured deer. And right then, he knew that if they caught him he'd end up in the same state as the rest of his family. Dead meat.

He ran.

And that was how he discovered that this "safe" place was about as safe as anywhere else, if not more dangerous. He banged on yet another empty home, pressed the buttons on yet more intercoms and got yet another lack of response. He would get no help tonight.

And they were getting closer. He could hear the sounds of hurried steps. But whilst he was running for safety, they were coming to kill him. He was the prey whilst they, with their guns, were the predators.

He ran aimlessly through the streets, knowing that if they caught him, they wouldn't hesitate to put a bullet in his head. He set a goal in his mind: there was a police station only a few blocks away. If he could get to that, he'd be safe -for the night, at least.

If he could make it through this night alive.

He counted the blocks in his head as he ran. Five blocks... four blocks...three-

It was a bottle that did it. Who knew what it was, because the boy never saw the label as he went crashing down. All he could think was that if it was alcohol, then that was just ironic. He was one of the few seniors that didn't drink or even go near the stuff, and now he would die because of it. Life truly was a bitch.

"Please," he gasped, when he looked up -and into the barrel of a gun. "I didn't do anything. Whatever my dad owes you, I'll pay it back! I- "

The leader cut him off with a wave of his hand, laughing. Somehow, that was worse than the guns, that hyena-like cackle. "I don't want your money, kid," he said between gasps of laughter. "Your life will do."

Nobody would claim to have heard gunshots the next day, though who could explain the amount of blood on the once pristine sidewalk? What couldn't be explained was the lack of body to go with that blood, or the fact that the boy was never seen again. Of course, some believed the rumours -that the boy had gone mad and killed his parents before turning the gun on himself -but a dead person couldn't move his body...

The general consensus was that nobody talked about it, because to do so would be to imply that this seemingly perfect place wasn't perfect. To suggest that someone had broken into the home and murdered the family was insane.

After all, this was a safe place. 

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