Out beyond the ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I'll meet you there. – Rumi

I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket. - Sylvia Plath

Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top. - Virginia Woolf

Preface

The dial tone of the phone echoed through the room, the light of the screen blinking down into a thick, sticky pool of blood that stretched from the vacant, wide eyed face of a man, his mouth open and frozen in an everlasting scream. His gun was trapped under his chest, useless and out of ammo, and entirely too far for the young girl to reach—even if she had wanted to.

Her breathing was ragged and torn, faster than she could catch. It raced away from her, out from under the bed, across the floor and over the bodies, before finally disappearing through the cracks of the wood and into the safety of the dark basement below them. She envied it. She wanted to go disappear with it, but she finds that fleeing and moving in general is especially hard to do when one can't breathe, or stop the room from spinning like an out of control car.

But the hallway had been quiet for some time, and she knew if she would call for help, the moment would be now. Another scream tore through the night, so loud that it reached her ears all the way across the house. The neighbors would surely have heard it, if they had neighbors—but they didn't. They chose to live in the country. Easier to train out here, easier to maintain some semblance of anonymity.

And now it's coming back to bite them in the ass. She wished they had neighbors. Maybe then, help would've come long ago. It never occurred to her young mind that the policemen who would've shown up would've just been killed along with everyone else; that they would've simply been innocent lives caught in the crossfire. Canon fodder.

No—to her, the fantasy of policemen coming was something too far out of reach, but a nice enough idea to fantasize about.

The scream was overridden by a roar that shook the house, and the young girl clamped her hands over her ears and squeezed her eyes shut, shrinking farther back beneath the bed as the screams were cut to an abrupt end and the roaring won out. She could only imagine what had happened. She had seen it for herself, seen the monsters ripping the throats out of her family, tearing them down like they were no more adverse than children on a playground.

Deciding that they were at least preoccupied on the other end of the house, she tapped into what little courage remained in the bottom of her heart and scrambled out from under the bed. She ignored the blood that soaked the front of her shirt as she army crawled across the wooden floor, her breathing coming so fast and heavy that it had taken on a separate life of its own from her. She felt like another part of herself had separated from her as she swiped up the wet, blood-coated phone with shaking hands.

Her fingers pressed the three on speed dial, forgoing nine-one-one entirely, as she had been taught to do. She couldn't keep her eyes from the door as she waited for the other line to pick up, her heart hammering in her throat, her nerves hyperaware.

She would remember this night for as long as she lived. She would remember the feeling of complete and total devastation, the way her entire body prickled with ice-cold terror, even in her palms and tingling across her fingertips. The way she could barely manage to choke out a coherent thought when her uncle finally answered.

How fast she dove back under the bed, totally ignorant of the blood that glazed all down the front of her. The feeling of the corpse's head on her barefoot as she frantically kicked herself forward and accidentally caught it on the way, kicking him back.

And the words that were exchanged on the phone as she heard the monsters moving just below her. Just a floor below her, down in the basement, where they had trapped the last survivor. She tried not to listen as they finished their job. Oh, she tried.

But she just couldn't help it, as she heard the final scream of absolute horror—filled with the knowledge that this is the last moment you'll see alive—before they killed the last person in the house besides her.

"Julian, make this quick. I'm in the middle of something." The man on the other end of the line rudely said, his voice a mixture of business-like professionalism and impatient annoyance. "Julian, are you there?... Hello?"

The young girl pried her bone white fingers from where they were clamped over her mouth, biting back a sob as she struggled to get the words she was screaming in her mind to come coherently out of her mouth.

"Uncle C-Chris," Her voice trembled like a telephone wire in a hurricane. "I need you. They're—they're all gone, they're all gone. They're—all gone, I need—"

"Simone?" His voice changed so intensely, he didn't even sound like the same person. Gone was the underlying tone of hostility, replaced with panic and dread, and some familial form of concern. "Who's gone? Where are you?"

A crash resounded through the house, just down the hall, followed by a series of thuds, and she couldn't bite back the horrified sob that tore from her throat.

"Simone!" He desperately exclaimed, though it barely registered to her through her terror as footsteps pounded down the hallway, slowly, menacingly. Almost teasing in their leisurely gait. "What's going on? Where's Julian? Put him on, let me talk to your father—"

"It's too late," She whispered, her voice barely above a breath but somehow coming out with all the force of a scream.

"What?" Chris's tone changed again, going cold and foreboding. "Simone, are you safe?" She didn't even dignify that with a response, as the footsteps grew closer, and she shrank farther under the bed. "You need to get to safety!"

The door creaked as it was pushed open, the light from the hall casting a long shadow off the figure that stood in the doorway.

"…They're here." She whispered into the phone. Frantic exclamation erupted from the other end, but she put the phone down and dug through her pocket with trembling fingers as the figure stepped into the room.

Okay, a few things. First of all, for those of you who are visiting me from Teen Sideshow, NO! I haven't forgotten about it. Or any of my fics for that matter! I'm just finding that the chapters are a little more challenging for me to get out than usual, but don't worry... I've not abandoned any of them.

Right. Now that's out of the way-I've got a new story idea. This one is gonna be more closely following the Teen Wolf plotline than my other stories have done in the past, so... If that's your thing, hooray! If I get five reviews on this, I'll post the first chapter. This was just the preface. I wanted to go ahead and show you guys her backstory a bit, or at least the most important piece of it, because it'll make the chapters to come easier for you to understand and easier to write. I have the first chapter finished, I just need to know whether this seems interesting to you guys... :) It's obviously an OC story so... Let me know your thoughts! I'll answer all your questions when I post the next chapter.