P-R-O-L-O-G-U-E

It was the initial smell of smoke that tarnished the air. It was thick, and not to mention heavy, with a consistency that was enough to clog the lungs by just the first inhale. The taste of ash on your tongue was strong enough to make you gag, but even worse, it continued on even after you coughed, clinging to the lubrication on the inside of your mouth to create a never-ending reminder of the fire that started it all.

The second smell that laid beneath the rotting soot was the overwhelming smell of blood. The metallic stench accented the smoke, but worse, there was so much of it that it nearly outweighed the black fog in the air. The blood was a lake, and it too was taking over the lungs. It was an inescapable, sour taste that stuck to your insides worse than the actual soot covered your skin-like the scent alone was rotting your soul worse than the horrible act you had just committed.

There were six of them. They stood in a circle, all staring down at the crackling, hissing, screeching fire that was starting to grow and grow before them. A tiny ember had emerged into a roaring feast, using the blood and its occupant as an accelerant. With a tremble in their bodies, they stared down at the fire. It was here, watching the red and orange flames lick across the corpse and dead leaves beneath their feet, that they all realized none of their lives would be the same. What had orchestrated here, a mere moment in time, had now become a terrible accent to the rest of their lives.

One could say it was the end of their lives as they knew it.

The hollering of voices far in the distance broke the human silence. What made up the group was five males and a girl was a hollow parade of has-beens, who had lost their souls the second they all agreed to this mess. Agreed to participate. Agreed to save one of themselves at the cost of losing the rest of them.

One of them was a young man who was normally prepared for anything, yet this had been far beyond them. His throat was tight, and his hands clenched and unclenched, as if the fighter in him was rearing to give a physical solution to a problem much bigger than a couple punches resulting in a knockout. His name meant 'unbreakable,' but now, he was starting to really doubt that. "We need to get out of here," said Kai quietly, his normally bravado tone suppressed by the shock and loss. "Before someone finds the body." The fire lit up the angular shape of his face, casting his golden eyes in a sinister shadow.

"Are you joking me? Somebody's going to find this eventually. It's a freaking fire in the middle of the woods by an abandoned fucking shed, and you expect me to believe that we have a chance of getting out of here without someone finding the goddamn body?" The hissing whisper nearly rose into a shriek as another boy raised his hands to his red hair and grabbed tufts of it in his fists, strangling at the normally well-kempt locks. His green eyes were huge and haunted. Afraid.

The broad-shouldered, dark-skinned man beside Kai looked with a dead, silver-eyed stare across the flames. "Jay, calm down." He rolled up the sleeves of his leather jacket.

"Calm down? CALM DOWN? How can you expect me to calm down?" Jay stepped backward; in the light of the flames, it was easier to tell that his generally well-kept appearance was now as strangled as his hair was. The front of his blue checkered shirt was torn wide open, and underneath, a white undershirt was scored with splotches of telltale blood. "WE. JUST. KILLED. A. GUY!"

"Shhhhh!" Kai hissed at the same moment everyone else did. "Look, just shut up, alright? We need to play our cards right, and we can walk away from this, without being attached to this at all. We just…. We need to think about this."

From Jay's side, the tall, lanky boy spoke next, his eyes rimmed with red underneath his thick-rimmed glasses, tears of fear having escaped his icy blue eyes. "We lost our time to think when we decided to drag this body out of that house and bring it out here." The boy, named Zane, was the type to always keep things factual and precise, but now, even his even-toned voice rang empty and defeated in the sickly night.

It was the big boy, Cole-a hunk of muscle and levelheadedness-that surprised Kai with his quick snap. "Watching a thousand reruns of CSI isn't going to make for a good enough argument that we can make it out of this okay, Kai."

"Are you all prepared to just throw in the fucking towel then? Call the cops? Say, 'hey, look, guys, we just burned the body of a student but it's cool, we're turning ourselves in for it'?" Kai shot a look over the rising flames of the fire. The others, only three of them now paying Kai any attention, stared at him with more fear and worry than he was able to combat with his sharp glare.

It was his sister, the only girl of the group, who spoke up. Her face was streaked with black, her makeup running away from her eyes-almost like it wanted to hitch a ride on her tears and run as far away from this situation as it could, like all of them wanted to. "He's right," she said, her voice crumbling and weak. "We have to at least try to escape this. We've burned the body; we've already taken the first step in hiding our crime. Now we have to run with it."

At her side, Cole wrapped an arm around her body and tugged her against him in a halfhearted attempt to comfort her, where she thankfully rested her head.

"Is nobody else seeming to see that this isn't even our crime?" Jay's whisper-hissing was about as hysterical as it could get. He looked like a crazed, caged man, all torn up, dried blood on his hands, and highlighted by the sinister shadows the flames caused. "Are you all forgetting we had no damn part in this?!"

"We made it our business when we decided to get rid of the body!"

"Yeah, the body of the guy that Lloyd killed!" In a sweeping gesture, Jay's arm lashed out to his left, where the only silent participant left stood still as a statue-the moment that the attention was turned to the boy, the toll that the murder had taken on him was obvious. His shoulders were slumped, and his pale skin was even whiter than normal, adding onto the trembling of his hands. He looked like a shrunken version of the self he'd been just an hour ago. Back when things were normal.

Back before it all fell apart.

Lloyd's golden hair fell across his eyes in shame.

"We're in this together!" Kai snapped, and he protectively felt his body shift toward Lloyd's. "Alright? We agreed to this, and now we're in this together!"

Zane peered over his shoulder into the darkness of the woods, cast in the shadow of midnight, before looking back at his friends. His big eyes were too wide. "We need to leave. There could be people from the party wandering in the woods anywhere."

"It's inevitable that someone's going to find the body." Cole swallowed, holding Nya against his chest, as across the fire, Jay paced like a caged animal, seconds away from punching a tree. "We need to get the hell out of here before someone finds us with it."

Kai nodded sharply in agreement. His mind, still buzzing with shock, was only able to process the world that came rushing all too fast at him by taking a hold of the reigns. He needed to get this heinous, crazy freaking...well, murder plot under control. "Fine. Jay, handle Lloyd, get him out of here and as far away from here as you can get him without taking him so far off it's an unrealistic stretch. Make sure you get him a change of clothes, and some for yourself, too, as a matter of fact. Cole, you take my sister, and I want you to go put yourself into the scene of the party as much as you can to make it look like you were hanging around the whole time but snuck off to have sex or something." Reeling from the words that he couldn't believe had just fallen out of his mouth, Kai glanced up over the fire and swallowed, hard. "Zane, you and I can go clean up the rest of the mess left behind."

"Someone's going to notice strangers going in and out of his dorm, you idiot," snapped Jay, his nerves alive and making him twitchy under the stress as he paced. "There's no way you won't get stopped."

"Everyone's too busy partying. If they're not screwing in one of the rooms, they're high or drunk and are partying elsewhere too much to care. They won't notice." Cole seemed pretty sure of himself-which wasn't surprising to Kai at all, considering he was the drug-addicted party animal-and took off his coat to wrap it around Nya's shoulders, before tearing open her shirt enough to make her look more sexually disheveled rather than the I-just-witnessed-murder bedraggled she was.

Kai swallowed hard, and looked at Lloyd. In the dancing flames' light, the flecks of blood that were still all over Lloyd's face, seeping through the shirt that Kai had quickly torn out of the dresser of the murder victim once he realized what had happened and shoved onto the frail-looking boy. It had hardly been enough, but it had been enough to fool people.

Kai turned to Cole. "Take care of my sister."

Cole nodded, planting a worried, chaste kiss on Nya's forehead, before wrapping his arm around her shoulders to start guiding her away. Nya turned and looked over at Kai as she was lead away, but what he couldn't help noticing was that her eyes slid past him and landed on Jay. Stayed there, as she walked away, as if she was terrified and wishing he was the one to come guide her away rather than her boyfriend.

Kai pretended not to notice that Jay had the same longing look on his face too. He turned to Lloyd as the flames of the corpse started picking up, getting higher, and higher, so that they were almost 4 feet now.

Wrapping his hands around Lloyd's tough yet slumped shoulders, he stuck his finger underneath Lloyd's chin and forced him to look up to him. Underneath the disarranged locks of hair in his face, Lloyd's baby blue eyes were bright with misfortune, guilt, sorrow-a mixture of so many emotions that Kai was getting dizzy trying to recognize.

The blood flecks, the spatter that had occurred from a bloody bashing, reminded him well enough that the terrified bookworm he was looking at was so much more than a pretty face.

"I'll come find you, when this is over," Kai promised quietly, squeezing Lloyd's shoulders. "I'm going to help you, Lloyd."

"I'm a killer," whispered Lloyd. "You shouldn't do it, you shouldn't have done this for me-"

"It's too late to take any of it back now, Lloyd." As if his body moved without his mind commanding it, Kai lifted the back of his hand and stroked it across Lloyd's cheek gently, soothing. "It's going to be-"

"Are you two done fucking each other with your eyes, because we need to go. NOW." Jay snapped from behind Lloyd, his voice icy and harsh, irritable. Stress had turned his cheery mood into a total rupture of character.

Releasing his hold on Lloyd, Kai stepped back, nodding encouragingly at the blonde, who was quickly snatched by the elbow by Jay and dragged into the direction of the parking lot. Towards safety.

"What a mess. What a mess. What a mess..." Zane kept repeating as he started running up the side of the hill, the hill that was their only barrier between the raging party taking place at the fraternity household at the edge of the woods and the scene of a cover-up. Kai's breath was a stark white puff of smoke in front of his face as he raced to keep up with him. He kept his bloody hands in his pockets, glad for his dark jacket to cover the spots on his front half.

All the while he walked beside the man top of his class yet now so knee deep in this crime that not even his great test scores would save him from a harsh punishment from the law.

Kai could feel his bones aching as he mounted the hill with Zane, not yet realizing the complete magnitude of his actions and what impact it held upon his future. "Stick with me, kid," he said ironically as they raced towards the blazing sound of music pumping through the walls of the frat house, "and we'll get away with murder."