Week Twenty- Three (March.30- April 4)- Topic:Blood
Winner: Arthur
Bad Batty
By Arthur
Bloody. Bloody. Bloody. Johnathan Harker would have called this the moment of seeing Dracula. Lady Lucy Westerna would have fainted strictly speaking. Never mind mere reaction of any by the likes of John Seward, Quincy Morris, Arthur Holmwood or Abraham Van Helsing. We saw bats!
There was a flat area of grass near the house under the big hickory tree. Math, Soldier and Allusion propped up their summer’s tent there in Math’s backyard.
If anything the tree reminded the boys of the air-refresher Math’s father always used in the car they all had been in after their baseball practices.
They were next seen carrying in a night worth of food.
About the property of Math’s backyard there had been a fence with wall-to-wall climbing plants and his mother’s flowers. Growing and living samples from different parts of the world Math’s mother explains this is the horticulture making home one of leisure. They are just simple forms of their small plots of land or vegetables, in gardens or greenhouses.
Math brought out his comic books. He had a long list he wanted to bring down from his room but he took his favorites he will share. They crowded around the lantern operated on batteries. Light spilled over a pile of comics. Math had anxious hands to handle the first.
Soldier’s watch had said it was ten. Way past a boy’s normal bedtime. Listening to Math and the comic books had done its trick of making Soldier sleepy. It was getting late. He began yawning.
Then Soldiers eyes were feeling heavy and occasionally were drooping. The next time he looked at his wristwatch it had budged one minute past ten. Anxiety.
Allusion crouched against a rolled up section of his sleeping bag. It was big and heavy and he had his pillow already stuck inside it. He moved far to one side leaning out while still in his bag. He had flattened popped corn kernels spill out from the open zipper of his sleeping bag. He could hear a slight crinkling noise from an empty potato flavor chip bag under him.
He almost seemed to stop in motion. He was trying to concentrate on Math and the strangeness of sleeping in his tent late at night; even though they were just outside a house.
The discussions had switched from war stories to Tron to Super League. Back to Looney Tunes and now and again to comic Daffy Duck. Daffy was in a haunted house. His story spoke for itself. Really there were no such things as vampires. Although Daffy was really a duck even if his feather were smooth as ink and even if he was a carton. But most everything else didn’t have that much more realism.
Math had remembered to bring his favorite comic. It was on the bottom. A half full moon shone a bright casting light through the tent nylon. The crickets chirped and quietly died. Then a cat somersaulted somewhere across the backyard lawn disappearing into the night. The evening’s noise around the backyard deadened to stillness in the tent. Even Soldier lay still. Probably fallen asleep. Math had to bring out his favorite comic. It was none other than a piece of resistance. The man called Morbius.
The comic book looked like it had been worn thin on the edges. A second hand copy no doubt. A very old issue in an old series before they were born. The story had taken sudden shape to appear written about true events of history. There was a gallant looking man perhaps he was a Viking or Nordic with a pretty woman lying below the shaded forest of a toppled over hallow tree. They were obviously talking of romance. They were suddenly interrupted. They hadn’t then lasted much longer because the man called Moribus ate them as do all vampires; they wilily drain blood from their willy-nilly victims.
Allusion didn’t mean to interrupt Math’s retelling of the slain likeness of the Viking character in the story, but he kept hearing strange screeching noises outside for a while. Could it have been a stranded dog off a leash and lost nearby as he first presumed? It had gotten clearer or closer since the crickets stopped suddenly.
The screeching was clearer and was very eerie while making Allusion uncomfortable. It now sounded totally different. It hadn’t sounded like screams before but now it suddenly did.
Both Math and Allusion looked bewildered towards each other. Math’s heart began racing. They popped there heads outside of the tent and saw the screeching came from flying bats overhead.
They rushed to the end of the backyard and climbed up a post of the fence to get a better look. They could hear the screaming. Math’s bracelet made a clinking noise against the metal fencing. The medical bracelet he wears to warn of his asthma.
He had to wear a medical bracelet. It was the reason he was only allowed to camp outside if he had been with friends. Now he found he was looking over the tall fence and could see the neighboring house. He could see a house and a falling wall of nylon like their tent but collapsing. In the terror stricken moments he could also see the girls racing around in their pajamas in a panic. They put out a Hitachi BBQ, the smoke and smolder rolled into the night air. The next door must have lit it to roast marshmallows in midnight.
Math then recognized one of the running girls. She was stopping to take down a telescope from its tripod and packing it into a bag. There were enormous bats screeching in the air above them. bats attempting to fly from tree to another. The newborn bats thinking they were birds and with the half moon brightness had made them easily visible. And half moon estranged.
More of Arthur's Writing: http://www.goodreads.com/story/list/7353...
More stories from this contest: http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/1243...
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