Fan Fiction ❯ Chain Link Fence ❯ Chapter 1/1 ( One-Shot )

[ A - All Readers ]

A piercing scream echoed in the night, shrill and desperate. It came from a girl with dark brown hair and hazy gray eyes. A girl fighting something from her darkest nightmares, all for the prize of keeping her life for another day.

But nobody heard the scream, nobody but the thing that seemed to glide towards her. It's cold laughter caused her to run harder, faster, but even then, she knew there wasn't a chance anymore. It was going to kill her, and there wasn't anything she could do.

'Stop thinking like that! There has to be a way, you just have to find it!' Those words echoed in her mind, and she observed her surroundings as best as she could while running. It had driven her onto the road beside the local elementary school.

And among her panic driven thoughts, a memory of a winter morning when she was a kid flashed by her eyes. The fence had been frozen, she remembered, covered in a thick bar of ice that made it hard to climb over.

But her friends had dared her to do it anyway, knowing it was slippery. They had been but children at the time.. She had fallen, cracking her head on the concrete. A week of hospital care had followed.

Even now, when she was fighting for her life, she couldn't help but smile. She missed being a child, back in the days when an adult could fight off anything she feared. When they were her protectors. Back when the biggest thing on her mind was wondering if she could get a cookie from her teacher if she was good.
'They say when you're about to die, your life flashes before your eyes. Is this it?' She wondered, the irony of the whole thing stopping her in her tracks.

The thing following her stopped a few meters away from her, just out of the street light, and just stared at her. And she stared back, trying to see it's face in the shadows of the night. Another memory seemed to flash behind her eyes, of her father, and the day he left.

She tried to close her eyes, but it was as though he wasn't in control of her own body anymore. And maybe, in a way, she wasn't. She was held trapped in her own mind, held down by her own memories as they assaulted her, and she watched them again and again. Reliving those moments in her life she would have preferred to forget.

The death of her little brother, the betrayal of her fiancé, the fire she had set...that took both the lives of her parents just the former summer...

The thing that had chased her stepped forward, and she almost screamed in pure fear as her brother's dead eyes stared at her. She blinked, and fell to her knees as she seemed to regain control of her body.
She looked back up at the thing, and gasped.

How could she have thought those were her brothers eyes, when it was so obviously the burned dead thing that had been her mother after the fire. She closed her eyes, and curled into a ball on the side walk, terror of opening her eyes absolute.

But eventually open them she did, and she found herself staring at the chain link fence again, the thick bars of ice that covered each wire exactly like the ones from her childhood, down to the blood that dripped from the link in front of her, where she had hit her head so any years ago.

And for the second time that night, she screamed, tears running down her cheek still.



Two days later, a paper landed on the doorstep of her home, where she still had a subscription.
The front headline read with strange clarity.


' Small town movie star found dead outside local elementary school. Details inside.'