~

~

~

~

She stared across the room at her computer, which sat on the small table placed by the open window. Outside it was downcast, almost rainy. Hence why Aly was staring at her computer and the precarious position it was in.

Alyona wanted to go liberate the computer from possibly becoming wet and ruined but she didn't want to get up off the couch.

Suddenly a thunderclap rang out across the city and Alyona found herself somewhere else entirely.

The room was cold. Everything was cold. The woman lay on the mattress, her eyes wide.

Alyona stared, looking around, trying to figure out how in the world she had ended up wherever she is now.

The woman's eyes were glazed, she stared blankly out into the large room.

The space reminded Aly of a church, a little more bedraggled than a church was supposed to be. The pews had collapsed and the cross that normally hung was laying on the ground, abandoned. The building was in ruin and seemingly as abandoned as it could possibly be. Except for the woman, who sat up, with a jolt.

The woman stared, right into Aly's eyes.

Then,

BANG

A gunshot. The woman was gone.

Alyona stared at the computer. Where had the woman gone? What the hell did she just see?

Something was terribly wrong, she could feel it. Whatever it was that she just saw was so incredibly wrong and jarring that it struck her to her core.

Alyona jumped up off the couch and grabbed the computer, pulling it away from the drops of water that began to fall through the open window. She slammed the window shut, almost aggressively, running to her bedroom to plug in the device in her hands.

What she had witnessed, whatever it was, had given her a strange sort of violent energy. She turned, lashing out to the side, her hand punching into the wall.

~

~

~

~

It was dark outside. The thin light of the moon sliced through the space between the curtains and the window. Javier sat at his kitchen table, the files all spread out in front of him.

He stared at the photographs, the pictures of the men, all splayed out and dead. Javier sighed, taking a sip of his coffee. He wrapped his hands around the mug, staring at the witness testimonies.

This is what humans did when they hated each other.

A sharp sound rang out, it might have been a car backfiring, or maybe even a gunshot, but it transported Javier somewhere else.

He stared at the woman. Her blonde hair splayed out around her head as Javier did his best not to cry. She was so thin, so awful looking.

Javier looked around the building, finding that it reminded him of the churches his mother used to take him to as a child. La cruzar lay on the floor instead of on the wall behind the altar as it was supposed to be.

The woman lay on a mattress where the altar would be.

Javier had a horrible feeling about this.

The woman sat up so quickly that Javier almost pulled back in shock, but he couldn't move, something was keeping him right where he stood.

The woman stared right into Javier's eyes with her own blank eyes.

She brought her hand up to her head, a pistol in hand.

BANG.

He dropped the mug and it crashed against the tile kitchen floor. Javier stood abruptly, eyes dashing toward every object in the room. "What the fuck," he whispered to himself.

The mug had shattered.

There was spilt coffee all over the floor.

Javier sighed, feeling this sense of exhausted energy wash over him. He gingerly stepped towards the dish towels, avoiding the broken ceramic and coffee. This could be cleaned.

~

~

~

~

The cursor blinked on the document, waiting for Lizzie to actually type something. This was meant to be a big scene between two characters where one reveals their love for the other. Lizzie was nervous to write it, nervous enough that she impulsively shut the laptop and set it aside.

She stood up off the couch and moved towards the open window of the house. Lizzie never thought that she'd make it off the property and, well, she was right. Grandma Debbie needed someone to take care of her and no one else was going to do it. It all fell on Lizzie's shoulders.

A crash sounded from the other room and, while Lizzie's brain was telling her to run over to where she knew her Grandmother was, she froze still as a statue.

Lizzie had been to church many times. The layout of the room was incredibly familiar to her but the cobwebs and tossed over pews were almost painful to look at.

What was even worse to Lizzie's eyes was the thin woman laying on a stained mattress in the middle of the room. She knew what it looked like when someone needed help and this woman, she needed help.

She opened her mouth to speak but nothing came out, Lizzie was well and truly frozen.

The woman sat up, almost abruptly and Lizzie's body wanted nothing more than to jerk away from the scarecrow woman. She watched in rapt horror as the woman raised some sort of gun to her forehead and–

BANG

Lizzie jerked around, her body finally back in her control.

"Ellie!" Grandma Debbie yelled from the other room. "My record player slipped off the desk, would you be a dear and come pick it up?"

She sighed, yanking the window shut almost aggressively. "Sure, Grandma."

~

~

~

~

Motherfucker. Gloria wanted to scream at the top of her lungs as smoke billowed out of the stove, she tried to bat it away with a towel but to no avail. The oven was quickly pulled open and Gloria stared, unfeeling, at the burnt-to-a-crisp casserole.

Mikey, their brother, was going to be home soon. Gloria placed the casserole on the counter and covered it with the towel she still held in her hand. It would be a surprise for Mikey if he actually came home tonight.

She pulled out her phone to order takeout from 'nibbles,' a restaurant that was just down the road. Gloria paused, did she really want to wait for food she could just walk to get?

The answer was no.

They grabbed their coat off the rack by the door and moved to grab their keys but, instead of grabbing them properly, the keys slipped out of Gloria's hands and smacked against the tile floor, making the strangest clinky sound.

Damn, was Gloria's first thought. This woman must be on some sort of heroin or meth because she was thin as all hell. Now, being thin is completely fine and normal but what's not normal is looking like an absolute skeleton wearing a badly constructed meat-suit.

The church was definitely a church. Gloria tried to reach out and stroke some of the dust off the tipped over pew next to their body but was unable to move at all.

The woman jerked forward and Gloria almost gasped at the empty, haunted, look in this woman's eyes. It was awful and Gloria almost stopped breathing, stuck in her gaze.

Gloria watched as the woman's arm raised up, a gun in her hand.

BANG

When Gloria could think again she was sitting on the floor, her hand wrapped around her keys and her jacket pooling around her.

They wiped the few tears that had appeared in the corners of their eyes. Gloria took stock of how she was feeling, of what she just saw and realized that she was tired. Not just tired, Gloria was exhausted, as if she hadn't slept in days.

Throwing off her jacket, Gloria went to go sit down and order food online, it was less social interaction anyway.