Secondary
Lily stopped and tried to catch her breath, unable to keep running from the monster. She listened for it, and heard… Nothing at all. Had she gotten away from it? Could she be safe from the thing that had killed her husband, that she had lured away from her children? She had heard it coming up behind her when she started to run, coming closer fast, and then – it should have caught up to her. But it hadn’t. And she’d kept running, and running, unable to hear it anymore.
“Oh god,” she breathed out, “No.” She ran again, feeling light headed from the exertion, all the way to the Holiheads’ home.
Delia sipped the hot chocolate, surrounded by concerned people with haunted eyes. There were four families hiding in the Holiheads’ home, most of whom had woken up when Delia started pounding on the door and screaming.
Roger had fallen asleep again, and Anna was crying on the shoulder of Miranda Holihead, the kindly old woman called ‘Grandmother Holihead’ by many of the locals, who seemed to know (and like) them all.
Delia herself was in shock, her mind had put off dealing with what happened and was still trying to avoid it. Instead, she tried to remember the layout of the Holihead house, the central room with a fireplace, which was roaring away, furniture covered with people all around. The TV had been removed from the corner and a barbeque set up in its place, on which water had been warmed in a pot for her. There were other rooms on all sides, and the only window was a skylight in the roof. Candles had been carefully placed to illuminate the room.
She remembered the entrance room which she had just come in through, and the kitchen and dining rooms to one side, the bedrooms and study to the other, with a laundry room and spare room opposite the front entrance, doors to each side of the fireplace. She was starting to feel sleepy, so she said so and was lain down with a blanket. She quickly fell asleep.
Lily collapsed, exhausted, about a kilometre and a half away from the Holiheads’. She had pushed herself so hard that she fell unconscious, and remained that way for almost an hour before she came to. When she awoke, she got to her feet, and started to run again.
Delia was woken up by a lot of noise at once. Three different windows were shattered, and the rifle carried by one of those on watch was fired. Someone screamed, and a man stumbled in through one of the side doors, bleeding from long claw marks. Everyone woke up quickly, and then through the door from behind the man leapt a werewolf, almost as tall as the ceiling and broader than the doorway.
One of the men ran at it with an axe, but with a flash of its arm his throat was torn out. Another one entered from the other side, claws and mouth bloodstained, and a third threw a bloody human leg from the front entrance as it stepped in.
A few had already made it through to the back entrance, and a few had grabbed whatever weapons they had brought, and held them ready to strike. Delia, near the fire, finally got up and ran through the nearest door, trying to escape.
She had run into the spare room, she realised with a shock of fear. She kept running, through another doorway into one of the bedrooms. The room’s window was shattered, and behind her she heard a cacophony of screams and snarls. She jumped onto the bed, and then out through the window, landing on her knees and digging small stones from the path into her hand.
She yelped in pain, and then ran on into the dark.
Lily reached the house about forty minutes after that happened. She found the front door beaten down, and inside there were dead bodies strewn everywhere, lit by the fireplace that was still roaring away. She looked around fearfully for her children, but didn’t see anything she recognised as them. She gulped and closed her eyes, calming her stomach, then lit a candle and went through to the rear exit.
And there was Anna, her gut torn open by claws, curled up in a pool of blood. She looked wildly around the rest of the room, then pushed open the back door and went outside. There were more bodies outside, and she followed a trail of blood around the side of the house and into the woods, and found Grandmother Holihead dead on her back, her throat torn out. And not far from her lay Roger, Lily’s son. Lily dropped her candle, and fell to her knees, sobbing.
Delia ran into the trees that covered most of the Holihead land, unseen by the pair of werewolves near the back entrance who were waiting to surprise those that fled through it. She ran as far as she could, but she was already exhausted from earlier and couldn’t run far. She crawled underneath a tree with low lying branches which she could barely see in the darkness. She curled herself up, and starting shivering in fear.
Lily spent nearly twenty minutes crying before she went back inside to search for Delia. She nearly vomited when she went back in, and eventually did when she found a man she knew, Jason Holihead (one of Grandmother Holihead’s sons), torn in two and gnawed on. She eventually checked every single body with the light of a torch she found, but Delia was not there. She thought a couple of others might have escaped, too, as she recognised members of three different families, but she didn’t find everyone she expected to.
She had no idea where they had gone, though. It was getting early, she hadn’t slept and her clothes were covered in blood so she went into Grandmother Holihead’s bedroom – and on one of the shards stuck in the window’s frame was a torn piece of Delia’s dress.
Lily ran to the bed, and then looked out the window and saw skid patterns in the gravel path outside the window. Please, she thought, exchanging her bloodied clothes for clean ones that had belonged to Grandmother Holihead, Please.
Lily went out the back door and into the woods in clean clothes, torch shone ahead of her, adding some clarity to the predawn light. She walked in a straight line out from the window, shining the torch at every tree as she went. When she shone the torch at one, and Delia was there looking back at her, she thought Thank god.
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