12 Kilos...You better run
Figures
Garrett doesn’t remember getting up from the small kitchen table and navigating the narrow pathway to the settee. He doesn’t remember sitting down and trying to navigate more of the trashy fiction novel he’s most recently fixated on. He doesn’t even remember settling in and pulling the musty smelling blanket over himself in order to sleep.
One moment Garrett was bidding the ancient a good night and watching her slowly working her way down the hallway to her room, and the next he is standing in the cold, the snow is coming down in rigid, icy sheets being driven by an unforgiving wind.
Looking down will be pointless, the hands will be thin and small and brown, the spindly arms attached will announce what Garrett is already assured of. He is once again stuck in a child’s body, his body so very long ago. The frigid cold reminds him that he doesn’t have much on but that hardly matters, the ice and snow aren’t going to be his undoing. He can already see the figure out there in the darkness, its far away enough to look smaller than it is but that doesn’t fool Garrett this time. He remembers the inhuman growl from the last nightmare, the way the figure chased him, hungrily.
Garrett doesn’t want to discover what awaits him under that hood.
Hoods.
Garrett turns away from the figure, to the west, always and forever to the west. He knows that if he walks that way, no runs, if he runs that way, he might just run far enough that he can outrun the horrors of the nightmare just like he ran out of the ruins of his old village and its many horrors.
Another figure stands near a collection of spindly pines, the outfit and stance are identical. This figure is near the trail that Garrett was planning to use to make his escape. He dares to keep still and peer carefully through the flurries of snow and he sees more, two more, no four, maybe six or ten. The figures are all around him and its all Garrett can do not to run blindly in terror. There is no point in running of course, and no hope in standing still as Garrett sees the first figure begin to advance either. What starts as a determined walk quickly devolves into a lopping jog as the figure gets closer and Garrett can hear it snarling over the sounds of the wind and the freezing sheets of falling ice.
Garrett runs, just as fast as his small legs will let him and he makes his way to the west, doesn’t he always? The figure standing near the trail doesn’t move, at first. For a few brief and hopeful moments, the figure doesn’t even seem to notice that Garrett is there but as he gets closer it growls like an angry dog with its paw caught in a trap and Garrett pivots and nearly runs into a tree before he regains his momentum.
The run is flat out, heart racing, hands pumping back and forth in the air as though they might grab onto some invisible bar that will propel the nightmare child body just that much farther out westward, the snow and ice steadily falling are new, the snow already fallen is also new, that is very good news, the stuff is unsteady to be sure but it isn’t treacherous or ankle deep in most places, not yet. Garrett feels his shoed feet digging into every bit of the frosty earth as they should while he digs himself into the landscape one agonizing step at a time.