An Eternity of Eclipse (45 page)

As I lay on the cold asphalt, my skull feeling as if it was about to split open, I could feel the weight of his body on my back, holding me captive underneath him. The pungent smell of alcohol attacked my nostrils, making me more aware of the perversion coursing out of him. I could feel his disgusting eyes roam over my quivering body.

“You stupid bitch,” his deep, raspy voice taunted. His revolting fingers began to run up my jean-clad legs, fondling me and causing me to shudder in revulsion. “You trying to be a hero?” A cruel and sickening smile threaded his voice. “I’ll show you what kind of hero you are.”

He tugged at my wrist and attempted to pick me up to no doubt drag me into a dark corner and rape me before officially killing me. At that realization, I could feel another surge of survival instincts flood through me.
No.
I wasn’t going to go down like this.
No way in hell.
I didn’t care that I wasn’t a martial arts expert, I didn’t care that I wasn’t the strongest girl in the world, and I didn’t care that I was fighting a losing battle. As far as I was concerned, I had two hands, two legs, and a brain—I wasn’t going down without a fight.

“Get away from me!” I screamed at the top of my lungs. I whipped around without warning and clamped my mouth over the hand that held my wrist. My teeth buried into the meat of his skin.  

“Ahhhh!”

I did not hold back. With all the force I could generate, I bit down even harder.

My teeth punctured through his flesh, causing him to scream while I tasted his blood. His grip on me loosened substantially, and I started to do everything that I could to fight him off. I wiggled uncontrollably, punched him, elbowed him, and kneed him repeatedly—basically anything and everything I could do to defend myself. When I was finally able to unhook my wrist from his grasp, I lifted my hand and plunged my perfectly manicured fingernails into his eyes, causing him to cover them with an anguished scream.

Finally.

With my frightened heart pounding profusely against my constricted chest, I gathered all the remaining strength I had once I was finally free of him. I picked up my feet and was ready to make my escape when—

Slash!

Something cold and sharp made contact with the flesh of my back. The razor sharp blade cut through the meat of my body like fabric, causing me to tumble almost lifelessly to the ground.

Boom!

“Augh . . .”

Paralyzed from head to toe, nothing but pain ravaged me as I laid on the damp road. The wound behind me was so long and big that I could feel the cold draft swim in and chafe the fragile meat and bones buried deep under my skin. I couldn’t even make a sound because the sensation was so unbearable.

Bam!

“Augh!”

I wasn’t given a moment of reprieve when a strong boot connected with my ribcage, sending me flying onto my back.

Swallowing past the pain, it took all the strength I had to open my tired eyes to stare up at my attacker. He was towering over me now, like a monster in the night. Blood spilled from the areas around his eyes where I attacked him. He was angry. He was so angry at me and at all the plans that I had foiled for him. I knew then that he was done with me—he wasn’t going to let me live any longer.

“Please,” I breathed out desperately, looking at him with tears shrouding my eyes. “Please don’t.”

His reply was merely a cold, emotionless smile that told me he was beyond human emotions. He was simply a sadistic man who was about to perform one of the most unforgivable acts a human being could bestow upon another human being.

He was going to kill me.

Slowly and very painfully . . . he was going to kill me.

A haunting thought came into my woozy mind in this excruciating state: this was how my family must’ve felt when I stabbed them—when I killed them.
This
was the fear they felt, the agony they experienced, the injustice they were faced with when a heartless monster stole their lives from them. Tonight, whether it was coincidence or destiny, I was going to suffer, just as I made my family suffer before they died.

I closed my eyes briefly, willing myself to stop thinking about my family, their death, and my biggest sin in life. What use was it to think about their death when mine was just around the corner? At this rationale, I pushed the blasphemous thoughts aside and went back to the only thing that mattered in my life: me, my own well-being, and the monster that was threatening my very existence.

I opened my eyes again and stared up helplessly, knowledge embedded in my eyes for I knew what was coming for me.

Death.

I watched him grip the long butcher knife and raise it in the air. The blade continued to drip with the blood he had slashed from my back moments prior. The silver knife twinkled under the illumination of the moon suspended above us, its glint taunting me and my helpless state. Then, just as I felt the first raindrop of the evening descend onto my eyelid,
as if shedding tears for me
, the man plunged his knife down towards my hyperventilating chest and—

“Ugh!”

I gasped.  

The pain that consumed me was unlike anything I had ever experienced. The razor-sharp tip of the knife stabbed through my chest, its cold and ravenous blade eating away at the flesh of my body. It slid down to a hilt before it was roughly pulled back out, leaving behind nothing but excruciating agony. I thought I was in pain before, but it was nothing compared to what I was currently feeling.

The gaping hole in the middle of my chest was exposed, the iciness of the drizzling rain streaming into the wound and reminding me, with every cold drip, how much pain I was in. It was so excruciating that I couldn’t even gather the strength to scream. I had no more energy to do anything but feel the unshed tears gather in my eyes. The pain became all-consuming.

It hurts to even breathe . . .

And the man wouldn’t stop.

As the rain began to pour relentlessly from the Heavens above and as my soft and pained breathing filtered into the cold air, he raised the knife again. He smiled sadistically at me, his eyes unblinking with diabolical rage.

Then—

“Ugh!”

The second stab to my chest caused me to lurch my body up like I was caught in a wave. Tears escaped from the corner of my eyes before the third stab came to my stomach, leaving me to gasp at the most unbearable of agonies. Again and again he would stab, and again and again, I could feel the cold metal slicing apart the flesh of my body, the blade hitting and scraping my bones each time. With every stab, I could feel my blood stream out, mating with the rain and chorusing after my hoarse breathing. Nothing but torture pillaged the nerves on my petite body.

At that moment, I wanted to die.

I wanted to die so that I could no longer feel pain; I wanted to die so that I no longer had to suffer through this torture.

Please let me die
, I willed my body, telling it to stop fighting so that I could be relieved from all this misery.
Please let me die.

My vision became hazier as the blood continued to seep from my body. From this, I knew that death was coming for me soon.

Boom!

As I began to feel my own life drift away from me, a loud clap of thunder suddenly resonated from the dark skies. At that same second, I could feel the earth beneath me begin to shake subtly. From the corner of my eye, I vaguely saw my blood mixing with rainwater. It streaked across the cement and dripped into the drain storms. Above us, rain continued to torrent down like a monsoon. I looked around and I could feel terror creep into me because even in my dying state, I could have sworn that my mind wasn’t playing tricks on me.

The ground . . . it was
really
beginning to shake.

Unbeknownst to him about what was happening, Sony’s dad came into view, his shirt and face completely covered with splatters of my blood. Even the rain wasn’t powerful enough to wash it down.

With a vicious smile, as if to silently say, “You should’ve minded your own business,” he lifted my left hand up. I knew that before leaving me for dead, he wanted to take my gold bangles away from me. When he saw that there was no clasp to release the bangles from my possession, he lifted the bloodied butcher knife with his other hand. Without any regard to the fact that I was still breathing beneath him, he began to saw the knife over my wrist, hell-bent on cutting my entire hand off just to get my bangles.

“Auuuuugh . . .”

I heaved painfully for air, trembling when the merciless knife began sawing my flesh and bone. I could feel the darkness begin to shroud over me, to finally take me away from all this despair. Peace was just on the horizon until I heard something that had me feeling more awake than I’d like to feel.

Sounds of water bubbling.

Sounds of water . . . boiling?

Clearly hearing the same sound, Sony’s dad ceased his sawing. His focused shifted to the side where the boiling sound originated. Whatever he saw unnerved him greatly because I could see his pupils enlarge in utter panic.

Shadowing after his gaze, I tilted my head slightly over the rain-strewn road. Bewilderment greeted my eyes when I saw that in the large circumference area around us—all the area that was mixed with my blood—there was steam rising out of it. Yet, what baffled me more was what occurred beneath the steam: boiling water.

It wasn’t my imagination.

The water was actually boiling.

Pop.

Pop.

Pop.

It first started off in the far border of the circle, then the boiling began to move in closer—the sound becoming stronger and the boiling becoming more potent.

Pop.

Pop.

Pop.

As if the heat had been turned up in the earth’s furnace, the big circular puddle around us was now bubbling like volcanic lava. All the while as this took place, the streetlights started flickering ominously.

I had never seen anything like this in my life.

The massive boiling water moved in closer and closer to my body until—

“Ahhhhhhh!”

I whipped my head towards Sony’s dad after I heard him scream.

The shock left me stupefied when I saw that steam had started to ascend from the splatters of blood on his face.

I gasped, absolutely horrified.

After that, in a sequential order, just as the ground continued to rumble faintly, the blood on his face began to sizzle and burn into his skin. In perfect harmony, the lava-like boiling increased violently while the streetlights continued to flicker furiously.

Pop.

Pop.

Pop.

Rainwater inflated into bubbles as huge as rhinos before it dissolved and another took its place. Oh God. No matter how afraid I was of what was happening around me, all I could do was look up in horror as Sony’s dad’s screams became more prominent and earsplitting.

“Ahhhhhhhhhhh!”

Sizzling mercilessly, the splatters of blood on his face started eating away at the skin. Unable to withstand the pain, he dropped my hand and stumbled backwards. The skin on his face started melting away like he had been splashed with industrial strength acid. The whole time he screamed, all I could do was shake in fear because I could feel the blistering water bubble beneath me, searing into the wounds of my own skin.

His screams stopped, and when I heard his lifeless body fall on the ground across from mine, I knew that he was either dead, unconscious, or very close to being dead.

I quivered under the rainstorm. My heart palpitated relentlessly, and as a result, my blood started to seep further into the ground.

Pop.

Pop.

Pop.

The lava-like boiling grew worse in the deserted street around me. It continued to fight against the pouring rain while the popping sounds inundated my hearing. It became so powerful that the fumes from the boiling water, which was mixed with my blood, began to ascend into the air. The fumes maneuvered around each droplet of rain and rose towards the skies like burning incense. Once it appeared as though the strings of smoke had penetrated the clouds in the sky and my boiling blood had trickled into the pits of the earth, something astronomical happened.

Boooooom!

Violent claps of thunder shook the earth and caused everything around me to vibrate. It felt as though the sky was bellowing in agony while the rumbles from the earth beneath me felt as though it was cheering in excitement.

At the same time as all this chaos took place, I couldn’t help but cry because I was so afraid. I could no longer feel my body. All I felt was pain. All I felt was fear.

What . . . what was happening?

It was only when the thundering became more violent and when the rumbling of the world beneath me became stronger that another strange anomaly occurred.

My blood. It all started to stream
back
to me.

In the far distance of the road, from beneath the soils of the earth, from the pools around me, and from the blood on the man’s body . . . my blood, akin to having a life of its own,
moved together in various sequential lines like snakes. A sense of single-mindedness clouded my blood as each string of steaming blood fought rain and wind to return to me.