Green?

In a matter of seconds as the pain subsided behind my eyes, I opened them and watched the world flood, not with water, but with color. After I sneezed, everything in sight shifted to green—from the parking lot to the sky beyond, even the people running into the parking lot, their hasty exit from the apartment building prompted by the wailing in the hallways—the fire alarm. It was what jerked me awake from a dead sleep on the closet floor, where a violent late night storm had driven me, in terror, from my bed around 2 a.m. The world had been the correct colors before I burst from the closet and threw open the window to stand in a wash of brilliant, nasal-tweaking morning sunshine.

The urgency of the fire alarm abruptly cut off, and I was left rubbing at my eyes, hoping it would correct the color. The effort failed. What the heck? Why am I seeing in only greens? And why won't it go away?

Sucking in a distressed breath, I leaned on the windowsill as I waited for my green-tinted vision to adjust to the sunlight bouncing off the asphalt ten stories below. It was hot outside, arid. I didn't see any signs of smoke. People continued to gather in the parking lot. Four more exited the building, their pace slow now, unconcerned. A group of teens, who looked to be about my age, stood in a laughing cluster and shoved each other around, and something inside of me eased. Would they use the fire alarm for anything other than an emergency? A fire drill perhaps? We'd only moved in earlier this week, so I didn't know. Maybe the neighbors were getting together to barbecue—a shady looking man did have an oversized spatula held dramatically high in one hand. As sunlight flashed off the cooking utensil, the guy held it with the food-flipping end pointed toward the building. He was poised there, almost waiting for some sort of signal.

"Somebody's still in there! A girl is trapped on the top floor!" A woman in the crowd yelled and pointed.

Spatula man followed her frantic gesturing and looked up at me, then he brought the spatula down, and several stories below, the building shook with a blast, blowing out windows.

Holy crap! I spun away from the window and bolted to the center of the apartment I shared with my aunt. She wasn't here. She was out for an absurdly early meeting with a client, safely at a coffee shop across the road. Lucky her. I paced in a tight circle, unsure of what to do. Clearly, evacuating the building would have been the best course of action from the start. Are the floors below even intact enough to safely escape? I stopped my frantic pacing and looked down, blinking rapidly when a stronger wash of color hit my sight. A dizzying, vertigo-inducing green. My watering eyes fixated on the green, but not green, floorboards swimming underneath me, making the solid floor seem almost translucent.

The wailing cries of distant sirens freed me from my transfixion. What should I do? Ignoring the green, I wrapped my arms around myself, feeling helpless—and then the real fun began. The apartment started to shake, furniture rattling and appliances falling off the counters. Yelping, I struggled to stay upright, fending off the mental image of something big burrowing up through the earth, searching for the surface.

The trembling subsided. I sucked in a breath, only to let out a squeal as another tremor shook the building, and a buildup of adrenaline drove me to get moving—now!

I flung the door open and took off, bare feet slapping as I ran down the green-washed hallway in my pajamas. I ran for the stairs at the far side of the building but stopped dead in my tracks when I came to the stairwell door and found it closed, locked, and entirely uncooperative. What nitwit closed this! It shouldn't be locked! The door's lone window was just above my head. Panic growing, I cried out in fear and tugged on the handle as the low, guttural groan of steel, glass, and concrete under extreme distress reverberated down the corridor. The vibrating window above me shattered and I lost my balance and fell. Scrambling on broken glass, I wedged myself into the corner as the wall across the hallway convulsed. Oh god, the building's coming apart.

The doors along the hallway blew off their hinges. Letting out a high-pitched scream as debris ricocheted around me, I fell silent when another blast followed right after the first. A portion of the top floor, along with my apartment, vanished, everything solid blown away in one surreal moment. I must have passed out, coming to just in time to welcome a painful hailstorm of rubble and a sharp ache behind my eyes.

As the dust began to settle enough to make out what remained, I held my pajama top to my nose. Legs trembling, I stood. Everything was back to its normal colors now; the pressure of the blast having purged my eyesight of the odd green tint. The lights were out, though somehow the ceiling remained largely intact, the blast having traveled outward, not upward. Daylight, harsh and brilliant, streamed in. The hallway I was in had been Swiss-cheesed, so I could see in through the holes in the walls to the twisted wreckage of the surrounding apartments. God, I hope everyone else had gotten out. Several steel I-beams were now exposed through the gaps in the upper level. I let go of my pajama top. With my back pressed to the still standing stairwell door, my attention went to the remaining dust cloud as it settled with an unnatural speed. The clear air shimmered with what appeared to be heat waves rolling off sun-baked pavement, but it wasn't hot.

I stood there panicking. I could run, the floor in front of me looked stable enough, but I couldn't bring myself to run headlong toward the—the thing standing in my way as it gained shape without taking on a visible form. A translucent, monstrous figure. What the hell was that?

I was cornered. The shimmering mass loomed in front of me. I watched as its barely seen form shifted to one side, and a small hole exploded in the wall behind me when the thing threw an imperceptible strike. Surprise zinged through me as I realized I was unhurt; somehow, I dodged the punch. My untouched state was short-lived though, as its next piston-like strike connected hard with my side. I was flung across the hallway, coming to an abrupt stop as I hit something solid with a sickening crack.

Stunned and unable to move, I gasped several times, splayed out on the floor as the world vibrated. Something was different though...this renewed shaking...it wasn't the fractured building. Horrified, I moaned and flexed my fingers, the only thing I could move. These tremors were coming from inside of me!

The odd sensation intensified. The filth littering the floor quivered against my cheek, in sync with my core-deep shudder. Trapped in my personal earthquake, I could only pant as my phantom attacker towered above me.

An odorless, snuffling breath washed over me. I whimpered as an unseen nose nudged me on my side, the creature steadying me with what felt like a hoof pressing to my hip. I gritted my teeth as the pressure of its huge, dry tongue ran slowly up the length of my arm as if savoring the flavor, like getting a good taste of the candy-coated outside, before its jaw closed on my shoulder biting down, hard, causing me to gasp. The pain of it raced through my body like all-consuming fire. Blood. There was so much of it. A dark, hot wetness poured from the wounds, as if there was no mass to the teeth that gripped me, nothing to block the flow. A hoarse moan escaped me as I was lifted from the floor, dangling like a well-worn chew toy, and then, with no regard for the trail of red his chew toy was dribbling, my new invisible friend turned with me in his mouth to make his merry way over an exposed I-beam.

"Stop it!" I choked out, a fresh bout of panic taking me as it maneuvered me into the beam's groove. The metal shuddered against my skin as my internal trembling seemed to transfer to it, the tremors spreading throughout the building to produce an ominous wobble.

Let go of me! I gurgled and spat, droplets flying through the shimmering air of its non-existent head. The spittle hit the opposite wall with tiny red splats and a guttural snarl rose from the beast. Not the smartest action on my part. Apparently, I just pissed off my new best buddy. Darn. And we had been getting along so swimmingly. His painful grip on my shoulder tightened, and he put all his ire into crushing me.

My vision darkened, leaving me with only the thick metallic taste of blood on my tongue and my perfect ears with which to hear my raspy screams and the creaking of my bones. Outside, the wind mirrored my anguish. It whipped at the ruined building, shrieking, as if trying to smash through its tattered walls and come to my rescue. Thunder boomed in the far distance, sounding like some angered god. Its outrage grew louder as if something was approaching, flying fast.

The ceiling let out a tearing groan, and with a strong blast of air, the grip of my attacker was suddenly gone, knocked from me with a short scuffling and a rise of hot odor. Electricity?

No longer pinned, my broken body fell, but the impact of the floor never came. A soft swooshing filled the corridor and two arms caught me. In a moment of held breath and complete silence, I was cradled before being lowered to the ground. Someone's trembling fingers pressed against my neck. The pressure of the touch faded, sounds faded, and then... nothing.

Awareness filled me anew, flooding painfully back. A sigh of relief reached me when my heart leapt under a palm pressed to my chest, the life in me pounding with urgency. My shoulder was a raging fire, my back and front sticky with blood. With the hallway groaning around us, arms slid under me to take me to safety, but I cried out in pain. Easing me back down, my pajama shirt was lifted, and I heard a masculine gasp.

Soft fingers ran the length of my left side from my hip, over my ribs, stopping just short of my breast, examining the damage from the fierce strike that had thrown me into the wall. A quiet sob slipped from my rescuer.

"I am so sorry, Aurora," he said, voice earnest, lowering my shirt to cover the evidence of my beating. "I won't ever...ever allow this happen to you again. I swear it."

He eased gentle arms under me once more, this time succeeding in lifting me. I struggled to say something. I wanted with all my heart to be able to tell him not to worry over me. This was in no way his fault. How could it be when I didn't even recognize the voice? The deep cadence of it so smooth, a flowing of milk over sweet honey. What I wouldn't give to have him speak to me some more, to talk to me for hours.

I wanted to look up into the face of my rescuer, but my eyes were useless, sealed shut with filth and tears. It took all I had left to say the words, "I'll be fine."

A light wind buffeted us, and then with a rush of air, the sound of traffic on the nearby interstate magnified. The air was fresh, clean, desert hot. The closeness of his breath coming and going told me his face was very near mine. We were outside now. But how? How had he managed to get us out of the building, and so quickly? None of it made any sense!

"I'll...be fine," I managed again.

With a guarded tenderness, he surprised me when he pressed lips to my forehead—carefully—his hot breath smelling strangely of electricity as he replied, "Yeah, that's what you always say," and then he lowered me to the radiant heat of the parking lot, where he paused to arrange my hair about my upturned face, as if tangled hair mattered.

The kind gesture made me want to reach for him. I wanted to ask, "How do you know what I always say?"

Brushing my cheek with a lingering touch, an unhappy growl slipped from him when, in the distance, my aunt's vehicle revved with impatience. After that, I couldn't sense him. He was gone.

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