Intense Cold

大寒 [5] / [13]

“Here you are?”

He bent down, doubled over by his nausea, and turned his head towards the door where her voice came from. Sarah stood reclining on the doorpost with her one arm hiding behind her back. Even though his sight was blurred and he couldn’t see her face clearly, he noticed that she was dressed in black, covered from her ankles to her neck, and she was beaming, judging by her oddly beady eyes framed with a wide grin.

“Who the hell are you? What the fuck is all this?”

His straining voice quivered as if being squeezed out, and sounded almost like a scream.

“Fuck?”

He saw her expression change in a brief moment. Her lips were like death, covering her white teeth at once. He felt the nausea getting worse. Sarah was not hiding her one arm anymore. She was holding something seemingly heavy. It looked like a hammer. But one with a short shaft that was not like anything Alexander had seen before. Sarah approached him methodically, one step at a time. It was obvious she knew what was going on in Alexander’s body.

“It would have been nice if you had just slept quietly. Why did you wander around a person’s house without permission?”

She stopped right in front of him, still bending down, and asked him with a kind tone as a mother's enlightening her son’s fault. But his instinct screamed within him with a prodigious roar, urging him that he must escape her presence immediately. Just then . . .

“YOU RUINED EVERYTHING, YOU SON OF THE BITCH!”

She let out a horrible beast-like shriek, striking a blow on his head with the hammer held in her hand. He threw himself aside reflexively. The short shaft hammer was much faster than his reflexes allowed. If he would have been off by only one second, his skull might have been split. His whole body felt cold by the hammer’s touch brushing against his ear.

But Sarah never stopped, screaming like a crazy animal, attacking him again. He kicked her hard, but his body, which was under the influence of some nasty chemical reaction, didn’t move as his thoughts willed. His foot couldn’t land a clear blow on her. He withstood her assault, holding Sarah’s wrists, who never gave up in her efforts to attack him, and took away her hammer narrowly.

He noticed that what she wore was made from vinyl materials. At first, her hand seemed to touch her ankle, then with the sharp, rustling sound of metal cutting through air, a knife slashed forth with a flash in front of his eyes. He stretched out his hand and arm instinctively, and the blade of the knife cut them mercilessly. As soon as he dropped the hammer, at some uncertain moment, both his hands seized the blade, which was about to stab his belly.

Because of the drastic move, the blood that ran frantically from his hands splattered her clothes, but it just rolled off the vinyl material. He realized why she wore those kind of clothes. His hands, which were gripping the blade that had yet to pierce his body, couldn’t even feel any pain.