Scene Immortal

  SCENE IMMORTAL

  Part One of the Blood Scene Trilogy

  By Chris Patton

  First Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press & Macabre Ink Digital

  Copyright 2011 by Chris Patton & Crossroad Press

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  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  ALSO FROM CHRIS PATTON & CROSSROAD PRESS

  AS NARRATOR:

  Deep Blue – by David Niall Wilson

  I'll Have a Blue, Blue Christmas – by David Niall Wilson

  Lost Souls – by Poppy Z. Brite

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  CHAPTER ONE: NIGHT AND DAY

  There was dark, confusion, and panic. Then discovery. Horrible discovery. Of something, something...

  Roads, rain, disorientation. A couple, not young, not old, terrified for their lives and the lives of their children, skidding this way and that to avoid oncoming peril. And all these thoughts in screaming milliseconds.

  I shot out of sleep and tasted the metallic tang of fear, breath jagged and shaking, sure I had screamed my sister awake for the fourth or fifth time this month. I listened for the padding of her feet on the hardwood. Nothing. Good. This particular dream, at least, had not been enough to send me wailing like a banshee out of deep sleep. I sighed with relief. It was crap enough that Shannon was now saddled with taking care of me, worse still that the "process" of getting over my parents' death was causing me to sometimes wake her up at night. Like she didn't have her own demons to deal with.

  With hesitation, I looked at the glowing digital numbers beside my bed, and realized with disgust that it was 5:20, and any chance of snagging some extra zees before having to get ready for school was strictly out of the question.

  Fantastic.

  Only the third week into my senior year, and I was already climbing the walls with senioritis, still mourning the loss of my parents, and in no way over the heartbreak of losing my girlfriend of two years, Jacqueline. 'Jacky-bird.' 'My babe'. Well, not my babe anymore. Who knew what nauseating pet names she went by now. I didn't know, and I tried not to care. She had been my everything from age fifteen to seventeen, discovering the amazing, nineteen-year-old music geek Arthur and dumping my sorry ass only two weeks before the freak accident with my parents.

  Sometimes life sucked. I guess that's the supreme rule of teen thinking.

  Today would be another blue Monday. Just like all the others. Ugh.

  My sister's voice put me into gear, chipper as it was this early in the morning.

  "Oh Vile Kyle, wakey-wakey!" Damn! I had wasted twenty minutes just lying here being Emo. My intent was to completely beat Shannon to the punch and be showered and dressed by the time she pulled herself out of bed, facing her first obligation of the day: waking me up and dumping me at school. We had only one car between us, and she needed it while I was in the hallowed halls of high school.

  "Yeah, yeah, I'm one step ahead of ya, Shae. I'm just gonna hop in and out of the shower and slide into something fast!"

  "Oh... of course you are." She knew better. My sister was as aware of my vanity as anybody, and it drove her nuts that I could spend ten minutes in the mirror making sure my hair fell into all the right pieces in the front, spiked just perfectly in the back, and dangled with a hint of blond sadness slightly over my left eye, a slightly deeper blue than the right. Sad, I know, but that meant a lot to me. The better I looked, the more I was sure Ms. Jacqueline Dalton was eating her heart out every time she saw me (not notice her) as I walked by her in the halls. So, to compensate for my too-long shower and vanity time spent in the bathroom mirror, I bounced into the kitchen, shoved an untoasted Pop Tart down my throat, and headed out to the car.

  The car we shared was totally not fancy or "hawt" by most people's standards, but it had been manufactured in 2007, and was a modestly fast sports car, so that was something. More than most had, actually. She liked to tool around the hills and sometimes into the city when she wasn't looking for a job, or trying to think of something to do to pass time or occupy her mind. Terrible and harsh to think of such things, but our parents' death had left us with a sizeable chunk of change. Shannon put a limit on what she saw as "excess,” calling it morbid and dishonorable in the wake of what had happened. I couldn't really argue. So we had one car, and we shared it. No big deal. I wasn't about to cause drama over something so minor. It wasn't really that big of a hassle anyway, because Shannon didn't go out much on the weekends, unlike me.

  The weekends had been my saving grace lately, which really wasn't out of the ordinary for a seventeen-year-old, I guess. I didn't like to judge myself against others my age. I always felt older inside, more advanced somehow. I did, however, have a little more emotional baggage than the typical late-teen, and I tried to dump it by hitting every all-ages show I could find in, or even near, the area. Of course, that meant I had to watch some tragically bad bands, and deal with a few obnoxious people, but I still got to be in the scene, glammed-up, hair done, hanging with acquaintances, if no real friends, and making as many new ones as possible, along the way. Shannon didn't care, as long as I was in by two.

  We had had the inevitable older sister/younger brother talk about drugs and alcohol, and I'd come clean with what little experimenting I'd done, and told her that I was practically straight-edge, but just didn't label myself as such. There were too many other labels that fit me better. This confession seemed to satisfy her. She had believed me without a second's hesitation.

  That was an amazing thing about our closeness, and the curse of it; we could almost always tell when the other was lying.

  And so my scene life went, weekend to weekend, this party to that one, one show to another, most of which were pretty lame. But that was far from the core of my issues with weekends. It was more that everything felt like coasting lately. Like partying on autopilot. I needed something to get me out of the funk, the grind, the weekly routine. Something new.

  Not likely. I would just have to suck it up, "be a man,” and really start focusing on my future. College. The eventual right career. All the stuff that should have been occupying my mind, but somehow wasn't.

  "What are you thinkin' about, kiddo?" she broke the silence.

  "Um, first of all, you've only got two years on me, and actually barely that, because I do believe I have a birthday in October."

  "Ah yes, big man! What are you gonna be now...?" She smiled and winked at me, knowing I knew that my eighteenth birthday was probably a bigger deal to her than it was to me. No doubt she was planning something ginormous, which of course both excited me and shot me through with a twinge of guilt. Probably unnecessary, I reminded myself, because she lived for parties and junk like that, and I guess eighteen was pretty momentous to some people. For me though, it was just another year, and I honestly had too many clouds hanging over my well-tousled head of hair to get too stoked over what would just end up being another day.

  The whole "big man" thing kind of got under my skin, too, because I was turning eighteen, and it looked like I very well might never sprout above 5'7". I over-compensated for this by spending hours making sure my body was in the most impressive
shape I could achieve. So at least my small frame was tightly muscled, and I was capable of taking care of a bully or a thug when and if it came to that. The friendlier jocks always joked that for a guy who hated on sports so much, I was impressively athletic.

  The fog was burning off as we crested the last hill of the drive, bringing Westridge Heights High into full view, and filling me with more than a touch of angst. It was still hard as hell to have to come here every day and look at my ex, Jackie. And I really had no choice in the matter, because her twin brother Josh was one of my best friends, and there was no way I was losing him over some teenaged crash-and-burn relationship. And of course, as my sister pulled into the round and I opened my door, boom! there she was, looking hot as ever and standing next to my best friend, who just happened to be her closest blood relative.

  Right.

  I exhaled, gave a despondent look over my shoulder to Shannon as if to say "do I gotta?,” and she just smirked at me. Yeah, come on dude, be a man about it.

  "Hey Shae,” I said, getting out and just about to shut the door. "No need to come pick me up, I'll catch a ride home with Josh." She smiled with big sis approval, and peeled away.

  Now to put the awkward first pleasantry of the day behind me. This was just a little more awkward, though, because although being best friends with Josh meant having to still see Jackie from time to time, they didn't often travel in a pair like this at school, and I didn't usually have to come face to face with her first thing in the morning. And something about facing the first love of my life who had left me for another guy, and at 8:20 am with raw Pop Tarts churning in my stomach, seemed to be making this the most uncomfortable encounter since the breakup.

  The look of barely-masked pity on Josh's face didn't help. His face was sort of scrunched up, like he was feeling the same sick ache I was. Josh was always empathic. Poor sucker. I loved him for it.

  "Josh, Jackie, what's up guys?" I managed, without sounding too stupid.

  Josh tried to jump in first, but his criminally hot sister beat him to it.

  "Not much sweetie, how are you?" she purred, and gave me one of those fake, "I'll always be your friend" hugs."Uh...great, I'm great. Yes." She was the only person on the planet who could make me stutter or completely lose my social cool.

  "That is fabulous! Well, I do hope to see you out sometime this weekend. Maybe you'll finally get to meet Arthur. I've told him everything about you."

  Before I could conjure a rude enough reply, Josh did finally manage to interject.

  "Yeah, hey man, you and I really should go hit a show together this weekend. You've been doing way too much by yourself lately,” he paused, then, "Hey Jackie, don't you have a class to get to?"

  At least she wasn't stupid, and picked up on cues easily enough. She danced off, along with a few shards of my heart. Why the hell was it so easy for her? Josh broke through my reverie.

  "Come on, Kyle, you've got to snap out of it. I know you still have it bad, and that she can be a total ice queen, but... I miss the two of us hanging out. I totally get that you've needed to be alone to process stuff, but my God, it's just not healthy after a while. You have to be out amongst the living!" And he seemed to add, almost as an afterthought, "And I promise we'll go someplace completely Jackie-free. She's my sister and I love her, but I do have a life away from my twin."

  "I've been going out,” I protested lamely.

  "Yeah, by yourself, all dolled up in "guy-liner" and perfectly separated and spiked hair, no doubt, flirting with random strangers and making small talk with anybody and everybody to keep your mind occupied. I'm talking about an actual, well, guys' night out. You know, with your best friend?"

  He beamed at me, waiting for my lips to curl upward. I couldn't help it. When Josh did that, I had to smile. His constant optimism was infectious and amazing. Heartbreaking ex-girlfriend of a sister or not, I just could not have asked for a better friend than Joshua Dalton.

  Yeah, I decided, I would go out this weekend, with another human being, and finally free myself from my self-imposed exile. After all, I couldn't be Emo all the time. That would just be too exhausting.

  "Yes, you're totally right. We'll definitely go out this weekend."

  "Exactly,” he said, all ear-to-ear grin. "Now, I've got class. See you at lunch." He started off.

  "Wait a sec,” I stopped him. "Do you think I could catch a ride home with you?"

  I didn't think his smile could get any bigger or brighter. "Ha, hell yes man, of course! Later!"

  ~ * ~

  The day drifted at a typical Monday's pace, that is to say, painfully slow. The classes were simple and unchallenging, all of my acquaintances seemed like shallow shadows of their former selves, and I felt I had nothing at all to get revved about. On top of that, there was the vicious cycle of my own self-pity heightening my misery. It was depression, mixed with boredom, layered with self-loathing. What a cliché.

  After third period came the day's first jab to the gut, as I saw Jackie round the corner from C Hall toward the lunch room. It was unfair and twisted that she still appeared so deliciously gorgeous to me. I was quite sure I was but a blur to her. But there she stood, chatting with some of her social-climbing friends, her mess of shocking black hair perfectly mussed, her neo-new wave makeup accentuating every perfect contour on her perfect porcelain face, and her outfit fitting her petite frame like a glove.

  Staring was probably a bad idea, I decided, after she caught me looking at her, and then actually had the nerve to wink and look at me wistfully before gliding off to lunch.

  What the hell? I thought to myself. Mixed signals were worse than complete rejection, as far as I was concerned. Surely it made no sense for her to be winking at her broken-hearted ex-boyfriend when she would be leaving campus in two short hours with the "gorgeously nerdy" Arthur Townsend. Yeah, she had actually described him that way to me. Ugh. Maybe Josh was right, and I needed to at least attempt to cut off all communication, difficult as that might be, simply because her proximity to Josh was not always distant. And what could I do about it, ask a pair of twins to start hating each other for my sake? Nah. Just keep moving on.

  Just then, Josh smacked me on the back. "Man, you love misery, don'tcha?"

  "I'm sorry. Can't a guy look... even if he can't touch?"

  "Hey, far be it from me to drag you away from the pity-party. So, you still riding home with me?” It was great just to hear him talk. To hear him be understanding about my plight, not to mention put up with the fact that I still found his sister lust-worthy, but that was something he had gotten over long ago. I guess he'd had to.

  "Of course, Josh.,” I grinned.

  "Excellent. I definitely say microwaved mac-and-cheese and some reality TV is in order. Oh, and we can watch something completely gruesome! I just bought five new DVDs in the 'House Of' Series!"

  It amazed me, the small things that lit up Josh's world.

  "Sounds perfect, man, can't wait."

  And really, I couldn't. Time spent with Josh was never boring. Even if there was nothing to talk about, we had a weird kind of friend chemistry that, I guess, a lot of guys wouldn't be comfortable with. Of course I thought that was stupid, macho garbage, to be afraid of friendly intimacy, but I somehow had the feeling that the jocks rarely went home and sat on the same bed together while whining about their feelings. As far as I could tell, that was my duty as a "scene kid,” and "Emo boy,” to sit around with my non-jock friends and talk about music, graphic novels, books, awful TV shows... ex-girlfriends.

  And let me state for the record, right now, that we, the actual Scene Kids, were not the ones who chose to label ourselves as Emo or Scene or Rocker, or whatever. But as soon as we started wearing tight, fashionable clothing, putting product in our hair, maybe the occasional splotch of makeup for special-effect or glam's sake on our faces, we began to get labeled: Scene kids, Emo bois, fashion-core-freaks, and the names just kind of got worse from there. So, we chose the less abrasive titles, and sta
rted using them ourselves, mainly in earshot of the more "straight-and-narrow" types, thereby robbing them of their ability to jab us with words. Truth be told, most of the "normies" and the "scenies" got along just fine with each other, it was only in extreme cases that tempers and egos had to be cooled and deflated. Taking on the names that each group gave to the other was one powerful way of keeping negativity in check.

  Now, I just had lunch and two more periods to get through without ogling Jackie, and I'd be on my way to having a great afternoon. And actually that's pretty much how it went by. Like Jackie, Josh and I were both in positions where we didn't go full days anymore, and he was waiting for me after fifth in the circular drive in front of the school, his car purring, sound system just loud enough for me to hear that he was listening to something decent.

  I was also aware of the lack of Jackie's presence in Josh's car. I expected nothing less. First, Josh wouldn't have agreed to take me home had he had his sister in tow, and second, of course the amazing Arthur had come to pick Jackie up, as had been the case every day for the past week-and-a-half. Yeah, I kind of kept tabs. I was having trouble letting go, and it had to stop. I needed this hanging out time with Josh more than I'd realized.

  CHAPTER TWO: DISCOVERY

  I hopped into his little hand-me-down Toyota and let the sound of the stereo wrap around me like a protective blanket. Josh's taste in music tended to skew a little goth for me, but we could both come to the table in our general distaste for generic pop or what was now passing as 'alt.rock'. At times, we would turn one another on to each other's music, sort of swapping sounds, with mostly positive results. In fact, my latest musical obsession was courtesy of Josh. They were a Darkwave band out of Oregon called Alphatwyn, with a driving sound and a vampiric/theatrical theme and edge to their presence, and the first time Josh put them on I was struck. Hard. I remember sitting there for several seconds, my mouth literally hanging open in awe, before Josh started laughing at me. "Come on man, you don't have to pretend to like them. I don't bruise that easily."