Trace idly drew shapes in the faint condensation that clung to the inside of the bus window with one hand, the other alternating between fiddling with one of her lip piercings and biting her fingernail. The sun hadn't quite risen yet that morning, and sky was overcast anyway, so the view of passing houses she got as she slumped sideways against the glass was tinged a dull blue, the recessed interior bus lighting making up the shortfall for her and her fellow passengers.
Trace didn't typically bother getting up so early—her work didn't schedule her for Monday shifts, and so she usually took advantage of it as a sleep-in day. But, after the disaster that had been the previous night, she had gone home to bed early, woken up in kind, and decided to get an early start, leaving Morgan snoring in bed as she shrugged on clothes.
To a secondary degree, her restless mind had probably been hoping to awaken to a late-night text from April, confirming she was safe at home after vanishing when the fight had broken out. She hadn't had so much luck, however. Trace was pretty pissed at April for that, but it was an anger rooted in worry, and, while she was fairly sure that April had probably just left in a hurry to avoid the carnage—and been too thoughtless to text an explanation—there was a part of her mind that dwelled on less pleasant possibilities. Trace tried to ignore it.
As such, however, she now found herself taking the bus into town alongside a regular contingent of senior citizens, who, Trace thought, always seemed to get up earlier in the morning than sense demanded. An elderly woman sitting behind her was clucking scornfully while poring over a copy of the Daily Mail, and Trace was pointedly avoiding paying attention to her.
Instead she was splitting her focus between her window doodles and spying on a very bald, very slender old man sitting across the aisle. He had an interestingly shaped birthmark on the back of his head, and she was trying to decide whether or not it looked like someone had cracked an egg over him as a child, or whether it was more like a bad attempt at a map of South Wales. For his part, the old man was staring curiously at the only other few passengers below fifty—a young mother wielding a pram containing a toddler, who was fast asleep.
Trace happened to be looking out the window at that moment, and so she failed to notice when her handbag—which was sitting on the seat next to her—shifted suddenly, seemingly of its own accord. If she had been paying attention to it, she would have noticed it loll to the side as it abruptly inflated, seemingly under its own pressure, folds and dents popping out rapidly as the patchy dark-furred surface began to pull at its seams, and held taut by the closed zipper line along the top. The handbag suddenly looked more like some sort of oddly lumpy, hairy balloon, rolling slightly as something heavy inside appeared to shift and bump around against the tight sides.
Trace might have looked over at the bag as one of the straining seams along the edge began to tear open with a soft ripping sound, but it so happened that the child in the pram chose that moment to wake up and begin crying loudly, much to the consternation of the old lady behind Trace, who let out a scornful huff.
Before anyone had further opportunity to be oblivious, however, the bag—thankfully not while anyone was examining it particularly closely—exploded. Someone fell out of the space where it had been with a shout, and rolled into the aisle, where they fell in a messy heap on the floor. Trace yelped too as she spun around, nearly elbowing the old lady, who had dropped her Daily Mail in shock. It landed on the shredded remains of the bag, covering over a splayed-out mess of fabric, strewn with loose change and battered sanitary products.
Trace stared at the girl who had landed next to her, and who was now staring around, a wild-eyed expression on her face. Her clothes were covered in a sort of unpleasant looking goo, and, alarmingly, her arms were covered in dried streaks of blood, which seemed to have leaked from an array of nasty looking welted puncture marks across her lower arms, some of which were still visibly oozing.
Trace and the figure locked eyes. "April?!" she gasped in a panic, eyes darting from the face of her friend to the injuries across her forearms.
"W- Where in the bloody hell did she come from?" exclaimed the old man from across the aisle, who was looking down at April with an expression of concern and fear, his birthmark now hidden behind the crown of his head.
April clutched at the cushions of the seats on either side of the aisle, smearing blood on them as she tried to pull herself upright. The old man shied away from her as she did, as if expecting she might suddenly draw whatever weapon had made the puncture wounds. Trace, on the other hand, stuck out her arm and helped pull April into a kneeling pose on the floor, where she sat, panting.
"Jesus Christ-! What in heaven is wrong with that girl?" squawked the old woman, piping up for the first time in a scandalized tone. She put a knobbly hand on Trace's shoulder, as if to hold her back, and raised her voice to be heard over the crying child, who had redoubled their efforts. "Don't touch her, dear. Look at her arms, now, she's been- she's been shooting drugs!"
Trace ignored her, bending down to put a hand on April's back. "April-! April, what happened to you?!"
April was catching her breath now, but her face remained grim. She lifted up her blood-streaked arms in front of her face and stared at them, a grimace of nauseated disgust flashing across her mouth. "Fuck..." she muttered.
"Seriously dear, don't touch her- it absorbs through the skin, you know!" The old woman was still tugging at Trace's shoulder, and Trace was forced to shake her off, irritably.
"Need to go wash this off..." murmured April, who was still staring at her bloody arms.
"We can do that. We can- we should get off the bus- can you walk?" Trace knelt down, putting an arm around her and shielding their heads from the woman, who was still attempting to start lecturing at them.
April looked up as she heard a clattering sound. The driver had pulled over the bus to the side of the road, and was now stomping down the aisle. The old man with the birthmark, who had seemingly retrieved him, followed anxiously in tow as the driver took in the scene.
"The fuck's happening here? Is that girl okay? What happened?"
"She's an addict!" piped up the woman with an aggrieved relish. "It's heroin, I think. Or maybe that fantanol stuff. It's bad- just look at her! And it gets in through your skin too- I told that other girl not to touch her, but she wouldn't listen, of course. Youth today-"
"That true?" The driver cut her off as he stared down at them both, nonplussed.
"I..." April stared up at him, wide-eyed. "I was... I was... stabbed by..."
"Stabbed-? She was stabbed!" The old woman threw her hands up in the air. "This is what this country is coming to these days... Young lady, this is why you don't get involved with drugs!"
"Should I call the police?" asked the driver, who to his credit, looked genuinely concerned. He glanced over at the crying child and their mother, who had stayed silent throughout the interaction, backing the pram to the other end of the bus and silently telegraphing that they wanted to be let off. "Is whoever did this still on board?"
"She fell down from upstairs, I think," said the man with the birthmark, chiming in from behind the driver's shoulder. "Appeared there all of a sudden."
April glanced over to him, then back. "Don't... call the police. Just let us off, please."
Trace glanced at her. "You sure?"
"Yeah..."
April staggered to her feet, tottering towards the double doors halfway down the vehicle. The driver kept his eyes on her warily, but assented, walking back to the cab and hitting the switch that sent the doors hissing open. Trace helped April step down onto the curb, the old woman tutting loudly after them as they crossed the threshold.
April walked over to a lamppost and leaned against it with one hand, then recoiled in mild horror as she left a faint red imprint in the shape of her palm on the metal surface. Trace stepped in front of her and clicked her fingers in front of her face, forcing April's eyes up to her. They stared at each other for a moment.
"April!? Talk to me. What happened? Were you attacked?"
"I... I, I don't really..."
"Was it those guys? The ones from last night? Did they come after you?" Trace seemed to be thinking about what the old woman had said. "D- Did they drug you? Christ, April- fuck!"
April shook her head violently, looking down at her shoes. "Can we. Can we please just, get me somewhere where I can wash this off. Please."
Trace hesitated for a moment, glancing around. The bus had disgorged them in the middle of a residential street, and while it wasn't fully unfamiliar, it would be a substantial hike back to Trace's flat.
"I think Charlie's place isn't too far from here. We can go there."
Trace reached out a hand to grasp April's, but April shied away. "The blood..."
Trace put her hand on April's shoulder instead, and began to lead her down the road.
"He'll want to know what happened to you anyway. None of us saw you after you left last night."
"I... It was... weird, I don't..." April bit her lip, glancing up at her.
Trace returned the glance with a hard stare. "We can talk about it later," she said, eventually.
*****
April let Trace pull her along by the shoulder as they stepped up to Charlie's porch. A chunky silver number "9" numeral hung above a battered brass mailbox, alongside a weathered looking plastic doorbell button, which Trace hammered impatiently. April let her arms hang at her sides. They prickled with a sort of fuzzing numbness around that dots of pain where the creature had stabbed her, and she wasn't sure whether that was a result of the wounds, or the way she was letting her hands hang loose away from her body, loathe to touch anything. The dried blood prickled on her skin, exuding a deeper sensation of wrongness than even the scabbed-over puncture marks managed to.
The door swung open to reveal Charlie with one hand in a pair of heat-proof mitts, as if he had been halfway through taking something out of the oven. "Trace!" he beamed briefly, before taking her in. "April!?"
April was getting real sick of hearing people exclaim her name that way that morning.
Trace pulled her across the threshold, practically muscling aside Charlie, who was forced to press back against the wall of his hallway. "What the fuck happened to you two?"
"Later," said Trace, glancing at Charlie as she pulled April through a door to his right, revealing a small ground floor bathroom with a mounted porcelain sink below a rectangular-frame mirror. Trace positioned her in front of the sink, and April leaned forward, placing her hands in the bowl as Trace spun the winged tap valve, sending a stream of hot water shooting into the basin. April watched wordlessly as it filled up around her fingers, the steaming water misting with a seeping red as the blood was leached from her hands and forearms.
When she was done rinsing the blood, she asked Trace to leave her alone for a moment and locked the door, sitting down heavily on the closed toilet seat. Realising she had some business to take care of, she slipped down her stained jeans, still spattered with streaks of wet slime, and pissed a long stream into the toilet bowl before closing it again and walking over to the sink.
After washing her hands for the fifth time, she held up her arms to examine the row of neat punctures dotting the surface of her skin. The spines that the creature had stuck in her had not been particularly thick, and so what she was looking at resembled more the wounds inflicted by an oversized knitting needle than anything else. They were deep, however, in some cases slicing down into the inner flesh of her arm. So far she had been able to mostly ignore the pain, but it did hurt, in a throbbing, deep sort of way that made her think of the possibility of infection and conjured images of puss-stained gauze.
Rummaging in Charlie's cupboard, she found a bottle of off-brand antiseptic, and braced herself before slapping a palmful of the stuff against her skin. She gripped the arm with her hand as the searing pain cut into her, her gaunt face staring back at her from the mirror. As she did, she became aware of the sound of slightly raised voices coming from the other side of the locked door, and distracted herself from the sting by tuning into them.
"...what do you mean you don't know? Weren't you with her?!" Charlie's usual falsetto voice was reaching new heights as he spoke with an anxious panic, probably forgetting that the loose-fitting wooden bathroom door did not constitute a particularly effective barrier to sound.
"I wasn't with her, she just showed up on the bus. I don't even know where she came from, I hadn't seen her since the pub."
"Was it those guys who punched her? Did they follow her home?"
"I think maybe, yeah. I mean, I didn't see her leave last night. I was too busy with Morgan, and... did you see what happened when she left, exactly?"
The voices went quiet as Charlie paused for a moment. "I... no. No, I didn't. Honestly, it was weird. It was like... well... I don't know."
"But, do you reckon one of them slipped out after her?"
"Maybe. But..." Charlie lowered his voice a little, and April had to strain her ears to keep listening. "...the other possibility is. You don't think, maybe, she might have done it to herself?"
"Really?" Trace's voice was incredulous. "Do you think? I don't think that's... like her." She sounded unsure despite herself.
"Isn't it, though? You know how weird things have been with her recently. Getting into that crash the other day, and now this? And- I think something's not right with her, Trace. We were talking last night, and she was saying she'd been seeing things."
"Fuck, what? What kind of things?"
"She wouldn't say. Wanted to talk to Michelle about it, I think."
"Well maybe she should! Can we call her? Are you two still seeing each other? You were together for a while, right? I know she and April have been..." she trailed off.
"Not... well, no, we haven't, not recently." Charlie sounded sheepish. "I'm more into guys these days, you know. And besides, it's not really 'chelle's problem, is it?"
"She'd help. She'd want to help. She cares about her, you know that."
"Yeah..." Charlie sounded uncertain.
Their voices trailed off into unintelligible mumbling as Trace and Charlie moved away into the living room.
April sat back, staring at her own face in the mirror, scrutinizing her eyes for some sign of what might be happening behind them. She tried to imagine that she really had gone insane; to recontextualize the whole madness with the red vine forest as some sort of psychosis-induced fever-dream, or the result of her being spiked with a psychedelic hallucinogen by one of the men at the bar. She couldn't do it, though. Did her brain really have it within itself to concoct something so precisely, pristinely strange? So alien and yet so self-consistent in her recollections? It wasn't as if April hadn't taken psychedelics before; the tone of the two different experiences wasn't really something she could square. No, if that had been it, then at the very least it had been something very new.
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"Besides," she thought to herself, looking down at her arms, "don't I have evidence right here?" The red pucker-marks of the puncture wounds were surely proof enough that her mind had not been deceiving her. "Unless I got stabbed by some stranger in a back alley, and that was the story my mind invented to explain what happened?"
She shook her head, violently. No, it wasn't something she could dwell on.
After taking another minute to compose herself, she unlocked the bathroom door and gingerly tip-toed into the living room. As she entered, Trace and Charlie immediately looked up, fixing their eyes on her warily, like she was a walking bomb that they half expected to explode. She suppressed her instinctual eye-roll and flopped down on the sofa opposite them, meeting their concerned eyes in turn. The pressure of their gaze bored into her skin hotly, a tense knot of anxiety twisting in her stomach as she tried to work out how she was going to explain this to them.
"I'm fine, guys. You don't have to look at me as if I'm about to commit a murder-suicide."
It was telling that neither of them laughed at that, instead opting to just glance at one-another uneasily. April sighed internally.
Charlie was the first one to speak. "April... can you tell us what happened to you?" He sat forward, elbows on his knees, propping up his chin with his hands.
April hesitated, wondering what to say, and then deciding to settle on something plausible that was at least loosely adjacent to the truth.
"I was attacked by... an animal. On my way home."
Charlie frowned. "Like, by a dog or something?" He looked at her arms, which April pulled into herself self-consciously. "Those don't look like tooth marks, Apes."
"No, it was, uh," she cast around for a moment, thinking. "It was like, a hedgehog, or- a porcupine."
"A- a porcupine?" Trace's face scrunched up in nonplussed bafflement. "Are you shitting me? April, why the fuck would there be a porcupine?"
"I don't know! I guess it, like, escaped from a zoo? I mean, I thought it was weird!" She ploughed ahead, ignoring their sceptical glances. "Anyway, I was walking home, I ran into it- the porcupine, I mean- and it chased me for a while, and then I tripped up... it got some of its spines in me. But then this dude came along and scared it off, I think, so I got up, and continued walking until I... I ended up on the bus with Trace this morning."
"April, please be serious," said Charlie, looking at her, his eyes pleading, "are you bullshitting us?"
"No," said April, then, seeing their expressions, repeated more firmly, "No! I promise, it's how it went down."
There was a minute of uncomfortable silence.
"Mostly."
The silence continued.
"I should... go, I think," said April, breaking the tension.
"What? No fucking way, April!" said Trace, "you're staying here until you're better!"
Charlie spoke up. "Well, maybe- April, maybe you should go to the hospital? Get your arms looked at, and... anything else you... need?"
"I just got out of the hospital yesterday," said April. "And I don't want to be locked in a psych ward any time soon, either," she thought, keeping the words to herself.
"Yeah, well-" Charlie gestured up and down her, as if to encompass everything that had happened to her in the past twelve hours.
"How long was I away for?" thought April. "It didn't feel like I should have been away the whole night. Crap, maybe my sense of time is broken now, too." Out loud, she said, "look, no. No. I don't need the hospital. Trust me. I just... I want to go home and sleep. I know what's best for me."
Her two friends exchanged uneasy looks, but seemed to accept it for the time-being. Charlie stood up and walked over to a side-table, where he kept his keys in a carved wooden bowl engraved with a tableau of bees tending to a bouquet of flowers.
"Do you want me to drive you home?"
For the first time that morning, April smiled in relief. "Please."
A few minutes later, April found herself climbing into the passenger side seat of Charlie's Vauxhall Astra, her hands gripping her stained jeans. Despite herself, she found herself picking at the skin of her arms, poring over the odd little dots and specks in an almost subconscious manner, her fidgeting brain still looking for evidence that she had actually managed to clean off all of the blood.
Trace clambered into the back seat. She had nominally decided to come along because she wanted a ride back into town instead of sitting alone in Charlie's house, but April strongly suspected they both wanted to keep eyes on her until she reached the front door of her apartment. She didn't blame them, really.
The car pulled onto the street, and began picking its way through the residential roads as it filtered its way towards the high street. April did her best to distract herself by people-watching as she leaned against the car window, eyes tracking the passing strangers walking their dogs, carrying bags between shops, holding hands; the assorted constituents of their lives. A man unloading kegs of beer from a truck outside a pub shouted up to someone who was leaning out a window, making a crude gesture with rugged, thick-skinned fingers. A woman across the street caught the motion and nudged a friend, laughing. A little further along, a gaggle of girls was standing on a street corner, giggling at something one of them was showing the others on her phone.
April reached down to her pocket, thinking to check her own phone for the first time since the previous night, now that there was no chance that she would get bloody fingerprints on the screen. Looking down, she saw that at some point during her misadventures the screen had cracked at a corner, a spiderweb of fractured glass radiating out from where she must have fallen into something hard.
"Figures," she thought, sighing to herself. At least it seemed to still be working; she thumbed it on idly, checking the time- 7:43am. Typically she'd still be asleep, assuming she wasn't scheduled for a shift at Sporks. Well, she didn't need to worry about that any more, she guessed.
Looking back out of the window, her eyes settled on a tall, bald man in a long coat and glasses, who was standing outside of a coffee shop, staring off into the middle distance while not seeming to look at anything in particular. She tracked him as he paused for a moment, turned around 180 degrees, stepped through the shopfront window, and out of sight.
For a moment, April didn't quite register what she'd just seen, the deluge of the past few days' events forcing her brain into a default repose of acceptant bewilderment that resulted in her not initially registering anything as odd. After a moment, however, the uneasy stirrings of her subconscious reporting that something unexpected had wormed their way up into her frontal lobe, and she twisted back around to stare at the coffee shop, straining her eyes for any trace of the bald man behind the dark glass that he had seemingly stepped through. The outside was bright, however, the sun having fully risen behind the ceiling of clouds, and it was hard to make out much of the dwindling rectangle of window beyond its blurry reflection of the street.
"You alright, April?" asked Trace, whose head was positioned slightly to the left of April's immediate line of sight through the rear window of the car. Her expression wore a renewed concern at April's sudden movement.
"...yeah, I'm fine," she said, turning back around to face the windscreen-
And started, jumping backwards with a barely stifled yelp. She clapped a hand over her mouth, and struggled to avoid any further reactions that might draw further attention.
"...you sure?" asked Trace from the back, sounding uncertain.
"...Yeah," she just about managed to breathlessly gasp out, staring through the windscreen. "Uh, hiccups."
"Oh, right." Trace went silent.
There were people in the middle of the road, and Charlie was driving directly through them as if nothing was there at all. There weren't many, but enough that they might otherwise constitute the population of a mildly busy street, except that they were moving across the tarmac in odd directions, and with no regard for the traffic or for one another. They tended to walk alone or in little gaggles of two to four, striding forward with some haste, as if they were being compelled to attend an urgent appointment.
That was not all; there was something... wrong, with some of them. Many did not look particularly out of place amid the presumably normal people on either side of the road—except for when a car drove through them—but others only looked loosely human, if at all. One man, dressed in a beige suit and matching bowler hat, had slices of negative space intersecting his body along the horizontal axis, like he had been chopped into slices along his whole body, and then had had every other piece discarded. Despite this, he seemed to be able to walk quite normally, clutching the brim of his hat with a hand that then failed to attach to a forearm, the limb simply ending in a nothingness that spanned six inches to where his elbow suddenly reappeared. Looking between two of the slices, April could just about make out a meaty cross-section through his body where one of the segments terminated.
She abruptly had a mental flashback to the image of Charlie in the bar the previous night, the sharp nothing slicing through his skull in almost exactly the same manner.
What?
Her attention was then drawn to another figure, standing in the middle of the road. This one could scarcely even be described as humanoid; it had four legs, thin and curved, ending in sharp points that made them look like skin coloured fountain pen nibs. The sharp edges were stained a bright red that was almost, but not quite, the shade of blood. These were attached to a hulking articulated body made up of two dark brown segments shrouded in a cloak of black cloth, shaped almost like giant vertebrae, and attached together with a disproportionately small ball joint. Tube-like entrails were strung wire-like in mid air between the two sections of its body. The whole thing stood a solid nine feet tall, and was fronted by a thin but eerily human head, lacking a chin but with some sort of vented breathing mask clamped over its nose.
April watched the thing in growing horror as the car approached it, then felt a brief mental shock as they passed through its body, April catching a brief glimpse of fleshy underbelly while it intersected the car.
She glanced at Charlie. Neither he nor Trace had reacted, and even the bizarrely inhuman creature had not acted as if it had particularly noticed the car driving through it.
April decided, right then and there, that she had a decision to make. On the one hand, she could acknowledge the crazy. She could speak up at that moment, tell Trace and Charlie that she was seeing monsters in the middle of the street. She could do that, and face those consequences willingly; the disbelief, the fear, the almost inevitable trip to a psychiatric ward that, she had to admit, might even be for her own good.
She could accept that none of this was real, that she had gone mad, and allow her life to be swept along in the consequences of that decision. She could close her eyes and simply try to shut out the hallucinations before they took over her life entirely.
Then there was the second option; the scarier option. She could say nothing, remain buckled into her car seat as they drove across the threshold of madness, and then follow that road wherever it might lead. She could choose to accept the evidence of her senses as real.
April thought back to everything that had happened to her in the past 36 hours. The monkey, the crash, Charlie at the bar, the fabric tunnel, the red forest. She remembered the man in the suit, the shapeless, spined predator, and she looked down at her arms, still puckered with the memory.
That was real. I lived that.
April decided to stay quiet.
By the time Charlie had pulled up outside of her apartment building, the apparitions had mostly dispersed. April wasn't sure if there were quantitatively less of them, or whether, for whatever reason she was unable to see the ones that were there. Regardless, after passing through a few more clusters of strangely dressed and/or strangely shaped strangers on the street, April had stopped seeing anything too unusual on the road in front of her. She wanted to feel relieved, but the emotion that came to the fore was more a sort of wary unease. It felt as though something was waiting at the periphery of her awareness, stalking from the mental shadows for the right moment to make its reappearance.
"Want me to walk you up, Apes?" Trace had reached over to tap on her shoulder, gently, as if she might shatter at the touch. April shrugged her off.
"I'm fine, I think."
"You're sure?" Trace sounded suspicious.
"Yes," said April, reaching for the door-handle.
"Actually, April?" Charlie interjected, holding a hand out to stop her, "Could I have a word? Outside the car? I want to talk about something."
"Uh, okay." April unbuckled her seatbelt and popped the door, stepping out, then let Charlie follow suit on the other side of the car before circling around to her from the driver's side. She closed her door, and they both leaned against it, vaguely uncomfortable. Trace looked on suspiciously from the other side of the glass.
Charlie glanced down at his shoes for a moment, before looking back up at her.
"What is it, Char?"
"April..." he started, before stopping again, seemingly at a loss for words.
"Charlie?"
He continued to dither for a moment, before settling on, "...are you sure you're okay?"
"Yeah. I said so, right?"
He looked at her.
"I'm fine, Charlie."
"Right..." he shuffled his feet.
April was eager to head indoors and to her bed, but Charlie was acting uncharacteristically enough that she made herself hang back, for his sake. Finally, he looked up at her again, opening his mouth again.
"It's just... at the bar... last night, I saw- I thought I saw... something. Something strange."
April gave him a sharp look. Could it be? She hedged, watching him cautiously. "What kind of strange?"
"It's just... when you fell to the floor..." He stared at her wordlessly.
"What?" April stepped closer to him, eagerly. "Tell me, please, Charlie."
"You..." He threw his hands up in the air. "I don't know April. You... disappeared so quickly. It was like... one moment you were there, the next you weren't, and then I didn't see you for the rest of the night. It was as if..." He gestured uncertainly, hands making shapes in the air. "Where did you go?"
"You were there," April thought to herself, "you saw what happened, when I fell into that place. What did you see, Charlie? Do you know- can you tell me that it was real? How I ended up there, from the floor of a Wetherspoons? From lying next to Trace's old handbag to... wherever there was?"
She opened her mouth, and almost let it all spill out, before shutting it again.
No. He doesn't even know what he saw.
Instead, she reached out and put her hand on Charlie's shoulder, locking eyes as she pinned him between herself and the car.
"Some weird fucking shit's been happening."
"Yeah, no shit. You seem to be in the middle of a lot of it."
"Yeah." April glanced back at Trace through the car window, who was watching them intently. "And, look. I don't really know what's going on, with me, or... with anything. But... I'm going to find out, okay? And when I do, I'll let you know too. What's going on, I mean. With everything."
"Right..." Charlie stared at her warily. "Just... April? Please stay safe. I don't know what's going on with you but... please? No more bike wrecks, no more getting mauled by, uh. Porcupines." He flicked his eyes down to her arms.
"Yeah. I'll try."
The look he gave her as he gingerly climbed back into his seat gave her the impression that he didn't quite believe her.
April watched them drive away, before turning around and climbing the three stories to her apartment. Unlocking the door, she glanced at the clock that read 8:05am. "Time to get up!", the brightly coloured digital numerals seemed to be screaming at her.
Suppressing an exhausted groan, April dimmed the display with the press of a button, and without so much as glancing back out the window, she drew the blinds in her bedroom, threw herself on top of her covers, and collapsed at once into a deep and uneasy sleep.