~ Chapter 1 ~ Red Bounty Road

 

 

 

 

 

 

~ Chapter 1 ~

 

Red Bounty Road

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

         Yeah, it’s pretty funny when somebody’s jackin’ around, and then they hurt themselves, but this time was different.  Jason actually killed himself this time.  The seventeen-year-old daredevil pulled a stunt so awesome, so difficult, that he ended up dying.  After that, everyone was a mess without Jason.  His stunts weren’t so hilarious when the slideshow the police officers gave Rogue, Daniel, Blaine, and I.  We were the immediate suspects because we were the witnesses.  The police thought it was all a dare.  A totally different kind of homicide mission in the making, but none of us knew what was coming.  Jason had claimed it to be a surprise, and a devastating surprise it was.

           Jason had climbed out of his first story window and onto the roof with his skateboard, a lighter, tape, and three Moon Rockets, the newest, coolest firework invented.  The package claimed that the firecrackers had enough power to blast you to the moon.  He taped the Moon rockets the underside of his board, and got in position.  “Ladies, and gentlemen!  I bring you, Jase’s Blast to the Past!  Hang tight you mofo’s while I blow your momma’s panties off!  Whoo-hoo!”  He lit the tail of the firecrackers and in five seconds Jason Tyler was soaring through the air.  He looked like a pro skater!  His moves were all too amazing, and the excitement of it all was like a major painkiller to the event that stole the moment.  All of us stood on the ground in pure amazement soon turn terror as he and his board started to plummet toward the earth from the three stories of air he was surfing.

A gasp was all that could escape our hanging jaws as he struggled to gain balance.  Jason waved his arms in giant circles as if he were trying to catch the air around him for support.  Traveling at twelve miles an hour, he hit the cement basketball court with a brutal impact.  The sound the collision made was a heart stopping, gut wrenching one.  The sound of bones cracking on impact made me gag.  Blaine and Daniel were the first to run to him as an aid.  They covered their mouths with their hands and turned away as the saw that the whole court was cracked.  There was no doubt that Jason was dead.  He had landed with his back towards the sun.  His head was undoubtedly cracked, for their had to be a cause for all of the blood leaking from him.

Daniel, flipped him over, and Rogue screamed.  His face was nothing but pure mush.  There was a huge split in his forehead that ran down his face.  His ribs were smashed into dust.  Most of them were sticking out of his chest in a horror-film way.  But if only their were a director, all the blood was just make up, and this was nothing more than a Hollywood Blockbuster, then everything would be okay.  But it wasn’t.  The blood was real, and it was seeping through his clothes.  The stench of blood, and the sight of death was enough to make me hurl, and that’s exactly what I did.

 

 

~              *               ~

 

 

We sat quietly in the investigation room.  Most of us were looking down at the floor.  Rogue had begun crying, and Blaine wrapped her in his arms.  I felt terrible for her.  She had just lost her only brother.  Rogue and Jason were twins, fraternal, of course.  He was born twenty minutes before Rogue, but ever since then, they were inseparable.  I almost felt suicidal.  Jason had been my best friend since the day I moved here from Iowa in fourth grade.  He was the only person who knew everything about me.  And now, he was gone.  He was nothing more than memory… a shadowed figure of my imagination. 

The pain was heart wrenching.  Everyone was on the brink of insanity.  No one knew what he or she was going to do without him.  The silence was deafening, and it only made the reality all that much more real.  It felt like it had been at least three hours waiting for the interrogators to arrive.  And we all knew talking about the incident was going to be as difficult as if we just re-experienced it.  To them, this was a game.  This was only a time to trivially toy with our emotions by making us relive the pain for their satisfaction.  And if you didn’t fess up, you were considered guilty in their eyes.  So far, life sucked.

We all knew the hardest part would be the funeral.  Everyone there would either love us, or absolutely hate us.  I already knew that Jason’s parents would be pissed at us, but since we were all they had left of him, they couldn’t be that mad.  Of course, their was still Rogue, who was suffering the worst out of us all.  And to see her cry this hard made me want to slap the people who set this up for us.  The three of us had already told them that we didn’t know what had happened until it did.  The voice of one more was not going to change anything.  Watching Rogue step into the small office with walls made of windows was a heart racing moment.  The interrogators knew they had the key to the treasure box with her.  She was going to be the answer.  Rogue was the youngest of us all by a couple of months.  Her heart was so tender that the smallest word of the tragedy would shatter it into a hundred thousand pieces.  They knew they could get anything out of her because she was so impressionable.

But they were going to be disappointed because there was nothing to hide.  Unless Rogue was keeping something from us, and that was very unlike her.  Her and Jason were very open about their feelings and their life.  They were fearless, and they had nothing to hide.  And if this time, she did, we would all be skating the thinnest ice ever.  This was big, our lives depended on her, and right now, we all knew she wouldn’t care.  Her brother was her world, and now both of them were gone.  So who were we left to be in her life… absolutely no one.

Each of our questioning sessions took about forty-five minutes to an hour long.  We were all DNA tested.  Meaning samples of our clothes, skin, hair, shoes, and blood were taken.  The detectives were p-o-ed about us being sober and healthy.  Well, they were just plain ticked off because we didn’t murder anyone, and we certainly didn’t know anything.  There were negative signs of Jason’s blood on the girls and Blaine, but Daniel was another story.  He explained that he turned his body over to observe the damage, and as a group, we backed him up.  Still not convinced, the detectives told us we would be staying in a prison for as long as they were needed in the investigation lab.  When they came back with the results of Jason’s death would be the day they came to get us.

 

 

~              *               ~

 

 

Rogue was crying harder now, and I felt the warm, hated liquid fell from my eyes as we entered the bus. Her beautiful blue eyes now black and wet as her eyeliner and mascara smeared around them.  We were told that we all would be separated throughout the prison.  Blaine’s hands were hard, and his knuckles were whiter than bone as he clenched his fist.  The muscle of his masculine jaw stood out, which made it obvious he was grinding his teeth.  Blaine was now stroking Rogue’s red hair, trying to make an effort to comfort her in anyway he could.  Every now and then, he would kiss the top of her head, and whisper it would be all right.  But we all knew it wouldn’t.  Not for a while anyway.

“It isn’t fair!” Daniel suddenly exploded from the back of the white bus.  I looked over to find him standing against the back of the bus.  His eyes covered by his hands.

“Sit down, sir.” The bus driver asked with a firm voice.

“Why don’t you sit down?  Matter o’ fact, why don’t we all sit down, and pretend that this really isn’t happening!”

The bus driver ignored the rude remark, pursed his lips, and kept driving.

Rogue began to cry harder, and Blaine wrapped her into his arms and chest.

“Daniel…” I said, trying to keep a firm voice throughout his breakdown.

“What?” he screamed.  “You know it too, Morgan!  We’re all screwed now!  If you haven’t noticed, we’re headed toward the s**t hole!  And if we don’t die of insanity, the prisoners will kill us!”

“Daniel, please…” I closed my eyes, which released my unwanted tears.  “You’re scaring everyone on the bus.” I said softly.

“Damn everyone on this bus!  Even me!  We’re all fucked over like dominoes!  There’s no way out of this!”  He was now walking up the narrow lane with his arms out stretched up to God.

I stood up, and grabbed his shoulders.  “Look!  You’re not the only one, Daniel!  We won’t be staying here forever!  We haven’t done anything for them to keep us here!  So sit the f**k down, and quit screaming!  Please!”  I said, my eyes already betraying me far worse than before.  Daniel seemed to get the message, mentally and emotionally, for he began to cry, too, and he wrapped his arms around me.  I hugged him back with equal immensity.  As I held onto him, I looked up toward the roof of the bus, and pleaded, “God help us.”

And as the bus continued to rumble down the long, red, dusty road to hell, we all stayed as close as possible.  I was wrapped up in Daniel, and Rogue was wrapped up in Blaine.  “I don’t want to go.  I don’t want to leave you, Blaine.” Rogue said, her eyes now sober of crying now.

“Shhhh, no.” he cooed gently as he stoked her face.  His green eyes probably very hypnotizing at the moment, as always when he was trying to calm her.  He had given me that look a couple of times, but I’d never thought much of it.  “Everything’s going to be all right… you’ll see.”

Rogue shook her head in his chest.  “No, it won’t…”

“Oh, yes it will, love.  I promise.” He spoke so sweetly it was like listening to the perfect voice of an angel.

“No, you can’t promise me that ‘cause…”

The room got so quiet that everyone froze like they were suddenly locked in a meat locker.

“What?” Blaine pushed on.  Obviously trying to hide all urges from his tone.

Rogue looked down at her rumbling thumbs, and sighed.  “You can’t promise me that ‘cause I fessed up.”

Author's Note

Tell me what you think! :)

Reviews

[Celeste]

I don't want to rate this, because you're a very young author, and it's a challenge to learning everything about writing at such an early age. Let me just say that the opening is good. There is plenty of action there, and the story moves very quickly. All of those things are very good. There are plenty of people three times your age who never understand these principles.

However, you really do need to edit this. There are a quite a number of grammatical mistakes, and you have to clean up the teenage slang. The reason for this is that your vernacular words are only understood and popular in your corner of the world. Other people in other parts of the country and outside the U.S. are going to wonder what "jackin' around" or what a "mofo" is. To tell you the truth, my eyes almost popped out of my head when I read "jackin' around" because my first thought was, "I can't believe that a fourteen-year-old is actually writing about masturbation!". Okay, when I read the next sentence, then I figured it out. However the real problem with vernacular expressions (slang) is that: 1) it dates very quickly; 2) because it dates so quickly, it will sound silly 20 years from now when someone else reads it. Just ask your grandmother what "groovy", "far out" and "psychadelic" mean. Even the famous author Upton Sinclair made this error when he wrote "Babbit". The slang is right out of the 1920's and sounds strange.

The other thing you might want to consider is point of view. Whose point of view is it in this piece? There's a old trick you can use: Pick one the characters and re-write the story from his point of view in the first person singular (using the pronouns/articles I/my/me), then change all the pronouns, articles and verbs to he/she. That way you can always be 100% sure whose point of view it is. Like they always tell you: NO head-hopping!

But even if I don't rate it, I DO like the story - just needs some work. :D

[D S Rollins]

Interesting!

[lawrence bear]

had me right to the end, great suspense

[Chris]

Great chapter! The words and sentences flowed nicely together. You began well and the chapter ended wonderfully with more than enough to keep the reader wanting to read more. Although, I'm a little unsure of the believability of a teenager cracking an entire basketball court, let alone one traveling only 12 miles per hour. Other than that, I have no issues with the story. Wonderful write.

[Kelley]

Very interesting start to a story Iris. I think I'm going to like this one.

[Arsenic Nemesis]

I really enjoyed this, very epic and well written. Stiked my interest, I look forward to more~