Richen

Chapter seven: A male and a female

 In a small town out on the countryside in Texas, a nineteen year old girl was about to help her father close the bar. The girl was usually always wearing stylish clothes, but right now she just had some regular bar working clothes on. The girl would always be the first among her friends to follow the fashion as it changed. Although she appeared not to, she was in fact very bright and smarter than many thought, and she could always find the good in people, when others could not.

 Suddenly she heard a sound, like something big hit the ground, from outside the house. The girl told her father that she just wanted to check what the ruckus was all about and went outside. Some short distance away she saw a tree burning and some smoke in the ground near it. She went closer carefully, yet eager to see what it was, almost nothing ever happened in this sleepy town, except for that horrible event fifteen years ago. Just a few meters away she could clearly see that it was a big hole in the ground and in the middle was a large rock. She had seen similar things on TV and knew that it had to be a meteorite that had crashed down from space.

 While staring at this strange rock the girl suddenly thought for herself that it maybe could be radioactive and was just about to back away when something happened. The rock suddenly cracked and some silver-grey liquid ran out from it. Intrigued by this her alertness was like gone with the wind and her reaction, when the liquid suddenly and hastily moved towards her, was slow.

 She tried in panic to shake the liquid of but it was sticky and each time she managed to remove some, it covered her again more rapidly and soon her entire body except her head was covered in it. Her father, hearing her screams came running towards her, and was just about to reach her when the liquid covered her head and she fell to the ground.

 All liquid went inside her through her mouth, nose and ears, and her father could do nothing but helplessly look at his daughter crawling and twisting on the ground. But suddenly she stopped twisting and her father could finally hold her still. The girl was partly in shock but she could feel inside that something happened to her, but somehow it felt good, it felt as like all her soreness and tiredness went away and she had never in her life felt so healthy. She told her father that she was okay somehow, but her father had already picked her up in his arms carrying her to the car to drive her to the hospital.

 He had the time of his life; he was on vacation from rainy London on his twenty-first birthday and sat on a bike with a girl that he had been with for only a week, in this lovely land of France. The young man was working as a reporter for a big newspaper in London and was always in the loop of what was happening and why. He was always working hard and usually had not much of spare time, but now he had decided to take a long vacation to live life.

 The young man and the girl had just been to the cinema and seen a movie that had premiered this day, and now they were on the way to the beach to take a swim and have a great time in the sunny weather. They were talking about the movie when the young man suddenly thought he heard a strange whistling sound behind them. As he turned his head to look back, the sound escalated very fast and he managed to glimpse a big dark object rushing towards them, then he felt a hard push and was knocked out and everything went black.

 
 He woke up with a searing pain in his right shoulder, but it faded away as he gained consciousness. A bit disoriented he looked around and discovered that he sat in the ditch by the road that he and the girl were traveling on. But he could not see the girl from the ditch, and why was he in the ditch? Slowly his memory returned and he remembered the whistling sound and the dark object. Assuming they had been hit by something he stood up and started to look for the girl, and there she was. A few meters away laying on the road the girl was apparently dead, because there was a large pool of blood under her and her entire torso was shredded.

 Nauseous from the sight he turned around and threw up. While doing this he finally noticed the big hole in the ground and the smoking rock laying in it. He looked at it and it appeared to have cracked open, like something had leaked out of it.

 While calling for an ambulance, the person on the phone asked how many injured persons there were, and just as the young man was going to say two, he felt that he was not injured at all, he felt very vivid on the contrary, so he answered that there was only one girl that was hurt and that it looked like she was dead. Ten minutes later the ambulance and some policemen came and he was asked to follow them to the station.