Kayla and the Devil by Bryan Smith

Author:Bryan Smith [Smith, Bryan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bitter Ale Press
Published: 2011-10-09T00:00:00+00:00

21.

After the MTA bus let her off on Broadway, Kayla started immediately back toward campus. Where else might she go? Anywhere she went, the Ripper would be trailing along after her, always loitering in the shadows or lurking just out of sight. Hiding out in her dorm room until her date--FUCK!--with Lee was the only thing that made any sense at all to her just then. She had a bottle of high-octane booze squirreled away in one of her overflowing desk drawers. 190 proof Everclear. Maybe if she got drunk enough, the vivid memory of those frozen, dead faces in the movie theater would go away, at least for a little while.

She stormed through the dorm’s front entrance and hurried over to the elevators. Two other girls were standing there when she arrived. One was texting away obliviously on her cell phone, while the other was staring intently at a large flyer taped to the wall between the two sets of elevator doors. Kayla’s stomach clenched at the sight of Martha Atwater’s picture.

Shit.

The photo of the smiling deceased woman was grotesquely large. She’d been in dire need of engaging the services of someone with some skill to instruct her on the proper application of makeup. In the photo she was wearing too much mascara and her use of eye shadow was positively hideous. She looked like a demented circus clown. Not quite as ridiculous as Red Nose, maybe, but it was a closer call than it should have been. Perhaps even worse, her flaring nostrils looked big enough to double as parking garages for alien spacecraft. She felt bad for thinking such things, but fucking hell, she couldn’t help it. And those eyes…oh, sweet Jesus, those eyes! The hi-res photo reproduction made Martha’s image look alive on the paper, which made Kayla feel like the woman’s big blue eyes were taunting her.

As if Martha knew exactly why and how she had died.

It was hard not to see a hidden malevolence in her expression.

A promise to even the score.

“Sad, isn’t it?”

Kayla was so spooked she flinched when the girl next to her spoke. “Uh…what?”

The girl nodded at the flyer, which announced the date and time for a memorial service. “That.” She shook her head. “So young. A shame.”

Kayla set her face in what she hoped was an appropriately solemn expression. Martha’s passing was genuinely sad, but what she really felt in that moment was a deep desire to never see that creepy goddamn flyer again. She ached to rip it off the wall and tear it to pieces, but standard rules of decorum dictated a calmer reaction.

“Yes. It’s very sad.”

“Did you know her?”

Kayla nodded. “She was my floor’s R.A.”

“Oh.” The girl touched her arm. “I’m so sorry.”

Kayla strove for a tone that showed she was trying very hard to be brave in the face of grief. “I’m fine, really.”

The other girl, the one who’d been texting the whole time, abruptly put her phone away and snorted irreverent laughter. “Fuck that cow. Look at her.

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