The Apartment Building

I smirked at Lee's reply. Hah... large intestines were full of sh#t...

The stalker was quite taken aback at the boy's statement. "Wife? How old are you two?"

Just then, the elevator doors opened, and I took the opportunity to get out of there as quickly as I could without leaving Lee behind or drawing too much attention. Not that there were any people in the halls, anyways.

We had to turn a corner or two to get to the right apartment, but once we were there, I stopped a bit a ways from the front door, and took a deep breath. So nervous, so nervous. What if something went horribly wrong? What if Lee got hurt? What if... there were too many things that could happen...

Justin followed along silently, a ways behind the two. When the sound of their footsteps stopped, he hid at the edge of the corner closest to them, and listened.

I was holding the pistol in my left hand, and drew the steel knife with my right. It didn't feel as balanced as my celestial bronze one, or even my sword, but it would have to do.

Ariana had been just about to eat a well-deserved dinner of carrot sticks and cheese when someone knocked on the door. It was probably just another salesman - she'd slammed the door in the faces of two today already. She sighed in irritation, and put the block of cheese and bowl of carrots on the counter, closing the refrigerator before walking over to the door. She opened it without bothering to look through the eyehole, and found herself face-to-face with something she didn't expect whatsoever. She froze for a half second like a deer in the headlights, eyes wide.

"SH#T," Ariana yelped and jumped backwards. The shot missed her kneecap, but carved a painful furrow in her calf. She slammed the door and hissed in pain, unable to put any weight on her left leg, frantically trying to remember where she'd left that knife or a gun. Damn, they were both in here room, and by the time she got there, the two demigods would have broken through the door. Sh#t, sh#t, sh#t.

Justin flinched at the sound of the shotgun, but tried to stay silent. What was going on, here?

I kicked the door as hard as I could right in the center, and it nearly broke off its hinges. I frowned and kicked again, and this time it fell.

Ariana continually cursed under her breath, and managed to jump to the side in time to avoid getting hit by the new round of fire. She'd dodged towards the counter, so, being the resourceful woman that she was, she grabbed the block of cheddar cheese and threw it.

I aimed the pistol at my mother and shot, but there happened to be... cheese? Cheese, in the air, in the way. Yes, a block of cheese with a bullet driven through it dropped heavily to the ground. I was... very confused...

Ariana dodged behind the counter, and threw the bowl of carrots this time. Such a waste of good food. She was next to the butcher block now, though, which was full of newly sharpened knives. She grabbed the most dangerous, with a large, curved blade made for chopping vegetables, and threw a smaller one at Cynder with deadly accuracy.

I ducked beneath the knife, which ended up stuck in the wall on the other side of the hallway, quivering. I took a step back, more into the hall, in case my mother threw something else that was actually dangerous, i.e., not food. This way, I wouldn't be in Lee's way, and I also wouldn't trip over him.

Justin decided that this might just be the perfect time to snatch the girl, whom he seriously doubted was twenty-five. He remembered her, now, that they were near this particular apartment. Yes, he remembered every little detail, and wondered what she really looked like, now that she was older. He crept behind her while she was distracted, fixated on whatever was going on in front of her, and then went in for the metaphorical kill. Tsss... He grabbed one of her wrists, the one with the gun hand, and wrapped his other arm around her neck in a chokehold. "Hello, there," he whispered gleefully into her ear, like a creepy creeper.

Suddenly, someone grabbed me from behind. I couldn't really stab them at this angle, and they were holding my wrist in a vicelike grip. I could barely breathe, much less say anything. And then the person spoke, and... and it was the man from the elevator, and I knew who he was, now. Oh gods. I hadn't recognized him at first, it'd been so much time, and he looked a lot different with that half-@ssed beard. Oh, GODS....

Ariana managed to duck beneath the countertop, but just barely. "Go f#ck yourself," she yelled back. What was she going to do? Any second, that boy her wh#re of a daughter was married to was going to point his shotgun in her face and pull the trigger. How was she going to get herself out of this one, with an injured leg to boot?

I struggled, and managed to cut the guy somewhere with the steel knife, but it wasn't a grievous enough injury to cause him to let go. Dammit, dammit, dammit...

Justin giggled a bit, as he was having far too much fun with this, even though the girl had just managed to cut him across the ribs.. He twisted her arm around until she dropped the gun, and tried to devise a way to get that knife out of her hand. She was trying to kick him or something, which could be back if she managed to actually cause some damage. "Stop that, dear, before you end up hurting yourself," he laughed, and forgot about staying relatively silent. "What was your name, again? I'm afraid I don't remember."

Ariana was hit in the knee by one shot, and in the upper arm of her knife hand by the other, and to make things even better, the leg she'd injured before started to hurt more than all her wounds combined, and she just fell over, sprawled on the floor, and the knife tumbled out of her hands and onto the tile.

I managed to kick the creeper in the knee with my heel, and then pushed off the floor in a backwards-y direction. It was hard to tell what the f#ck was going on, really, since I was about to pass out from lack of air and couldn't see anything anyways. But there was a loud clunk and my attacker suddenly slumped to the ground, unconscious. I almost fell over, myself, but managed to stumble over to the opposite wall before collapsing. I didn't pass out, though.

Justin the creep hit his head on the wall rather hard, you see, and was summarily knocked out.

My breathing was ragged, and my throat burned from being constricted for so long. "L-Lee... he's the one... the one who... when..." Hopefully he understood my gibberish. Gods, I was such a wreck right now...

The last shot hit Ariana in the other arm. It wasn't like she could dodge or anything like this. After the kid rushed out for some reason, she tried to get up, but with the pain, she couldn't bring herself to put weight on any of her limbs. It just hurt too damn much, even with her exceptional pain tolerance. A feeling blossomed inside of her that she didn't often feel any more - fear.

Ariana glared and gritted her teeth together, mentally steeling herself, before she launched a vicious little kick at Lee's knee. It hurt like hell to move, though, and she instantly regretted the attempt. She had a horrible feeling that this was no where near the worst that was about to happen to her, though.

I followed Lee back into the apartment, and sat down on the sofa. If I looked over the back of it, I had a pretty good view of what was going on at the moment. It was a little chilly in here, because of the air conditioning, so I picked up a blanket that was neatly folded on the arm of the couch and wrapped it around myself.

I decided that this was probably too far away to really observe as best I could, so I got up with the blanket still wrapped around me, and walked over into the kitchen.

Ariana just started spewing every curseword and insult she knew, and there were quite a lot of them.

I didn't much like the things my mother was calling Lee, so I kicked her in the side of the face before sitting down on the tile floor, just barely beyond her reach.

Cynder's foot struck Ariana in the jaw, and was actually effective in shutting her up.

Ariana turned her head to the left, and closed her eyes closed right, and tried to ignore the ridiculous amount of pain she was it. It didn't work, of course. It was the most she could do to not just start screaming and crying, which was what she was sure the kid wanted. She refused to give him the satisfaction if she could help it.

I leaned against the cabinets behind me and watched the process, quite intrigued, and wondered how long it would take before my mother starting screaming and begging for her life.

Oh, gods, help me, Ariana thought, and just couldn't keep herself from letting out a whimper after that. Just... so horrible... she felt like she was going to vomit or something.

I snickered when my mother made that pathetic noise. I was getting so much sadistic joy out of this. It was her turn to be helpless, and weak, and not be able to do anything at all to defend herself.