Emii_suckz

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The late afternoon sunlight casts its rays on campus grounds, illuminating every blade of grass in golden light. It’s a calm day in Iowa, and for most, a break from class and a chance to catch up with friends.

For those within earshot of Dorm Building C, it means that Abby’s band is practicing again. One would assume that with so much practice, they’d at least be decent. Unfortunately, one would be terribly wrong in assuming so. 

Each of the members alone aren’t exactly bad. Mediocre at best, but not bad. It’s when they come together that any skill seems to deteriorate completely. Most of the other students don’t know them at all beyond that shitty metal band that likes to ruin a good afternoon. The ones that know more see them as an overconfident, underbathed mess. 

Abby’s the one who started the band back in high school, gathering up her closest friends and forcing them to learn instruments. 

She’s beginning to regret that now. 

“Manny– Manny!” She shouts over the noise. The rest of the band keeps playing, too focused on what they’re trying to do to notice that their lead has stopped playing. 

“Manny!” She shouts again. Nothing. He keeps drumming, nodding to a beat that just isn’t there. 

Abby flicks her guitar pick at him, hitting him right in the forehead. He finally looks up, drumsticks stuttering to a stop. 

“We suck,” Abby says plainly. Mel and Owen exchange a glance, which she ignores. 

“We don’t suck,” Manny argues immediately. “We just need practice. Come on. We got that gig on Saturday, things are going good.”

“Except for the fact that we suck ass.” Abby groans, pulling her guitar strap off her shoulder and setting the instrument aside. “This is so stupid.”

Owen speaks up after a moment. 

“We could always try that thing I was talking about–”

“No,” Abby interrupts. “We’re not doing your bullshit 4chan demon ritual.”

“You’re just scared.”

She shoots him a glare. Because yeah, she’s scared. She’d always been the one to cry when the others brought out a ouija board, keep her eyes closed the whole time when her crush had insisted on watching a horror movie and run screaming from haunted houses. She’s pretty sure this whole thing he’s been suggesting is just to make fun of her. 

Whatever. He’s just being an asshole, as usual. 

“I’m taking a break,” she mutters, turning around and storming out the door. Her boots thud loudly in the hallway, the chain on her pocket jingling faintly. 

The quad is still bathed in sunlight, making Abby squint and shield her eyes. She really needs to get out more. It’s just a little hard when everyone calls her a goth or an emo and then she has to explain the differences between goth, emo, and metalhead. 

She’s just dumped herself onto an empty bench when she heard it. Your laugh. And she nearly runs back to the safety of her dorm. 

Even your laugh is perfect. Everything about you is, of course– you’re the campus it girl. Effortlessly pretty, unbelievably charming, and actually funny. People laugh at your jokes not just because you’re pretty, but because you’re smart and charming and witty as hell. More than that, you’re nice. Genuinely, truly kind. 

Abby remembers the popular girls in high school, the pretty ones who were only nice on the surface. You’re not like that. You’re nice just for the sake of being nice. You’ve even talked to her once. It was to ask for a pencil, but you still talked to her. She clings to that memory like a drowning man to a life raft. She also has that pencil– which you returned to her, of course– kept carefully in an envelope in her sock drawer.

Honestly, she wouldn’t even call it a crush. Everyone who knows her calls it that, because everyone who knows her even a little bit knows that she gets red in the face and can’t speak whenever your name is mentioned. They don’t know that she’s pretty much head over heels for you, even though you probably don’t even know her name. They think it’s a little crush, but it’s a hell of a lot more than that. 

So when you walk away from your group of friends to take a seat on that same bench that she’s sitting on, she nearly dies on the spot.

“Hi,” you say cheerfully. 

Abby stares at you, eyes wide. You’re sitting next to her. You said hi to her. You’re wearing a white sundress. God, you’re pretty. She’s suddenly very aware of her old jeans and Death t-shirt that she cut the sleeves off of with a pair of craft scissors.

“...hi.” She barely manages to get it out. 

“So,” you say, ignoring her awkwardness. “Everything okay?”

Abby blinks. You… you’re asking if everything’s okay. You probably saw how pissed she was leaving practice, and were too damn nice to ignore it like anyone else would have done. 

“Yeah,” she says quickly. “Yeah, everything’s great. Sorry–”

“No need to apologize,” you say with a shrug. Abby’s too focused on the way the glitter in your pink lip gloss shimmers in the sun to hear what you say next. She’s wondering if your lip gloss tastes like strawberries. It looks like it tastes like strawberries. 

She only looks back up to your eyes when you frown slightly. There’s a slight urge to find whatever’s making you frown and squeeze it by the neck until its eyes pop out, but she stuffs that down to try and listen to you. 

“What’s that sound?”

For a second, Abby thinks you might be hearing her heartbeat, the way it feels like it’s trying to escape from her chest. Then she realizes that’s stupid, and actually tries to listen to the world around her. 

She winces when she realizes she can still hear Manny’s drums from here. Along with some other sound, almost like a chanting? Definitely weird, especially that it’s loud enough for them to hear all the way over in the quad. But not the weirdest thing she’s heard after stepping out of practice for a minute. 

“Oh, uh… there’s a band that practices around here.” She doesn’t specify that it’s her band. “Probably making up some lyrics or something.”

You nod slowly. 

“...Right. You listen to that kind of music, don’t you?”

She’s about to play it off, and then she hears the next thing you say. 

“I think that’s pretty cool.”

No way. You think it’s cool. It is cool, but most people don’t think it’s very cool. For some reason, it doesn’t occur to her that you might just be saying that to be nice. 

“Yeah?” She says, a little too excited. “It’s uh… it’s actually my band. Yeah. I play guitar. And sing, but it’s not really singing, more screaming.”

You nod as she speaks, still smiling. 

“Huh, I didn’t know you were in a band. Maybe I could come to one of your shows or something.”

Oh god, please no. She can’t let you find out just how bad they suck.

“I– I don’t know about–”

“Why is there smoke over there?”

At first she’s just grateful for the distraction, then your words register. Smoke. She’s jumping up from the bench and running towards the building in a second. 

“I swear to god, if those idiots set the fucking dorm on fire again–”

Sure enough, there’s black smoke pouring out of every open window in the building. It’s darker than any kind of smoke she’s ever seen. Maybe it’s some sort of electrical fire? 

Then the screaming starts up. Owen’s voice, screaming. And then some sort of screech. 

“What the hell-?” Your voice comes from behind her– shit. She hadn’t realized you were following. 

Abby skids to a halt, kicking up grass and dirt as she whips around. 

“Stay here,” she says quickly. “Please, just– stay here.”

Then she’s off again, shoving through the door to the building as terrified students pour out. Somewhere in the back of her mind she realizes that you’re still following, and that you’re going to realize what a bunch of losers her and her friends actually are. But she can’t let herself think about that now, not when her mess of a friend group just set another building on fire. 

She throws open the door to her dorm, and her ears pop like they would with high altitude. There, she sees it. Furniture pushed aside to make way for an intricate circle drawn on the floor with chalk. Black candles half-burnt around it. The smell of ozone, like the air after lightning. And in the center of the circle, a pit. Not the empty, dark kind of pit. This one seems full, like black water at night. 

It feels like her stomach just dropped down to her feet. The ritual, the stupid ritual Owen had been talking about. It was real. And it had opened a fucking portal to hell in her dorm room. 

Manny’s standing near the portal, dumping a bucket of water onto one of the candles. The flame doesn’t even flicker. 

“PUT THE GODDAMN CANDLES OUT!” Owen yells from behind a chair. 

Manny throws the bucket in his direction. “I’m fucking trying, man! It’s not working!”

Mel is frantically scrolling through her phone, trying to figure out how to undo it. Abby just stands there in shock, watching as smoke keeps pouring out of the portal. It’s thick and dark, crawling out over the floor and slipping out the open window as the vapor twists into screaming faces and clawed hands. 

“Oh my god–” your voice comes from behind, startling Abby so bad she trips over absolutely nothing and falls towards the portal. 

She just barely manages to catch herself, scrambling away from the rippling edge as it seems to pull her in like a magnet. In the rapid movement, the sole of her boot scrapes through the chalk, disrupting one of the lines.

There’s a hellish screech, like a thousand demons in agony. Then the edges of the portal start to recede. Slowly at first, and then it snaps shut as the candles go out all at once. There’s nothing left but blackened char marks on the linoleum. 

Silence, just for a moment. A moment for Abby to briefly think she might have saved the day, or even impressed you. Then she remembers that she only closed the portal through a complete accident, and that she fell on her ass right in front of you.

“...Abby?” Manny says slowly, eyes wide as he stares at something past her. Past you. 

She slowly looks back. 

Towering over you is what she has to assume is a demon. Red-brown scales covering a four-armed, scorpion-tailed, goat-headed monstrosity. Glowing yellow eyes roll around, then lock onto you as you turn to look. 

You scream, stumbling back as Abby jumps up in front of you, holding her fists up like that will do anything. Honestly speaking, she’s fucking terrified. But there is no way she’s letting you get eaten by a demon that her friends summoned on accident. 

Those yellow eyes narrow to slits as they refocus on her. 

“You,” it speaks, pointing one long, clawed finger at her. Its voice sounds like glass breaking, jagged teeth shining with black saliva. “You have summoned–”

It stops. Shuts its mouth. Then coughs and spits out a coagulated ball of hair, blood, and flesh, covered in that black saliva. 

Abby’s eyes drop to the hairball, then flick back up to the demon. It clears its throat, then takes one step forward with a weight that cracks one of the tiles. 

Abby takes a big step back as well, very conscious of you behind her. At some point your hand found its way to her shoulder, holding on tight. The fact that you’re letting her protect you is kinda swelling her ego, up until the demon raises one arm and swipes its claws out at her. 

You yank her back just in time, pulling her inches away from the talons that would have shredded her into ribbons. She falls back from the shock and the force of your pulling, nearly toppling down on top of you but just barely managing to keep her footing.

The demon isn’t so graceful– stumbling after the miss, then going down face first. 

Manny is the first to move, snapping one of his drumsticks in half and jumping onto the demon’s back, plunging the jagged pieces of wood into its back. 

The demon shrieks as the sticks dig past the scales with a wet squelch, two of its arms reaching back to claw at Manny as the other two arms try to push itself up. 

Manny doesn’t stop. He keeps stabbing the pieces of drumstick into the demon’s back, blood spurting from the mess of stabwounds. 

Abby jumps into motion a second later, grabbing a wooden chair and smashing it atop the demon’s head with her best war cry. 

The chair splinters, leaving her holding just two of the legs. But the demon falters, momentarily dazed by the force of the hit. 

Abby looks back quickly, making sure you saw that. She just hit a demon over the head with a chair, that’ll impress you for sure. 

But you’re not behind her anymore. Abby blinks, eyes darting around for you. Just in time to see you rushing back into the room holding a fire axe, which you lift into the air before dropping the blade right between the demon’s horns. 

The shrieking cuts off with a wet gurgle. It’s quiet for a bit. 

Manny rolls off the demon’s back, lying flat on the floor beside it and staring up at the ceiling as he tries to catch his breath. Abby stares wide-eyed at you. You, standing over the dead demon, wiggling the axe gently to try and pull it free. 

“That was… brutal,” Abby mumbles, still in awe at the way you just split a demon’s head down the middle without hesitation. You’re still trying so delicately to dislodge the axe, and that’s when Abby finally moves forward. 

“Can I…?” She asks, grasping the axe handle near where you’re holding the end. Not touching your hands, though, she’s nowhere near bold enough for that. 

“Yeah, be my guest,” you say, stepping away. 

Abby tightens her grip on the axe handle, then puts the sole of her boot on one of the horns for some extra leverage before yanking the axe easily out of the cracked skull. Some of the blood spatters onto her shirt, but she pretends not to care. She just hands the axe back to you. 

“You alright?” She asks. 

You take the axe back slowly. “I think so.”

“I’m fine too,” Manny calls out from the floor. “Not that anyone cares.”

Abby shoots him a look. Then it occurs to her that Mel and Owen are nowhere to be seen. Before she can ask about that, there’s a scream from down the hallway. Definitely human, definitely terrified. 

“Manny,” she says slowly, turning towards him. “How many demons got out?”

He pales. 

“...Shit.”

By the time she realizes what that means, you’re already running out the door. Her legs are moving before she decides to follow, chasing after you. There’s no way she’s letting you face off against who knows how many demons on your own. 

The hallway is… hellish. There’s blood everywhere. Covering the floor in a puddle of gore, smeared on the walls, seeping out from every closed door. There’s too much. The smell hits like a truck, warm pennies and raw meat. 

At the end of the hallway, one girl stands with her back turned. White nightgown, not a speck of blood on it. 

The lights flicker, then go out. Abby immediately grabs your arm to pull you behind her– quick footsteps splashing in the blood as something gets closer. 

The emergency lights turn on, flooding the hall in red light. The girl who was at the end of the hallway is now only a few feet away, staring with all-black eyes and hair that moves like it’s underwater. She smiles, revealing sharp teeth that should be too long to fit in her mouth. 

When it starts to run at her, Abby doesn’t think. She raises her arm and punches as hard as she can. 

The demon girl’s skin is so cold that it burns, but the punch knocks her back as easily as it would a human. Abby’s just hoping that you saw, and that you’re still watching when she throws another punch, this time at the demon’s stomach. 

It doubles over from the force of the blow, black bile gushing from between her fangs. Abby takes the chance to grab it by the hair and smash its face into her knee. 

The demon girl stumbles back a couple steps, then shakes its head and raises its own fists. 

Oh, shit.

Abby swallows down her fear, reminding herself that you’re still watching. If she has to square up to a demon to impress you, so be it. 

So she steps forward, cracking her knuckles and taking on a fighting stance. She’s been in fights before– messy, drunken fights outside of concert venues and dive bars, and then the shitty fights with the jocks in high school. She’s never fought a creepy-ass demon in a nightgown, but she finds out pretty soon that it’s mostly the same. Of course, the creepy-ass demon has more joints than a human, and it keeps trying to bite her, but it’s generally the same as fighting a person. 

The main difference, though, is that you’re watching. Not just watching, but cheering her on. Every time she gets a hit in on the demon, you cheer and say something along the lines of ‘fuck her up, Abby!’ and every time, the demon girl manages to get in a nasty hit because Abby’s too busy being giddy over your praise to pay attention to the fight. 

Finally, Abby manages to grab the demon by the throat and flip it over her hip, blocking out the sound of your cheering just long enough to stomp her boot at the demon’s face. 

“Hell yeah, Abby!” You cheer. “Get her ass!”

There’s a wet crunch as the stomp caves in the demon’s head as easily as if it were rotten fruit. Abby stumbles back, choking from the smell that can only be described as rotten shit and bile. You gag and pinch your nose shut. 

“Holy shit– why does it smell so bad?!” Abby says, voice muffled from behind her hand. “The other one just died, didn’t gas us out. Fucking hell.”

“That’s horrific,” you gag. “I almost threw up.”

Abby hooks her free arm around yours without thinking about the contact, just knowing she has to get you out of the hallway and into some fresher air.

She navigates through the dark red light until she finds the door to the stairwell, shoving it open and stumbling through. 

But they’re not the only ones in the stairwell. As soon as the door shuts behind you two and you finally gasp for breath, Abby sees them. 

Demons. More than she can count, all completely still, staring at the two of you. Glowing eyes blink once, and then all hell breaks loose. 

Abby shoves herself in front of you once again, catching a clawed hand before it can reach her. You don’t stay still, though– as soon as Abby catches the hand, your axe comes down to chop it right off the scaled arm. 

The next few moments are chaos. You try the door, but it’s jammed. Abby jabs the severed hand at the next demon to approach, shoving the claw through the narrowed eyes of a snake-headed demon. Your axe chops down through skulls. This time, you don’t try to be gentle pulling it out. You just yank it free with a grunt before slamming it down into the next demon that comes at you. 

Their faces twist, bones crunching and blood spurting, coating you and Abby in gore. She glances sideways at you. Your previously white dress is completely red now, drenched in blood and guts and little shards of bone sticking to the fabric. There’s a gash on your arm where one of the demons managed to claw at you, but you’re still swinging your axe like a madwoman. Or some kind of sexy, murderous lumberjack. 

She’s distracted enough that when the next demon manages to get up the stairs, she doesn’t notice. Not until it’s grabbing her by the neck and dragging her towards the pit of demons all climbing over each other for a chance to attack. 

She tries to fight back, she really does. Her legs flail, kicking at every part of the winged beast that she can, but it’s hopeless. This one is strong, and it’s holding her in the air with no chance of breaking free. 

Time seems to slow down when she realizes it. A lizard-like face snaps its jaws inches from her foot. 

She’s going to die. She’s going to be torn apart by the demons that her friends unleashed by accident. She’ll never get to see any of them again. She’ll never get to see you again. 

Of all the thoughts rushing through her mind in those moments, that one is at the top. Maybe it’s just because she can see the terror in your face as you scream her name. Maybe she really is just that hopeless. 

Either way, she has just enough time to speak without thinking. 

“I’m in love with you–!”

And then she falls, right into the mass of teeth and claws. 

But she doesn’t feel teeth and claws. Instead, she feels… rain? What the–?

Her back hits the ground, the edges of the stairs digging into her skin painfully. But she’s alive. The demons are screeching and howling, scattering and trying to find an escape from the rain. Not rain. The sprinklers. Distantly, she can hear the fire alarms screeching over the demons’ clamor. 

You’re at her side in a second, grabbing her by the shoulders and trying to drag her off the stairs. She’s too heavy for you to move, though. 

The demons shriek, rolling in agony as the water seems to burn them like acid. It eats past the ghoulish heads, past scaled and leathery skin alike, past rotting grey flesh and muscle and down to the jagged bones. Bits of melting flesh fall from the creatures, dripping away as they fruitlessly try to catch their own flesh. 

You stay like that, arms wrapped around her shoulders, until the last of the screeching dies out under the fire alarms. The two of you are left alone in the wreckage, surrounded by bones. The water is rinsing away the blood from your skin. God, you look beautiful. 

And she just told you she’s in love with you. 

The only sound is the fire alarms and your heavy breathing. But inside Abby’s mind, she’s screaming in agony. She doesn’t even care that the demons are all gone, she’s just hoping you get the axe and mercy kill her. If she’d known that she would live, she never would have opened her mouth. Now she’s alive and you’re alive and you know how obsessed she is with you. 

“So…” you say slowly. “You’re in love with me?”

Oh shit, oh fuck–

“No!” She says quickly. Lie, too much of a lie. The rest of the words tumble out too quick for her to stop them “Well, maybe. A little. Kinda. I don’t really know. I mean, I don’t really know you. We only talked one time before today, not that I really remember, but– fuck. I just, I really like you. Not just because you’re beautiful, even though you are beautiful, probably the hottest girl I’ve ever seen–”

She takes a deep breath. 

“But you’re not just beautiful. You’re nice to everyone, even when they don’t even deserve to be talking to you. And I liked you for a long time, but today? Jesus Christ. I kinda fell in love with you when I saw you put an axe through a demon’s skull.”

You’re quiet after that. Abby is losing it internally as she stares up at you, at the water dripping from your hair. You probably think she’s some kind of freak. Which, to be fair, she is. But you probably think she’s also a creep. And a loser. 

“I’m not a creep,” she says quietly. “I’m not stalking you or anything crazy like that, I’ve just seen the way you are with people. I know it’s weird, and you don’t have to say anything, I swear I’ll never bother you again–”

You cut her off with a finger pressed gently against her lips, and she immediately shuts up. 

“Abby,” you say slowly. 

She nods, listening intently. 

“Do you want to go get coffee sometime?” You ask. Like sitting in a stairwell surrounded by demon bones and asking someone out is perfectly normal for you. 

Abby can’t breathe for a second. More than a second. She feels like her spine just got ripped out of her ass. 

“...Yeah,” she finally manages to choke out. “Yeah, I would.”

You smile down at her. How are you still this beautiful after fighting demons? Abby knows she’s a mess. She definitely has bruises already blooming on her face, she can feel how swollen her lip is. And her eyeliner is probably running like crazy. 

“Cool,” you say plainly, and your voice snaps her right back to the present. You just asked her out. She’s going on a date with you. 

She still can’t breathe.

“Yeah,” Abby says again. “...Cool.”

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a/n: metalhead abby won the poll so here we are. i had such a fun time writing this ough. i haven't written any horror in so long guys... had to make it a lil gross. i did get a little bit too into the horror at times, sorry about that, i tried to balance it out with the comedy.

this is inspired by deathgasm, a stupid movie i watched when i was like 14.