BloodWashed - Chapter: 1

Chap 1. 1

~ NELL ~2

3

The howl filled the house. It’s eerie sound echoed and bounded down the white walls of the hallways, and through each room.
Nell started awake, sitting straight up in the soaking bed covers. It was hot tonight in the city of Las Vegas.
She swung her legs over the bedside, and fumbled with putting her aging feet into the green and red plaid slippers; fumbled till she finally bent, and slipped her toes by hand onto the warm faux-fleece inside.
She then proceeded to move quickly down the hall from her room to the living area where she found her youngest grandson, Mathew, sprawled out on the couch. He wore only his boxers, the long black remote pinched under his naked stomach as he slept.
The TV was blaring. A chorus of loud howls sounded through the house as the picture of the man on screen began to speak. About what exactly Nell didn’t care, she wanted only to quickly turn down the volume.
‘Disgusting creatures, wolves’ she thought as she set the remote on the table beside the old recliner. Nell would never understand why her grandson liked them so. She turned to the sleeping Mathew with the thought. He was the scrawny seven-year-old son of her much-loved drug-abusing daughter, Ally.
She hadn’t heard from Ally, not since she’d dropped the boy at her doorstep four years ago. Nell bent to his sleeping figure kissing his head, and by the light still on in the adjoining kitchen saw his hearing aids discarded on the floor. She plucked the aids up, and set them on the table beside the remote. At least he’d thought enough to take them out, only last month he’d lost one in the couch and they had to go buy a new one.
Nell stood there a few moments in the middle of the living room, watching him sleep. She took the old quilt off the back of the couch and covered him, even though it was hot. Then she moved to the air conditioner at the window and turned it on.
As Nell went from the cold blowing air conditioner toward the kitchen to make some coffee she thought about the first moment she had ever seen her youngest grandson, the only child Ally had ever told her about.
Ally had turned up out of nowhere four years ago in the early morning hours just before dawn. She was clutching the tiny hand of an underfed blonde haired little boy who was busing himself with sucking his thumb. He had held onto a very dirty and ratty stuffed T-Rex, and there had been a tattered Power Rangers backpack on his small shoulders that had held everything he owned.
Ally had told her mother that she feared for little Matt’s health. “Matt,” Ally had explained sitting at Nell’s small kitchen table over a beer, “is always crying about his ears, and recently when he’s not crying about the pain he wont even look at me or Josh, his father, when we call him.”
Ally had gone on to say that she didn’t have the money to pay for him to see doctors about his ears, or even just to go to public school. Besides, she couldn’t see Josh hurt her son anymore, and live with herself.
Nell had graciously taken the boy in. She’d originally made the offer for the both of them, her daughter, and Matt, however Ally had turned down the offer just as every other time Nell had offered out a hand to help.
She could only watch Ally, from her welcome mat, disappear into the night most likely, she imagined, toward the nearest bar.
Bad ears were something that ran in their blood. Almost all the children that Nell could remember, including her, had had severe ear infections as young ones. Her elder brother, Kenneth, had gone completely deaf from those infections.
With a visit to the nearby hearing clinic it was confirmed that Matt was indeed legally deaf. His hearing disorder could have been prevented with proper care, however, even though it was to late to reverse the affects, it was not too late to prevent further damage.
Matt still didn’t talk very much, and when he did his words were slurred and the sentences roughly put together. Only a year ago she’d finally saved enough money to send him to an adequate school and speech therapy. The progress was slow, but it was progress.
Nell turned out the kitchen light as she finished pouring her black coffee, and headed back toward the hallway toward her room. Instead of going to the end of the hall and left where her bedroom was, she moved through the door across from it.
This room was her study, a bookcase filled with books, and an old style desk with an open laptop and pens strewn across it where all that occupied it. She sat at the laptop, setting her coffee on the flowery coaster, and pushing the boot up button. She waited.
The single window of the study looked out on street to the front of her house. The streetlamps lit the middleclass neighborhood sufficiently. No lights were on in her neighbor’s houses. For a moment she closed her eyes, and listened to the traffic sounds that entered through the open window from the highway not even a mile out.
Her computer played the XP opening song. She opened her eyes, sipped at her coffee, and waited patiently. Little did she know these would be some of her last few moments.
As Nell's mouse drifted to the start menu button, and clicked it up into view, two cool to the touch black gloved hands came up from behind her. In a single movement they took hold of her thin delicate neck, and squeezed her airway shut.
Her dying lasted only for a few moments, but for her those moments were long and blinding with pain and panic. The coffee found the walls; the laptop found the floor and broke on the hardwood.
In such a relatively small span of time the physical form of Nell, mother of three; grandmother of eight, was completely still, and would remain so ever after.
The walls watched unobtrusively, as walls are most apt to do, while the pale skinned, thin, blue-jean clad, dark haired young man moved with simple and liquid speed to the living room, and the sleeping boy.
The walls, the pictures, and the single mirror that hung above the television were silent in their constant vigilance. They watched the man scoop the boy up as if an infant, and then they watched him exit the house through the front door from whence he had come.
As all walls and objects, they would never say a word to anyone. Humanity’s constant witnesses without a way to convey what and/or whom they see besides what man or beast has left behind on and round them. 4


The man was counting on their silence.5