Someone was outside.

Jack could tell, he’d got into bed to rest, but someone, or something, had just moved past the window. Panic gripping him, he cautiously slid himself out from the covers, still more-or-less fully clothed from earlier.

Moving down the hallway, almost crouched, he looked around, trying to catch a glimpse of whatever might be out there through the windows.

‘It couldn’t be Penny - she went home’ - his brain posited and analysed immediately, adrenaline levels skyrocketing as he ruled her out of the running.

Walking into the kitchen silently, he peered through the curtains, but everything was suspiciously calm and quiet outside. It was like there wasn’t even any wind, the scene looked dead, grey, empty.

Opening the door to the small utility room beside the kitchen, he crept to the back door, looking through the panelled glass and out across the small back yard he had grown up playing in. Weeds and bare patches of muddy, thinly-seeded lawn showed the lack of attention it had received over the winter.

As he stared, his eyes were drawn slowly, inexplicably, to the keyhole on the back door. The key was normally left very deliberately in the lock, at a 90 degree angle to prevent anyone from using it from outside, and for convenience from indoors when anyone needed to quickly head outside.

The lock was empty.

Someone was outside.

His eyes flicked back to the window, he swore something had moved out there.

And then, he saw her.

Like a creature from a lagoon, or a monster from a B-movie, the enormous red-haired girl raised her legging-clad leg over the 6-foot fence, hurdling it with almost nonchalant ease.

Bolting like a missile, he tore back into the kitchen and absolutely hurled the key drawer open, almost tearing it from its rails. He recognised the back door key immediately by the keyring, a grey and blue chunk of plastic promoting his father’s tech workplace.

Snatching it between trembling fingers, he sprinted back into the utility room only to see the handle turn and an enormous, burly arm extend inwards like a piston, swinging the unsecured door open without hesitation.

He slid heavily to the floor with a clumsy thud as he tried to retreat back out of the utility room doorway, his feet giving way as he rapidly changed momentum, jarring his head hard against the unforgiving tiles and dropping the key somewhere on the ground. He scrambled to get upright, his feet skating against the tiles as he used his hands to push his body upright, all the while the Alpha giantess continued her unwelcome breach into his tiny home.

He just about got to his feet and careened into the main hallway by the front door. Behind him, he could hear large, cumbersome movements, a mop or ironing board falling over as the leviathan squeezed through the utility room.

He ran to the front door to open it, but remembered in an instant that he’d locked it and taken the key back into his room with him. Cursing, he tore across the house and burst into his room, staring glassy-eyed at the floor, the desk, the chair. Where the fuck was the key?

The back of his neck felt completely aflame, his heart was smashing around inside of his chest and he felt like he was likely to collapse. His vision started to blur as he realised with a sickening wave of dread that he could not for the life of him remember where the key was.

Turning around, he saw Caitlin’s hulking form emerge, crouched down in the hallway, her substantial arms supporting the weight of her upper body as her muscular legs tucked underneath her. She turned to face him, her long red hair sweeping loosely across her face to reveal an expression both predatory and wrathful. She immediately started closing the distance to him.

Jack let out an anguished squeal of terror, frantically grasping for the edge of his bedroom door and hurling it shut in the futile hope that covering the visage would make it somehow not real. Angling his shoulder, he leant into the door with all his might and spread his legs apart to try and hold it firm. Twisting his arm at an angle, he braced his right hand against the door handle, trying to prevent it from turning, but within a matter of seconds, he knew he was beaten.

First, the door handle rotated effortlessly, nearly spraining his hand as he desperately tried to stop it with his fingers, and then the plane of the door he was braced against inched open with an eerily unrelenting force, his feet skating ineffectually across the carpet as Caitlin comfortably forced her way inside.

A mammoth arm reached around the door and grabbed a hold of him, securing his forearm in her steely grasp and dragging him like a ragdoll to the middle of the room as she seemingly expanded to occupy the poky confines of a small Beta bedroom.

With his free arm, he reached out to grab at the phone on his desk in a vain, last minute attempt to somehow escape the certain fate he had sealed for himself. If he could only press 9-1-1 with his thumb at least there'd be a chance someone might become aware of his plight. Miraculously, despite his desperate flailing action, his fingers wrapped around the phone’s slim body and secured it to his palm, but as he turned to look at his prize and try to punch the number home, Caitlin was already greedily pawing at his puny hand with her own, plucking it from his grasp as if his fingers were made of straw.

“N-noooooooooo…. Pleeeease..” he whined as the girl contemptuously inspected the miniature device, an evil grin carving into her freckled features as she enclosed her robust fingers around it and crushed it to a shattered pulp in her oversized palm.

He was crying now, overwhelmed with distress, on the verge of puking at the sheer powerlessness he had.

Using her leverage over him, Caitlin threw his body around almost in mid-air with one brawny arm and slammed him down onto his own bed, winding and temporarily dazing him.

As he fought to regain his breath he saw her other arm reach out for the laptop he had at his bedside, picking it up and lining it up between her gigantic hands as if she was about to open a small pocket book.

Lowering her eyes to his, her smile unflinching and demonic, she slowly began to bend the computer between her oversized fingers, the silvery plastic casing warping, discolouring and rupturing like shrink-wrap before finally snapping violently as she ripped it apart in two pieces as easily as if she were tearing a slice of bread.

In open-mouthed horror, he watched her drop the two destroyed halves of his most important possession, the receptacle for all of his work, his writing, his window on the world…

She reached out for him, her hands covering his face and engulfing his mouth so he could not breathe…

“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGHHHHH!!!” he screamed, smashing his head into the something hard and wooden.

He could feel something wet and warm beginning to spread across the back of his skull.

Panicking, he swept his arm behind his head to stem the flow of blood and reached around to get his bearings, his bleary eyes taking a while to adjust.

He was in his room.

There was no Caitlin.

He was on the floor.

Pressing his hand against the sharp pain at the back of his head, he began to take stock of what on earth had happened. He had had the most vivid waking terror yet. His laptop lay on the floor by his side, thankfully in one piece, but presumably had come to rest there after a sudden, impromptu trip to the floor.

His duvet was in a kind of exploded heap, half removed from the bed and hanging near his fallen legs; it resembled a kind of chest-burster exit wound, almost perfectly preserving the conditions under which he had thrown himself from the covers and to the ground.

The blow that had woken him up had been a sickening impact against the base of his bedside cabinet. He had probably fallen first, and then writhed over towards it before finally delivering the killer reverse-headbutt at the end, he determined.

He could feel that there was a fair bit of blood seeping into his scraggy scalp, so he got to his feet on wobbly legs and made his way into the bathroom, dabbing at it with a clump of dampened toilet roll whilst mixing an antiseptic solution haphazardly in the sink from one of the bottles his parents kept for emergencies.

Dipping the wad of soggy paper into the solution, he pressing it to his head, gritting his teeth as the sting of antiseptic on wound kicked in, making sure to keep it held against the sore patch to mop up most of the blood and disinfected the area.

After a few more wads of toilet paper had been gingerly put to use, and the trickle of blood had seemingly been stemmed into a clot that would scab over, he drained and rinsed the sink and flushed the evidence away. He picked up the small vanity mirror his mother used for make-up and tilted his head away from the main mirror, trying to use a double reflection to catch a glimpse of the back of his head. From what he could see, it was no more than a small cut, a nick against a sharpish corner of the wooden cabinet, but it still hurt like fuck and looked no prettier.

Suddenly, he remembered with startling clarity Penny’s fist crunching into the floor of the old school. The rivulets of blood streaming from her knuckles, the power and emotion of that moment. He had meant to have her come home and clean the cuts, he recalled, but it hadn’t quite come to pass. Instead…

The memory of her kiss came into focus now, the soft imprint on his face, and he reached to touch his cheek, looking at himself in the mirror. He wasn’t one to admire his own reflection, but seeing himself as Penny did - his relatively wise-looking, currently dark and bleary eyes contrasting with his still-boyish features - it wasn’t beyond the realms of crazy that she could perhaps find him attractive, that she might see him in that way. Tousling his own hair lopsidedly, he put the vanity mirror back down and splashed cold water on his face to try and wake himself up.

Grabbing a fresh handful of paper roll, he walked himself groggily back to his room, stuffed it into the back of a woolly hat, and affixed it to his head. The migraine-like headache was beginning to set in, but a sharp blow to the head was the least of his worries though. What seemed like a good opportunity to rest up and calm himself had turned into a sleep punctuated by the most unnerving and upsetting hallucination yet, it had been barely an hour since Penny had departed and already his confidence was descending into a death spiral.

Grabbing his laptop wearily and inspecting it momentarily for damage, he opened it and reattached it to the power cable by his bedside. Propping himself up in bed, his aching head cushioned against the backboard by the hat, he started to type.

Slowly at first, he falteringly began to get down the facts. It would help to make a record of everything, just in case there ever would be some kind of justice.

He couldn’t feel much worse, so it wasn’t like it was even that emotional or raw any more, he just tried to list what had happened.

The words began to steadily flow until it was practically a deluge, pouring unfettered from his tormented mind. He hadn’t written like this for some time.

Things shot into his consciousness, he would then write them down without a moment’s hesitation. Word after word, sentence after sentence; it felt cathartic to try and purge his thoughts and for them to come tumbling out so freely. He barely even noticed the passage of time, before long, his mother was home to check on him, at first pleased to see that he looked better and apparently keeping up-to-date with his work, later more concerned that he hadn’t touched the food she had left for him to heat up.

A bowl of soup and a minor lecture later, he continued to dissect, document and take stock of everything that had transpired recently, hoping that in the retelling he could find some semblance of hope or a way to keep himself out of harm’s way. The bleakness of the predicament never left him, but the act of putting it down in black and white made it strangely more bearable, like it was more of a story, and less of a brutal, inescapable reality.

After a few hours, though, he had exhausted his reserves. The words were becoming strained rather than flowing forth freely, and reluctantly he had to put it to one side and begin to prepare himself for the day to come. His heart was increasingly in his mouth and it felt like he might hurl at any moment, but there was a little more steel in his mind since Penny’s impromptu pep talk. He would try and hold himself together, if only to see her again as soon as possible.

He loaded up his web browser and logged into his social network. Almost immediately, Delon’s chat box popped up in the corner.

D: You ok, man?

J: Hey Delon. I’m alright, feeling a bit better

D: Good good, been worried about you. Penny drop off your stuff alright?

J: Yeah, she did, thanks

D: Nice one. About tomorrow…

Jack waited as Delon typed for a short while, the blinking ellipsis – the little trail of dots – signifying his incoming message.

D: I’ll meet you outside school, I can stick with you for most of the day, I don’t know about Alex but Penny said she’d try and look out for you too

J: Yeah, I’ve spoken with her, she’s going to meet up with me but I don’t know when

D: Oh good, hopefully we can both cover you over the day

D: You walking in or getting the bus btw?

He paused, it would be safer to go in on the bus, blending into the crowd of giant kids would both reduce the chances of being spotted, and in the event of Caitlin appearing, would provide witnesses if she tried anything.

J: Bus I think. Meet me at the bus stop at school?

D: Ok yeah, good shout

D: Strength in numbers

J: Yeah, keep my head down

D: True

There was another lull in the conversation.

Jack decided he might as well admit what he was feeling.

J: I’m really scared

D: I know, man, we’re here to help though

J: But what if Caitlin just just takes me again?

A shudder went down his spine.

D: I dunno, man, don’t go anywhere alone, keep your phone on you at all times, ready to record stuff if anything happens

Jack recalled his nightmare. Caitlin crushing his phone in her bare hands with barely a squeeze.

J: Yeah

He was unconvinced that that would work.

D: Just an idea, if she does anything we’re all on the lookout

D: Remember, Alex said she would try and keep her ear to the ground

Alex.

Jack had forgotten about her completely.

On a Tuesday she was in a number of his classes, more than Delon, actually. She’d surely have to keep up appearances, otherwise Hannah or Caitlin would notice something was up. It was unlikely that he could rely on her help if something were to really go down, but this new outlook on her at least meant that if something were to happen, there’d be an insider able to report back.

Small comfort, but just the sort of thing that tiny, flickering hopes grow from…

D: I gotta run, dude, ma’s shouting, but I’ll see you tomorrow, yeah?

D: Try to rest up.

J: Cheers D, I appreciate it.

Delon’s icon went grey.

Jack put his laptop down to one side, clocking the time.

8:57pm.

Less than 12 hours until school.

He put his head down and tried to rest.

He was going to need it.