Harper Rock U had the best St. Patrick’s day celebrations. It would have to, what with students dying left and right of mysterious incidences. So when Shailene called her up and asked her to drive down together for the long weekend, Phoebe wasn’t about to decline. Their college wasn’t doing anything to celebrate the holiday and Phoebe couldn’t handle another day in lecture. The semester was half over and already she was bored to tears. At 25, Phoebe should have been well into her university degree by now. Instead, she had changed her specialty so many times she’d accomplished just about nothing in the many years she’d spent behind a desk.
A gunshot from the window of a beat-up sedan distracted the inebriated coed from her lamentations about the tribulations of higher education. Just then, her heel caught in the sidewalk, and she yelped, her mind spinning with accusations that Harper Rock should probably spend less money on the dark and creepy factor and put more funds into finding their lost students and fixing their crappy roadways. In her drunken stupor, the fall seemed to take more than its cursory ten seconds, slow motion blurring her vision but not enough to ignore the fact that a huge hunk of concrete was heading right for her forehead. Joy.
Her head cracked against the sidewalk with enough force rattle her brains about and blind Phoebe for just long enough that she couldn’t push herself up. In that time, the scraping of nails against concrete had missed her purview. What roused Phoebe out of her disoriented blackout was the latch of long, jagged, and razor-sharp teeth on her bare ankle. The teeth sliced through her skin like butter, and she barely felt the initial laceration. What had her screaming was the burning, in her blood, through her tendons, like someone had poured poison straight into her bloodstream and skipped the formalities of kicking her *** first.
The assault didn’t stop. The ten second fall she’d just experienced, as long as it had felt, had nothing on the repeated slashing and clawing of her tender skin. Eventually, Phoebe’s screaming stopped, and she simply stared up in the sky, with blank, glassy eyes and a mouth wide open, waiting to be devoured completely and die.
The last thought that went through her mind was almost too morbid to repeat. “Blast me lucky charms,” she thought, “I’m magically delicious.”