Vergil

The credits trickled off the screen until the last line of text sunk from view. The light from the projector still lingered long after the machine ran out of film. The still lit, black screen illuminated an empty lot where families, friends, and neighbors used to gather in bonds of community and fellowship. Dregs of memories were all that remained. The faint smell of popcorn in the air, or a hint of laughter carried on the wind. The small rods sticking out of the ground to mark parking spots now just looked like headstones. The gargantuan blank screen was the last to go. The light clicked off with an anti-climax. The Nueva Vista Drive-In died to an audience of one.

Vergil Wilson sat in the darkness and mourned. He raised his glass of Morgan in a toast to the death of his old friend. He drained the glass in a single swallow; his sixth of the night. He mused on just how depressing it was that his best friends were the glass in his hand and a graveyard of past entertainment, both of which were now gone. He'd always viewed the drive-in as a time machine of sorts, a vehicle to days gone by. The Morgan made his mind more susceptible to the journey. Some nights, it was the back of Lisa's jeep; he could still feel the stifling heat and see the fogged up windows. Other nights, it took him to any number of beat-up, barely running cars of old friends; Danny, Chris, Luke, and Quinn. Rarely, he found himself curled up in the lap of his mom with her hand gently running through his hair.

Time travelling always made him thirsty. Vergil moved to pour another glass and found  the bottle empty. He contemplated the merits of just never getting up. All the reasons he had for getting up and braving through the day had dwindled away to nothing. He imagined how easy it would be to close his eyes and just cease being. He didn't know where he'd end up, but it'd surely be better than where he was. He closed his eyes and waited for sleep to overtake him.

A flash of light erupted behind his eyelids, jolting him awake. The screen was lit once more, but not by the light of the projector. It glowed a brilliant color that defied the visible spectrum. The closest thing it resembled was the most intense, vibrant shade of violet he had ever seen. The light pulsed on the screen, each one increasing its intensity. Vergil closed his eyes and threw himself to the floor, burying his face in his arms. Even through the numbness of alcohol, he could feel the burn in his retinas. The violet light still pulsed inside his head behind closed eyes. A high keening sound rose into the air. It was reminiscent of a guitar string oscillating back and forth. With each cycle, it increased in amplitude building towards an unknown climax. Vergil tried covering his ears, but the sound was inside him. It felt like piece of him vibrated along with it. The whirring felt like it was approaching the resonant frequency of his being, and he would shatter just as easily as a plate glass window. The feeling transcended pain. It didn't feel like his body was tearing apart, it felt like he was separating at an atomic level. It was at that moment the keening reached a fever pitch. It carried on at that frequency, and he could feel the violet light start to solidify and fall over him like a blanket. It seeped into his skin until he became saturated with it, each individual molecule soaking it up like a sponge. Energy beyond comprehension stored inside every particle, and yet, Vergil clung to consciousness.

He had no idea how long he lay there. He existed in a timeless, violet void. Any attempt to observe the world around him was an exercise in futility. It may as well have been a sensory deprivation chamber. He let go of conscious thought and drifted away.

Jordan

A furious yapping jolted Jordan from her dreams of Derek. She wiped sleep from her eyes and squinted towards the source of the dog's distress: her bedroom window. Jordan quickly reached for her glasses, fearing the worst. At twelve years of age, Albert, her  miniature schnauzer rarely barked at anything, especially with this much ferocity. Could someone be trying to get into her room? Her mother had assured her things like this didn't happen in Idaho, but she remained skeptical. People are the same everywhere, sometimes they just wore different clothes.

Now that her vision was fully functioning, Jordan approached the window cautiously with a hairbrush in hand. It wasn't much of a weapon but applied in certain areas it could buy her some valuable time. She inched towards the window prepared for anything. She imagined an invader in a white mask with little holes all over it. He was the man in a movie her mom was watching after Jordan was supposed to have gone to bed. Ever since they moved, Jordan couldn't fall asleep. Without the familiar noises of the city, her thoughts were deafening, running rampant through her mind. At this moment, she longed for that silence. She would be able to hear whatever it was that was outside instead of Albert's insistent barking.

She had come up to the window at a diagonal angle in order to minimize the chances of her being seen by her potential assailant. She could feel the blood draining from her fingers as a result of the death-grip she had on her hairbrush. Before she could get a good look, light pierced her window, bathing her room in a color her eyes had a hard time processing. It felt like purple, but it was brighter, like it was too complex for her simple eyes to handle. She darted her eyes away from the window and realized that Albert's barking had stopped. The dog had lain on the ground, unmoving. She couldn't tell if he was breathing or not.

Jordan took a step towards him and felt her socks rub against the carpeted floor. A jolt of electricity rushed through her body, paralyzing her in place. She had lost all muscle control. Energy crackled through her body. Her nerves felt like wires with electricity surging between them, and her small body was just an inadequate vessel for all of the energy. She didn't even feel like a person anymore, just a being of pure energy. She fought to hold onto Jordan. An image of her mother crying in the living room every Sunday night made her fight even harder.

Jordan focused every ounce of her willpower to lift her right foot. She needed to get to window and see what was going on. Her foot lifted a fraction of an inch off the ground when a sound pierced her conscious mind. Her willpower scattered to the wind, and her body collapsed underneath her. The closest thing she could compare the sound to was when her shower was warming up. It would give off this high-pitched sound that got more and more annoying until it reached the target temperature. As it increased, so did the electricity in her body. She could see little sparks travelling between the hairs on her arms.The sound levelled off, and she could feel the air in the room get heavy. It slipped over her like a warm blanket, and she fell asleep.

Paul

A loud thud startled Paul from his uneasy sleep. The simultaneous glares of the lights from his TV and the laptop resting on top of his rotund belly momentarily blinded him. Without looking, he reached his arm onto his side table. He pawed at it a few times before finally grabbing the remote in his sweaty hands. He shut off the television, closed his laptop, and looked at the double sliding glass doors that led to his backyard. Small cracks spiderwebbed from a point in the middle of one of the doors. A large dust imprint and small flecks of blood dotted the area like some abstract work of modern art.

"Stupid fucking birds," Paul muttered to himself.

He started shifting his considerable girth back and forth in his seat, trying to use his momentum to get himself out of his chair. After a few futile attempts, Paul decided it wasn't worth the effort and settled back onto his Relaxzen Rocker Recliner with massage and heat capabilities. The best three-hundred-and-eleven-dollars he had ever spent. Lately, he could think of fewer and fewer reasons to actually leave this chair. In the big scheme of things, did it really matter if he had a crack in his door? He never had any visitors, and he rarely went outside.

He loathed the thought of going back to sleep, too many dreams. He decided to try and get some work done instead. He booted his laptop back up. When you worked from home, it didn't matter when you did your work. Before he could decide who he wanted to be for the evening, a horrible yapping disrupted his train of thought. It had to be that damnable miniature schnauzer that lived next door. It didn't matter what the new neighbors  assured the homeowner's association. He knew those city folk and their stupid mutt would be nothing but trouble. It went deeper than that. Their type of people just didn't belong in a nice, respectable neighborhood.

He reached for his cell phone to leave a scalding voicemail for the head of the homeowner's association to wake up to. Before he could dial the number, light flooded his living room. His mind struggled decoding the color of the light that now coated his sanctum. He knew one thing, he didn't like anything he didn't understand, especially when it was in his domain. The sensation of it seeped into his living room and into his very being. Prolonged exposure to the light enhanced the feeling. A connectedness between he and everything in the room started to develop. They all had the shared experience of invasion by a force beyond explanation. Invisible strands that transcended his five senses enveloped his mind in a mesh of energy that connected him with everything in the room; an empty can of Dr. Pepper, numerous Hostess wrappers, and even the individual motes of dust thinly coating the entire room. He struggled to decode all the stimuli flooding his mind. Inputs assailed his mind to the point he couldn't perceive the world around him. He floated in a violet ether with skeins of thread tethering him to all the matter around him. It felt like he was trapped in a spider's web.

He had no concept of how long he stayed suspended in that way, but at some point, the strands started vibrating. It started slow at first. The gentle vibrations giving his brain the sense of some disturbance in reality brushing against his own. He couldn't help but compare it to the same analogy of the spider. Something had stepped on his web, but it was too big to fathom. Whatever it was, it was becoming more and more agitated. The strands started moving faster and faster and started to pull at his mind. They were immeasurable in number, but he strained to grasp them to keep them from ripping his mind apart. He held onto one single thought: I still haven't gotten my revenge. The thought that had fueled him for the last twenty years of his life was the only thing that kept him whole as he slipped into unconsciousness.

Vergil

"I thought you said there wouldn't be anyone here," a male voice said, waking Vergil from his stupor.

"There isn't supposed to be. This place is shut down," another voice whined.

"Should I tell the Miasma we have a problem?" the more menacing of the two voices asked.

"Since when is one lousy drunk a problem?" the whiny one queried, his voice raising an octave revealing his anxiety.

"You make an excellent point Vyth," said the first voice, increasing in volume as it got closer to where he lay.

Vergil's eyes shot open, realizing he was in danger. He moved to his feet in a cautious fashion, not wanting to get up too fast. His surroundings spun around him; he'd still gotten up too fast. The room had a distinctly violet hue, and a man wearing what seemed to be a tweed jacket swerved towards him. He wove back and forth in Vergil's field of vision. Vergil turned to run. He placed his left foot on the ground and pushed off hard. That was as far as he made it. The wall behind was much closer than he thought. He stumbled headfirst into it. He felt his body plow through the wall like it was nothing more than a piece of cardboard.

He tried to stand up, but his body refused to obey his commands. It was as if all the energy had been drained from his body. It was unlike anything he had ever felt. He lay there impotently, waiting for the man to come upon him.

"It appears as if our little experiment had an adverse effect on our friend here," said the nameless man.

"We knew that we would run that risk, not that it'll matter in the long run," the man called Vyth chimed in.

Vergil clamped his eyes shut, waiting for the inevitable. He could feel the presence of the man directly behind him. At that moment, a heaviness in the air that he had not noticed before lifted. Seconds passed and still nothing happened. The room was empty. Whoever had just been in the room with him had left with whatever had been in the air. If there had even been anything.

He gave one last herculean effort to stand up and realized he couldn't. He decided to sleep instead.

Hey guys adding in an author's note.

I hope you enjoyed Trial Run. I certainly enjoyed writing. This whole thing started for me from that one drive-in scene and took on a life of its own. I never planned for it to be a story.

If you did enjoy, feel free to vote, but don't feel obligated this isn't a dictatorship.

Lastly, I would love to hear your theories especially what the violet is and who the men are!

Thanks for Reading. Whoever you are. I appreciate you.