Death In Her Eyes - Erin Bedford Page 0,2

deep pain of a knife slipping in. Then there was the screaming. The screaming was unbearable. High pitched wails of unspeakable terror and gurgling breaths. Any sane person would have gone insane by the chaos of images that played havoc in my mind. They barely cause an emotional reaction from me anymore. It sometimes made me wonder if that makes me a sociopath.

I dug my nails into the palms of my hands and the physical pain of them biting into my flesh pulled me back into myself. I shoved all of the images back into the room and slammed the door, the force of it vibrated through my mind. With the visions safely behind the metal door I could finally breathe again. I took a deep breath and clicked the lock back into its place.

Touching my face, I felt the wetness there and almost glared down at it. I never cry. I learned a long time ago that crying didn’t change anything. It didn’t bring people back. It certainly didn’t stop the visions from happening. But today, today it was necessary. I glanced back at the list and started to punch in my aunt’s number.

It almost felt good to cry.

Chapter 2

In my short eighteen years of life I have seen more death and destruction than most war veterans. I would rather face an onslaught of bleeding soldiers than face the crowd of mourners before me. Death I could handle, people…not so much.

Mom would have been happy so many had come to mourn her death. She has way more friends than me. Which wasn’t exactly hard since I’d only ever had one friend. Nicole Berman. Or Nikki to her friends, meaning me. Nikki actually was the only one at the funeral home I was happy to see. The rest could go find a shallow grave to lie in.

Unlike my somber personality, Nikki was a breath of Jewish sunshine. From her dark curly mass of hair all the way down to her sensible “got them on sale” shoes. She really was my lifeline in this world. She’s helped me more than once from getting completely lost in my own sinking pit of carnage. To top it off she was completely aware of my little ‘gift’ and had no problem telling me where to stuff it when I tried to warn her off of any guy who was doomed to die in the foreseeable future. We actually met because of a guy, back in sixth grade when all the other kids avoided me like a bad case of cooties.

I’d been hanging out by the swing sets watching the other kids playing kickball. I’d never been a joiner to begin with, but it would have been nice to be asked to play sometimes. But by then I had already been labeled as that scary blonde girl. I had made the mistake of telling this one girl, Jessica, that her new puppy was going to get its head chopped off by her dad’s weed whacker that weekend. Ever since then not too many people talked to me if they could help it.

Nikki wasn’t like them. She had been a transfer student, so all the boys were in that new toy phase with her. This one boy in particular, David Bartelli, who was like the Joe Jonas of Ms. Johnson’s sixth grade class, was hard core for Nikki. He even brought her flowers one day. It would have been sweet if I hadn’t already known that David would die later that year from a bad outbreak of measles.

I probably should have kept my mouth shut. Probably. Who knows maybe my vision was wrong that time and David would have grown up to be a charming man who would have married Nikki and brought her flowers every day for the rest of their lives. But at that point in time David was a conceited little brat and stole Twinkies out of my lunch box every day.

So, when I saw Nikki heading over to where David was hanging out with his other equally stuck up friends I had to intervene. I mean, it was my civic duty to let Nikki know just how short term of a relationship she was in for. When I told her she just looked at me like I was the most fascinating thing in the whole world. From that point on we had been inseparable.

“Great party.” Speak of the devil. I loved her sense of humor. It was one thing we actually had