3 Chapter 3: Marked

Suddenly, she wakes up in the truck and sits straight up. It's dawn now, the sun is peeking over the mountain and the truck is still running. She lets out a huge groan and looks down at her ankle. A frail, skeletal hand with a bone jutting out at the wrist is clasped tightly against her skin. She sobs uncontrollably trying to pry it off but each attempt is unsuccessful. "What do you want from me??!!" she yells angrily.

   It's a bone-chilling silence for several seconds until a thundering voice replies, "Come with us, Kourtni."

"Go where?" her voice fades into a squeak.

The seconds ticked by into minutes. She's trying to process the situation but is failing to explain how everything panned out. Replaying the situation from last night till now she is getting flashblacks that haunt her. She slowly looks toward the passenger side window of her truck. The air is still frosty, she can still see her breath yet, the handprint that smacked the side of her vehicle was completely gone. The sun wasn't all the way up and the condensation from her breathing inside her vehicle was still fogged up where all she could see is a translucent view of the sky beginning to brighten up.

Crackling fingers begin to move one by one around her ankle, losing the grip. The hand behaved in a way as if it was waking up after a slumber and needed to stretch. Kourtni's heart skipped a beat, she just watched, scared yet intrigued. The hand loosened it's grip even more and slid down from her ankle to her foot to the floor.

It was like it didn't recognize it wasn't attached to it's owner, whoever that was she was unsure, she had a breif flashback to who grabbed her ankle last night and shuddered at the bone popping crunch the seal of her door made to their arm. However, the situation didn't seem to scare her as much as she thought it would. The hand was walking around on it's fingers, displaying dog like behavior with it's middle finger out stretched like it was sniffing the air.

Kourtni watched it roam around and then she heard a click. Click. Click. It was painfuly slow and the sounds were spaced out a few seconds from each other but that made the hand go insane. It began running around sniffing, running up under her seat and back underneath the passenger side to the front. Click. Click. It was obvious the hand knew where the noise was at this point and made a leap up to Kourtni's passenger side seat and then toward the door.

Kourtni snickered, the door was locked but this hand obviously doesn't know that....she thought until it pryed the lock open and crawled toward the door handle. "WAIT! NO! PLEASE!" she pleaded, "please don't open that door. Those things scare me." The hand stopped and waited serveral seconds almost as if it was thinking about what she had said, like it understood.

Click. Click. The noise was much louder than before and the hand opened the door to the truck.

Kourtni looked down at her ankle where the hand had been sitting since the attack and fried into her skin was a handprint. Inside of that handprint read the word "INSIGNIS".

She looked toward the door and the hand was gone. She glanced back down at her ankle, "insignis" she spoke quietly to herself.

Click. Click. Her thoughts were interrupted and her eyes wandered toward her open door.

Two skeletal hands were on the edge of her sit. She watched and waited nervously as she saw black hair start to come into view... "Are you- are you gonna hurt me?" she managed to spit out the words. The figure stopped moving, all you could see was black hair and and two frail hands clipped onto the seat firmly. The air turned stale and a deep humming can be heard toward the direction of this..thing.

"I know you hear me." Kourtni said with some confidence. A long pause of silence between these two until finally, "Yeh, I's can hair youh." The skeletal figure responded.