Chapter One.
Nightmare on Elm Street: The New Blood
By Bubbles
Disclaimer: I do not own the copyrights to the Freddy Krueger character or the franchise A Nightmare on Elm Street. This is just a fan fiction. I'm just a fan.
Chapter One: Brady.
Brady Thompson didn't normally have nightmares. He slept like a rock, the way most seventeen-year-olds do after spending hours trying to land kickflips behind the strip mall parking lot.
At five-foot-seven, Brady was skinny and perpetually slumped forward, with shaggy dark brown hair that fell into his wide-spaced brown eyes. He wore tortoiseshell glasses perched on the bridge of his nose—purely an affectation, since his vision was a crisp 20/20—and dressed exclusively in thrift-store finds.
It wasn't out of necessity; his parents made pretty good money, with his dad running a busy dental office and his mom working the front desk as his receptionist. Buying secondhand was just Brady's style. Tonight, like most nights, he was dressed in his usual uniform: tight worn jeans with a heavy silver wallet chain clipped to the pocket, beat-up high-top Keds, a ripped gray metalhead band t-shirt, and a scuffed leather jacket.
Which made it all the weirder when Brady closed his eyes in his bedroom and opened them inside the Springfield Mall.
Springfield had a pretty good-sized mall, all polished tile, neon food-court signs, and echoing Muzak, though Brady wasn't the type of kid who ever hung out in places like that. Yet there he was, wandering past dark storefronts under the hum of overhead fluorescent tubes.
His high-top Keds squeaked softly against the floor, his silver wallet chain clinking against his hip with every step.
He happened to look up from the floor and realized he had drifted straight into the middle of the toy section.
Rows of brightly colored plastic packaging, stuffed bears, and battery-operated trucks towered over him on metal shelving. In the fuzzy logic of the dream, he didn't even stop to wonder what a seventeen-year-old guy was doing roaming around a toy aisle in the middle of the night.
Then the fluorescent lights overhead began to flicker.
Buzz. Snap. Buzz.
The cheerful mall music warped, slowing down until it sounded like a dying cassette tape, before cutting out entirely. From somewhere behind the towering shelves of board games and action figures came a sharp, deliberate sound—the unmistakable shriek of metal scraping against metal.
The noise chilled Brady straight to his soul, raising the fine hairs on the back of his neck. He froze, his hand instinctively dropping toward his wallet chain as the shadows at the end of the aisle stretched longer and darker.
From out of those shadows stepped a weird-looking shape.
At first, it was just the silhouette of a thin guy standing sideways at the end of the aisle, poised almost playfully, like Fred Astaire getting ready to tap dance. As he drifted into the strobing fluorescent glare, Brady’s breath caught in his throat.
The man’s face was ruined—beat up and knotted with thick, melted scars that twisted in the flickering light. Pulled low over his brow was an old, beat-up brown fedora hat.
What really caught Brady's eye, though, was the ugly Christmas sweater in dirty stripes of green and red; the bright red seemed to blare out of the gloom as if it were jumping off the screen of a 3D movie.
Below the sweater, he wore dark, pleated dress trousers—the exact kind of stiff church pants Brady's grandfather wore on Sundays—ending over a pair of heavy, scuffed-up work boots.
None of that was what truly terrified Brady.
At the end of the thin man's gloved hand, four long, curved blades made of polished razors shined and sparkled every time the overhead lights buzzed and flashed.
Brady couldn't move. His high-top Keds felt glued to the polished mall floor as the figure tilted his fedora-covered head, his scarred mouth stretching into a wide, crooked grin.
"Hey, four eyes," the man rasped, his voice sounding like dry leaves scraping over concrete. He raised his hand, flexing his fingers so the razor blades clicked together with a sharp, metallic snick. "Let's see how fast you can run."
Brady finally broke free from his paralysis, spinning on his heel and bolting down the toy aisle. Behind him, the heavy work boots didn't run—they tapped and scraped against the tile in a mocking, rhythmic shuffle, followed closely by the shriek of steel dragging across the metal toy shelves.
"You can run, kid, but you'll never get away from me," the horrible voice echoed down the aisle, sounding like cold fingers dragging across even colder ice cubes. "I got my eye on you."
Splat.
Something wet and sticky smacked hard against the back of Brady's neck. He spun around in mid-stride, slapping his hand to his skin. When he pulled his palm back, his stomach dropped—he was holding an eyeball. A loose, wet, glistening eyeball sat right in the center of his palm, staring up at him.
Brady shrieked in pure terror, flinging it away as his high-top Keds slipped on the polished floor. Behind him, the horrible man threw back his head and laughed, a ragged, wheezing cackle that bounced off the shelves.
"Told you, kid. I got my eye on you!"
Brady spun back around, faltering in his steps as he scrambled to get his footing and keep running.
He bolted past towering displays of board games and plastic action figures, his heart hammering against his ribs, his silver wallet chain slapping wildly against his hip. No matter how fast he pumped his legs, the rhythmic scrape of work boots and the shriek of metal stayed right at his heels.
The man caught up with him at the end of the aisle.A searing, white-hot flash of pain tore across Brady's shoulder blades as the razor glove sliced deep through his leather jacket and ripped t-shirt.
Brady woke up screaming in terror, thrashing tangled in his sheets in the dark of his bedroom.
He sat upright, chest heaving, cold sweat soaking through his shirt. His tortoiseshell glasses were sitting safely on his nightstand, and the familiar shadows of his bedroom walls surrounded him—no mall, no flickering fluorescent lights, no scarred man in an ugly Christmas sweater.
Then, slowly, the burning sting across his back made him reach behind his shoulder. When he pulled his hand back into the dim moonlight filtering through his blinds, his fingertips were stained dark and wet with blood.
