by Isoellen
The deaths surrounding her carried the mark of gratuitous dark energy. This was the violence of broken, selfish-mindless things and the very reason her family line removed itself from the big cities. The humble way escaped humanoid power plays. Wars. Greed.
Mama said, "Not in this place. Not in this life. Safe."
"This is not safe, not safe at all," Annabell murmured. Just like every tale of woe in her life, Annabell lived on to feel it while others died. The attack had missed her.
Annabell prided herself on wise decisions, but this—this horror—swallowed up all her ability to think clearly. Exhausted, she'd fallen asleep on the floor, half-dressed, filthy from cleaning up death's messes, eyes shut as soon as she sat down to wash.
Coming to life, sitting up, she took stock of herself. First to finish what she started hours ago, reset a fire, warm water, find clean clothes. The routine of living kept her moving, the way it had every time lonely and pain overwhelmed, and she wanted to give up. A habit of not thinking or feeling about anything except what was in front of her served her well.
Benjere. His children. The workers. Or that she had buried no women. "I won't think about it," she said to the empty house.
Her voice didn't echo. Mama had nothing to add.
Couldn't let it touch her. Don't think. Do. She would take action. Tell someone. Tell her brothers in town.
Her brothers, Kejere and Vejere, born eighteen months apart, lived close to the town center with their wives. Once as close as twins, Kejere's marriage to Lurann Ardensdotter caused a breach in the family that to this day boiled with accusations and unforgiveness. Lurann was older than Annabell by almost six years. Men sang songs about her beauty and her bust in all the wine houses.
As members of the Righteous Way Council, her brothers heard the world updates from the schoolhouse information center. They might know something. They might have already gone to one of the other river towns for help. Perhaps they had called a meeting in the Gathering Lodge and formed a team. If some distant war caused this violence, the school viewer would have a message about it and Kejere would know.
When she wanted to go to the village, she rode in a wagon with Benjere, in the donkey cart, or she walked.
There was the river path, or the rock path, a well-worn tread winding behind her neighbors—closer on the side of the Peace Lands than One Road. It was a little longer, but tree-lined. Sheltered, it felt safer than the open road, where anyone or anything could see her coming and going. She'd get to her brothers. They would know what to do. They could send messages to the other villages.
Annabell packed a lunch. Washed her body and face from the basin three times because she kept discovering that she was crying without realizing it. Slid on her favorite walking boots and threw back her shoulders.
Moving kept her sane. She could not, could not stop.
The day felt heavy. Muffled. If ever there was a cloud of woe over her, it was now. The stormy threat of it surrounded her. Instead of letting it suffocate, she used the sense of purpose to drive her forward, her feet moving. Staying hyper-alert to her surroundings, she expected to see someone on the walk. See something normal.
She saw no one. Nothing, other than the quiet, amplifying the tension of her every step.
Her chest burned, perspiration beading between her shoulder blades as she walked. Houses were scarce along this back road. Smaller structures belonging to people who didn't have big farms. Fishermen, workers saving for better, married couples waiting on their chance to inherit or saving to buy a permit from the council and build in one of the few empty plots of land left. All kinds of people.
As part of the first settlers here, her family took part in the planning of the Peace River Treaty lands before anyone ever set foot here. What village would go where, how many people, and how each village would function. The 'humble life' was an intentional way of living. A controlled choice. "We must make sacrifices for peace. Finding safety in this greedy, selfish world was hard," Mama said.
As if time held its breath, that feeling of disconnect she'd had all day worsened. By late afternoon she'd only seen a couple of silent birds in the sky, and no other living things. She heard no dogs barking or farm animals as she approached the town. No noises from rickety wagons.
This was not good.
Where was everyone? Had that evil reached the town? How was it possible? Her throat burned with a need to shout, to call out to someone. To see any number of the people who routinely shunned her and to call out to them. She'd run up to them, grab them by the shoulders and kiss them.
She'd be grateful to see someone. Stifling the frightened sounds wanting to escape her mouth, Annabell kept moving, desperate to see a familiar face. The sense of isolation hurt today. She couldn't take it. She had to see someone. At any moment a person would come around the bend of the path, or she would hear a human-caused sound.
There were houses coming up. She'd see someone there.
There had to be someone there.
The little wood slat shack where the young seamstress lived with the cobbler's son was the first house close to the path. The mud yard where they kept the geese was empty, no goose in sight, and the door going in the house hung open. The place gaped at her. Like a scream. Like her Benjere's house.
She hugged herself. Afraid.
Pulled by the string of the unknown, she kept walking until she saw more houses, better, well-kept homes. Even their backsides were well kept, some with fences, most without. These people she knew too. Name after name. No child played outside. No good wife in the garden. There was not an animal to make a noise.
Shivering in the middle of the road, looking at the backs of houses belonging to the townspeople, she wondered what to do. She wanted to run. She wanted to talk to her brother and the town council and get their help. Make them fix this thing.
"Ho now, what do we have here? Look at you, pretty thing. Where did you come from?"
A man came out of the house carrying an open jar of preserves, his lips and beard coated with jellied fruit. Unable to place him, she stood frozen. As if a feral dog in the street said hello instead of barking, the man on Mac Hessy’s front step made no sense. He was wrong, out of place, wearing strange clothes of shiny cracked and worn material. His roughness gave the impression of hard work and long use, but his slated, wrinkled face, and eager grin belied anything as honorable as work ethic. He looked dangerous.
This was a bad man who did very bad things.
Run.
A rabbit chased by a mangy, starving dog, Annabell ran. She ran toward Vejere's place. The closest to her location, he could fix this. He would help her. Heart in her mouth, she darted that direction, between houses, to her brother's. Mind racing. He could fix this.
Laughter followed.
"Oh, pretty thing. We own this town. Own what's in it. All the pretty, fresh, helpless things, like you. Where could you go?" The sound sent a chill through her. Three more demon men.
Annabell ran past Vejere's old founder's home. She assessed it in a harried glance. It looked different. Its beautiful, proud austerity brought low. Tainted. The potted plants that usually lined the front were missing, and she knew, just knew that Vejere, his wife, and sons were not home. Not even alive anymore.
Now that Annabell experienced violence, felt the true heartache of woe, it stained her, stuck to her senses worse than pitch, and smelled like death and madness. Everywhere she looked, she saw it. Smelled it. The hair on the back of her neck prickled. Where to go, what to do?
Veering right, she kept running, not daring to look behind herself, heading through the shortcuts, through yards and alleys of her childhood.
Behind her, all around her, she heard voices yelling back and forth. Jovial and profane.
"Looks like some straggler pussy, boys. You know how I feel about all these fresh, untouched things. Someone grab a bag, and let's go chase this little wildling kitty."
The announcement was loud and too close. Reverberating all
around her, their voices came from above and from around corners. She wanted to stop, look around, figure out what was happening, see how close the enemy was to 'bagging' her.
But Annabell couldn't lose her momentum. Hide. She had to hide. There was no defense. If these were the men who killed her neighbors, her brother, even the children, there would be no mercy.
There was a crash- an explosion of black and red in her ears that stole light and air, replacing everything with sharp pain. It burst over and through her in a flash.
Then nothing.
Annabell fell face-first into black.
Chapter 4
Boss Wants Pretty
"She ain't dead."
"But you ruined her pretty. Look, all this blood and I didn't even get the fun of making it happen."
"Boss, she doesn't have to be pretty to use."
"I wanted pretty," the second man, Boss, said. "I wanted to be the one to mess it up, Bacsh. And you had to go and clock her in the face and knock her off her feet."
"She was runnin'. You wanted me to shoot her?"
"Bacsh, you throw me another excuse and you'll be done. Getting tired of them. Got it? I have had enough slags and wastes-of-space to last a lifetime. I was looking forward to fucking lots of pretty, and you ruined this one."
Annabell could barely process the slurred, smudged language. Her face and head throbbed. Beats of pain like that time the donkey kicked her. Something sticky and bitter crusted over her lips and chin. When she managed to get a shaky arm up to touch it, her fingers were wet and it hurt. The sharp stab of her own touch stole her breath. She dared not bother to moan.
An open sky above her, the world had changed its position and orientation, with strangers leaning in and talking about her.
One stranger pointed at her nose. "Maybe it isn't as bad as it looks, Boss. Slap something cold on it and she will be pretty again." The man was hopeful.
"Are you a medic now, Bacsh? Get the rest of the crap and take her to the big house. I'm going with Runk to keep checkin'. If there was this one, there could be others we missed."
Rough hands pulled her up, yanking her about without any regard for her hurting. Her stomach had something to say about that treatment, protesting by emptying everything she'd forced into herself that morning.
Male voices laughed and hooted, the sounds crude and blaring. Someone said, "I won the bet, told ya' we'd come across another geyser today like those two from last night."
"This one can't be a part of that. There were rules. She's still got her clothes on, and that's from an injury. She don't count," protested another.
Someone pushed her from behind. She stumbled, throwing out her hands for another fall, trying to catch her breath and not step in her own vomit at the same time. At the last minute, deft hands caught her fall, directing her toward the bed of a wagon.
None of these men were familiar. The shape and slant of their accents, their words, were in the shared common, but they made no sense. Outsiders. They didn't belong in the village of Righteous. Drunkards. Bad men. A more mythical thing than stories of rare Dorsus wildlife wandering in from the Peace Lands. Stinking with evil—a smell all their own—somewhere between rancid body odor and bodies three days dead, she breathed through her mouth when they got too near her.
"Who that is human would refuse clean, when a little water does redeem?"
"These men, Mama. These men would refuse clean," Annabell said out loud.
Men moved around the wagon, filling it with stolen goods, with one standing near it at all times. There was no opening to jump out and run. She couldn't keep track of how many there were as they moved in and out of her messed-up vision like ants, putting goods into the wagon from the houses around them. Finally, one climbed into the bed. Annabell moved as far away as she could.
He laughed.
The wagon, pulled by a tired old draft horse taken from someone's property, started to move. Annabell cradled her head in her hands to keep it still. She lost herself in dizziness and pain until movement stopped in the shadow of a bigger building, the Gathering Lodge. The biggest, proudest structure in Righteous, built in the middle of the town next to the school and the market, the building showed off their community values and craftsmanship.
And it was overrun with strangers.
Head spinning, Annabell couldn't count how many strangers there were. She only knew for certain that she didn't see any of her menfolk. Not her brothers. No neighbors. Not one man whose face she recognized.
Horse hooves clopping on the stone-laid courtyard, the driver took the wagon around the back of the building to the bakehouse. Like the lodge, it was another proud Righteous structure. In her youth, Annabell attended dances in other community buildings along the Peace River. None of them boasted a shared bakehouse big enough to bake all the village bread or spit a whole cow for festivals. A mess greeted them between the two buildings. There wasn’t room for the wagon between chairs, tables, and, piles of stuff with no reason to be outside. Men dressed in dark, stiff clothing with shiny accents walked between the open doors of the lodge and the bakehouse. Some sat at tables. Others stood around, watchful.
She heard a woman scream.
Why had she come here? This was a huge mistake. How stupid to come to town and not run to another village. Missing the obvious right before her eyes. "This is what happens when you look with your emotions and not with your eyes. Did I not tell you? All the rats in the barn have come out to play. You did not mind your manners,” Mama said.
"Papa said Righteous was the safest place in the world," Annabell told the voice.
Mama's shade had no mercy for her daughter. "There is no excuse for stupid."
"There is no excuse for stupid," Annabell echoed.
Pinching her arm, the man hauling her into the bakehouse answered as if she were talking to him. "Righteous? That's the name of this place? Ha. Low hanging fruit. Not a decent weapon or a fighter to wield it. It was harder to get here than it was to take it over."
There were men everywhere. She didn't recognize any of them.
"Answer me," the guy with her arm shook her like a rag doll.
"Righteous Way is the name of the town," she said.
"Great name for a town," another man added. They were all the same. Their faces were different shapes, but her captors were unified in the way they talked, the clothes they wore, their low-minded malice. She couldn't tell them apart.
Flung open wide, the bakehouse double doors took on a sense of ominous warning. Every building in Righteous was a portal to woe.
A woman in the back of the brick building pushed dough into the mouth of one of the smaller ovens. Half-dressed, she was intent on her work and close to the heat. Purple smudges marked her exposed arms and neck, the tops of her breasts, and a harried mask of exhaustion covered her face and puffy, bruised mouth. Annabell knew her name, but couldn't say it. The person in front of her was not the same wife and mother of three Annabell had known all her life.
At the front of the bakehouse, the dry storage trap door gaped open. Led to the edge, and given a push, Annabell could choose to climb down the flat slats of the angled ladder into the dark or fall in with no idea of where she might land.
She climbed.
"Woman of Woe," the dark hole of a room whispered.
"An unshuttered life leaves room for rats," Mama said.
The fat-bottomed brown things, with their bulbous eyes and snake-like tails, Dorsus rats were the enemy of every 'humble' family. Sneaking in to thieve and pollute all the good put up in the times of plenty. Any noise in the dark caused a farm wife to think there might be rats digging in the stored food.
But rats didn't talk or whisper curses.
Another example of their strong community, the finished dry cellar under the bakehouse was a place for community food. Every family in Righteous of means gave a tithe to support it. Instead of food now, it was filled with people. With no light, her nose swelling and pain clouding her vision, Annabell c
ouldn't be sure but it seemed there were only women and children here.
She stepped to the floor into the square of light provided by the trapdoor. She wanted to ask questions, wanted better answers than the obvious one screaming at her, as bodies shifted and moved. Someone moaned and another whimpered. But they held back their pain and protests, terrified of what existed in the world above them.
"They must have found everyone then if they found her," the dark murmured after a moment.
"No one is coming to help," another answered, hopeless.
"Did you at least do something? Did you try to get help?" The questioner stepped forward a little. It was Bess, Benjere's wife.
Seeing Benjere's body pinned to the wall in her mind's eyes, the mess and stain of it she'd not been able to clean away completely, Annabell shook her head. "Who is it? Who are these men?"
