Through Glass: Episode Four

by Rebecca Ethington

  I could see it all because it was what I had covered my walls with. It was the history that I had lost myself in from the day the sky had gone black. From the day that I had realized that everything had changed, and that there was nothing I could do to stop it.

  I could still tell you exactly where each of Jason’s smiles were on the walls of my rooms. I could tell you the stories for each picture, and the tales I had made up for the unfamiliar grins that I loved just as much.

  “Yeah,” it was the only word I could get out.

  I didn’t dare look at Travis as I pulled the fitted sheet over the old mattress, the elastic snapping into shards of dried rubber as I secured it. I focused on making the bed, on the feel of the cotton under my fingers, as I listened to the crack and the pop of the fire. The heavy, painful pounding of my heart returned as I tried to banish the memories.

  “Do you remember when Jason turned seven? All he wanted was a superman cake…” Travis said into the silence, his voice trailing off as the memories sliced into his heart.

  “That showed superman’s death,” I finished his statement without thinking about it, the memory coming back in a torrent of heartache whether I wanted it to or not.

  Jason had insisted on the bloodiest cake possible for his birthday, complete with blood and guts and mass amounts of red frosting that our slightly hippy mother had insisted on making with beets instead of the regular food coloring stuff that she had deemed poisonous.

  “It tasted awful.”

  “Jason didn’t seem to think so. He ate it on top of every meal for a week.”

  “You do realize he only did that to gross you out?”

  “Oh, I am fully aware now, just as I was then,” I said with a smile, the memory not seeming as painful all of a sudden. “Doesn’t make it any less disturbing.”

  We both chuckled together as I lay back on my now freshly made bed, the sounds happier than they had been a moment ago. While I could still feel the hollow knocking that ate at the pit of my heart, it didn’t run through me in sharp regret and pain anymore.

  I had always hid memories in the fear that they would destroy me, but now, having someone to share them with made it a little bit more manageable. It took that rough, sharp edge away.

  I said nothing as I watched the shadows of the fire lick the ceiling, the strips of yellow light flickered and moved like an ocean. Pieces of shadow and light moving in harmony as the fire burned.

  It was so different than the shadows I had seen move around the store.

  My heart clenched in fear as the thought I had tried to banish came back, my muscles tensing before I pushed the thought away again. Instead, I focused on the light that rippled over the ceiling, not on the shadows that seemed to dwell around the corners of my vision. I lay still, focusing on the memories that didn’t hurt, hoping that they would start to feel a little bit more manageable.

  Before I had even thought about it, I had lifted my arm, pulling the sleeve of my jacket down to reveal the drawing of my own face, the lines beginning to fade a bit, the left side obscured by a dark, purple bruise I hadn’t seen before. I knew at once where it had come from.

  “Do they do that to everyone,” I asked in a whisper that echoed through the darkness.

  “What?” Travis asked back, his voice just as soft, as if he was afraid of what I was going to say.

  “Stone them. The way they did to me.” The words almost got stuck in my throat, the phrasing so archaic that it felt out of place, yet I knew they were the only words that would make sense.

  The relative calm that we had found in our shared memories seemed to vanish into an anxious fear at my question. It tightened around my stomach in an uncomfortable metal band that seemed to spread all the way through me, making every beat of my heart hurt.

  “Yes.” His voice was tense, the tension only adding to my fear. “They are scared. Scared of what the world is. Scared of what you could become.”

  “What I am going to become…” I was careful to keep my voice controlled, not full of the anger that I had felt rush through me so aggressively. Even though I had tried, however, I wasn’t sure I had succeeded.

  I fought the shiver that moved through me at the thought, pushing it from my mind as I turned toward Travis, only to find him already turned and staring at me.

  “No, Lex,” Travis said calmly, obviously hoping to calm the fear he had heard in my voice. “I have rescued a few from holes. Houses so run down that they shouldn’t be used as barns. Hotters so hot they weren’t even worth saving.”

  I cringed at his words, the calm mellow of it only grinding at my fear more, awakening it. It wasn’t how he had spoken the words, it was what he said that cut through me. It sliced through the steady calm and erupted inside of me, the thought of the number of people they had destroyed, that they had hurt, all because they were afraid.

  “People.” I said the word more to myself than to Travis, but it had the same reaction.

  “Excuse me?”

  “They are people, Travis, just like I am a person. Just like you are person. People that live and breathe and are full of life—”

  “We call them hotters for a reason, Lex.” Travis’s voice was a growl as he interrupted me.

  I should have been worried that he didn’t understand, but in some ways, I wasn’t. How could I be? I was scared of the Tar just as he was. I wanted to make them bleed. I wanted to see the sun again. But the way they talked about hotters was the same way they talked about The Tar. And they weren’t the same, just as I wasn’t yet.

  Yet, I reminded myself.

  “Is it for the same reason that you call me a hotter?”

  “Lexi…” He was pleading, but I just ignored him, my words rolling on as my anger began to grow. I knew I should stop, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t let him justify this.

  The Tar had justified what they had done and look where we were now.

  “Was I worth saving if those people weren’t?” I shrieked, my voice tight as the volume began to increase.

  “You are my sister.”

  “And a hotter.”

  “I never said—”

  “It’s derogatory, Travis!” I screamed as the anger boiled out of me. What little control I had over it, evaporating. “Like stray dogs and 1920s segregation! The way Abran spoke of it… and the fact that they were all ready to kill me over it, didn’t help much…”

  My anger began to seep away as I continued talking, the bruises that covered my body throbbing in a dull reminder of just how real their opinions of me were, and how much Travis had risked to get me out of there. If anything, that one thought took away the last of my emotion, and I sat heaving in the silence as I looked at my brother, his own face relaxing as he seemed to realize the extent of what I was saying.

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t get you out before they did that.” His voice was soft, the apology so heartfelt that my heart tightened painfully, my face burning at the memory, at the pain that I heard echoed back to me.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I replied, even though it did. “Would they have done that to Cohen?” I resented asking the question the moment it was out of me, my heart speeding up in a pitter-patter that echoed in my ears like a thousand running feet.

  Everything hurt as I looked at my brother, waiting for him to answer, needing him to. Only to have a soft chime echo through the silence. It almost sounded like the wind chimes that our mom would hang every spring, the ones that had the painted lilac blossoms on them. The ones that matched the beautiful bush that used to grow outside my window.

  A shiver that bordered on pleasure and fear wound its way up my spine, my joints tensing painfully as if it was just another warning, another call to signal the arrival of the beasts that would attempt to devour us.

  I watched as Travis’s shoulders tensed in time with mine, his body straightening from the relaxed position as he sat up, pulling from his pocket a cell phone that was glowing with a dull yellow light. His broad shoulders were tense as he
stared at the phone, watching it ring, his breathing slow as he tried to control his fear. Whereas mine only seemed to grow.

  “Is it Bridget?” I asked, knowing full well what the other side to that question was, and that there was only one other person it could be.

  Travis knew, too. His eyes darted up from the still ringing cell phone to meet mine, eyes wide in fear before his thumb compressed the button, the light changing as the call connected and Travis switched it to speakerphone.

  “Tee,” he said simply, the stress in his voice making the vowels grumble.

  My muscles shook as I tensed, waiting for a response. The phone rattled with the static before a voice came through, the broken connection making it hard to understand.

  “Tee...? Hon…? Are you…?” The static took over after she was only able to get just a few words out, but it didn’t matter. My body relaxed, the fearful stress that had taken over unwinding into the stiff tension that had become so normal it was almost welcomed.

  Travis’s reaction was much more emotional, however. The phone stayed still in his lap as his head lowered into his hands, his fingers digging into his hair as he began to shake. At first I had thought he was angry, and I had feared an outburst that I had never seen, but then his voice broke as he tried to talk through the static, as he tried to respond to Bridget’s desperate attempt at connection.

  “Bridge, baby. Oh, baby.” His voice cracked as he broke down, the tension in his knuckles loosening as relief that I hadn’t known he’d feared would never come flowed out of him.

  The tension in his shoulders slowly left as the static continued, his body calmer as he clung to the phone, holding it close to him as if it was a child, desperate to hear anything from her.

  I just sat and watched him cry in joy as the static mingled with the crackling of the fire. I didn’t know if I should leave or if I should hug him. I didn’t know what to do because I had never seen him, or any man, react this way. In many ways, I felt like an intruder, my social responses left handicapped thanks to my years in seclusion.

  I leaned forward as the static seemed to equalize, the white noise fading into nothing and letting Bridget’s voice flow free.

  “Travis?” she asked, her voice as strained and stressed as I felt.

  “Bridget? Baby? I’m here. I’m here. Please tell me you’re okay.”

  “I’m okay. It was a clean shot, nothing a little rest can’t heal.” Her voice shook as she spoke, the low tones making it clear it was probably worse than what she was letting on, but I knew Travis wasn’t going to let the thought cross his mind. Not now.

  “Thank God,” Travis moaned, the joy that she was okay soothing the tense fear I was sure had been poisoning him for the last few hours.

  He pressed his head against the phone, his body curling as he attempted to get closer to her, as if being closer to the phone could help him accomplish that.

  “Abran is pissed,” Bridget continued after a moment, the tones in her voice changing as she moved to what she obviously called for in the first place. “He doesn’t believe me and locked me out of the system.”

  “He locked you out?” Travis asked, a deep surprise in his voice that I didn’t understand.

  “Yeah.” She tried to laugh, but the sound was weak before she began to gasp for air, the attempt to laugh obviously making it hard to breath.

  I listened to her gasp, the sound making my heart pinch in a worry I couldn’t comprehend. Travis glanced up to me at the noise, his eyes deep and wide before they returned to the small box he held in his hands. The message in his look only increased my worry, my knowledge that something more was wrong with Bridget than what she was telling us.

  “But he’s an idiot,” she said as she caught her breath. “You can’t lock out the person who created the program.”

  “That’s my girl,” Travis responded, his pride overtaking his worry for the moment.

  “Listen, I don’t have a lot of time, but I needed to warn you. From what I can tell, he’s moving up the attack on the main Tar house.”

  “He’s moving it up?” Travis asked, suddenly alarmed.

  “Yeah.”

  “When?” The soft quality of his voice had left with that one word, his jaw now only tight and strained as his back tensed and straightened.

  “I’m not sure. I’m still trying to break that encryption. Either that or it’s not in the computer…”

  My back straightened as Travis’s had, leaving us sitting still and stiff as we looked at each other, Bridget’s voice fading to nothing between us.

  “Are we going to make it in time?” I asked, my voice shaking as I asked the question I could see repeated in Travis’s eyes.

  Travis said nothing. He only flexed his jaw, his teeth clenching together with a snap as he stared at me, his eyes mulling over every answer, every game plan. I just sat still as I watched his eyes, watched the thoughts move through them.

  “Not only that,” Bridget continued, her voice breaking through the strained stare my brother had fixed me with, “but he’s sending the black team after you.”

  Travis stood at her statement. What I had perceived as fear and anger in him before was nothing compared to what I saw now. His hand shook as he held the phone in front of him, his muscles rippling as he looked away, his eyes darting through the dark as if waiting for an assassin to come through the line of light. And judging by what Bridget had said, that was exactly what was going to happen. The term—the black team—didn’t sound promising at all.

  All thought of the shortened time table was forgotten as I watched Travis’s reaction to Bridget’s words. A slither of fear worked its way through me, twisting my stomach and tightening my joints.

  “What’s the black team?” I asked, fearing the question as much as I feared the answer.

  “It’s the elite team Abran sends when he wants something dead,” Travis answered, his voice a hard line.

  “Think of a kamikaze squad, Lex,” Bridget piped in, the disembodied voice sounding odd as it addressed me. “Except these guys work in the dark.”

  I knew at once what she meant by that. I had lived in the dark, in the shadows where the Tar lived, where they came in silence and devoured you before you even knew they were there. My eyes darted to the fire, subconsciously needing to know that it still burned bright, even though I knew it wouldn’t protect us from what Abran was now sending after us.

  Travis’s voice echoed around the empty room as he swore in frustration, the sound making me jump. His muscles rippled as he began to pace the floor in front of me, his irritations saturating the air and heightening my own panic.

  “I think I found a way to get out,” Bridget continued as if Travis’s outburst had never occurred, “but I can’t leave for another day or two. Getting shot sucks.”

  Travis’s pacing slowed as her voice echoed through the phone, her tone changing to one that echoed her own fear as well as something else that I wasn’t able to pinpoint.

  “As long as you are healing, I can take care of everything else,” Travis said, his voice still hard even though the muscles in his shoulders seemed to have relaxed.

  “I know, honey. I’ll call you every day on the four.”

  “I love you,” Travis choked out as his tears began to fall again.

  “I love you, too.”

  “Stay alive,” they said together, their voices echoing against each other as Travis began to shake with tears. His thumb then pressed against the illuminated screen as he ended the call, the light dimming into nothing, leaving Travis staring at a blank screen.

  I didn’t dare say anything. I only sat in silence as I watched my brother before me, his back curved as he stared at the phone in his hands, his shoulders shaking as he fought the sobs, fought the tears and sadness that I knew all to well.

  I knew that kind of pain. The pain from when you were separated from someone you love. I knew the way your heart would break when you had to walk away from something like that. I could only assume
that Travis was feeling something akin to the heartbreak that lived deep inside of me.

  The heart break that still tried to break me.

  I exhaled shakily as Travis did, knowing I had to say something and wishing I could find the right words. It was just like before, when I had watched my lanky, little brother mope around the kitchen. I could see the pain on his face, and I just couldn’t leave it there.

  “She really loves you. How long have you been together?” I said, knowing I was stating the obvious along with a question that sounded as if it was coming from the curious teenager I had once been, and not the adult I was supposed to be.

  Travis looked up to me at my obvious statement, his filthy face streaked with the tears that still flowed freely. I watched the tears flow down his face, the lines in his jaw hardening as he waged a battle with himself. A battle for what, I did not know until one side won over the other.

  “She’s my wife.”

  I could have sworn I had forgotten how to breathe in that instant.

  I knew at once he wasn’t lying. I could tell by the way he said it, in the way his body seemed to loosen at the admission, the way his heart seemed to break as what wasn’t said meant almost as much as what did.

  Bridget was not just his girl friend. She was his wife. A woman he had married when the world was black, after he had lost everything.

  I had known when Travis had left her behind that he wasn’t as alone as I was, but now I knew how deeply that went.

  “What? Why didn’t you tell me?” Even though I had already accepted the truth, I couldn’t stop the words from spewing out of me, the questions meaning so much more than just a plea for clarification.

  Travis seemed to accept that as well because he only smiled, the fear of my reaction evaporating from him as his grin only seemed to grow.

  “I don’t know. It didn’t really seem appropriate given the situation. I couldn’t exactly say ‘I’m sorry you have been sentenced to death, but the girl who just saved you is my wife…’” He said it like it was a joke, but I couldn’t bring myself to smile, or even to chuckle as he did. I only sat, my body stiff and uncomfortable as ice seemed to run over my skin, the same thought running laps through my mind.