by M. E. Betts
"Swoop," she read aloud.
The owl turned, perching for a moment longer as it overlooked the treetops, then dove down at a sharp angle, its wings spread. Daphne stepped to the outer perimeter of the cliff, her toes on the edge, and looked down. The woods no longer resembled the ones in Kentucky, the ones in which she and Jacob had spent the day. They had changed, now appearing to look more like the ones she recalled in the Mark Twain National Forest, the ones through which she and her group had been traveling in Missouri. Her mind began to catch up, remembering the true time and place. As her eyes moved over the treetops, she took in an aerial view of the water treatment plant near Bixby.
She spread her arms, following suit after the owl, and dove off the cliff, swooping downward.
Daphne regained consciousness not all at once, but in slow waves, like a tide ebbing and flowing in and out of what felt like days. The sounds around her were what came first. There were the two male voices beside her, and the general din of people out in the main room. Her sense of touch came back next, which made her acutely aware of the pain on her back, pain which is unique to burnt flesh repairing itself. It stretched from the small of her back to her shoulder blades, and it seemed to be covered in loose-fitting gauze.
She ducked again out of consciousness, retreating into a trance-like state from which she segued into short dreams and memories.
In one such memory, Daphne found herself sneaking back into the treatment center in the pre-dawn hours, as she had on many occasions. She and Tanya shared a room, and the other young girl did her part to help Daphne back into the facility whenever she could. The first time Tanya assisted her into the room through a faulty screen, then through a narrow window gap, she had questioned the escapee.
"I don't get it," Tanya said as Daphne slipped her petite form into the room. "How can you bring yourself to actually come back here?"
"I need to do my time," Daphne had responded. "After all, I did kill those people. And even though they were bad people, that doesn't change the fact that I need to be punished for what I've done."
Tanya snorted. "If you say so," she said. "In my opinion,you already did your time--all those years of your childhood spent with those sick fuckers."
Daphne shrugged. "Maybe. But this is just what I have to do. I guess I can't really explain it."
Tanya smirked. "Yeah, well, you're just lucky you wound up here in the boonies, where security's lax as shit. This sneaking out stuff wouldn't fly at the last big-city place I was at."
Daphne knew it was true. It was the combination of her own stealth and the lack of awareness in others that enabled her to sneak around undetected. It was a lesson that she had learned while she was still with the Andersons, patiently waiting for a window of opportunity before applying her skill and stealth. Wherever a corner was cut, you could be sure that Daphne lurked, weighing her possibilities. She knew that all the ability in the world was useless if it wasn't applied in the right time and place.
As Daphne lingered in the threshold between fantasy and waking reality, she envisioned herself scaling the wall as she used to, preparing to sneak into her room. She peered through the glass into the interior, where Tanya lay dozing soundly. Before Daphne could tap on the window to wake the other young woman, she saw two large dogs enter from the hallway. They each had oversized upper canines, stretching out of their mouths and down past their chins, and their eyes glowed a dull red. She saw the sinewy muscles through their short coats, which were studded with knobby, badly healed scars. Their ears, once long, were torn and tattered, hanging like ruined drapery at the sides of their face. They paced the room menacingly, regarding Daphne's sleeping friend. She knew, however, that Tanya was safe, since she wasn't the one they wanted.
Daphne studied them from her perch outside, her fingers holding up her body weight. She clutched the interior window sill, reaching through the lower gap where the screen was no longer sealed to the window frame. Her toes rested upon the brick edging which surrounded a first floor window below, protruding less than two inches from the surrounding bricks. Her muscles began to burn and twitch under the pressure of maintaining the pose. She glared in at the dogs, trying to will them to leave the room. To her thorough disappointment, they proceeded to hop onto her bed, each facing the doorway as they sat with their backs to the window, presuming that when she returned, it would be from the hallway and not the window.
Forced to retreat, Daphne reached over to her left, her hand sliding around a rounded pipe running to the ground level. She squeezed the pipe between her hands and feet as she slid down its length, her descent steady and controlled in her grip. She withdrew to the woods, her mind racing. The sun was just below the horizon, electrifying the border between night and day with a belt of neon orange and pink. Daphne knew that if she didn't make it back into her room within the next few minutes, the morning nurses would make their rounds and notice her absence. She wondered if the two dogs would still be perched on her bed.
She sighed, stalking along the edge of the woods, with her eyes on the building. As the sun climbed higher toward the horizon and lit the white pines around her with impending solar radiation, reminding her that time was a factor, she came to a realization.
"Why hide?" she said softly to herself. "I can destroy them."
She started toward the facility, her fear replaced by irritable rage. Just before she emerged from the treeline, her right shin was snagged through her jeans by a large thorn on an aged blackberry cane. She lifted her pant leg and gasped lightly, glancing at her lower shin. Bright red blood trickled down to her ankle, then onto the forest floor. Without thinking, she reached down with her right hand, plucking the thorn from her flesh. She coated her hand with the freely flowing blood, smirking as she transferred the vital fluid from her fingers to her face. She reached down for more blood, repeating the process until her entire visage had turned crimson. Baring her teeth in a primal grin, she exited the woods and entered the clearing surrounding the building.
She lowered her chin toward her chest, glaring up over her eyebrows as she began to sprint across the lawn. As she picked up speed, the inertia pulled back on her shoulders, her upper body bending backward slightly. She compensated by leaning forward, her shoulders down and her arms trailing slightly behind her. When she reached the outer wall of the building, just beneath her room, she found that she could leap up to the second floor in one bound. She arced through the air, planting her toes on the upper brick edging of the first floor window upon which she had stood earlier, before her retreat. As she clutched the second story window frame, gazing inside, she saw the dogs turn to see what had caused the noise. Other than the two canines, the room was empty, and in fact seemed unused in some years. The blankets were folded neatly on the beds, but covered in a thick layer of dust. Other than the beds and their coverings, the room was spartan. Upon seeing Daphne's blood-covered countenance, the beasts leaped down to the floor and into the hallway. Daphne scurried upward, past the second and third floors toward the roof. Each dark window she passed confirmed that the building was unoccupied, other than the two demonic hounds.
She reached the roof, climbing up and making her way toward the front, above the entrance. She crouched at the edge, waiting to hear the doors open. After a moment, she heard the pair exit from ground level below. A second later, they entered her field of vision, and she saw that their form had changed from canine to human, though the red, glowing eyes remained along with the scars, the collars and the oversized fangs. They were clearly distinguishable from her perspective as Red and Logan. She watched them as they started around to the back of the building. Crossing the roof, she crouched again above her former bedroom window, waiting for the two men to catch up.
Red and his underling rounded the corner, entering the rear yard and glaring up toward Daphne's former window through the ashy, embrous coals set into their eye sockets. Daphne let out a low whistle, and they continued to glare in vain at the window, unaware that she was on the r
oof, in plain view. She whistled again, and as the two of them looked around, catching onto the fact that they were looking in the wrong place, she spread her arms and zeroed in on Logan, the closer and more accessible of the two. She sneered and swooped downward, diving forty feet from the roof of the old brick structure to the lawn below.
As she cut down through the air, she realized that her feet were now equipped with metal talons. She flexed her toes just before they touched down onto Logan's shoulders. The talons sliced and curled in, and without thinking, Daphne ascended up toward the rising sun, her prey in tow. She wore a masque of righteous vengeance as she arced up to around fifty feet, then dove downward, steep and hard, and dashed Logan onto the lawn. Fluffy white dandelion seeds floated through the air in his wake, illuminated with dawn light, as screams tore through her victim's lungs with her newly acquired claws still embedded into his flesh. She rose again, Logan's ruined, crumpled legs dangling lifelessly beneath him as his screams died down to defeated whimpers of protest.
She continued to rise, straining under the extra weight, until she and the sadist were above the tallest trees of the nearby wood. She hovered for a moment, then retracted her talons from their grip deep within Logan's upper back. He tumbled through the air until his body made contact with the dandelion-strewn lawn, twisting at the trunk as he landed with his feet facing the ground and his dead face staring up at the sky.
Daphne, still hovering above the treetops, glanced around the perimeter of the facility. Having finished toying with Logan, she recalled her attention to the more important of the two targets. An emboldened grin played across her face, her blue eyes twinkling as the wind whipped long strands of scarlet hair over her freckled cheeks. She became disembodied, seeing herself in third person, as she whispered a self-assured declaration.
"Red's dead."
Daphne found herself once again inside her body and her right mind, this time firmly, fully and instantaneously. Her eyelids remained closed at first, listening to the female voice she heard coming from her left. She struggled to focus with the loud, blisterous sensation of seared back flesh as a constant backdrop, so loud in her mind she could practically physically hear it. The effort to keep from crying out was a steady drain on her willpower.
"Yeah," the unknown woman said. "So I'm just sitting here with her, I guess, 'til they get back...if they get back."
From the way the woman's voice bounced around the room, Daphne was pretty certain that she was facing the wall. She heard the slight creaking of what sounded like one of the brown metal folding chairs in the room, and she risked a glance to her left, where she saw the young woman sitting on the chair, tilting it back and balancing on its rear legs.
It was one of the young women from the group Red had summoned to witness Heather's humiliation, the one with the smug grin on her face as she had exited the room afterward. She was speaking into a hand-held radio, facing toward the wall as Daphne had predicted. There was a crackled reply through the speaker, and Daphne closed her eyes again, listening over the roar of cascading pain that threatened to inundate her.
"I'll be back as soon as I can, little sis," said a male. "Just--just please sit tight 'til then, okay?" His voice paused until the woman at the other end responded.
"Okay," she said, "I will."
"Don't do anything I wouldn't do," the man said through the speaker. "Don't go after Heather. Let it go, and we'll go someplace else, get on with our lives." He paused again, waiting for a response. "Michelle? You hear me?"
Michelle sighed, leaning her chair back onto all four legs. "Yes, Evan, I hear you."
"Good," the nameless man replied. "See you soon."
Michelle hooked the radio to her belt loop, sighing again. Daphne, still struggling significantly with the pain, listened closely to the sounds outside the room, or rather the lack of sounds. Besides Michelle's disgruntled breathing, there were only the sounds of the moderate breeze outside and a clock ticking from elsewhere in the building. For several seconds, Daphne sat with nothing but uncertainty to distract her from the pain burned into her back. There were, of course, many unanswered questions regarding the circumstances in which she had found herself upon awakening.
Where's Red? The question presented itself first and foremost, a compulsory demand ringing through her head. She racked her mind, trying to recall any snippets of memories she may have had while only partially conscious.
As she focused, she heard another sound, one of particular interest. It was coming from outside, and if Daphne wasn't mistaken, it was a hunting rifle. She didn't know a lot about guns, but she did have a knack for cataloguing the sounds of noises with which she was familiar. Various types of hunting weapons had been in common use in Kentucky, audible year-round from the Andersons' rural home surrounded by dense woods. She even recalled her adoptive father taking an heirloom hunting rifle out to the woods behind the hobbie farm when deer season rolled around. He and his son would generally return empty-handed, the elder petulant and embittered from his failed expedition.
Daphne and Michelle sat quietly, each listening for a return of gunfire. After a moment, pistol shots rang out in response to the rifle. Daphne felt every bang and boom in her traumatized flesh, rustling her distressed nerves.
Michelle brushed past Daphne and out of the room, and a few moments later, she heard the sounds of zippers being opened and closed and fabrics being rubbed against one another. Outside, the chorus of gunfire continued. As Daphne listened, she became certain that she was hearing several long-range rifles, along with varying pistols. She speculated on who it was out there engaged in battle with the sadists. Although she knew that it could be her group, she also knew better than to assume. It was well within the bounds of feasibility that Red and his group had crossed somebody else, sadists being unpopular as they were.
As Daphne lay face-first, bound and agonized, she heard a dirtbike approach from outside. In the next room, Michelle threw a few more things into her bag, zipped it and hurried to the front door. Daphne heard the door swing open, and a moment later, the dirtbike sped away, in the direction opposite that of the gunfire. The sound receded until it was gone entirely, and there was only the ticking of the clock in the otherwise silent building with the muffled chirps and barks of gunshots far beyond the walls.
Daphne lay tied, driven nearly insane between the torture of the burns spread across her back and the rage induced by the fact that she was a sitting duck. In her despair, she did something which she hadn't done since the day of her parents' and brother's funeral, when she was less than six years old. Her chest began to convulse, and she struggled less and less to choke back the sobs working their way up from her lungs. After a few moments, she wept freely, casting off the shackles of many years' worth of unshed tears. They poured from her eyes, coating her face and hairline. She confronted the full brunt of the pain burnt into her, allowing the physical and mental agony to merge together in her psychological distress. Together they condensed inside her until they flooded out with her tears and screaming sobs.
After a few minutes, having spent much of her energy, she began to wind down. She focused, with no small amount of will power, on those people, places and times which had brought her peace. She had some vague, nebulous memories of early childhood, when she had still lived with her biological family. Mostly, though, her life had been blissfully uneventful before that point, at least the parts she had been old enough to remember. There were merely hazy recollections of a simple, innocent time, a time when she had everything she needed.
It was only after some months of living with the Andersons on their rural property in Kentucky that Daphne began to develop a love of the wild, and the woods behind the house became her refuge. She had stumbled upon some old, forgotten military survival guides in Mr. Anderson's tool shed, including several covering the flora, fauna and geology of the local area. Using these field guides and some phonics that she recalled from kindergarten in Chicago, she taught herself to read fluently while
simultaneously learning about the wild environments around her. She studied all the plants she could identify, tasting those said to be edible and steering clear of those purported to be poison.
Although the woods were a part of her, given that she freely assimilated herself with them, she couldn't initially wander their depths as she would have liked to. The tracking shock collar with which the Andersons had fitted her would only permit 50 yards of range. Daphne knew that the distance would have been even shorter if it weren't for a bothersome alarm which would sound from inside the house when she did chores such as taking the garbage to the dumpster or dragging tree branches to the fire pit. Since Mrs. Andersen couldn't abide the interference of the shrill beeping while watching her soaps and game shows, Daphne had been given more range.
Her love of the woods had continued during her in-patient treatment, as well as after her release, when she had taken a taxi from the facility to the woods near the Andersons' farm. In these woods, she had hidden away her titanium knife, burying it beneath an ancient, gnarled oak. Upon her return, she quickly found the tree and excavated her knife, cradling it to her breast as tears of relief poured down her face.
The taloned huntress had spent the remainder of the short time before the dead arose wandering Kentucky, lurking on the fringes of sleepy farming communities. She was always amused to hear whisperings of a ghostly woman on the edge of town, misplacing and stealing random, mundane items such as jerkied snacks and leather gardening gloves. Despite her nomadic, penniless lifestyle, Daphne had felt truly content for the first time since parting with her biological family in Chicago. She moved of her own volition, seeing the stars from a different part of the woods each night. She slept outdoors, seeking shelter only in freezes and downpours, and lived off of foraging and hunting what she could while stealing the rest from yards and outbuildings.
When the apocalypse came, her lifestyle barely changed, other than her primary concern shifting from sneaking amongst humans to a mixture of living and undead. She thought of contented memories in the woods. She thought of Shari and Hugo, and the other people she had grown to like, even love, since the end of the old world.
