Flesh and Blood

by Sian Rosé

  A loud blast of hysterical laughter ejected from Ronnie’s lips.

  “You couldn’t make it up, could you?” Minnie said bitterly, chewing on her lower lip. “Anyway…” a trace of a smile lit up her face, and for a brief moment, she was that wholesome, beautiful sixteen-year-old again. She held up a set of car keys, jangling them temptingly in front of his eyes. “We’ve got a car! And money. We’re going to leave tonight. Road trip!”

  Ronnie blinked, “sorry, what?”

  The money they’d hurriedly scavenged from Steve’s had dried up quickly, as well as the loot that Minnie had shown up there with in the first place. No matter how much their stolen stacks of cash had seemed in the moment, it felt like their money always had an irritating habit of draining away quicker than they could count. Yet, somehow, Minnie had an uncanny way of always getting more.

  At whatever cost.

  “All of Jakub’s family will start poking around asking questions. They’ll be sending the police round here. We have got to move.” Minnie supplied impatiently.

  “But where’s his mother? Did she leave? Did she give you the car and money?”

  Minnie paused and dropped her gaze, running her tongue along the front of her teeth. He processed that familiar expression and felt his abdomen twist. A bizarre mixture of dismay and exhilaration.

  “Min…” he began, with a tired sigh.

  “She didn’t suspect a thing,” whispered Minnie, ignoring him, an excited grin creeping up onto her face. “She fell right into my hands, gave me all she had… it was so easy…

  “And now what, Min?” he shouted the fury that had been simmering beneath the surface of his skin finally boiling over. His cheeks flushed bright red as he smacked his palms onto her upper arms, clenching her entire body tightly in his vice-like grip. “We go on the run, again? What kind of shitty life is this for Zach?” He shook her, anger pulsing through his veins like a torrent of lava. “Huh?”

  Minnie laughed in response, a single, glistening tear squeezing from the corner of her right eye and dribbling slowly down her cheek as her body trembled within his rough, unforgiving hold.

  “Don’t you see?” she smiled up at him, pupils glassy, as deep and black as an abyss. “Don’t you get it? If we hadn’t have killed Jakub, that sick fuck might’ve done something worse than taking photos… as soon as you started to leave us…” she grimaced, ignoring the shiver that rippled up and down her spine.

  “Because we did kill that motherfucker, we got to stay rent-free here, no questions asked, no police breathing down our neck, laying low… we got to be a family…” more tears broke free of her eyes, her cheeks wrinkling as her happy expression only widened. “And now? Because we killed that sicko, his mother walked right in here and gave us everything we needed to leave. And because Jakub wasn’t alive, she trusted me that he was out,” she laughed, “I told her that he was an honourable soldier. She was ever so proud!”

  Ronnie shook her small, frail body in his strong hands, savouring the tension of her bones, separated only between them by skin and a thin layer of flesh.

  “You sound…” he almost spluttered, his voice breaking, “...evil… you sound like… him.”

  His words hovered there above them both, seeming to echo and crash about in the atmosphere like shattering glass, never disintegrating. But they did not hurt Minnie. They did not even hurt him.

  “Good,” she hissed, forcing her face as close to his as it would go so that her voice tickled his chin. “Because being good is for mugs, Ronnie. Look where being good got us?”

  Ronnie’s face crumpled. He released her from his grip as he fell to his knees and felt the full weight of his pain slam hard into his gut. His body fell into itself, and for the first time, he let the emotional agony and turmoil be felt. He cried. He bawled.

  She sank down beside him, her smile only growing in the centre of her face like a beam of sunlight. She gripped onto his shoulders and caressed their blades with the pad of her thumbs, forcing him to look up at her.

  “This can’t be right…” he crackled, unable to meet her gaze.

  Minnie just laughed and lifted his chin with her hand so that he was forced to look into her eyes.

  “But that’s just it, isn’t it?”

  He swallowed hard, goose flesh prickling on his arms as he waited for her to continue her dreaded but truthful speech.

  “We were never born to be right, Ronnie.”

  Chapter Fifty-six

  2019

  Before that fateful evening two decades ago, there had never been anything eerie or foreboding about the little woodland park, just a short walk around the block from Ross’s family home. On the contrary, as a kid, he’d never had anything but joyful memories of going to Oakwood with his friends, or sometimes even his little sister (who he had secretly enjoyed hanging out with all along). He remembered cycling there in a convoy of bikes, climbing trees, making dens, and leaping over tiny, shallow streams.

  Then that awful summer’s night had rolled around, where his parents had been up all night, pacing madly back and forth as they panicked. They’d sent him up to bed, but even if it wasn’t for his mother’s hysterical shrieks of fear resounding up the staircase, he could feel it deep in his bones that something had been very wrong.

  When Minnie had been found, it had only been a very brief, very fleeting release from the intense fear that had gripped him like a noose. Because it wasn’t long after that, they’d discovered that deep within the woodland, where the siblings had shared so many wonderful memories, there’d been a monster lurking in its shadows, just waiting to rear its ugly head.

  From that day on, particularly when she’d gone missing, all of those snippets of the past had been tarnished. Tinted black. Ruined forever.

  Ross tightened his grip on the steering wheel and swerved into the small parking area on the outskirts of the woods.

  His heart thumped as he wrestled with the grim fact that now his own little girl was lost somewhere in the heart of that same dangerous place.

  Swallowing back a thick knot of dread in his throat, Ross forced himself out of the car and approached the thick metal gates that now guarded the gaps between the trees. The sky was darkening now, and he could still feel the moisture of more rain hanging like a forbidding fog in the atmosphere.

  After the incident, the council had put up the gates so that people couldn’t enter in their cars anymore, and furthermore, they would not be able to enter at night time, when the monsters came out to play. Still, even in the daylight, Ross felt unease at the sight of the place. He couldn’t help but notice how his ankles seemed to grow heavier and heavier as he walked towards the nearest gap in the fence and stepped sideways through it.

  “Annie?” he shouted, his throat hurting as his words came out surprisingly croaky. “Flo?” he added, not wanting to seem dismissive of his newfound niece.

  When he’d realised that the girls had gone to Oakwood, he’d had to pretend to be calm. If he’d flipped out on the outside, like he could feel himself crumbling on the inside, he knew what it would do to Paul. And who knows what it would do to Minnie and Ronnie, who were probably still haunted by the traumatic memories they shared of the place.

  No, Ronnie knew that he had to be the level-headed one. It was his job not to be so emotional. To be logical.

  “Annie? Flo?” he called out again, louder this time. He widened his steps, so the satisfying crunch of twigs beneath his feet joined his voice in the crisp stillness of the air.

  The man clenched his fists as a gentle but cold breeze rushed over him and stung his skin. As he walked, he continuously glanced around, searching desperately for anything to indicate the presence of the two children.

  But, there was nothing.

  Nothing but the rapidly increasing thump of his heartbeat, pounding away against the inside of his rib cage.

  The seconds crept by agonisingly slowly like the victim of a severe burn dragging themselves out of a fiery car wreckage.
Horrific images of what he had imagined the burning car to look like on the night when Minnie had been attacked blared inside his skull, her screams drilling deep into his eardrums.

  It was then that Ross began to wonder if he should have just let Paul call the police after all.

  Heart rate quickening, he delved into the pocket of his jeans and pulled out his phone. He began to dial 999 when he suddenly noticed in the corner of the screen the small, bleak indicator that told him there was no service.

  “What the fuck?” he muttered incredulously to himself, turning the phone on and off again. If Flo’s phone had worked well enough to answer a phone call, why couldn’t his?

  Just as the screen lit up again, Ross felt a small sigh of relief at the tiny, single bar of service that appeared in the right-hand corner of the display.

  “Hello, Uncle.”

  The sudden voice startled him so much that he almost dropped the device down into the sea of leaves beneath him.

  Standing just a few feet away from him was a little girl, maybe just a bit shorter than Annie. He’d only met her in passing, but he recognised the slow, smug voice as the same one he’d heard on the phone just before he’d left the house. It was also plain to see that this was Flo. Her childishly rounded face was nostalgic to look at, a perfect mixture of both her mother and father twisted together into something that was somehow so strikingly unique.

  “Where’s Annie?” he found the words spilling from his jaw, much more harshly than he had planned. “I mean, are you okay?” he quickly corrected himself, although this did nothing to steady his nerves.

  Flo’s lip furled upwards slightly into a smile that made Ross’s skin crawl. It was unnatural to him that this child made him feel so uncomfortable simply by looking at him. He likened it to how it might feel being trapped inside a cage, backed into a tight corner by a starved lion.

  “Flo?” he continued, forcing himself to break the heightening tension.

  “We’ve been playing medieval castles,” she told him gleefully, eyes gleaming.

  “Ok…” her uncle swallowed, looking back and forth at the seemingly empty woodland space that surrounded them. “So where’s Annie? You know, she’s probably very frightened. We don’t let her play out alone.” He felt a flash of anger and had to bite down hard on his tongue, not to add that it was actually pretty out of order that Flo had clearly manipulated his daughter into doing it. He’d only just gotten his sister back. He wasn’t about to burn the small, spindly olive branch that connected them by upsetting her youngest daughter.

  Flo nodded slowly, “…yes.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Yes.”

  Ross’s brow furrowed, “yes, what?”

  “Yes, Annie is very frightened.”

  Bile began to rise up from the bottom of his stomach as he remained frozen, locked in an uncomfortable gaze with this unnerving, frankly fucking weird kid. He had no idea what to say.

  “Then take me to her,” he instructed firmly, wishing that he’d brought Minnie along with him. How stupid of him to think that he could handle a child he’d never even met before, blood-relation or not.

  “Sure!” shrugged Flo, before breaking out into a jaunty skip that was full of youthful energy, but at the same time painfully slow as Ross began to trail along behind the girl. In the back of his mind, he willed himself to say something else, to smooth things over. But his lips remained stiff and tight, enclosing the undeniable irritation that was locked inside him.

  And so, the two skipped and walked in silence. The dark, dense atmosphere only seemed to thicken and deepen around them as he followed her further and further into the woods. It struck him as odd that an eight-year-old girl could so fearlessly and so confidently parade around an unfamiliar woodland, with an eerie grin still plastered over her face. It wasn’t even as though the two were playing in the usual haunts that local kids and teenagers would visit; Flo was taking him much further into the wood than he ever remembered voyaging as a child.

  Just as he was about to open his mouth to speak, Flo came to an abrupt halt and gestured towards a thick, towering tree trunk a few feet ahead. There was nothing so remarkable or unique about it, aside from maybe it was wider than its surrounding counterparts. Even so, Ross wouldn’t have been able to pick it out. It wasn’t memorable in any way.

  “What?” he wondered out loud, squinting as he stared ahead, following Flo’s small, pointed forefinger.

  “Annie is hiding behind that tree,” she informed him, innocently tucking a strand of her hair behind her ear.

  He looked down at her, an eyebrow raised. “How do you know that?”

  “Look!” she chirped enthusiastically, grabbing his hand and pulling him with surprising force towards the moist bark. As they got nearer, she jabbed her finger towards a small, almost unintelligible carving embedded low down in the tree trunk.

  “A…F…” Ross read underneath his breath

  “Yes,” said Flo, “for Annie and Flo.”

  His lip crept upwards then, a wave of relief coming down on him as he remembered carving initials into the trees down at Oakwood back when he was a boy.

  “It can also mean, AS FUCK,” Flo went on. She said it matter-of-factly, oblivious to how her sudden swearing smashed through Ross’s brief, calm demeanour like a wrecking ball through a pane of cheap glass.

  “Annie?” he called again, almost stumbling over his own feet as she scrambled around the tree trunk, awkward feet crunching through leaves on the forest floor. “An-“ he froze.

  It felt as though his heart, his soul, and every other vital organ within his skeleton simultaneously plummeted, stealing away his breath and ability to even move in one swift motion. He tried to open his mouth, but his lips were stuck. His head screamed at him to move, to say something, to do something. But every part of him was rigid. Numb. Cold death engulfing him from the inside.

  “I read online,” came Flo’s voice, clear as day and as sharp as razor blades, despite feeling like it was coming from a mile away. “That this was a genuine form of torture, back in medieval times. Kings and queens could literally kill off anyone they didn’t like, and they could make it as gnarly and painful as they wanted.”

  She laughed a horrible, shrill, tinny sound that sent chills into Ross’s bones. “In our game, I was the queen, and Annie was my prisoner.”

  Slowly, he felt warmth return to his veins as his blood started pumping hard and fast through his body, fuelled by fury that was so intense that it made his head spin. Tears that he could not feel but only see as they blurred, his vision started streaming down his cheeks.

  Through the blurry glass of his pain, the horrific image of gore lay ahead of him, propped up against the foot of the tree trunk.

  Annie faced upwards, her eyes bulging from her skull, almost rolling back into her head.

  The lower half of her face, her neck, and torso were saturated in blood, slits around her lips and mouth still trickling crimson fluid.

  Her jaw hung open at an awkward, inhuman angle as if something larger had been forced down it.

  “I didn’t think it would actually work,” continued Flo, coming into view as she knelt down beside Annie’s body and pointed to a swollen and bruised wound on her side. The material of her clothes appeared to have been ripped, exposing the damaged skin beneath.

  There was a sudden movement, a twitch, and a high-pitched squeak that was so earth-shattering that it broke Ross out of his trance and sent him reeling backwards with shock.

  Gnawing the inside of his daughter’s stomach, beady black eyes gleaming, tiny, furry face hungrily chomping on her flesh and peeking through her skin, was a blood-drenched rat.

  A horrific scream erupted from Ross’s lips as he finally blinked away his tears and became aware of the pained sound erupting from within him. He clutched his chest, unable to breathe as he stared at the grisly image of his sweet, innocent little girl being eaten from the inside.

  “Yeah, turns out it's true,” sa
id Flo, her voice now louder and clearer. “Rats will eat just about anything.”

  “YOU LITTLE BITCH!” snarled Ross, lunging himself forward at the small girl, every part of him ablaze with anger. He pinned her down by her shoulders, her small, easily breakable bones digging into the palms of his hands. “WHAT HAVE YOU DONE? WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?” he shrieked, tightening his grip on her shoulders, shaking her so vigorously that he thought he might break her. To his surprise, her smile never faltered. In fact, the more he shook her and hit her against the hard tree roots, the louder she seemed to laugh.

  Blinded by his rage, he let go of her shoulders and began to smack and punch the little girl in the face as hard as he could until her snowy white cheeks were purple and blackened with bruises, and blood poured from the corners of her lips.

  “HOW COULD YOU? HOW COULD YOU?” he screamed, over and over, until his voice was reduced to nothing but a tinny, gravelly croak echoing pathetically through the woods. He scratched and slapped until the small, helpless child who lay like a broken china doll in front of him was unconscious.

  Then, he sank back on his knees and looked from one child to the other, his entire body heaving as his world felt as though it were crashing down all around him.

  He sobbed and cried, his agonised moans resounding through the woodland, causing the leaves in the trees to shiver slightly as if his pain made him larger than life. He remained there.

  Until a police officer put a calm, steady hand on his shoulder.

  Chapter Fifty-seven

  Spring, 2008

  “You sure that this is the one?” Ronnie asked, peering over the steering wheel of the car at the tall, dirty-brick house that was wedged comfortably between two others just like it. The brick and stone of the stairs leading up to it was crumbling away and smothered in a layer of cobwebs from years of neglect.

  “I’m certain,” smiled Minnie, grimly, turning to her husband and placing her hand on top of his knuckle. They shared a look of mixed excitement and nerves, him nibbling anxiously on his lower lip, whilst she tightened her grip on his hand as though they were waiting for the drop on a fairground ride.