“So what do you think it is?” Once Alice had moved out of the way, Elijah was kneeling in front of Brynna and grasping her face with both hands.
“I think she’s trying to keep herself awake. I think she’s hungry and thirsty, too. Had she been eating or sleeping well before this?”
“She hadn’t eaten or slept since we got here.” Elijah replied as he put Brynna’s arm around his neck and lifted her into his arms.
“Adjust her so she isn’t lying back like that.”
“I’m trying.” Elijah moved Brynna up so that she wasn’t tilting back in his arms anymore. Her head was rested snugly underneath of his.
“You got her?” Alice asked softly.
“Yeah. Just to tell you, Brynn, I know I’m not rescuing you.” He whispered softly to her and I could have sworn I saw a small smile appear on her lips as though she had heard.
We walked quickly from the room, stepping over Daniel to continue back the way we came. As though to remind him even in his unconscious state how severely he had pissed him off, Elijah brought back his foot and kicked his father hard in the ribs.
“Well, that’s a new way to say goodbye, I guess.” Alice commented as we hurried along the corridor.
“I’ve been wanting to do that for years.” Elijah replied just as two guards walked out in front of us.
“Elijah, what are you…” One started to say but Alice had lunged forward and tackled him backwards. A strange noise, a mix between a grunt and a roar, forced its way from my stomach out of my mouth as I ran forward and dropped to slide on my knees towards the second guard. Once I reached him, I spun sideways and kicked my feet out to knock his from beneath him. As he crumpled to the ground, I heaved myself up and landed on top of him. With both hands, I grasped his head and slammed it down into the floor.
We were running after that. We were ready for an army of them. I didn’t have to look at Alice or Elijah to know their eyes had turned over white; we were all on the hunt. Once we reached the door that led out of the ship, Alice pushed the button and the door slid open, revealing to us that night had fallen. The second we stepped out of the ship, we heard the screams of the survivors as the natives attacked.
It was those shouts of pain and terror that awoke Brynna from whatever stupor she was in. She rolled sideways out of Elijah’s arms to land on her knees in the dirt. Before we had even turned back to look at her, she had jumped onto her feet, swaying as vertigo overtook her for a brief second.
“Penny and Violet…” She muttered to Elijah as he grasped her arms to steady her.
“I took care of it. They know what to do. Just run!”
None of us needed him to repeat himself. We took off running as another massacre matching the one that had occurred the night before unfolded around us. It took every bit of my selfish willpower to not stop and help those I saw being ripped apart. As I ran, I was sprayed with the blood from a woman’s stomach as one of the natives dug his clawed hands deep inside of her abdomen.
Senseless and evil and sadistic and cruel… Their attack infuriated me but also drove me to move faster.
In the chaos, we were separated.
Violet
Maura knew something was amiss. Though I did have anxiety, I rarely shook my leg rapidly up and down to betray that I was worrying. My fears were always silent and unnoticeable, even to her. But as I awaited the return of Elijah and Brynna, I sat with Penny in my lap and bobbed her up and down on my legs that refused to keep still.
“I can’t color in the lines when you do that!” Penny snapped at me suddenly and I tried to stop. I avoided Maura’s gaze.
“What’s wrong, honey?” She asked in quiet suspicion after sitting down beside me.
I shook my head slightly and shrugged. If I opened my mouth, I would spill Elijah’s plan. If I looked at her, I would begin to cry and that would be enough of a confirmation. I was going to have to drag her off into the woods. A part of me wished that I could leave her but I knew that I couldn’t.
“I know you’re scared. But your father said all we have to do is run to the door of the ship and they’ll let us in. Dad is going to take care of all of us. And he’ll come around with Brynna. He always does.”
I don’t know where she found evidence to draw that conclusion. A look back at our history was enough for me to know that he had never come around when it came to Brynna. Since Lucien had died, he had made my sister’s life hell. It hadn’t been her fault. In her mind, she believed that everyone, including me, blamed her. But she was wrong; Elijah and I knew that whatever had caused her daze, her blind ignorance to what was occurring, had to have been serious. She never allowed herself a moment’s peace from her raging thoughts and her constant attention to detail. Her love for Lucien had been strong.
Night seized us like a faceless threat. Immediately, some of the braver people flocked to the end of the campsite to watch the trees that had gone still suddenly. My heart pounded in anticipation as my arms locked around Penny. I was ready to make our escape.
“Maura, when I say to run, you need to run with me.” I told her and she looked away from the trees to stare at me.
“What are you…”
A native zoomed up to her out of nowhere, evoking a scream of surprise from both of us. Out of reflex, she reached out and punched him hard in the face. It had been a punch thrown with every bit of force she could possibly muster and still, the native didn’t stumble. In fact, hitting him had only injured her. I spun Penny around so she was on my back and ran forward, bringing my own fist back.
When my fist hit him, he flew backwards and landed on his back. Remembering that I had Penny attached to me was enough to stop me from going after him and finishing the nasty, bloody work.
“Run, Maura, run!” I shouted at her. Before she could obey my order on her own, I had grabbed her hand and began pulling her with me as I took off running at a speed that she couldn’t achieve, being only human. I was forced to slow in order for her to keep up.
“Do not let go, Penny!” I yelled over the symphony of screams, running feet, slashing skin, and the pounding of bone on bone. Penny was crying through her own high-pitched wails of terror but her grip on me was strong enough to pull my skin away if anyone tried to snatch her off of me. Even my little sister was beginning to gather the inhuman strength that had awakened in some of us.
“Where are we going?!” Maura screamed frantically over the overlapping, deafening sounds.
“We’re just running. DUCK!” I reached back and forced her onto the ground as a native soared through the air towards us. I whipped around, waiting for him to turn and charge us again. But his target hadn’t been Maura, Penny or me; it had been a man five feet behind us whose throat he had just bitten into. I went to jump up, only to see several of my dad’s guards storming towards us, machine guns in their hands.
“Stay down!” I yelled to Maura. I pushed her down below the fallen log that I had only just seen kids practicing their balancing skills on the day before. I pulled Penny off of my back and wedged her in between Maura and me before laying both of them on the ground. Just as the gunshots rang out, Maura forced her way up from beneath me and covered Penny and I with her body.
The guards jumped over the log, firing blindly and through Maura’s arms, I saw more of our number being taken down by the spray of bullets than the natives, who moved in a blur so quickly that shooting them was nearly impossible. I can’t begin to describe how horrifying it was, to see people I had begun to recognize by both name and face struck down by my father’s guards. They were good people who had survived the end of the world only to be shot by cowards firing blindly into the dark at targets they could not see. I knew that my father would not grieve their untimely, accidental demises. In fact, a part of me knew, and was sickened by knowing, that he would see their deaths as an all too welcome relief.
Once the men with the guns had passed us, I held Penny to my chest, waiting for her to wrap her legs and arms around me before we took
off running again. Our hearts pounded and our lungs threatened to collapse with each deep, heaving breath, but we didn’t stop. Our legs propelled us forward until we had broken into the cover of the trees.
“We need to keep moving!” I shouted over my shoulder to Maura as my eyes scanned every shadowed corner of the forest frantically.
“I can’t… I can’t…” Maura gasped out after collapsing onto the cold, pine-needle covered ground. I turned around and watched as she struggled for breath, knowing that until she had gathered her strength back, we couldn’t continue on into the trees.
“Maura, I know it’s hard, but we have to keep going.” I urged her as I continued to look all around. “If they want us, they’re going to follow us in here!”
“They live in here! We just have to wait them out. We can’t go any further!” She managed to exclaim despite her growing inability to breathe normally.
“We can’t stay at the campsite! They’re going to keep coming back! They’ll kill us all, Maura!
“Elijah… your father…” She paused for a long time before adding, “Brynna…”
“Look, I love Dad but he made this worse for us!” I knelt down so that I was level with her and able to look imploringly into her eyes. “We can’t stay here with him!”
“So what are we going to do, darling?” She asked and I was stunned to see that her eyes were ablaze with anger, “You’re going to do what Brynna tried to do and abandon him? You’re going to leave him the way Brynna left your mother?!”
Even as my need to keep moving stayed firmly rooted at the forefront of my mind, an animosity I couldn’t comprehend took hold of my heart. Maura was suggesting that Brynna’s abandonment of my mother saddened her. It took no intensified understanding of things for me to know that that was simply not true. Through my mother being left behind to burn on the earth, Maura had gotten my father. She was now the “wife” of the leader. After years of being beaten down by circumstance, she held a privileged position.
“If you want to stay, then you can stay.” I shot at her after standing back up. “I want you to come with me because you’ve always been there for us, Maura. But if he’s more important to you than we are, then you can stay.” I turned away with tears welling in my eyes as I realized that Brynna’s dark feelings towards Maura might have been warranted. It’s a tough thing, seeing someone’s darkness at such a young age when before one had seen only light.
“It’s not that!” She told me after walking forward and grasping my arms. “Darling, you need to come back to the camp with me. Come back and we’ll talk, alright? Of course I want to go with you. I don’t want to be anywhere else. But we cannot leave him to fight this on his own.”
“Do you really still see good in him, Maura?!” I shouted at her. Penny broke down into tears again. “Shh…” I whispered as I ran my hand down the back of her hair. “I’m sorry, Penny. I’m sorry.”
“I do. I do because it’s still there. What he’s doing…” She shook her head slightly. I knew that she was trying to think of a convincing explanation for his heartless actions. “It is the difficult decision but unfortunately, it’s also the right one. He has to keep a firm hand on these people or there will be chaos. You are young. You do not understand that.”
“No. Contrary to what you may believe, I understand more than you do.”
I wanted to remain firm and angry. I wanted her to see no signs of pain on my face as I realized that she cared more for her father than she did for us, the children she had raised. But I loved Maura dearly because she had always been there. She had stepped into the role my mother had so willingly abandoned. For Elijah and I, at least, Maura was the only constant in our lives.
Tears streamed down my face as I turned to her and whispered, “Goodbye, Maura.”
Like the naïve child I was, I expected her to follow me. Even if she was cursing me under her breath, I still believed she wouldn’t let me walk away.
Her sobbing was drowned out by the noises that had come back to the forest. My feet moved me forward, carrying Penny and I closer and closer to an uncertainty that would never become clear. I knew Elijah and Brynna would find us if they had survived, but then what? What would we eat? Where would we sleep? How would we avoid the natives?
I forced my tears to stop for Penny’s sake. But inside, a terror as old as Earth and Pangea roared as it took its first breath.
Brynna
I did not care if the natives heard me. The sounds in the forest had resumed their deafening musical number and I screamed over the noise for Elijah, Violet and Penny. Once or twice, I even called Maura’s name, though to see her when I expected to see only my siblings would have been truly sickening. I almost chuckled at the thought of vomiting right on her designer tennis shoes.
I had been walking for hours, knowing that the attack on the campsite was over and that the natives were back in the woods. I was exhausted beyond feeling any degree of fear. I was hungry enough that when I passed by a bush stocked with orange and black berries, I actually stopped to pick a few. I held them to my nose, sniffing them for a reason that I could not fathom. It didn’t matter how they smelled; I did not possess any length of knowledge on plants that were edible versus plants that were deadly. However, my heart began to beat erratically fast, even tripping over itself a few times. The second I dropped the berries to the ground to grasp my chest, my heart had resumed its normal gallop.
Alright, instincts. Message received.
“Elijah!” I called as my eyes widened in the darkness. I could see the clear outlines of the trees and the shadows that moved between them. I looked up, seeing the twinkling of a billion stars overhead. The canopy created by the clustered mass of abnormally large willows blocked their light. I was seeing in the dark because my body was forcing itself to see.
The space around me was open and yet I felt as though I had been shut inside of a coffin. All around me, I was surrounded by the hodgepodge of trees. Their age yielded a silent knowledge of all that had passed, from the beginning to the present. Despite standing for thousands upon thousands of years, they still smelled as youthfully fresh as they had when they were mere saplings planted by the Gods.
Such strange thoughts to be having…
I broke into a clearing, knowing I had put miles between the campsite and myself. There was no turning back now. My sense of direction had always been skewed but in that case, it was downright nonexistent. I’d starve or die of dehydration before I found my way back to the campsite. Not that I wanted to return, of course…
My thoughts turned to my mother quite randomly. If my father had been on the ship, then common sense would dictate that he had not been with her. They had been living together even though their marriage had long been over. My father had so many mistresses, I used to say he had a harem. His age did not diminish his good looks and as a result, many women, even those my own age, had desired him. Power certainly had something to do with their attraction. Thoughts of acquiring a fraction of his wealth surely aided their ability to devote themselves to him. They had disgusted me, those dirty little girls. How they could look at such a terrible man with even fake affection in their eyes, I did not know. But then, for once, I did not want to know.
My mother had an on-again and off-again relationship, as they are called, with a good and honest man named John. I had been stunned to learn that he was the foreman at a construction company that specialized in building expensive homes. That was how they had met; he had built our sprawling fortress that we called our house. Their relationship had begun shortly before what had happened with Michael. I remembered how he was the only male I trusted enough to allow in my presence after those unspeakable events with my godfather. In fact, my mother had taken me to stay with her at his house several times, just so I would feel safe. Once there, I spoke and laughed as though nothing at all had happened. I was, quite simply, a normal nine-year-old girl once again.
Remembering this makes me very sad.
I had alwa
ys liked him. Despite his gender, I had trusted him. For a moment, I prayed to God, the Gods, or the empty space above my head that he had been with my mother when the event had occurred. I prayed that even though they had not been on good terms in many years that he had held her and assured her that they were going to be alright. They would not feel any pain. Everything would be over in just one millisecond and he would hold onto her even after they had passed over to the other side.
I stopped abruptly, almost tripping over my feet in the process. Tears had slid out from the corners of both eyes in a rushing, almost unstoppable movement. I breathed heavily for a moment, swatting at my eyes to wipe them away. From the bottom of my stomach, I felt a bubbling, gnawing scream clawing its way up my chest and into my throat. My harried breaths hitched in my throat and I struggled to continue breathing as my heart raced; it beat my insides to a bloody pulp as an agonizing punishment for what I had done. My hands flew to cover my mouth as I stomped my feet; to the audience of trees, I must have looked like a child holding their breath during a tantrum thrown to acquire some coveted prize.
A stirring in the bushes snapped me out of my reminiscences, noncommittal yet truly heartfelt prayers, and my somewhat maniacal fit of suppression. I ducked down, falling onto all fours and taking a huge inhalation of air. Where only a moment before, my lungs had been filled with something heavy and acidic, now they were clear and clean. The rustling in the bushes had snapped me back to the common realm where I did not have to feel.
I knew it was a native. They had been hunting me the whole time. I looked up, my breathing becoming heavier as I stared into the bushes that were moving sporadically but forcefully each time. Whoever it was, they were big. They would take me down easily. I would have to fight with weakness, as my strength had long since fled me. I would be killed without a doubt…
Instead of a person walking out, though, a lion the size of a small car came strolling towards me. In the silver light streaming through the break in the canopy, her huge blue eyes gleamed. I did not know whether to run or stare.
The Shattered Genesis (Eternity) Page 32
