The Risen Series | Book 5 | Defiance

by Crow, Marie F.

  Watching those around me, I can see their individual reactions. Their minds are making private hells into movie reels starring whom they imagine once belonged here. I let my eyes wander too, as we wait for any noises to hint that we are not alone.

  There are pastels cards on the desk. Picking one up, I pulled it apart from the one which was once only its neighbor until the splashed blood made them conjoined twins. Written in a cartoon chat bubble is a rhyme about growing older. It’s signed by many different names in many different scripts with just as many private jokes. Whoever once sat here, it was her birthday when this happened. Touching the wilted and brittle skeletons of the roses that were left on her desk, I watch as their petals fall, so resembling the dried blood all around us. I wonder if she died that day, too.

  “It was her birthday.”

  The voice from the darkest pit of a hallway spins every male around me. Their various sizes of guns lift with the same unison to the spot where it came from. Aimes instinctively takes a step backward. I, being the sadist that I am, takes one step forward.

  “Who are you?” I call back to the voice.

  It earns me quick, side-glances of confusion as I take the ‘leader’ role from the men’s club around me.

  “Pinky,” he calls back, still hiding in the shadows.

  “Seriously?” Rhett asks. “Someone named you, Pinky?”

  “No, that’s just what they called me,” he says. “I used to blush a lot.”

  The irony of the name isn’t lost on me from Law’s and my earlier conversation. Looking at this teen though, I doubt any part of him is capable of helping to take over the world. I can hear the sadness in his voice, but before I can question him, Marxx does first.

  “And they are who?” Marxx asks.

  The voice doesn’t call back. Pinky doesn’t answer Marxx’s question. When he strolls out of the darkness, he is staring at only the roses with their damning memories and not the men with their guns pointed directly at his head.

  He isn’t anything more than a teen, but his shoulders sag with the weight of a fully burdened adult. His clothes look worse than ours, as if he hasn’t changed out of them since the beginning. The shading of the stains is obvious, and seeing the wraith of a male teen in front of us, the men relax their aim. They don’t completely lower their weapons, but they are no longer pointed at Pinky’s head.

  “It was her birthday. I came in to surprise her with the flowers,” Pinky says, touching the fallen petals. Only his fingertips caress them, shuffling them more than handling them.

  “Are you here alone?” Aimes asks him.

  Her arched eyebrow is more curious about who, or what might be lingering in the back rooms from where he came than whatever story this teen is stumbling upon to share. Like a skipping record of times gone by, I’m more interested in the story. Whatever is waiting for us to discover it, can wait. Glancing around the open room again, I have a feeling I already know what we are going to discover.

  “The older ones left for the day to see a movie at a theater in a town over. It’s just the littlest ones here,” Pinky tells the petals.

  We all glance at each other hearing what he has said. Rhett’s gun rises again. He is no longer looking at Pinky. His eyes are only for the hallway and the dark secrets it is holding.

  “Where is your mother?” I ask Pinky.

  His eyes lift from the memorial on the desk to me. There is a quivering of his lower lip. It doesn’t match the shock in his eyes I have left with my question.

  “With them,” he whispers to me.

  It’s all Rhett needed to hear. He doesn’t wait for any of their little signals. Rhett is already down the hall, swallowed by its darkness before Pinky can stop him.

  The teen transforms into something of pure rage watching Rhett walk past him. Before Pinky can take more than just a few steps, Lawless has him by the hair, kicking the back of the teen’s knees. They unhinge and come undone by the force from Lawless’ boot. Lawless follows the advantage of gravity and puts the teen to the ground completely. As Pinky screams into the collection of confetti, he never stops struggling under Lawless’ strength.

  With a head nod, Law motions for Marxx to back up Rhett and I follow with my curiosity as if it’s a noose around my throat. Lawless reaches for me, but with him being the main keeper of the possessed teen, he is easy to avoid. With nothing more than his cursing over my decision following me, I follow the two who have already been swallowed by the darkness ahead of me.

  I follow their sounds, refusing to wait for my eyes to adjust. It’s something we have learned to do. Waiting around to be able to see what is in the dark only allows the things already in the dark a better chance to see you, and worse.

  Rhett and Marxx wander slowly into each room we find. I wait by the door, keeping a watch for anything to slither from the darkness, but I can’t keep my eyes from seeing what is around me. The rooms are large caverns of age-appropriate items. Everything from miniature desks to large plastic bins of toys sit silently unused and forgotten. Each room seems to adjust to a younger age group, unsettling Rhett with the discoveries, as their silent picture grows more shocking.

  The rooms before were easy to figure out. They were basic school-like rooms where the children seemed to have just left and should return at any moment. Each room now is slowly becoming grislier. It started so slow, it was almost easy to miss if you weren’t already searching for any simple clue, which could cost you your life. Toys weren’t put perfectly away. Cartoon themed bags weren’t stacked perfectly. Now, as we are standing in a room filled with cribs and such, there is nothing simple or easy to ignore and the smell is growing thicker as well.

  The sheets are crumpled in the cribs, stained with so much more than anything a small child could provide. Matching colors of unease are spread in wide, sprayed patterns behind the cribs on the walls around them. The small explosion of dried blood paints a perfect explanation of what has happened to the small toddlers who once belonged in those cribs.

  Marxx’s eyes have glazed over. He is only registering what his brain needs to see. The rest he is blocking out as he fights to hold onto any small piece of sanity. I’m already half crazy. I’m already haunted. I see it all.

  I see every spot where someone stood pointing a gun into the many cribs. I see the spots where the babies were laid, soaking the carpet with their deaths. I am seeing another fragment of hell on earth. The only supplies here are the nightmares and the missing pieces of someone’s soul.

  “One more door,” I call out into the room, when both men seem to stand mute and disoriented.

  “Yeah,” Marxx answers, less than thrilled with the fact.

  I don’t know if he is agreeing with me or acknowledging me because he doesn’t move. Neither he nor Rhett takes any steps towards the hallway where I am waiting for them by the last door. The men J.D. molded to break the world are now breaking because of this world, but not me. One day, maybe one day, I will learn to fear what these men with hearts as black as theirs have come to fear. Life would be so much easier if I would.

  The door opens without a sound, but the room isn’t silent. The blinds are open in this room. The sunlight is as cruel as the bloodstains within it, showing everything and nothing at the same time as it filters through the room. The sounds and the smells tell everything the sun doesn’t want me to know.

  Glazed, almost colorless eyes, stare at me from between the many wooden bars of the cribs sitting around the room. Sweet, chubby faces of babies are sending my spine to vibrations of weakness instead of my heart with the sounds coming from their stained and ruined mouths. Lips, which were once milk-stained, and gurgling with their innocence are crimson streaked. They growl at me, craving me for reasons they never held any grasp of only a few short months ago. It’s not the feel of my arms around them or the sound of my heartbeat they want close to them. It’s the taste of my flesh and the blood my heart is pumping they now desire.

  I hear Rhett’s sharp inhale f
rom behind me. He pulls me behind him, attempting to block the room from my memory. I let him. I lean into his dark, leather vest and inhale the scent of it to escape from the scents around me. I press my forehead between the framing bones of his shoulders as my breath rips my body with its rapid pattern, but the sounds, the sounds he can’t protect me from.

  The soft growling has become something louder, something more primitive and feral with Rhett standing in the doorway. Not even the teen screaming under the strength of Lawless can fully remove the chorus ahead of me. By his screams, I know what has happened here. I know now what I had only imagined I knew before.

  I don’t know the exact moment I turned to head back to the teen. I don’t know what I really had planned to do, but when I find myself pressing my boot to the side of his face, something as dark as the demonic children I left behind me takes over.

  “Why?” I ask him. “Why did you do this?”

  “They are just babies. They don’t know what they are doing,” Pinky tells me, fully understanding what I am asking him even if the others don’t yet.

  “Your mom?” I ask.

  I already know his answer. I just want to hear it before I become his judge and jury.

  “She didn’t understand. She was killing them. She was shooting them. ”

  Lawless stands slowly as if he was kneeling in something disgusting when he hears Pinky’s confession. He keeps one boot planted in the teen’s back while the fingers on his hands twitch, as if they too are covered with some dreadful substance. He doesn’t look at me. He, like myself, has put the pieces together. We can do that now. Life has granted us this bow-graced gift.

  “So, you killed her?” I ask Pinky.

  “She didn’t understand,” Pinky almost whispers. “They’re just sick. They don’t know what they are doing. They can be cured!”

  “Your mother, and a few others, were left here alone when some of the teachers took the older kids away. She did what she thought was best when they turned,” I shout at him, still lost in the depravity of his sins.

  “No, she was killing them! All of them!” Pinky shouts, but his eyes aren’t seeing us. “I asked her to stop. I begged her, but she wouldn’t. So, I stopped her. I took the gun from her and I stopped her. Then I fed her to them. I fed all the teachers who were left to them. I keep them safe now. They are safe until I figure it all out.”

  “You fed your mother to those things?” Aimes asks, her disbelief proportionate between each of his confessions.

  Her voice is high pitched and outraged with just a touch of disgust.

  “They’re just babies. They have to eat. They’re just sick and don’t understand. She was a murderer. They all were,” Pinky tells us.

  I guess it wasn’t just Mommy Dearest and her friends he offered to his new charges.

  “No, you’re sick and don’t understand. You’re the twisted little freak,” Aimes tells him.

  Before Pinky can answer her, Lawless has already skipped ahead or he is stuck behind because he asks, “Figure out what?”

  Pinky is now limp, wanting to melt into the stained floor if he could with Law and I standing over him.

  “For us to go to the fort,” Pinky whispers into the stained papers.

  Pinky wasn’t seeing us when he said it. He wasn’t seeing the room with his sins sprayed across the walls. Pinky is seeing someplace else; someplace he has deemed in his mind as a haven for himself and his new responsibilities.

  “What fort?” Aimes asks from her corner of the front room.

  “The fort. The one the woman was setting up for everyone. It’s supposed to be safe. I just have to figure out how to get us all there,” Pinky says, as if he really believes the monsters in the back room would be accepted there.

  His voice is as far away as his sight. He is daydreaming, planning, and plotting. I just wasn’t prepared for what he had in mind.

  Lawless, lost in his thoughts, has let complete pressure escape from Pinky, freeing him from his forced imprisonment. Pinky’s voice was so soft when speaking, so out of touch with what was going on, he had made himself appear non-threatening. Even I, the one so angry just slips of a second ago, have forgotten about him when hearing the explanation of somewhere safe nearby.

  I didn’t hear Pinky stand. I didn’t hear the gunshot. I didn’t feel the blade slide into the flesh of my thigh. All I can feel is the red, hot ruin of Pinky’s face sprayed across my own. My sight is even tinted red as if I am looking through a rose glass-stained window. A window so red in color the dried memory on the desk beside me would have once been envious.

  Dolph is trying to pull the revolver from Aimes’ hand with more force than needed while Lawless is cleaning my face with his shirt and inspecting me with his eyes. Dolph jerks it from her tiny fists so hard she stumbles, almost falling beside the body of the headless teen. In my shock, I have no voice to argue with Dolph’s treatment of her, but neither is anyone else. Not even Rhett says a word to stop Dolph as he shoves Aimes back into the corner she had been using as a cloak to hide in its darkness.

  “What were you thinking?” Dolph shouts at Aimes.

  “You could have hit Hells,” Lawless says.

  Lawless isn’t shouting. His voice is calm, neutral, and so much more frightening than any volume Dolph’s voice might harbor. It robs our pixie from any courage to argue with him. Her mouth just hangs open, but her voice isn’t brave enough to lend it any help. When she looks to Rhett for support, he turns, giving her his back as he and Marxx return to the back room to do what they have to do.

  Lawless is kneeling before me, and with one look of apology, he pulls the small knife from my thigh. Like the heat from a fire and the searing of a flame, I feel every inch of it as it is removed. It tears a sob from my mouth. The sound melts Law’s eyes to his amber pools when he presses his bandana to the bleeding slash of my flesh.

  “What is your obsession with stitches?” he whispers to me.

  “It’s much like my obsession with trouble,” I reply.

  “What’s back there?” Dolph asks me.

  His voice might say he doesn’t know, but the furrowed lines around his eyes as he braces for my answer says he does.

  “The babies. They turned. Pinky has been feeding them and keeping them in their cribs,” I explain.

  I let the tone in my voice carry the emotions over what I saw. Sometimes just words are meaningless with the many horrible things we keep discovering. Dolph lowers his head. He understands completely.

  Lawless keeps his gaze straight and even with mine. He’ll stay with me in every horror we stumble upon. He won’t look away if I don’t. He won’t hide if I don’t. I’m not hiding now, and he’s letting me silently know he is right here beside me. Words, they are sometimes such meaningless things.

  Chapter 9

  “He said there was a fort?” Aimes whispers to me.

  She and I are waiting outside as the men once again take charge. This should ruffle every single one of my hard-headed tinted feathers, but it doesn’t. I don’t want to force my way into the room filled with the dead babies Rhett and Marxx put to rest. I already have the smell of death caking me with the horror story that once had happened in the building. I don’t want any more side effects from what was allowed to take place.

  “He didn’t tell us where it was. You shot him.”

  She rolls her eyes, much like the teen princess mode of which she seems to be stuck in, saying, “He had a knife!”

  “That he put into my leg. Lawless could have handled him.”

  “Okay, so next time I will wait until one of our vested crusaders comes to the rescue when I think someone is about to kill you. Happy?” Aimes asks.

  Her tone is anything but happy and her sarcasm isn’t hiding that fact.

  I look at her, arching an eyebrow, and tell her, “If someone is truly about to kill me, then please, feel free to shoot.”

  “Even if it’s you?”

  “Cute,” I reply.

  She
shrugs, saying plenty before actually asking, “Do you think there really is a fort somewhere? I mean, let’s be honest, he was not at the top of the sanity food chain.”

  “Who is?”

  Aimes shrugs again, but this time it’s more of an agreement than a concession.

  “If there was,” I say, when she doesn’t take up the banter again, “there has to be some mention of it somewhere in there. Someone like Pinky doesn’t come up with bright ideas on his own. Someone had to have told him about the place and he most likely wrote it all down.”

  “What? Like a dear diary of depression?” Aimes asks.

  “Something.”

  Aimes is silent, chewing on her bottom lip with her thoughts. She finally says, “I know where it would be.”

  I groan when she pushes from the truck and heads into the very place I was content to avoid.

  “Can’t you just tell them where it is?” I shout my question and it turns Marxx towards us when he hears me.

  “I could, but I thought you were tired of our Prince Charmings?” Aimes shouts back.

  She knows how to push my buttons so well.

  “At least they don’t think of me smelling worse than a urinal,” I say to her as I pass her.

  She blows me a kiss with more sound effects than needed. She once again sparks the curiosity of the men around us. Marxx watches our approach with complete distrust. I guess I’ve earned that.

  “Hey, pookie bear,” I mockingly call to him, trying to ease down the storm building in his eyes.

  He only arches an eyebrow. He is waiting to see what I am plotting before siding with either side of my plan. Seeing the jagged scar on his arm, I guess I’ve earned this from him, too.

  “Our Pinky thinks she might know where psycho Pinky might have kept a clue to where this fort is, or whatever he was talking about,” I offer him.