Grabbing onto Genny’s shirt, I spin her, propelling her ahead of me. “Run!” I shout, with every ounce of air my lungs hold.
She doesn’t pause. Whatever life she endured with this new horror has taught her to take direction well. She runs and only when I see the flowing of her hair from the action, do I turn to keep her from being followed.
I run backward, letting the shouts of my name in the wind guide me towards those who are waiting. The now running things ahead of me propel me from those who aren’t. I glance around through the air-tossed knots of my hair and see no one left upon the beach. There’s just one cluster of the damned hovering over something on the sand, but I won’t allow my mind to dwell on that, nor acknowledge what it may mean.
We were the last ones to be free from our fight. Everyone is either on a boat, running to a boat, or wading in the water to help those near them into the boat. I am the last one on the shore.
Turning to fully run, I see Rhett fighting through the cold water to head my way. Marxx is shoving, half carrying Dolph towards the boats. Paula is holding onto Lawless. I shake my head, signaling for him to stay. The closest boat is already starting their engine as Genny is hoisted into it. She, too, has turned to watch me. Collin has his hands resting on her shoulders to discourage what seems to be a family trait of self-destruction.
I feel the rake of a hand in my hair before it clamps down upon it. Sharp nails dig into my scalp to anchor itself in those same knots I saw my family through. Instinctively, I pull forward, not connecting the reason why I’m feeling what I am feeling. My eyes and focus are on the targets ahead, blurring out all other thoughts.
My body is rocked backward. My spine extends and it pulls my feet from underneath me. My fall is graceless, denial fueled, and gravity hindered. Despite the hand securely holding my hair tighter than any rubber band I’ve ever used, I crawl forward, seeing only the boats ahead of me, hearing only the sound of my name on someone’s lips and not the sound of my death in something’s throat.
The claw is paired with another and now there are needle-like sensations in my shoulders. My mind refuses to admit they are teeth. My sanity refuses to grasp or accept that logic. Instead, I dig my fingers into the wet sand and use that as stability to force me forward. Something is running hot and fast down my arms. I don’t want to look. Once I do, there will be no doors to hide my mind behind. Once I see what I’m refusing to give into, my mind will break, taking any lingering resolve with it.
Hands have secured my legs. I stretch onto my stomach making the still tender flesh scream, or perhaps that’s me screaming and my flesh is agreeing with me. I can feel the thread in my thigh popping through the meat it attempts to secure. I’m no longer crawling forward, but I make the motions, just the same, clawing at the sand in refusal to admit defeat. Just hours ago, I had stood under the same sun, with a different type of defiance. A defiance colored with exhaustion and remorse. A defiance born of pure ice. This defiance is heat, a fire and a determination to live. I was defying life, and now, with every last ounce of strength I have, I am defying death.
When the pain rips through my calf, a scream rips from my throat. It breaks my concentrated efforts to contradict the part of my mind living in the denial over what is happening. I look at my arms, finally seeing the bright red blood that has been streaked like some style of war paint. Turning my head further, I meet the eyes of what was once a brunette. She stares at me while her jaw works the bones of my clavicle, trying to separate the tendons and muscles from their protective bones.
It was her hand which found my hair, securing my body for her fiendish friends to feast. My brain fights the dam that is fracturing with the truth. It tries to re-plug the facts leaking through its thick walls. Despite the efforts, the dam is fractured, splintering, and compromised. Truth rushes through and washes away the last slip of denial to which I was clinging.
Like Ginjer, my screaming stops. I stop. Everything stops. My head is suddenly too heavy to hold up. I let it rest upon the oddly soft sand, sand softened by the blood I am spilling, while keeping my eyes locked with the one who finally grants me escape. I watch her until she blurs, becoming a picture of haze blending into the many shades around us. Then, I close my eyes, letting it all go. The waiting room doors open, and I’m almost grateful to see who is waiting for me.
Chapter 22
I know where I am. I know these pastel walls which surround me and the colorful tiles I am walking upon. I know the path I am unconsciously taking. I know the purple doors, now looming in front of me, taunting me yet again to open them, to just take a small peek.
“Is that wise?”
His voice comes from behind me. Turning, I stare at the one man I didn’t know I leaned on so heavily for life support. There’s a different type of tears escaping my normally hate-filled eyes. I rush to him. I rush to Chapel.
His arms consume me, and they are the soul-soothing perfection I remember. The smell of his leather vest is more calming than any blend of lavender I have ever encountered. He holds me as long as I need him to, to hide me from the world he left me in. He doesn’t grow impatient as time extends. He lets me drink from a well I thought dried. It sates a thirst I didn’t know I was craving. Only when he starts to stroke my suddenly groomed hair do I pull away to really see him.
Like the father he is, he wipes away the tears as he inspects my face.
“Are we dead?” I ask him, allowing him to treat me like the kid he has always seen me as.
“One of us is.” He pushes back the hair from my face, smiling into my green eyes.
“Am I?” It’s a whisper, faint and barely audible, but asked all the same.
He doesn’t answer. He simply smiles again. A smile blended with sympathy and secrets.
“Comforting,” I tell him.
“What are you doing, Hells?”
“Standing shit-deep in my own created nightmare.”
Chapel smirks. “You always were gifted with your words. That’s not what I’m asking you. What are you doing, Hells?”
I’m confused. Honestly, when these little dreamscapes take place it’s normally J.D. lurking to rip off the scabs and marinate them with lemon juice. I don’t know what he’s asking. So, I don’t answer with anything, but the look upon my face.
It doesn’t deter him.
“Why, Hells?” He’s looking past me now to the dreaded purple doors.
Turning to view them myself, I battle with the many different retorts my ‘gift’ wants to use to reply. Instead, I answer him the way only he can get me to. “I have to look.”
“Why?” he whispers.
I can feel the words clawing my throat. I want to keep them stuck, trapped deep behind locked doors and closed curtains. There, in the darkness I have created for them, they can fester, eating away at me internally while being ignored externally.
“I just do.”
It’s what I tell him. It’s not the truth. It’s not why I always have to look, but he already knows that.
His hand cups my shoulder, splitting my mind from here and seconds ago when a different type of hand steered me to the truth. “Then look.”
He doesn’t stop me. He lets me walk towards the moment I ruined everything. He doesn’t follow me to my damnation. He waits. As all good guardian angels do, he waits.
The metal doors are the same heavy metal weight they were then. They emit the same groan. They, too, want this locked forever, but I keep showing up to refuse their slumber.
I wasn’t aware that I had closed my eyes until I was forced to open them to look around me. The smell of rot and bile doesn’t greet me. I can smell the copper scent of blood, but it hasn’t turned yet to something darker, deeper in scents. The sounds are of panic and screaming, but a different octave hangs in the air around me.
This is a tone of terror for what is happening to someone, not the screaming of what is being done to them. The rushing around the room isn’t one of escape. These people are rushing to small child
ren stacked high on the bleachers who convulse, shattering their own bodies beyond their normal strength. Their screams are over the damage their small charges are doing to themselves, slamming their bodies against the metal until bones break and fluids escape.
I’ve heard enough stories of when it started to know what I am watching. This is when it started here. The walls hold onto this memory like a body part clings to trauma. Wearing it. Sharing it. Exposing it for others to notice since there is nothing these walls can do to change it.
When I arrived, the ones who are now fighting to stop the inevitable became the inevitable. I recognize those raven curls, the security guard still standing by the door, even the principal shouting orders. I recognize them. I want to shout, to scream to get away, to come with me now, as if it will save them. As I watch them, my hands itch with the facts resulting in me clenching and releasing my fists. They are already dead. There is nothing I can do.
“You didn’t cause it, Helena.” Chapel has come to watch their confusion. “You didn’t cause it and you couldn’t have stopped it that day.”
With the ending of his words, the room shifts, becoming something utterly different. Now, it’s how I witnessed it that long-ago day. Those who were just running around the room to be heroes are now victims. They lay spread out through the room, exposed, destroyed almost to the point of not being recognized if it wasn’t for the small slips of identity Ashley had pointed out.
The children are gone. At least, they appear to be, until I hear the echo of my own scream deeper in the hallway. Each shriek I hear pulls a tear from my eyes. I know where the children are. They have found my pink-clad Angel. This is the moment they took her from me and all I did was watch.
“You didn’t cause it, Helena,” Chapel repeats himself.
He is here being a witness to all of my dark sins. He’s viewing the very failures which walk with me every day, motivating me to never again turn my back. The failures which dance around my mind, spreading their dark effigies into every moment.
“It was just a simple shot,” Margaret says.
I turn to view what I am sure will be a death-cloaked minion. She isn’t. She’s perfect. Her white bows bounce as she skips around me before heading back towards those purple doors. She is something a mother would sigh over with pride, not the nightmare of which I was introduced. She pauses, right at the doors, and smiles at me before finishing her innocent exit.
“You didn’t cause it, Helena.”
Chapel smiles at me and standing on either side of him are two small children. They take his hands into theirs, smiling a smile like their father’s. A woman appears behind him. Smiling the same warm knowing smile they are all sharing.
Chapel’s smile widens with their arrival and I know this must be the family who he was so ready to return to. The small children must be Kay and Ken. The woman, Trina, his wife. Chapel is finally home.
I start to smile at him, but it freezes on my lips. Trina is no longer the image she was when she first appeared. Her hair is now sweat-matted. The complexion of warm tones is grey and pallor. Her smile isn’t one of warmth. It’s to expose teeth she uses to latch onto Chapel’s neck. She tears apart the flesh, stretching what she pulls from him in her mouth. Blood gushes, spraying the wall beside us before sliding down the grooves of the cement blocks.
“It was just a simple shot,” Margaret sings from down the hallway, “and wherever Helena goes the lambs are sure to die.”
I scream. It isn’t an imprint this time of an engraved memory held by unrelenting ghosts. It’s my voice. My fear. My torment. My pain as I watch Chapel’s family devour him while he smiles at me.
I’m no longer seeing the gym. The room is dark and illuminated by lamps smelling of burning oil. I’m still screaming, though.
“Hold her down!” I hear Paula scream from somewhere near me.
A sharp sting is felt in my arm. The frenzy in my heart slows, slipping away just as the room is doing around me. I can’t scream anymore. My voice is too weak to obey.
“What was that?” A voice my mind doesn’t recall asks.
I know it’s Rhett’s fingers tracing my face. It’s the same style of caress of which Chapel had used before our tour. If Rhett is showing a room filled with people such an open example of concern, I understand why Chapel couldn’t answer if I was dead.
“Purgatory,” Rhett says. “That was purgatory.”
The sounds of the room fade away. The sensation of his touch lingers along the lines of my face. It’s the last thing I cling to before everything becomes muted and void. It’s the last thing I cling to before hearing a red-haired little girl sing my name from the darkest pitch of the blackness I am tumbling down into. When the chorus of condemned cherubs begins to sing, it’s the one thing I wish I could feel again.
Chapter 23
I don’t know how many times I’ve bounced from Margaret’s little games to the dark room that I’m lying in. There were times their voices mingled with the gym. I would try to call out, begging for someone to hear me, but the visions slide, meshing and flowing the two worlds to one, or colliding them together into a tragic blend. This is one of those tragic times.
I can feel Lawless holding my hand and the soft vibrations of his voice near my ear but all I can see is the piles of dead children as I’m sitting on a long-ago-abandoned kitchen floor. Their heads aren’t turned away from me as they were that day. Now, each one stares at me with their eyes peering into what’s left of my soul.
“Haven’t you had enough yet, Girl?”
I cringe, sinking even deeper to the floor when I hear his voice. I let the congealing blood soak into my jeans. I even trail my fingers through it reminding me of Jell-O before it’s fully set. Anything to distract me from J.D.
Letting out a slow whistle of appreciation at the scene around us, he tours the kitchen with his normal slow walk. He squats down beside Margaret, turning her limp head back-and-forth upon her neck. “This is the bitch that keeps tormenting you, ain’t she?”
I submit a quick arch of my eyebrows for my answer.
“Why don’t you just burn her? Isn’t that what you do to the dead you wanna keep dead?” he asks.
I know what game J.D. is playing. I didn’t miss the dig he just inserted. I’m just not interested in going round-for-round with one of my imaginary friends.
“Why don’t you just wake up, Barbie?” he asks me. There’s a tone to his voice that pulls my eyes his way. His face holds a look I’ve only seen a few times in the span of our lives together. That soft sound comes again, saying “Barbie, wake up.”
I sit up, hearing him speak so softly to me. I’m used to his verbal banter, the way his words can strip you of ego or fill you with rage, but not this pleading pitch. I watch him walk over to me, kneeling so close I can feel his breath on my face. His hands are on my shoulders. It’s comforting at first, until he starts to slam my body against the metallic door.
“Wake up!” He begins to shout over-and-over, each time it becomes louder and more urgent. With a sudden breath, I do.
The shaking stops. My body is moaning from the damage it has caused and my voice shares its opinion.
“There,” I hear Aimes say, when the hands are removed and whatever bed I am laying on shifts its weight. “You just had to shake her. She’s stubborn like that.”
“Bitch,” I slowly whisper to wherever she is standing, with an almost hiss characteristic
The sound of my voice results in such a commotion around me. I instinctively flinch with it. It sounds as if a thousand voices are speaking at once. They bounce off the walls of my skull resulting in a different type of pain. There are hands checking random points on my body, spreading my lips, shining a light in my eyes, and various other tests only they understand. The light did nothing to help my eyes focus or the throbbing their voices were creating in my head.
“Leave her alone!”
This voice I know. This is our resident shield maiden of medicine. The bass of
her voice sounds as if she’s about to start a war.
“I said, leave her alone,” Paula repeats it again, this time slower, shockingly putting a punch to each word hiding a threat among the vowels.
“Ohhhhh, you’re in trouble,” Aimes is taunting someone. Which isn’t shocking at all.
The hands disappear, leaving me feeling somehow more invaded with their absence.
“Go tell them.” The way Paula’s voice softens, I know she is talking to Aimes without having to witness it.
“Okay,” Aimes declares in her normal, sing-song pattern, “but if she starts to slip under again, you know where to find me.”
I listen to the sound of her retreating feet. I hear a door open before she shouts into the room, “Love ya’, Hells.”
“Sure, you do.”
I hadn’t intended to say it. My voice found some will to live and expressed it, though.
I feel the bed sag under added weight. “I can’t see.” I don’t know who I’m talking to, or who is sitting near me.
“Shhhhh,” Paula whispers. “It’s going to take a moment for your eyes to adjust.”
“Adjust to what?” My confusion carries to my words.
Paula chuckles. “To being open.”
It makes so much sense when she says it like that.
“How long?” I’m scared to ask, but my voice is doing that trick where it just vomits words before I can stop it.
“Not too long,” Paula croons. I can feel the moisture from a damp rag on my arms. “Long enough,” she finally concedes.
“Chapel wouldn’t tell me if I was dead or not.” Part of me knew better than to mention his name to her. Part of me also is still tripping along a cloud of destroyed sanity.
I can feel her tensing, picking the right words to say without revealing too much. It makes me wonder if we are alone in the room or not.
“Well, for a while there we didn’t know either.”
The cloud tripping part asks, “Am I dead?”
The Risen Series | Book 5 | Defiance Page 15
