The teenagers heaved the trunk onto the tailgate of the truck and pushed it cozy with the rest of the things. Anika stood in the bed of the pickup, arranging space for the small items that still remained.
“Is there anything else, Mrs. Morgan?” Petr asked. His voice was timid and whispery.
“No Petr,” Anika replied without looking up, her tone with the boy curt and dry. “Perhaps Gretel has something.”
Gretel had witnessed—without interfering—similar interactions between her mother and Petr over the last three weeks, and felt sympathy for both of them. But mostly she felt for Petr, who craved her mother’s acceptance and seemed to be adjusting pretty well to his new life with the Klahrs.
He was certainly adjusting better to his new life than her mother was to her old one.
With Hansel, her mother had recalibrated fine, and had returned to being as sweet as she ever was to the boy. Perhaps she crossed the threshold into overbearing on occasion, but Gretel assumed such behavior was perfectly normal. With Gretel, she was also still loving, except that Gretel now detected more of a demureness from her mother, a newfound reverence toward her daughter that contained a dusting of dread. Awe was the word, Gretel guessed. Her mother was in awe of her.
But with everybody else her mother had been cold. Even to the Klahrs, whom she’d lathered with thanks and blessings for days afterward, there was an uncomfortable distance—a mistrust that only the saintly Klahrs could and did understand. And with Petr the feelings seemed to be especially true, though for Gretel the reasons why were no great mystery. So, as difficult as it was to witness, Gretel didn’t intervene during these implied slights or moments of aloofness, and instead allowed her mother the room to recover. There was trauma to be worked through, and who could blame her for not being chipper and friendly after only a few weeks?
Petr lingered by the truck looking down at his shoes, which surprised Gretel since normally he took any opportunity her mother gave him to scurry out of the kill zone of awkwardness. But today he stood pat.
“I’m sorry,” Petr said, his voice solid, though tears had begun to plop down to the gravel below. “I know you’re angry at me. For what my father did to you. I never knew anything.” He paused, “And that’s not who I am.”
The sentences came out quickly and evenly, as if he’d rehearsed them a hundred times; but there was emotion in every word, and on the last sentence Petr’s voice cracked, and he turned from the truck and broke into a trot toward the house.
“Petr!”
Anika’s voice stunned the boy, who was nearly past the porch and on the path down to the lake. He stopped immediately and stood tall, though he didn’t turn to look at her.
Gretel moved aside as her mother stepped over the trunk to the tailgate and down to the driveway before running to where Petr stood, turning him toward her and pulling him in close.
The boy collapsed in Anika’s arms, sobbing like an infant. And for the first time in Gretel’s life, she heard her mother cry.
An hour later the truck was loaded with everything that would be travelling with the Morgan family—whatever remained now would simply remain. Gretel’s mother mildly alluded to ‘coming for it another day,’ but Gretel doubted that day would ever arrive.
Gretel said her goodbyes to Petr—whom she imagined would live in her story as her first love, though love wasn’t quite what it was. But it was something. Something to grow and learn from. And she would see him again. About that she was as certain as the sunset.
“We have to stop at the Klahrs, Mother,” Gretel reminded, “don’t forget.”
“I want you to give them this.” Gretel’s mother handed her daughter a note. “It has all the information about where we’re going. Once they have it, Gretel, they’ll be the only ones—other than the three of us—who know where we are. I want you to tell them that.”
“Where are we going?” Hansel asked, a pitch of pleasure and adventure in his voice. If his mother had said to the other side of the moon, Gretel knew Hansel would have been okay with that answer. She was home. They were together. That’s all he cared about. He had it right.
“Pretty far, sweetheart,” his mother replied, “pretty far.”
Gretel had asked the question the night before and, essentially, had gotten the same answer, with the additional provocation of ‘We’re going to get some answers.’
But Gretel had already begun getting answers.
She opened Odalinde’s copy of Orphism at the bookmarked page and began reading. Not much had made sense when she started a few days ago, even with the translation, and she had gotten only ten or twelve pages in.
But it was beginning to come together.
THE END
Marlene’s Revenge (Gretel Book Two)
Christopher Coleman
Copyright © 2016 by Christopher Coleman
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without written permission from Christopher Coleman.
Prologue
As always, time was the enemy. Not bad luck or people or ambition—the scapegoats she often turned to in crisis—but time. Time was always flowing relentlessly, unaware of its destruction, like a herd of buffalo striding across a plain of anthills.
The men would be coming soon, and if they found her here alive, there wasn’t even the sliver of a chance of her survival. She would be the one to make sure of that.
Her mind went to the Source and her mouth watered instantly. Even in her current state, with death looming above her like a buzzard, ready to descend upon her at any moment, she couldn’t keep her mind away from it. It was the smell, she now realized, that triggered the thought. . That candied aroma of her former prisoner still lingered in the damp air of the cannery, wafting down from the top floor in subtle waves. It wasn’t that exact smell though, the one she had grown to lavish over all those weeks while the young woman lay trapped and shackled in the back room of her cabin; this smell was mixed with the even sweeter fragrance of another. Her daughter. Gretel.
Gretel.
The silent sound of the word in her mind elicited a tingle in her shoulders and groin.
The witch lay mangled on the stone floor, the fall from the loft leaving her body a twisted heap, with arms and legs pointed at unnatural angles. The top half of her body felt like it was on fire; the bottom half she felt not at all. At the crest of her head, she could feel the pressure of the weapon used to strike her only hours earlier, the weight of it unstable and sickening. There was no pain at the entry point, but the damage was certainly unimaginable. My head and face have been through a lot over the past few days, she thought, belching out a deep, hoarse cough, a sound representing both laughter and disgust.
You must go. Now. They’re coming. The voices registered as whispers in her brain, urgent and quick, not unlike the manner she imagined deranged women in institutions had heard just before they sunk their children, one by one, below the waterline in the bathtub.
The witch tried to open her eyes, but they felt sewn shut. She tried again but felt only the stretch of her closed eyelids. She wiggled one finger on her right hand, then two, tapping them on the floor, the tips splashing in the shallow pools beneath them—her blood, no doubt, and judging by the depth, not an insignificant amount. She made a fist, barely bringing her hand together at first but then progressively working up to a tight clench. She relaxed her grip and stretched her fingers wide before slowly bringing them to her face, using her thumb and index finger to crush the crust of caked blood from her eyelids. She could now see the handle of the weapon staring at her, taunting her from an inch away, the business end of the thing still clinging tightly to her skull. She resisted the urge to pull it away, fearing the
hemorrhaging that would ensue.
Moving only her eyeballs, the woman surveyed her surroundings, glancing wildly from wall to stairs to ceiling to floor. This last area—the floor—was a horror show, and the newly risen sun hid none of the massacre. The fallow, brown ground where she lay was now a dark purple lake of viscous blood, the color matching perfectly that of her palms and sleeves.
The woman maneuvered her hand under her cloak and then reached down toward the top of her thigh, touching herself lightly at first, and then, feeling nothing, grabbing her leg with the force of panic. Her leg muscles tightened reflexively with the clench, bringing a sigh of hope and relief to the woman. She had feeling in her legs. She was not paralyzed.
They’re almost here, the voices warned again. You’ll die here. Die here.
The last two words drifted away, but she followed them until they disappeared from her thoughts.
“I will not,” the woman spoke aloud, her warm breath bouncing back at her off the base of the hammer. “I’ll never die.”
The woman inhaled to her lungs’ capacity, and on the exhale rolled herself flat against the floor, chest down, before pushing herself to her knees. She stretched her back straight and stared up through the opening of the loft, listening for life. They had long since gone, of course, the women, but she would never again assume anything.
The ditch. Get to the ditch.
She thought of her cabin and the holes she had dug following her Source’s escape, just after resurrecting her life with the most brilliant taste she would ever know. The instinct to dig had been odd, but she’d followed it, using her newfound strength to move quickly through the sod and dirt. She’d buried some of the potion there, and now she needed to find her way home to drink it.
The witch finally stood, the effort of it immense considering the trauma her body had suffered. But the potion seemed to have staved off any truly debilitating injuries. And as long as she was mobile, she had a chance.
She walked to the door of the cannery and opened it slowly, half-expecting one of the Morgan women—or perhaps a System officer—to be standing outside, waiting with pickax in hand to finish the job they had come so close to completing. But there was only the clean, cool air of the Back Country, and as it entered the cannery. The feel of the breeze on her wounds was exhilarating. She walked outside the boundaries of the dilapidated structure to the openness of the cannery grounds and listened again for anything that may indicate her odds of escape—sirens, voices, gunshots—but she heard only the sounds of the morning.
She strolled to the chain link fence and stared through to the lake, reliving last night’s hunt. She had lost control. Lost sight of her goals. Lost her chance at Gretel.
She retraced her steps back past the cannery and began to ascend the hill at the rear of the grounds. With the industrial hammer still projecting from the top of her head, she imagined she must have looked like some type of mythical woodland beast, the kind hundreds of people claim to have seen but which is widely dismissed as legend by the rest of the world.
She had not a clue what the top of the hill held for her, but at this point, it was her only chance of escape. If it was more fencing, like that which ran along the front of the cannery, she would be in serious trouble. In her condition, she couldn’t conceive lifting herself six inches off the ground, let alone the eight or ten feet that was necessary to clear a fence. She’d fly again one day, but not today.
Halfway up the hill, she saw the shape of a roof come into view, and soon after, the warehouse. There was no fence barring her from the structure, and this, she acknowledged, was a small sign of hope. And when she slowly pushed open the back door of the warehouse and saw the corpse of the man who had started her on this latest path of addiction and murder, she knew Life had returned for her.
Chapter 1
“There it is. I told you it was here.”
The woman’s eyes sprung open and she caught her breath at the apex of an inhale. Voices. Voices and footsteps. Her mind deciphered the sounds even before she was fully awake. There were three of them. She knew it instantly. Three intruders. Pre-adolescent. She could detect the pitch of their voices and their vibrations through the ground.
“It really is here,” another boy replied. “I can’t believe it. I didn’t think it was true.”
The woman turned her head toward the sound of the words and was greeted by one of the earthen walls of her bunker. She could feel the rays of the sun beaming through the grass canopy that had so effectively camouflaged her for what must have been, at this point, months. Maybe even a year. These young travelers on the perimeter of her yard were the first to come since those days immediately following the horrific night in the cannery. The first she had detected anyway. It was likely others had come and gone during her deepest of slumber, and now the thought of laughing gawkers defacing and stealing her property made her gag. She thought back to the first days of hiding, the days when the men had come for her, scouring her property and desecrating her cabin. But they had come to do more. They had come to take her as their prisoner. To rob her of her potion. And, no doubt, to kill her.
The potion.
She felt beside her and touched the small jar that still contained several viable ounces of the elixir—the extraordinary brew that had allowed her to rest and heal. The grave had been her shelter and concealment, but the potion had allowed her to go without food and water, to get perfect—almost—once again. Perhaps these plodding boys had awoken her a few weeks earlier than the optimum recovery time, but her mind was clear and her body lithe. She felt fresh. Reborn.
The woman stood in the ditch and peered over the ledge, pushing the twigged canopy up with the top of her head, stooping slightly to keep her eyes at a level barely above the dirt wall that surrounded her. Through the foliage in the distance, she could only see the shoes of the intruders, but she could tell by their voices they weren’t much older than twelve. She held her breath for several beats and then exhaled slowly, never blinking the eye that remained. Her left eye had been beyond repair; the combination of the ceramic bowl and hammer claw had proven too costly. She had feared the damage would be permanent, agonizing over the dire possibilities during her grueling trek from the Back Country, and she now accepted the obvious truth of it. But it was only an eye. The rest of her seemed to have healed quite well. She blinked her eye fully now, feeling the bulge of the orb beneath her lid, savoring it setting in its socket. There will be a price to pay for the other one, the woman thought. Revenge. A smile followed this last thought as the literal manifestation of the biblical metaphor took hold in her mind.
“Wait,” one of the voices uttered. It was the third boy this time, younger and more frightened than the others. “What if she’s there? What if she’s waiting for us?”
The woman listened closely to the reply, ready to strike if the answer was inadequate, ready to erupt from the ground like a tarantula if the boys suddenly became spooked and began the first movements and utterances of flight. Instead, she smiled wildly at the sound of the other boys as their crackling voices spilled into mocking laughter.
The first boy coughed out a few more chortling breaths and then said with defiance, “She’s dead, you pillock. Her skeleton is at the bottom of a lake somewhere in the Back Country.”
“So everyone says, but how do you know that’s true? If they never found her body, how can you know?”
“Because the girl killed her. And her mom was there and saw the whole thing. They saw her dead body splayed across the ground as they left. That’s how I know. Are you the only person from the Southlands who hasn’t heard the story?”
“I’ve heard the story, but back to my same question then: where is the body? Why is there no body?”
“How many laps do you want to take around this ‘body’ track? Hmm? I don’t know where the body is exactly. It was probably dragged off and eaten by dogs. Or something. The System doesn’t seem too concerned about it, so why are you?”
“
I’m not concerned about it, I just...”
“Or maybe,” the first boy interrupted, “maybe they did find the body and the System is covering that whole night up. Did you think about that?”
“No.” The boy paused, indicating he was considering the explanation. “But why would they do that?”
“Because that’s the kind of crap they do! I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.” The first boy’s tone was curt now, irritated, and any more talk about the body’s location was likely to propel him into raw anger.
The woman groaned in ecstasy.
“And anyway, she’s not here. How could she be here? She was killed in the Back Country, not here at her cabin. Think about things before you spit up your stupid theories. Besides that, the System has probably been through this place a million times by now. The cabin is empty. There’s no one here waiting for us.”
The boy paused, and the woman could almost see his eyes widen and his chin jut out slightly, taunting another challenge.
“But...I guess if you’re scared, you should stay back here. I honestly don’t give a crap. I knew I shouldn’t have brought you along.”
The woman listened intently, in some ways hoping the boy would call the bully’s bluff and keep away from the property. So soon after her hibernation, she was somewhat concerned she would only have strength for one of the boys right now—maybe even two if she was quick with the first. But three would be a definite challenge, so if one of them had to escape, she’d rather it be the sensible one. Not that she was more concerned about him than the others, she just figured the more prudent boy would be too frightened to tell his tale to anyone who mattered. At least not for a few days anyway. And by then she would be gone. By then she will have started hunting again.
The Gretel Series: Books 1-3 (Gretel Series Boxed set) Page 33