Rhett climbs the stone steps to the open doorway with his blade in hand. He signals for us to give him a moment to look inside before we follow him. Seeing what is staring at us with unblinking eyes and weatherworn paper hats, I would rather take my chances inside.
The changing of seasons is evident on the tile floor of the room we enter. Water stains the entrance from snow that has been blown in only to melt to form irregular markings. The house smells of a stagnant lake if lakes were decorated with streamers and sagging balloons taped to its edges.
The many handprints and long lines of dried darkness ruin the neutral colors chosen for the walls. I want to convince myself that it is only mud. The markings are nothing more than over zealous children and the natural damage they can cause. I want to convince myself of that, but I can’t. I’ve seen too much since this all began to ever be able to lie about what the marks are and what they mean. These same experiences allow me to know that one of the many layers of what we are smelling means we are not alone. We just haven’t found them yet, and they haven’t found us, yet.
Both of the men are twitchy. Every noise we make pulls their shoulders taunt. Each doorway we pass is a building of courage to look into. When Marxx signals for us suddenly to stop, the snow might as well have been poured down our backs for the icy chill he gives us.
“Not that way.” Marxx mouths the words, too afraid of how they might carry. He is staring at an arched entrance into a den. The taller house beside this one blocks the sun’s light leaving the room in long shadows and an unwelcoming feel.
Rhett arches one eyebrow with his unformed question wondering what he isn’t seeing that Marxx has. The way Marxx’ eyes are darting around the home, I have a feeling he is seeing a lot that we aren’t.
“No breeze.” Marxx adds just the smallest level of a voice to his words. We look to the streamers and see what we missed. The streamers are still swaying. The many pinks and decaying whites intermingle with each other with an invisible wind. The wind was not caused by nature, but by something else passing near them.
“April?” I mimic Marxx with my mouthed question refusing to add my voice to it.
“Don’t know,” Marxx answers, “but I’m not going that way until we check the rest of the house.”
Rhett teeters on both sides of the fence about the plan. A part of him wants to rush into the den and either find the little girl or kill what is in there. I can watch the pros and cons of the plan work themselves out by the expressions on his face. Marxx leaves him to his demons, leading Aimes and I further into the house. Rhett follows, but he doesn’t turn his back on the room and its shadowed secrets.
Down the long hallway, I watch as those who once lived here age from framed square to framed square. Sweet faced babies turn to toddlers who turn into children. The holidays come and go like a slide show as I walk past. Halloweens to Christmases blend with birthdays all framed in their monuments of times gone by. With so many signs of the attacks around us, the smiling faces somehow appear that much more delicate.
Aimes stumbles into a wooden hall table. Mementos fall to the ground like porcelain explosions. Each crash seems louder than the first. The twisted irony is how they fall slowly, one after another, dragging out the duration of the sound. The silence that follows is engulfing. Each of us strains to hear any sounds from inside the home alerting us to dangers. When nothing moves, Rhett tears down a section of streamers and begins to beat Aimes with the thin paper. Watching her being mock assaulted with the crumbling pastel pieces breaks the tension that has been building. Marxx even finds himself joining in with the subdued laughter.
“Alright! Alright!” Aimes whispers, finally throws her hands up to shield herself from the paper. “Death by paper cut was not my exit plan!”
“People plan that?” Rhett asks, giving me a heavy stare as he drops his sorry excuse of a battered weapon. My response is a middle finger before I turn to follow Marxx again on our hunt for a little girl who has mastered this whole hide-and-seek game as well as she did follow-the-leader.
“Hells, you and Aimes finish scouting out down here. Rhett and I will head upstairs,” Marxx whispers. He is motioning with his head as if “here” and “upstairs” were hard to figure out in his directions.
The fact that I feel the need to give him the same answer as I gave Rhett means that I am recovering faster than expected. The fact that moving is still a small form of torture tells me that I have a long way to go still.
Aimes and I watch as the two men climb the stairs to the room over the garage. We don’t move until the two men are out of sight and realize Marxx was serious about his idea. Leave us down here and the two men go upstairs? Surely he was joking and any moment his head will pop down with his twisted smile asking, “Scared ya?” I think Aimes is, too. She tilts her torso to see up the stairs as if waiting for the same thing.
I unclip the blade from my side and whisper, “It looks like we are on our own.”
“Think they will kill each other up there?” Aimes asks me, still doing the half-lean, trying to see up the dark stairs.
“I’m more worried about what may kill us down here.”
“Yeah, I guess that is a bigger worry. If Marxx thought anything was really down here, he wouldn’t have left us, right?”
“Riiight,” I say to her with a smile extending the vowel sound to further carry my disbelief.
“You could just lie to me.” Aimes hisses behind me in a whisper as we begin to creep through the hallway again.
“You look very pretty today.”
“I hate you…”
I feel my smile before I can stop it. The men have always had their friendships that gave them the strength they need to face their obstacles. For Aimes and I, it is the same. Except that we don’t use trash-talk and dares to build us up to walk into the unknown. We use humor. One last laugh before the hand comes out of the darkness to snatch you.
The shadows feel denser without Marxx leading the way. They seem to follow us without Rhett holding them at bay behind us. I can feel my hand tremble as it clutches the blade when we pass open doorways to bedrooms. I spare their darkened rooms one quick glance before moving past them. Just a moment of a pause to watch for movements or to listen to sounds before we almost run by the opening. Zombie Barbie my ass.
The last room served as their living room. Its wide expanse has the feel of comfort that is minus the smears, the toppled frames and general unease of an abandoned house. I feel as if we have made it through a carnival house of horrors and can finally exhale. There is nothing to jump out at us. No one has rushed at us from silent bedrooms. There have been no hands pushing through small spaces to grab us as we went past. With the front door standing wide and open to the daylight beyond it, my heart starts to settle into a normal pattern.
“Empty.” Rhett barks from behind us and both Aimes and I jump, releasing a half-muted scream. “Don’t guess you two had any luck?”
“Define luck?” I ask fighting to regain my breathing.
“Nothing ate us,” Aimes says with one palm to her chest, “but we might die of a heart attack, now.”
Rhett winks at Aimes as he walks past her. “Waste of perfect tits,” he says just loud enough for us to hear as he passes between us. He is keeping the unsteady bridge he and Marxx are sharing steady by holding his voice low. The moment passes quickly with Marxx following so closely behind him.
“Now what?” I ask, no longer needing to keep our voices to a dull whisper filling the hole that Rhett’s comment has created. It has stunned Aimes into an unusual silence. I almost hate to let the moment pass.
“She must have cut through the house to get deeper in.” Rhett is staring outside with his back to us as he answers. I wonder what look his face holds after that slip of a comment. Is Rhett back or did he just forget for a moment our civil war?
“So, we are going deeper in?” I ask him.
He shrugs his broad shoulders. “Do what you want,” he says taking the first
step onto the cement porch answering my question. He’s not back. He forgot.
“We’ve come this far,” Marxx says endorsing the idea.
Rhett turns to look at him over his shoulder. For a flash, there is a look of gratitude with a smile of appreciation before it dissolves back into the stern boredom he has been wearing. “Move,” he says with authority still staring over his shoulder.
“Marxx said we would come. No need to go all drill sergeant on us.” Aimes rolls her eyes with the mood swing and crosses her arms to further punctuate her own mood swing.
“Move, now,” Rhett says again with the same brash tone and dead eyes, but he is not looking at Aimes and myself. Something about how he is staring makes me turn in that direction.
I wish I hadn’t. “Marxx, move.” My voice is back to a whisper as if it could help us now. It can’t.
Marxx doesn’t even question us as he strolls up to where Aimes and I are standing. It’s a slow walk as if he is in some park enjoying the weather while my heart pounds in contrast to his steady steps. When he is near us, only then does he allow himself a backwards glance and the first look of apprehension over what was just inches from him.
There standing with the utter stillness she never possessed in life, is a small child. She still wears a cotton turtleneck and a brightly colored skirt with so many matching colored crinolines a ballerina would be envious. Her dark tights have runs showing her pale skin tone between the spider webs of lines. One shoe is missing, and with her damp hair, she looks more lost than murderess. Those glazed eyes of hers though give all the warning to her nature that we need.
“I’m a little tea pot, short and evil,” Aimes sings softly, pulling the child’s dull eyes to her direction.
“Perhaps you should just be still.” Rhett leans down to whisper into Aimes’ blonde hair startling her with his hot breath and voice.
With Rhett and Marxx now between the demonic replication of innocence and ourselves, Marxx motions with his hand for us to step backwards onto the porch. I don’t argue. If they can’t take out one little girl, as horrible as that sounds, then we are in more trouble than I could be of help with.
I watch from the doorway as the two men work together to perfect the kill. Marxx lunges for the child, triggering her attack and while she is focused on Marxx, Rhett sinks the serrated blade into her skull. She staggers to the side from the force and it brings her eyes to me. As she folds to her knees, I watch her body grow limp. After all this time, it still isn’t any easier to watch.
I know what she is now, but the wrapping of the package still stirs the same shame as it did the first day. When the life leaves her eyes, there is a shared moment when we are staring at the other and I feel her slip away, taking another piece of me with her; the piece of me that desperately wants to go with her.
“Let’s go,” Rhett says cleaning the dark blood from her skull on a curtain near the doorway. “If there is one, there are most likely more around. I want to find April before they do.”
I nod, still staring at the crumpled, discarded child on the ground. This is someone’s “April” who we are now just turning our backs on, leaving her to be destroyed by time. She is just as precious to a mother somewhere as the kid we are looking for now, but we have come to not even glance back at the ones we leave behind. Who is really the monster?
“Hells?” Aimes is tugging on my arm to bring me back to the present. She doesn’t know the dark halls of the past that I roam, but my face must show their horrors.
“I’m good,” I tell her concerned face. “I’m good.” I echo again to myself. With how she continues to stare at me, I figure at least one of us should try to believe the lie.
“Where are they, Hells?” Aimes whispers to me now that we have started to follow the two men into the street. With life’s perfect timing, the sun passes behind a cloud upon her question.
I look at her, praying with every shred of belief I still cherish she is not asking about the ones I fear she is, even when I know better.
“The kids?” Aimes clarifies her question just as I feared she would. “Where are the kids?”
“Gone,” I tell her, turning my eyes to the backs of the men we follow. Something on my face, or the pitch of my voice, stops her questioning. We both know it is only stalled. She is still watching me and I can almost hear the gears turning. Her gears that will either grind the truth from me or crush me between their teeth once they have gained the strength to start to turn.
“April!” Rhett’s voice bounces off the houses filling the street with her name. It sends the heavy black birds into the air with angry cries answering his intrusion.
“Rhett,” Aimes hisses shocked by his outburst, “why don’t you just ring a damn dinner bell?”
“I don’t plan on being eaten.” Rhett never breaks his stride or his glancing around for any signs of the little girl as he speaks. There is an almost desperate edge to him; a wanton abandonment with the risks he is taking just to have any hope of finding her.
“If you make a Selma joke right now, I swear I will shoot you,” Aimes tells him
removing any chance for one of his favorite sexual innuendos.
“You don’t have a gun,” Rhett says. He is either avoiding their normal word play game of dares or simply missing the chances provided for him. Both options worry me. Rhett is not one to shy from the line. In fact, Rhett often reinvents words just to make the other person uncomfortable as he crosses the line.
“Marxx, hand me your gun.” Aimes holds her hand out and I think she fully expects Marxx to give it to her.
Marxx chuckles under his breath, turning to look at her out stretched hand before turning back to the street. “Maybe next time,” he tells her scanning the melting mess for any silent clues.
“Why don’t we have a gun?” she asks me and I shrug. It is a question I have often found myself asking when cornered with nothing but the knife and a giggle from a little girl.
“I think they are worried we would shoot them when they let their little male egos get the best of them.” My statement catches Rhett’s attention. He gives me a second of a look before returning to his search for April. The grin carves my lips before I can hide it.
“Most likely, you would end up shooting yourself,” Marxx answers with his eyes still downcast, searching for the invisible trail.
He and Aimes begin a volley of the pros and cons from each perspective. He shuts her reasons down as fast as she can multiply them. When she begins the debate over rabid teddy bears attacking in the middle of the night, I tune them out. Instead, I let my eyes scan over the homes we pass with their black windows and wood covered doors.
There is a feeling of defeat here. The homes stand too empty as if the occupants were stolen, not evacuated. Cars sit abandoned in their driveways unused in escape attempts. The lawns are littered with debris that looters would have no need to steal. The televisions, game consoles, fine china and other such items all sit under the layers of weather, smashed and broken. Looters would not have taken the time to cause such destruction or risk bringing the attention the noise would attract. This was deliberate. Like the black windows and the wooden attempts for security, this was all planed. I just don’t understand the logic.
I don’t understand what is ahead of us, either. It’s the noise that draws my eyes to the direction. It’s a soft sound, a constant motion of a sound. Like a child on a swing, it ebbs and flows with the pattern of the breeze. The sound sets the hair on my neck ridged like I should be shivering from the cold. It’s one of those sounds that sets your whole body on edge before your mind can catch up to the warning.
When we turn the corner, the large oak has more than just the black crows in its branches. The tree was once used as a park centerpiece, but now it’s cloaked with something sinister. The sight steals the air from our lungs and stalls our brains, slowing the pieces from being put together over the confusion of what we are seeing.
Hanging from the many thick branches are
small children. Their eyes are wide and bulging from the pressure of the rope. Those who still have eyes. Those who don’t are left with black cavities that somehow stare at us deeper than those who do. The birds have been relentless in their scavenging. Grooves of flesh are missing, exposing bones or darker spots along the bodies. The cold winds of winter stir them, swaying them with the creaking ropes and ruffling their clothing. They sway like broken piñatas among the branches that someone sick has taken their stick to.
All around the base of the thick trunk lay the burnt remains of people. Their skin is blackened and contorted from the flames of the fires that once burned them. The fingers of their hands are twisted, locked in an outstretched cry, begging for help. Their faces tell the horrible tale of being burned alive. Around the many circular piles is the word “IXOYE” in something dark enough to be blood.
There is no snow here to cover this. Mother Nature wants this to be seen and there, sitting in one of the many piles, is April. Her blonde head is bowed as she sits by the remains. Her clothes are now stained from the ashes she must have disturbed and the soiled snow she has ran through. If she knows we are here, she makes no move to signal it.
“April,” Rhett whispers the little girl’s name. He whispers it softly as if talking loudly around such a massacre would be sacrilegious. He might be right. “April,” he whispers it again, stressing the short name into something longer. She still doesn’t move.
My feet have a life of their own. They always seem to move without my consent, landing me in situations I would have rather avoided. They are doing it now. I step past Rhett whispering her name and gingerly make my way to the child. My eyes land on the bodies around me and bounce to the bodies above me with small jerks. I’m too nervous to not keep either set in my vision for too long. If either set were to move right now, April would be back to being Rhett’s problem and dry pants would be my problem.
The Risen (Book 4): Courage Page 15