Anika Rising (Gretel Book 4)

by Christopher Coleman

  It was over before Mattheo could bring the gun as high as his hip. He did manage to squeeze the trigger, and the subsequent explosion from the round put a small crater in forest floor that was only inches from Anika’s right foot. But before he could make another move, she was behind the boy, gripping his neck in a gruesome twist of her arms, applying a pressure at the base that was instantly fatal, so severe that it shattered his windpipe and six of the seven cervical vertebrae that formed the top of his spine.

  Anika released Mattheo’s body and watched in horror as it fell in a heap of dead flesh next to his father’s crumpled corpse. She felt a sudden loss of instinct, drive, as if a demon had just released her from its possession. She hugged her arms to her chest, squeezing her own body as if trying to awaken herself from a nightmare. But the smell of the flesh was real, and no alternate level of consciousness could eliminate it from her senses.

  Anika squinted back the tears that had already begun dripping on top of her victims, neither of whom deserved to die, neither of whom had a chance to live once she smelled them.

  Anika now accepted that she was like her now. Marlene. Driven by an inexorable need to kill her fellow man and feed on their flesh.

  But Anika knew she was worse. Marlene had at least shown a great level of restraint with Anika during all those weeks and months of her captivity, and never allowed herself to give in to the hunger before the potion was complete. Anika, on the other hand, needed no potion, and thus restraint was a luxury. She had died already—at least, that was her assumption based on the evidence to this point—and her resurrected desire for raw, human meat could be had with regularity. There was an abundance of it everywhere she went.

  She looked down at the bodies below her, and decided she would take only the flesh of the older hunter. Mattheo’s body she would drag to the lake and sink to the bottom, where, it was not lost on Anika, she, herself, was assumed by her family to be decomposing. There was no honor in this decision; in fact, it would only help to demonstrate that Mattheo’s killing was an even greater waste of life. But the decision was a type of line in the sand for Anika, and she was hoping it would instill in her some modicum of self-discipline. The boy was dead now, a victim of her reflexes and instinct, but she could still hold on to what humanity remained in her—when not in the throes of hunger—by making as many rational decisions as possible.

  Anika knelt at the torso of Mattheo’s father and ravaged his body with the veracity of a starving wolf pack, using her newfound strength to tear him open at the belly. She removed the organs—liver, heart, and kidneys—and devoured each in several large, predatory bites. Her hair hung over her face as she fed, interfering with the purity of the meal, and soon became heavy and unruly from the weight of blood. Anika could feel the warmth of the innards across her face, and could only imagine how she would have appeared to an onlooker.

  With the insides of the hunter eaten, Anika felt no hunger for the rest of him. She wasn’t repulsed by the skin and flesh, and could have eaten it if that was all there was, but she felt satisfied by the rich organ meat, and thus immediately dug out a shallow grave with her fingers and buried the hollowed out body, leaving it to be consumed by the lower-life forms that dwelled in the dirt.

  Anika then grabbed the collar of Mattheo’s shirt and dragged his body down the slope of the forest to the lake bank. Once there, she dressed in the spare clothes that Mattheo had packed—a decent fit—and then filled the two backpacks—his father’s and his own—with as many large stones as would fit inside of them. Then, using a rope she found amongst Mattheo’s father’s supplies, Anika tied the packs tightly around Mattheo’s waist and neck, and then pulled his body toward her off the bank and into the water.

  Anika looked in both directions and could see only see the empty bank of the Klahr property in the distance off to her right. In the other direction, there was only the lake bend around which was Rifle Field. The scene was clear of witnesses, and Anika slowly pushed down on Mattheo’s chest, feeling the sickening ease with which the corpse sank beneath the surface.

  With each second she held the corpse below, waiting for the lungs to fill, a new level of panic rose within Anika.

  She couldn’t sustain this type of life for long. And probably not at all. Even if she could stomach the thought of a lifetime of feeding on the insides of human beings, it wasn’t reasonable to think she could rely on her food supply coming in the form of stray hunters wandering near her property. She would be caught eventually, the murders uncovered and solved, and once convicted of the treachery—of which she would indeed be guilty—she would hang from the gallows like a common traitor, or be shot in the head as she stood blindfolded against a stone wall.

  The truth was, though, even if her villainy was never discovered, Anika couldn’t live like this. There was simply no way at all. She wasn’t supposed to be alive anymore, and perhaps the whole truth of it was that she should have never returned from the Old Country. Maybe Anika’s story should have ended once she took Gretel to the Old Country to regain her heritage. Maybe she was simply the vehicle for allowing Gretel to find the answers to the secrets of Orphism. Once she had left her home in the Back Country, maybe she was meant never to come home again.

  But she had come home, triumphant and sick, and whatever accidental combination of poison and cure she’d received from the witch and the village elders and Gretel had now made her own death a defiant obstacle. Once a simple Back Country woman, farm wife and mother, Anika had gradually turned into a resemblance of Marlene, and was now even worse than the witch herself.

  From where she now stood, about ten feet off the bank in thigh-high water, Anika could see the outline of the Weinhiemmer cannery through the trees at the lake bend. The structure seemed destined to remain the eyesore it had always been, blemishing the beauty of Rifle Field with its pocked exterior and surrounding barbed fence.

  Anika, of course, held mixed emotions about the cannery. It was to that place that she and Gretel had escaped, sheltering themselves from Marlene as the witch pursued them like a starving bear. It was the night of Anika and Gretel’s reunion, a night that culminated with Gretel sinking the heavy iron claw of an industrial hammer into the middle of the witch’s forehead.

  And now Anika had taken the lives of two people, almost blithely, a father and son, two men that certainly formed a part of some larger family, individuals who were just as innocent as she and Gretel were during their fight against Marlene.

  Anika was the villain now, there was no question as to that, a monster as hideous and loathsome as the one she had helped kill not so long ago. And despite her angst and regret at the crimes she had just committed, neither of those emotions meant a thing. They weren’t going to bring back the innocent man who seemed ready to help Anika; or his son, who indirectly knew friends of Gretel and whose body she could now touch with her foot beneath the water. Neither of them would ever get a proper burial, and their family—mother and wife, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters—would forever live in doubt about their disappearance and death, questioning whether it was abandonment or abduction.

  And they would suffer.

  Anika took a deep breath and ducked beneath the water, and then swam in the direction of Rifle Field. Out of curiosity, she challenged her lungs and their need for oxygen, and though she easily made it around the bend and to the shores of the open field, she could also feel the pressure to breathe emerging. She took this as a positive sign, since it indicated there was still life in her.

  And if there was still life in her, it meant she could still die.

  Anika stepped from the water and onto the grassy bank, and then headed directly to the tall, chain-linked fence that separated Rifle Field and the cannery from one another. The barbed wire that looped in wide circles at the top was as menacing as ever, the patina of rust coating the tips of the barbs adding to its deadly appearance.

  It was a perfect test, she thought. If she could feel the pain on her hands and body
as she climbed through the piercing barrier of the fence, it would be a signal that death could still be achieved.

  Anika thought of Marlene, and the witch’s own reluctance to die.

  Gretel’s hammer blow and the witch’s fall to the cannery floor would have killed any human. But it hadn’t killed Marlene. It was as if her body had acquired a resistance to death in the way any normal body immunizes itself from a litany of diseases.

  But she wasn’t completely resistant.

  A couple of shotgun blasts was more than enough to finally finish her life. The gun shots were traumatic, gauging huge holes in her head and chest, leaving no place for the blood to flow to keep her body functioning. No amount of potion or witchcraft could heal such extreme injuries.

  And Marlene herself had killed Odalinde, also an Orphist who had been emboldened by the potion for centuries.

  So if they could die, so too could Anika.

  She felt the sting of the barbs in her hands and face as she climbed, and then her groin and thighs as she straddled through the spiraling wire, feeling the stretch of her skin each time it caught a tip of the metal spikes, tearing at the soft flesh until it opened into long, thin cavities of red. The pain was dull, like walking barefoot through a pile of smooth but uneven stones.

  But it was pain nevertheless.

  Anika pulled the last of her tattered shirt through the barbed barrier, and then jumped the seven feet from the top of the fence to the ground on the cannery side. Memories of the night of her escape tried to creep back to Anika’s mind, but she shunned them for the moment. And hopefully, if things went as planned, she would never have the chance to think of anything again.

  She walked around to the front of the cannery and swung open the large metal door, allowing the afternoon light to fill the open space inside. Anika took a tepid step into the building, the smell of it bringing her back to the day of her escape, when she’d fled in terror from the storage building that sat on the hill above.

  The dust and dilapidation still raged in the interior of the cannery, but the main room was barer than she remembered. The tubing that ran throughout remained, and the floor-bolted canning tables, but the floor itself was absent of the tools that were so prevalent that night she and Gretel had come, and was now littered with trash and bottles, some of which looked fairly fresh.

  This newly strewn garbage wasn’t surprising to Anika; the tale of Gretel and Anika had now become infamous, wide-spread, and as a result, various locations along the timeline of the story had become popular tourist attractions, the cannery being one of several. The System, who theoretically had jurisdiction over the abandoned building, had, of course, done nothing to prevent the gawkers from trespassing, as they were still trying to rid themselves of the tarnish the Morgan story had left on their institution. And due to this lack of interest, the loose items of value—mainly tools—had been stolen.

  This was a problem for Anika, since her plan to carry out her suicide depended on her finding at least one of the sharp, mortal objects that were present during her previous visit. At first glance, however, it appeared she would need to devise a new strategy.

  The hammer, of course, the one Gretel had used to send the witch plummeting to the cannery’s ground floor, was also gone, no doubt stolen within days of Marlene’s inhuman resurrection. Its gruesome heritage would have certainly been the prized possession in any aficionado’s collection. Or perhaps Marlene had simply walked out with the hammer in her head, oblivious to the destruction it should have caused.

  But what did remain was the stain of the witch’s injury; the dried puddle of blood and fluid still mapped the floor just below the open ladder way leading up to the loft.

  Anika took a deep breath and stared up through the opening in the loft floor, and then climbed the ladder, stopping for a moment on the top rung before pushing herself up to the wood-based tier. She walked to the open window that looked out over the lake, and immediately wished it were ten stories higher. Twenty perhaps, and with only concrete awaiting her below. That should be high enough to do the job, she thought.

  But there were no buildings in the Back Country—and possibly even in the Urbanlands—high enough to facilitate a fatal fall, especially considering her freshly won resilience to pain and injury.

  She turned away from the window and scanned the remainder of the loft, and then, finding nothing useful, descended the ladder and walked out of the cannery. She stood in the open air now as she considered her next move, taking in the scent of grass and trees, of animal scat and dead fish, odors previously masked in insignificance from her senses, but which now overwhelmed her.

  She closed her eyes and focused, concentrating on the puzzle at hand, letting the sensory experience of her surroundings fade to the background. Her goal was death now, but death was proving tricky. Most people understood the emotional dilemmas associated with suicide, not the least of which was the effect it would have on those left behind. And the mental challenge was formidable too, of course, since most people had a mind oriented towards survival, and overcoming that orientation required a great deal of commitment and resolve.

  But the physical aspect of suicide was not to be overlooked either. Millions of years of evolution had created a human body that was in some ways so fragile—its susceptibility to disease, for example—yet quite resilient when it came to the ultimate seizure of life. Anika assumed a handgun would be the most efficient, since it was the one weapon she knew of that was specifically designed for killing people. A close-range shot to the skull was as certain to kill as any other she could imagine.

  But, for the moment, that option didn’t exist, since the only gun the Morgans now owned was sunken beneath the lake, an incidental casualty of her own killing.

  And even if she had an arsenal of guns at the house, she had no plans to ever step foot in her home again. Anika was beyond cleansing now, a pariah, and the last thing she wanted to do was to carry the filth of her soul into the home where her children were born.

  The warehouse.

  The structure was just out of sight from where Anika now stood at the bottom of the hill, but as she walked towards it and began her ascension, the sloping metal roof of the building began to crest into view. As the shape grew larger, a wave of nausea set in, and Anika couldn’t fight off her recollection of the moment when she had watched her father emerge from the back room of the warehouse, presenting himself for the first time as the crooked miscreant he’d become. He had told her the story of her heritage that night, of her mother’s incredible family and their ancient and revolutionary discovery. And he had revealed every detail behind the motivation that led to his daughter’s kidnapping and torture, and of his ghastly plans to kill her for his own immortality.

  But he’d not counted on her strength and desire to see her family again, and when the gap of opportunity opened, Anika had killed her father, thrusting a shard of broken glass into the side of his neck.

  And then she’d escaped to Rifle Field, fleeing down the very hill she was now climbing, before jumping to the lake side of the fence through the cannery window. From there she took to the water, and eventually reunited with Gretel in the middle of the lake, just between the Klahr orchard and their own property.

  The irony of Anika’s current trek was not lost on her. She was essentially in a journey of complete reversal, and now instead of desperately seeking escape and survival, she was looking for a way to take the life she had so preciously defended.

  Anika walked through the back of the warehouse and through the interior door that led to the main storage room. She scanned the room, which, despite its abandonment, was still lit by fluorescent emergency lighting. Not much had changed from that night a little over two years ago, Anika thought. The sofa and table and chairs remained, set up just as they were then, bizarrely arranged in the center of the room, appearing almost as toys against the backdrop of towering shelving and thousands of square feet of open space.

  She stood silently in t
he room for a few moments, focusing again on the details of her capture, hoping to recall something from that night that could guide her towards her next move.

  And then it came to her.

  Officer Stenson had been with her and her father for a brief time that night, just after he had found Anika on the Interways. And during his time there, he had brought out a tray of food from somewhere in the back of the building. That meant that somewhere in the back of the warehouse there was a kitchen.

  Anika returned to the back room and turned left, and then walked down a hallway that seemed to dead end at a utility closet. But as she approached the door to the service room, she spotted a narrow, doorless opening in the wall to her left. The room was dark, but a dull orange crisis light revealed what appeared to be a kitchenette. In less than a minute, Anika was in the room and holding a small paring knife to her throat, saying her final prayers, asking her children to forgive her.

  She stood tall beneath the glowing orange bulb, stretching her neck toward the ceiling, and then touched the blade of the knife to her throat, pressing the tip against her skin to get a feel for the pain she should expect. She would have to get the knife in deeply to ensure the vein was fully sliced, thus maximizing the bleeding. If she bumbled the cut, she would likely still die from the wound—eventually—especially in the isolation of the warehouse where she wasn’t likely to be found for weeks.

  But there could be suffering. And Anika just wanted to die in peace.

  Anika closed her eyes and swallowed, and then pierced the blade into the side of her neck. That was the starting point from which she would begin to slice her own throat. The knife wasn’t razor sharp—she could barely feel the press and puncture of the metal—but now that she was in, it seemed perfectly suitable for accomplishing the task at hand.

  She scraped the knife across her neck toward the center beneath her chin, and was now only inches away from the vein that would explode beneath the trauma of the metal.