The Shattered Genesis (Eternity)

by Rudacille, T.

  She aimed expertly and whistled for good measure. The creature’s head jerked up, looking in our direction now. It hissed, its already hideous face contorting to a new, horrifying sneer; it was the face of a hunter cornering its prey. But Alice raised the gun, the fear she had felt for days vanished completely from her eyes. Without hesitation, she fired one shell right into the monster's bony chest.

  It was thrown backwards before it could even shriek in protest. It landed, twitching and spewing frothy spit from its mouth. I put my arm around her, pushing the shotgun down before she fired it again. She looked at me, nodding slightly, still saying nothing.

  “Well, I think we killed it.”

  “I don’t think it’s dead.” She replied, walking forward. “I can’t see anymore. Can you switch on the lights?”

  I couldn’t see in the dark anymore, either, so I had to feel my way along the wall to the light switch. When I clicked it on, she was delicately placing the shotgun back in the compartment above the fireplace. We walked back to the creature hand in hand.

  It looked different; its body had filled out to the shape of a healthy person instead of a fully decayed corpse. Its hair was no longer white and long but cut short and matted to what remained of its blood-soaked head. And when I flipped the thing over onto its back, I stumbled away in horror. Beyond horror…

  A scream erupted behind me. It was a scream of desperate terror and grief that consumed her instantaneously. It was the scream she had kept forced down deep inside of her since the moment that thing had arrived.

  We were looking into the face of her mother.

  XXX

  The problem with living in a neighborhood where houses are practically built right on top of each other is that the smallest disturbance, the smallest suggestion of something being out of the ordinary, alerts everyone. I don't think that Alice's neighbors would have seen the creature even if they stared right at the house while she was outside. I know they didn't hear the loud, screeching noises that she made every night. But they did hear the blast of the shotgun. As I held Alice, trying to calm her down, I heard a knock on the door upstairs.

  “Oh my God… oh my God…” Alice was crying.

  “Babe, there’s someone at the door.” I told her softly and she pulled away from me, looking even more distressed.

  “Do you think...” She hiccuped as new sobs took hold of her. “Do you think it’s my dad? Do you think he’s one of those things, too?”

  “I don’t know. Just stay here.” I instructed her urgently, “I’ll be right back.”

  “No! Don’t leave me!” She exclaimed, jumping up and grabbing my hand, “Don’t leave me with her!”

  “Alice, you have to stay here. Just for a minute. I have to get this person to go away. Just stay here. I’ll be five minutes. I promise.”

  She nodded, but sat by the door, her back to the body.

  I sprinted upstairs, ready to fight another one of those horrible beasts. Alice’s words hung in my head like a bad song I couldn’t shake; what if her dad was one of them, too?

  “Open up! Police!” A thunderous voice boomed from behind the front door.

  Just as I was thanking God for the sudden arrival of the police, I suddenly remembered the obliterated body downstairs on the floor who just happened to be the estranged mother of my girlfriend. Surely, two teenagers at home alone with the body of the woman who had so protested their relationship left little room to speculate on motive. I watched enough CSI and Criminal Minds to know that.

  Expletives flew through my head as a cold sweat broke over me. How was I going to get rid of a cop? What if he wanted to search the house? Even if I didn't know how exactly, I had to make him leave. I just had to tell him everything was fine and he’d go.

  I threw open the door before I could wonder what I was going to say any longer. If I needed to appear surprised at something, I couldn’t afford to stand and think about all the answers I was going to give to the cop’s questions. I watched enough Dexter to know how to play it cool and collected.

  “Hi, Officer.”

  I had to stop myself from grimacing; no kid greets a cop like that! “I didn’t do anything!” would have probably been a more realistic greeting. Of course, it also would have raised more suspicion than it would have remedied.

  “Hello.” He replied formally, “Sorry to bother you, but neighbors reported hearing a weapon discharged here. Is this your house?”

  “No. This is my girlfriend’s house.”

  “Are her parents home?”

  I prayed the sweat that was pouring from me wasn’t noticeable. Nothing was more telling than someone who appeared nervous.

  “No.” I replied, shaking my head slightly and crossing my arms over my chest. I even leaned on the door-frame, trying to appear completely relaxed. “They’re on vacation in Bermuda.”

  “Where is your girlfriend?”

  “Sleeping.” I answered automatically, “And no weapons discharged. Maybe it was a car backfiring or something.”

  Too much, I thought to myself and shut up.

  “They said it sounded like a shotgun.”

  “Oh.”

  “I think I should come in and have a look around.”

  “Why?” I asked, panicking only internally. On the surface, I was still composed, thankfully. “We’re just chilling. We didn’t do anything. Alice is asleep and I was, too, before you knocked.”

  “Would you wake her up and tell her to come down, just so I can make sure she’s okay?”

  “No. She’s been…” I was scrambling for an excuse, anything to keep him from coming into the house. Alice was a wreck; she had been crying for half an hour and she more than likely had blood splattered on her. There was no way we’d be getting out of the situation if he saw her. “She’s been really stressed out today because she’s not used to her parents being gone and she just went to sleep.”

  “That’s why you’re here?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Because her parents aren’t here?”

  “Yeah. She doesn’t like to be alone.”

  “Plus, I’m sure you’re both just thrilled to have the house to yourselves, right?”

  My eyebrows almost met in the middle in a comical expression of disbelief at his statement. I won't lie and say that I didn't take it the wrong way. The half-smile at the corner of his mouth didn't help to dispel my belief that he had just suggested something with an obscene undertone.

  Still, I was calm.

  “I guess so.”

  “Well, just so I can feel I did my job, I’d really like you to call your girlfriend downstairs.”

  More curse words exploded in my mind and came quite close to pouring out of my mouth. I knew he was only doing his job, but given the circumstances, I just couldn’t afford to play nice with him. I couldn’t let him come into the house. So as my anger and frustration mounted and my need to get Alice and I safely out of the bizarre mess we were in became as real and as crucial as thirst and hunger, I snapped.

  “Leave!” I barked at the cop and my eyes widened in horror. I couldn’t believe that I had actually said it. We were so screwed now, everything was lost, we were going to jail for killing Alice’s mom...

  “But we didn’t know it was Alice’s mom, Officer. We thought it was a ghastly female demon creature!” Yeah, that would work…

  But the cop, as though I had in one word absolved his need to do his job to high standards, turned and walked away, muttering a quick, “Have a good night,” over his shoulder.

  There was something hypnotized in his eyes and lighter in his step as he walked away.

  “I just controlled his mind.” I muttered to myself before turning around and running back downstairs into the basement, calling Alice’s name as I went.

  “I can’t believe I killed her… oh my God…” She was whispering to herself, as she sat with her face rested on her knees.

  “Alice, you will never believe what just happened.”

  �
��Where do you think my dad is? Do you think he’s one of them, too? Do you think he got turned into whatever they are, Quinn?” She asked, looking up at me with tears streaming down her cheeks.

  I knelt down in front of her, all trace of my thrill from a second earlier gone.

  “I don’t know.” I told her, grasping her hands, “But I can tell you that something weird is happening here. I had this dream. It was so real. I can’t even describe to you how real it was. I know that it’s going to happen and it’s going to happen soon.”

  “What is?” She asked me as she swiped at her eyes.

  “The world is going to end.”

  I expected her to protest and to tell me that I had lost it, but she didn’t. Her face remained impassive as she stared past me into the room where her mother’s body still laid.

  “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do now that I know that. And I do know it, Alice.”

  “Do you know when?” She asked me quietly, still not looking at me, “Is it soon?”

  “Yes. I do know that it’s going to be soon. And that was a cop at the door, by the way. I controlled his mind.”

  “How?”

  “I have no idea.” I replied. “But that doesn’t matter. The point is, he’s gone and we’re going to be okay.”

  “We’re going to be okay even though the world is ending soon?” She asked, her large brown eyes meeting mine finally.

  “Yes. I know that I had that dream for a reason. I know that it means that I’m supposed to do something about it.”

  “You seem to know a lot of things, Quinn. I don’t know anything anymore.” She put her face in her hands and started to cry again. I didn’t know how to comfort her. I had never seen her cry before and now, when I finally did, there was nothing I could say. I think I would have been able to console her if the situation that caused her to feel such sadness had revolved around normal adolescent angst. But the issue we were facing was something else entirely.

  I embraced her and told her again that everything was going to be alright. I told her we would survive the hell we were going through somehow. I told her we would survive the impending end of the world and figure out a way to live after all life had ended.

  The things I said I knew, I did know. But those promises I made to her were empty and halfhearted; I had not even a semblance of the clarity I had about the other things when I tried to picture ways that we would outlive the end of the world. I was offering her the only reassurances that I could, knowing that not one of them truly mattered. I knew very little else besides the few details of that one, terrifying event that was coming quickly into clear view.

  I was tumbling from a brightly lit, spacious room where all was laid out before me in perfect clearness, into a dark, claustrophobic space, grasping around for the light that had just thrown me away.

  XXX

  “I am trying to be delicate about this, baby, but I know that we’re running out of time. We don’t have any time to look for him.”

  “He’s my father, Quinn! I already killed my mom, for God’s sake! You won’t at least give me a day to look for my dad?!” She shouted in fury as I threw her clothes into her suitcase.

  “We still have to go to my house and pack some things. I still have to say goodbye to my parents.”

  “You’re just going to leave your parents?! You don’t even care?!”

  “Of course I care! It’s just…” I trailed off, unsure of where my apathy was coming from. I had always had a good relationship with my parents until recently, when we had begun to spar over mine and Alice’s romance.

  “It's just what, Quinn?!”

  “I know there’s nothing I can do for them. I know we have to just get out of here. Look at this.”

  I handed her the papers I had printed from a discussion forum I had found online. I joined the forum to add my own two cents, telling the other posters (from many different countries, I might add) that I had the same dream, on the same night, down to the very same details.

  “What is this?”

  “That dream I had… Other people had it, too. We need to go meet them.”

  “We don’t even know them! They could be crazy people, Quinn! What is wrong with you?”

  “What’s wrong with me is the fact that we’re running out of time before the world explodes, Alice!” I snapped at her and instantly regretted it. She pulled her knees close to her chest and put her face against them, crying again. I knelt down beside her and tried my best to apologize but she wanted no parts of it, at least not then.

  “We just have to go, Allie. I know how hard it is for you. It’s hard for both of us…”

  “What are you going to say to your parents?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe they already know and they’ll come with us. But I don’t think I’ll be able to convince them. They already think I’m rebelling against them and now they’re just going to think that I’ve lost it, too.” I was silent for a minute, picturing saying goodbye to them for the very last time. The finality of it stole my breath more painfully than a swift kick to my stomach could. I loved them as most sons love their parents. I had always wanted their approval and accepted their praise and even criticism until I met Alice. After they objected to her, I couldn’t accept anything from them anymore. It was so foolish of me. It was so childish. They were wrong about her, but that should not have shifted my feelings towards them as dramatically as it did.

  I knew that I had to lie to them. I knew that I had to pretend that we would be back soon, even though after the dream I had, I knew that they wouldn’t be alive when that cataclysmic event occurred.

  “How are you going to say goodbye to your parents, Quinn?” Her voice snapped me out of my thoughts abruptly, before I had had enough time to fully make up my mind on an answer to her question.

  “I’m going to lie.” I replied and said nothing else to her on the matter.

  XXX

  The memory I have of us leaving her house for the last time is as clear to me still as it was the day it happened. I remember how she insisted on locking the door and how I knew that she was just trying to preserve the smallest bit of normalcy by doing so. I remember how we walked hand in hand down her driveway to my car that was still parked crookedly next to the curb. I remember how she looked back, tears streaming from her eyes, at the house she had grown up in. I couldn’t imagine what she was feeling but I would be able to feel it in reality with no imagining necessary soon enough when I said goodbye to my parents. Though they would still be alive when I left them, they wouldn’t be for long. In both cases, our goodbyes to the people who had raised us were equally final, despite her mother already being dead and her father being missing.

  “I’m just going to run in and grab some things. Just a few things, so they don’t know that we’re running away. I’m not going to tell them that you’re out here.”

  She just stared out the window at the sky that was beginning to darken over our heads. The drastic change in the weather was enough to convince me of the impending end of the world; the sun never broke through the thick, threatening clouds. We were in a state of perpetual night. I wondered if anyone else found the overcast days and pitch black nights as ominous as I did. People who hadn’t had the dream would surely shrug it off as just a nasty bout of depressing weather, but I knew better. I found myself staring up into the sky as I walked to the front door of my house.

  I turned the doorknob and pushed, being greeted not by the familiar smells of the many strange concoctions my parents invented for dinner but by the distinct iron-like smell of blood. My heart dropped immediately as the realization gripped me; when I had left the night before, another one of those things had come for me. My parents had awoken, aware of a strange presence in the house. They had been killed mercilessly as they stood between me and the thing that had broken in, completely unaware that I was already gone. Their sacrifice was, to say the very least, completely in vain.

  I didn’t stumble back at the sight of their bodie
s lying side by side in front of my closed bedroom door. I didn’t collapse into a fit of tears. I didn't scream hopeless, desperate questions to no one in particular, demanding a reason for the merciless slaughter of my parents.

  I lurched forward suddenly as the few bits of food I had eaten over the past day came tumbling from me like my body was trying to expel some deadly toxin. After I wretched and gagged and wiped the tears the exertion had forced from my eyes, I did start screaming. I screamed like I was staring the devil in the eyes and like I was being cut down the way my parents had been.

  It’s amazing how in the face of trauma, we revert back to the needy nature we possessed as children. I was young still, but old enough to know that Mom and Dad couldn’t solve all of my problems for me and yet as I stared down the darkness that had scared me so much as a child, all I wanted was for my parents to run in and tell me that it was all just a nightmare.

  Alice and I were so young and we needed the people who loved us more than anything in the world to solve the ominous riddle of what to do for us.

  But they were gone, and we were on our own forever.

  Violet

  It happened while I was sitting in class, staring out the window as a light snow began to fall from the clouds. My teacher was rambling on about cell mutations and the impacts they have on an organism. I knew that even though I wasn't listening.

  “It's snowing!” A girl in my class exclaimed and I couldn't help but roll my eyes; the sudden change in the weather wasn't exactly worth a disruptive outburst. Plus, that girl was in the same clique that I despised: A drama nerd whose second interest was writing emotionally charged prose to describe her trivial high school conundrums and her mundane hormonal changes. We had Creative Writing together and every time she shared a piece she had written (which was every freaking day), I tuned her out completely and doodled in the corner of my spiral notebook.

  My sister was the one that recommended I take that class in the first place. She was smarter than me by a long stretch but we both shared a love of books and writing. I wanted to become a novelist one day. Our parents told me that unless I wanted to write an autobiography, my dreams of becoming a famous writer would never come true. My sister told me that I could do anything I set my mind to, though she immediately chastised herself for using such a trite expression to encourage me.