The Shattered Genesis (Eternity)

by Rudacille, T.

  “I can’t say that she didn’t see it. When did you see that, Violet?”

  “While I was asleep!” I cried before putting my face in my hands to hide from their concerned gazes for just a minute. “I woke up crying for them. But you wouldn’t know that, would you, James? You and Brynna were off exploring like this is some vacation! Like the world didn’t just blow apart! Like everyone you ever knew didn’t just burn away! What is wrong with you two?! How can you not care about this?!”

  “Whoa, whoa…” James held up his hands in defense. “I know what just happened, Violet. I know better than anyone. I saw this long before anyone else knew a thing. What I’m trying to tell you is that Brynna’s decision was not completely hers. The original group of people who had that dream, people from all over the world, mind you, voted. We decided that your parents couldn’t come with us because they were in the group that was going to leave us behind. Now, I will say that Brynna agreed. She wanted to leave them, too, but only for that reason. I can promise you, that it was only that.”

  “You voted…” I repeated in a fierce, incredulous whisper. Before I could stop myself, I had lunged forward and slapped him hard across the face. Thank God there weren’t many people around to witness that embarrassingly overcharged outburst.

  “Violet Mae!” Maura and Brynna exclaimed in shock and outrage, respectively.

  “You voted over whether to let them live or die!” I screamed as I lunged forward to hit him again. “My parents!”

  Maura had pulled me away from him, but I was still charging forward, infuriated beyond any degree of anger I had ever felt. Who did he and his psychic friends think they were? How could they have determined the salvation or death of people they had never met? Who was he to decide whether my parents were worthy of being saved?

  I must specify that I knew both of my parents were not good. I knew that they possessed some quiet evil in their hearts that they were scarcely aware of. But that didn’t mean that they deserved to die. In fact, on Pangea, they might have been redeemed. Who was James Maxwell to decide that they didn’t even deserve that chance?

  “That is enough!” Brynna was standing in front of me, shaking with a strong anger of her own. “We are not barbarians, at least not yet! I would appreciate it if you would refrain from acting like one!”

  Though that was a typical Brynna line, the way her eyes flashed over from their usual icy blue to a fiery red was not.

  “Brynna…” Maura whispered and her grip on me went lax. “What happened to you?”

  After her arms released me, I fell onto my knees and stared up at Brynna in horror. Brynna looked at James for help in deciphering exactly what we were talking about and he indicated his eyes. She nodded slightly and blinked to allow her own to dissolve back into their normal blue.

  “Look in the mirror. And control yourself before you kill us all!” Brynna spat at me as she pulled a cigarette from the pack with a shaking hand.

  I stood up and hurried to the mirror that was hanging over a desk in the corner of the room. I firmly believe that my heart stopped beating as I took in the sight of my own reddened eyes. How long had they been like that? What did it mean? I ran back to Maura and threw my arms around her neck, my whole body shaking with a new terror. It was the utter horror of finding myself unrecognizable. I was seeing clearly that something existed in me that was not entirely human.

  “We don’t know why that’s happening to people.” James explained quietly. “Besides being able to see things and to just know things, people have been mutating.”

  “Into what?” Maura asked as she ran her own trembling hand down the back of my hair and gripped me so tightly that I could barely breathe.

  “We don’t know,” James continued calmly, “We have no idea.”

  “I don’t want this. I never wanted any of this. Why didn’t you just leave me?” I cried before glaring at Brynna again.

  “It is too late now. So I suppose it is time you start making peace with the fact that you’re here. But for the record, I would have dragged you kicking and screaming.”

  “Why?! You don’t care about me! You don’t care about Maura or Elijah or Penny! You only care about yourself!” I pointed my finger at her on the last part.

  Behind her, a vase of flowers shattered, causing us all to jump and Maura to exclaim in horror. I looked at her, terrified, to see that she was grasping her heart, her eyes wide as she breathed heavily.

  I looked at James and Brynna, my anger dissipating only to be replaced by that same fear I had felt a moment earlier. I didn’t know what was happening to me but there was no way that those instances of anger causing some physical effect were meaningless. There was something happening. I felt it growing inside of me like a lethal cancer, eating through every part of me that I had possessed since birth. It was changing me over to some unfamiliar creature for reasons I couldn’t fathom. The same thing, as I understood from witnessing Brynna’s brief transformation, was happening to her and James.

  “Do not be afraid of it.” Brynna told me firmly. “It’s happening for a reason. Isn’t that what faithful people like you are supposed to believe, Violet?” Her voice was dripping with condescension and the rage welled inside of me again. At least this time, nothing broke.

  “You can’t tell me that you two think this is good.” Maura snapped in a fierce whisper. “You can’t tell me that you think this is all just part of some plan! It’s wrong. It’s… unnatural!”

  “How are we supposed to know what is natural?” Brynna asked after sitting down on the couch and lighting another cigarette. “Who are we to believe that what we knew was normal?”

  “Because there was nothing else! Before this, there was nothing else but what we knew.” I told her. I sat down now, too, to keep from fainting. “What, do you have some theory on why all of this is happening?”

  She exhaled smoke as she chuckled to herself softly.

  “You are asking me if I have a theory. Do you want to ask me next if Homer wrote The Odyssey?”

  “Please, darling, share it with us.” Maura snapped. I could see that her tolerance for the continued lunacy was wearing thin. It didn’t help that Brynna essentially gouged out our eyes and left us crawling around in the dark until she decided to heal our sight with her long withheld answers.

  “It is adaptation. We are mutating in order to survive in a completely unfamiliar setting. We’re getting stronger, we’re getting smarter, and we’re getting a few extras thrown in. We are the last remnants of the human race. We are meant to start it over.”

  “But,” I looked from her to James, “are we still human?”

  “As far as we know. Our hearts are beating, we’re breathing. We must still be human. We believe that we’ll remain human. We’ll just have some other skills to help us out. You don’t have to be a believer in anything to believe that.” James told me and I stared at him, watching my hand-print grow steadily clearer on his red cheek.

  “I shouldn’t have hit you.” I muttered after diverting my gaze away from him.

  “It’s understandable.” He brushed off my apology calmly. “I won’t say that I didn’t vote against allowing them to come but I will say that your anger at it is understandable.”

  “I need to ask, for my own peace of mind, why you left them, Brynna.” Maura blurted out suddenly. When we looked at her, we all saw a steely resolve in her eyes. She was going to get the truth immediately. There would be no more skipping around it with half-assed excuses or blatant lies.

  Brynna was not weak when it came to Maura. She didn’t hold back or excuse her behavior. She never failed to be honest to the point of bluntness. The answer she gave Maura would be no exception.

  “I knew they were not allowed to come. You all were. I made a choice.”

  “Was it malicious? Did you leave them to die because of how much you hated them?” Maura pressed her.

  Brynna stared at her for a long moment. Then, she shrugged but said nothing. Her response, or lac
k thereof, was psychological torture at its cruelest.

  “Just tell me you didn’t! Just lie to me, if that’s what it takes!” Maura’s pleading shouts broke my heart. “I can’t afford to see you differently now! None of us can afford that. Just tell me it wasn’t out of hate, Brynna!”

  I wanted to scream at Brynna to answer her as I watched Maura’s desperate need for that denial grow. But she just stared at her icily, raised one of her eyebrows and pursed her lips in an expression of contempt and slight confusion.

  “What makes you think I owe you anything at this point, Maura?” Brynna stubbed her cigarette out in the crystal ashtray on the table and walked away, leaving Maura to dissolve into tears that shook her entire body. I was responsible for comforting her now.

  James hurried after Brynna, calling her name, sounding as though he was now at a level of fury similar to Maura’s level of grief. The intensity of both of their mental states mirrored my own rage, my own growing hatred. How could anyone be so heartless? I didn’t know what had made her that way, but I knew that while I loved her as my sister, I hated who she was at her core. Inside of her dwelt a spiteful, demonic creature that preyed on human weakness. It sniffed out every fear, every sadness and every regret a person had ever suffered through and turned it against them. Through doing that, she controlled chaos because she created it.

  I loved her because she was my sister. But after learning of what she had done to our parents, every last cruel act she had committed in our lives was amplified to a loud droning that would remain omnipresent in my ears, possibly forever.

  I wish now that I had forced her to make me understand why she allowed such evil to exist in her. But I was so young and so incredibly blinded by my own pride and my own frustration at not being able to understand. I loved her because I had seen goodness in her as she raised Penny and I through the years.

  That love, despite its purity, was weak in strength. It was eaten by the very same beast that lived inside of me, too.

  Brynna

  James had already been slapped once that day but he was clearly coming back for seconds. Though it had been Violet that had struck him, I was very close to doing the same despite my adversity to such dramatic consequences of feeling. There was never a need to physically harm someone when one could simply cut them down with words. But when he grabbed my wrist in a painful hold and spun me around to face him, I had to stop myself from striking the other side of his face with all of my newly discovered strength.

  “What do you want?!”

  “I want you to stop this. You are driving them crazy. What did they do to you? What did they do that makes you think it’s okay to be so cruel to them?”

  “Is this a lecture? Am I supposed to apologize? Are you living in that fantasy world where Brynna makes everything right by falling on her knees and begging for forgiveness?”

  Believe it or not, that fantasy world’s population was booming.

  “No, I live in the real world where Brynna is going to go back and apologize. Then, Brynna is going to get her damn head on straight. Did you save them so that you would have punching bags? Is that what you need? Is that how you deal with your shit? By hurting other people?”

  I giggled softly and pulled my arm from his grip.

  “You are seriously attempting to lecture me on how to run my family. The last I checked, we had only just met. Therefore, you hold no say over any of these things you are protesting. It is none of your business. Consequently, you should stay out of it. Thank you so much.”

  I went to keep walking (my course of action in every uncomfortable situation) but he grabbed both of my arms now, turned me around to face him, and pushed me up against the wall. Though he used little force, I still viewed his abrupt manhandling of me as a violent assault and promptly kicked him hard in the shins.

  “Thank your lucky stars I did not aim higher.” I breathed in his ear as he doubled over in pain.

  I started to push my way out from in front of him but he fought through the discomfort and held me against the wall even more firmly.

  “What is it?” He asked me through clenched teeth. “What is wrong with you that you feel you need to act like this?”

  “Let go of me!” I barked at him as I struggled to break out of his grasp.

  “No. This is not going to keep happening. Up until this point, I have let you do what you want. But you are going to destroy them if you keep this up and I know, somewhere in that disgusting, cold heart of yours, you don’t want that. You wouldn’t have saved them just so you could destroy them.”

  “This is none of your business and if you don’t let go of me in ten seconds, I am going to start screaming that you are brutally attacking me. Do you really want people to think that this ship has its very own rapist?”

  “God, you are infuriating!” After shouting that in my face, though, he did let go of me. “What is it that you want, Brynna? Why do you insist on acting like this? What are you so damn afraid of that you need to treat them like this? Oh, and please, let me know what I did to you, that made you hate me so much, too. Is it that I got close to you?” He asked tauntingly, with his face close to mine again. I shook my head slightly in disgust and avoided his eyes. “Is it that while you were dying, I saw your vulnerable side? Is it because while we were in the hallway, you told me you needed me?”

  “You shouldn’t even care. Every other male in this population of survivors would not care why I act the way I act. They wouldn’t even care if I acted that way towards them. You are a man, aren’t you? Act like one.”

  I spat that at him with as much venom in my voice as I could muster. But he had debilitated me, even if only somewhat, by bringing up what had occurred between us. The revulsion I felt at being so vulnerable with somebody, especially a man, was crippling.

  “I do care. I care because even though you make me want to rip my hair out, I care about you. How could I not, after what we went through together? And you can say now that you don’t feel the same way. You can say that you never did. But I know that’s a lie. I know it.”

  “You’re wrong.” I forced myself to laugh. I wanted to run. I wanted to escape that moment of awkward sharing. I couldn’t imagine where it was going to lead. I would never admit a thing to him now that I had slept. Through rest, my disgusting, cold heart, as he called it, had ricocheted me painfully back to my disgusting, cold senses.

  “I warned you to stay away from me. I just do not know why you are pushing your luck. Why don’t you just run? Really, it’s better for you. I will pretend that I care about you for a moment when I tell you that you need to stay as far away from me as you can. In reality, though, I am telling you that because you have begun to truly aggravate me and I can no longer stand your presence.”

  “Well, you’re stuck with me!” He shouted furiously, “I don’t care whether you like it or not! I saved your life because I…”

  “Why?” I demanded after pushing him away from me. “Why did you want to save my life? You had to, right? You knew that you had to. Isn’t that what you said?”

  “No. Do you really want to know? I was just going to go see you in that bar so I could make my peace with leaving you behind. The guilt I had over letting you die was killing me, Brynna! So I forced myself to go see you in person. I was ready to leave, ready to forget you ever existed but…”

  “But what?!” I screamed, needing an answer so desperately for reasons I did not fully understand. How dare he make me question his intentions? How dare he tell me that I, too, was going to be left behind? What had changed his mind? I needed to know.

  “I saw you across that room and you took my breath away.”

  I looked at him now as my heart dropped from my chest into open space and my defenses crumbled away as though succumbing to a witch’s spell. We stared at each other, both silent.

  In a blur of movement that sent my heart leaping back up and forward to bang hard against the wall of my chest, we were flying together and wrapping our arms around
one another. Then, we were kissing with the same passion and intensity of actors in an old romantic film. I could almost hear the outburst of old-time music and I could almost see us in black and white. It is so very sentimental and childish to say those things, but that first kiss truly was magical, I am not sorry to say.

  His strong hands moved down my back and he lifted up to hold me against the wall. My legs wrapped around him and my arms flew up to hold him closer.

  I was not the most experienced kisser in the world, having never allowed any member of the opposite sex close enough to practice. There had been many that had attempted to get that close, only to be shut out immediately by my strong opposition to ever engaging in a romantic relationship. But with James, I found kissing him to be easy, almost effortless, like dancing in mid-air after gravity had been effectively erased. More than that, it was non-threatening. In fact, I knew in that moment that I was safe, knowing it more resolutely than I had ever known anything before. While I was there with him, locked tightly in his arms, no one and nothing could hurt me, not even the ever-present, unstoppable forces of the universe.

  In the heat of the moment (and believe me, it was a firestorm), we didn’t notice Violet walking down the hallway with her headphones plugged into her ears. We only took notice of her presence when the sight of us shocked her so substantially that she dropped her iPod onto the floor.

  We pulled ourselves apart, our bodies begging to continue, but our minds knowing that we had some new, very uncomfortable explaining to do. For the sake of appearances, I did not even let him grasp my hand. I could not afford for Violet to see me in such a vulnerable state after years of teaching her that the exact behavior I was exhibiting with James was unacceptable. I had encouraged her to one day find love, of course. All little girls needed to believe in the existence of true love. But I had warned her to be cautious. Always remain one step ahead. Never allow complete weakness to overtake you whilst you are with them. They would use every weakness you deigned to show them against you.