Authors: Jeremiah Knight
32
“What has been seen, can never be unseen.” Those words had been spoken by Jakob two weeks previous, when he’d stepped around a tree against which Anne was leaning, pants down, going to the bathroom. She’d thrown a turnip at him and chased him back to their parents, but the embarrassing—for both of them—event became a funny story. And ‘What has been seen, can never be unseen,’ became a catchphrase for a few days. When they saw an ugly creature. When mom delivered a meal. When Dad woke up in the morning. The phrase went through her mind now as she looked up at the small room into which she’d fallen, but the phrase lacked all trace of its former humor.
“Shh,” Shawna said, crawling in after her. “Are you trying to announce where we’re hi—oly shit.” The woman paused half way through the door, her eyes angled up toward the walls.
For a moment, the two of them stared in silence, frozen by revulsion. Then Shawna seemed to remember that she was an adult, and as such, the moral guardian of anyone whose age still began with the prefix, ‘pre.’ “Don’t look at it. Just stare at the floor.”
Anne heard her, but didn’t listen. As much as she wanted to, she couldn’t look away.
Shawna crawled the rest of the way into the room and then leaned back out, pulling the separated clothing back together. Then she pulled the door shut, yanking on the small handle, until the seam disappeared once more.
“Seriously,” Shawna said. “This stuff isn’t good for your brain.” She then began plucking the 8x10 photos off of the wall.
Despite the woman’s verbal concern for Anne’s psychological wellbeing, Anne knew better. Shawna was embarrassed. She might eventually take all the photos off the wall, but she was starting with the photos of herself. In some, she was alone. Changing. Bathing. Standing in front of a mirror. But in others, she had company. The man Anne assumed was Mason. His old raisin-like body was a stark contrast to Shawna’s plump, grape-like curves. But what was he doing, pressing his gross self, up against her, his face warped with what? Pleasure? And her face... She didn’t look happy. Or sad. Or angry. She looked dead. She looked...
Unconscious.
Then Anne saw it.
Really
saw it. What his body was doing to hers. To the other maids—Charlotte and Sabine. To women she didn’t recognize. And a few she did, including Carrie.
Anne nearly threw up, but contained her revolting stomach.
She looked away from the walls and found herself looking through a window that revealed the bedroom. She ducked down, afraid of being seen. “Get down!”
Shawna ducked with her, clutching the lewd photos of herself. “What is it?”
“A window,” Anne said, keeping her voice quiet. She pointed up at the window, but even now she was starting to realize the truth. She’d walked right past the gilded mirror and hadn’t thought anything of it. But it wasn’t just a simple mirror. You couldn’t see in, but you could see out.
“I should have guessed.” Shawna stood back up and resumed pulling down photos. “I don’t care if there really are just a hundred people left in the world. Mason didn’t deserve to be one of them.”
“He’s not the only one,” Anne said, but didn’t elaborate. Instead she inspected the rest of the room’s contents, careful to avoid looking at the walls. There was a video camera mounted on a tripod. It was positioned off to the side, but it could be set up in front of the two way mirror. The cord dangling from the camera led to a computer sitting atop a desk in the corner of the room. There were two flat-screen monitors, speakers and a very nice, high-end printer. Stacks of photo paper and ink cartridges lined the floor of one wall.
What looked like a thick notebook sat next to the computer keyboard and mouse. Anne opened it to find page after page of DVDs, carefully labeled with names and dates, and slotted into protective sleeves. Anne noted that the dates on the first ten pages went back to well before the Change. She turned dozens of pages at a time, counting more than thirty different names. Then she reached a page with just three DVDs, and stopped, not because it was the last page—though it was—but because she recognized the name on the final DVD: Ella Masse.
Anne’s eyes flicked to the printer. A single page lay face down in the tray.
She reached out for it slowly. Her fingers fumbled with the page edge until she lost her patience and crushed the whole page in her hand. She nearly fell over when she turned the image around and saw her mother’s naked form. She had seen her mother with no clothes on several times. And she was expecting to see a candid shot of her. But the look on her mother’s face… It was seductive.
“Your mother was a smart lady,” Shawna said.
“She doesn’t look very smart,” Anne replied, wondering for a moment if this is how her mother seemed to get her way with men. “She looks like a slut.”
“A smart slut, then.” Shawna shrugged. “She was giving him the show he wanted. Disarming him. Distracting him. Men like Mason think with their...never mind.”
Anne was about to say that she wasn’t as young as she looked, but the truth, she was beginning to realize, was that she was far younger than she had been led to believe. She might look twelve, and act twelve, but her formative years had been rushed past. “I don’t need to know.”
Shawna looked relieved. “The point is, this photo of her doesn’t reveal a weakness. It reveals a strength. Probably why she’s still alive and Mason is a piñata.”
Anne nodded. She knew it was true.
Mom would do just about anything to stay alive.
For me,
Anne thought.
She stayed alive for me.
No, that’s not right. She stayed alive for everyone.
As much as Anne liked to think Ella’s dedication to her was all about the bond between mother and daughter, she knew a large portion of it had more to do with what Anne meant to all of humanity. Lawrence might have thought to check Anne’s DNA, but it had never occurred to him to search for a USB device hidden in her head. Why would he? It was ludicrous.
And Ella had clearly used these same...skills to enamor Eddie. Did she ever care about him? Or was he always a pawn? Would she be able to reignite his feelings for her? It seemed likely, since he didn’t kill her on sight. Or was he now playing her to find Anne? Adults were confusing.
But what really befuddled Anne now was the sneaking suspicion, and concern, that Ella was also using Peter. Her father.
What if he’s
not
my father?
What if we look alike only because he and mom look alike?
The memories Anne had of young mom and dad didn’t support this theory. She’d felt what her mother felt for him. But she also had a large chunk of her mother’s memories missing, including the time period when Peter chose another woman over her mother.
That couldn’t have gone over well.
But would she betray him? Would she manipulate him?
Yes
, Anne decided. If it meant keeping Anne safe and undoing the wrong she had inflicted on the world. Ella would do anything.
Any-thing
.
So the question was, in the case of Peter, did Ella need to lie, or was the truth enough?
“What are you going to do with those?” Anne pointed at the growing stack of photos.
“Burn them.”
Anne handed the photo of her mother to Shawna. “The computer and DVDs, too.”
The woman sneered at the disc collection. Confirmation enough. When Shawna looked back up, her eyes went wide with surprise and fear. She was looking at the two-way mirror.
Anne turned around and looked into Mason’s bedroom. What she saw made her whole body go rigid.
Eddie stood in the bedroom, looking right at them.
He can see us!
Anne thought, and then she realized the truth. Eddie was looking at his reflection, and forcing Alia to look at hers. The girl, who annoyed Anne most of the time, but had started growing on her, was wet with tears. Her whole face trembled. Kenyon had a long knife, the tip of it pressed against Alia’s cheek.
He shouted something at her, making a demand.
Despite her fear, Alia shook her head, denying the man’s request and gaining a boatload of respect from Anne. Alia might be a burden in the wild, but she was braver than Anne would have guessed. Defying a man with a knife to your face took a lot of guts. But in the case of Eddie Kenyon, it was also stupid.
Eddie relaxed a little. Let out a sigh.
“No,” Anne said. “Stop.”
Eddie showed no sign of hearing her.
Shawna wrapped a hand around Anne’s mouth. “Shut-up!”
Eddie loosened his grip, but kept the knife in place. He spoke to her again. Anne imagined his soothing voice, reassuring her that everything was going to be okay, if she just did what he was asking.
Right when Alia started to buy into it, relaxing her body, staring right into Anne’s eyes without knowing it, Eddie shoved the knife blade through her cheek and yanked it out just as quickly. There was a wide-eyed beat as Alia tried to comprehend was had just happened, then blood began to gush over her face, and from her mouth.
Alia screamed.
It had to have been loud, but Mason’s secret room had apparently been soundproofed. Anne couldn’t hear a thing, but her tough heart broke for the girl on the other side of the mirror.
Alia was suffering for Anne.
“What the hell is he doing?” Shawna asked. “Why is he torturing her?”
“To get to me,” Anne said. “To get me to come out.”
Anne started rummaging through drawers, disgusted as more photos, DVDs, and other more tangible evidence of Mason’s perversions spilled onto the floor.
“What are you doing?” Shawna asked.
Anne pulled a sharpened pencil from the drawer. It wasn’t much, but it was better than nothing. “He’s good at his job.”
Shawna said nothing, but had a distinct, ‘what’s that supposed to mean?’ look on her face.
“You’re welcome to help me,” Anne said. “But don’t get in my way.” Then she stepped to the small hidden door and yanked it open.
33
Kenyon winced. The girl’s scream was far louder than he’d anticipated. It blasted into his left ear with the kind of high pitched decibels that went out of musical style when the 1980s came to a neon-clad closure. Despite the horrendous sound, and the pain it brought, Kenyon was pleased. Anne was a tough girl, but Kenyon knew part of her bravado was to hide her bleeding heart. She cared about people. All people. Even ones she didn’t like. He didn’t know if Anne and Alia were close, but he did know they’d been together for the past five weeks. That meant, if Anne was hiding in the house, she’d probably expose herself to save the girl. And if she wasn’t, Alia would scream until she died.
Kenyon yanked the girl by the back of her shirt, positioning her between him and the open door. From here, Anne would be able to hear the screaming from anywhere in the house and out the front door. And if Ella or Jakob got any suicidal ideas, she’d make a good human shield.
When Alia began to cry, Kenyon leaned down next to her bleeding face. “You’re going to scream for me now, aren’t you?”
Tears mingled with blood as she nodded.
“If you make me ask again, I’m going to carve holes in your cheeks. Understand?”
She nodded once more and tried to groan an ‘Mmm hmm,’ but an uncontrolled sob bubbled up from her chest. She tried to hold it in, but the sound popped from the side of her ruined cheek, spraying blood onto Kenyon’s face.
His smile gleamed white. He didn’t mind the blood. And the girl was already screaming again, even louder than before.
Over the shrill anguish ripping through the air, Kenyon heard something new and disconcerting: the Apache’s chain gun.
It’s the kid,
he thought. Ella wasn’t foolish enough to risk her life, and everyone else’s because of a scream. But Jakob, he’d also spent the past five weeks with Alia, and she was a looker. Probably head over heels. How could he not be? She might be the only teenage girl left alive on the planet.
Eddie chastised himself for not realizing it sooner, but it didn’t matter. If the Apache was shooting at him, the kid was stew.
His smile returned.
Jakob’s demise would definitely bring Anne running. Her friends were dying, and that was something he knew she couldn’t abide. He’d seen her face every time they lost a member of their original party. Ella was cold and indifferent, the way a survivor had to be. Like Eddie. But Anne? Every life lost chewed her up inside. She eventually got good at hiding it, cloaking herself in a shell of indifference, but that didn’t mean she was invulnerable to loss.
When the string of chain gun rounds echoed to a stop, Eddie prodded Alia in the back and said, “Again!”
As the scream bubbled up the girl’s throat, something about the light in the room changed. A shadow. Moving fast. Kenyon’s first thought was that one of the helicopters had flown past, blocking the sun for a moment, but he hadn’t heard a change in the rotors’ pitch.
Someone’s in the room,
he thought, but he dismissed the idea. He’d checked under the bed and in the closet. The room was empty.
But his neck prickled when he detected just a hint of a pulsing vibration in the floor boards beneath his feet.
Someone’s running.
Charging.
Move!
Kenyon shifted to the side, while twisting to face his stealthy attacker. The movement saved his life. Instead of puncturing his jugular, the pencil punched a hole in his already wounded arm. It hurt like hell, but wouldn’t make him less capable than the bullet already had.
But the attacker wasn’t done. The pencil came out with a slurp, reeled back and stabbed again before Eddie could counter. This time, the writing utensil struck a nerve in his elbow, sending an electric shock up his brutalized arm. He stumbled back, thrown by the pain.
Sensing she was free, Alia scrambled from the room, clutching her cheek, lost in terror. But as Kenyon turned to face his attacker, knife in hand, he forgot all about Alia. She’d fulfilled her role.
Anne had come out of hiding.
The girl stood before him, pencil wielded like a blade. She looked mostly how he remembered her, but with a shaved head. There was something different about her eyes though. He recognized the ferocity, but there was something else in the mix.
Confidence,
he realized.
Anne charged, targeting his wounded arm. It wasn’t a bad attack. The more holes she put in him, the more he’d bleed. And with loss of blood came loss of energy, and eventually death. And she nearly tagged him with the pencil again, but the rest of him was still operating at 100%, and eager for a fight. He sidestepped and kicked out his left leg, slamming his shin into hers.
A shout of pain burst from Anne’s throat. She tumbled forward and nearly drove her face into the corner of a nightstand, which would have been unfortunate. She reached out and caught herself before colliding, dropping the pencil.
“You don’t need to fight me,” Kenyon said. “You and your mother can come back to ExoGen. You can live long, happy lives.”
Anne grunted, pushing herself up, favoring her right leg. “We were happy.”
“Out here? In this miserable world?”
Anne’s eyes flicked around the room, no doubt searching for a weapon, but other than the pencil that had rolled through the open door and into the hallway, there was nothing. Kenyon held his knife out, letting her see the long blade. He also had the assault rifle on his back, but it would be impossible to quickly retrieve with one arm. She’d be out the door or trying to gouge his eyes out before his hand found the grip. “There are a hundred ways I can make you hurt, without killing you.”
“And there’s a hundred ways that I don’t give a shit.”
Kenyon remembered he was arguing with a twelve year old. Logic and threats weren’t going to get him anywhere, especially with Anne.
“And what about your mother?” he asked.
“She’s taking care of herself,” the girl said.
Kenyon was about to reply when Anne’s words sank in. She hadn’t said Ella could take care of herself. She said Ella
was
taking care of herself. Present tense. It was then that Kenyon heard the sounds of a struggle rumbling up from the first floor. Hutchins and Crawford had been engaged, and so far, not a single shot had been fired.
Then a voice rolled up the staircase. “Alia!” The kid. Not dead. So who had the Apache shot?
Anne charged with a scream, fingers hooked like claws, something she’d learned from her mother. Kenyon aimed for her arm and swung the knife. The cut would be deep, and take the fight out of her, but it wouldn’t kill her. The blade slid through the air, and struck nothing. Anne dove beneath it, rolling onto her back and then kicking up hard.
Kenyon felt his balls compress. The sensation was followed by pain and nausea that threatened to drop him to the floor. But that wasn’t what happened. There were few things more painful, but most men struck in the nuts fell to the ground, not out of pain, but for attention. He did pitch forward though, and that’s when Anne drove the same foot up into his chin.
He staggered back, but caught hold of Anne’s extended leg. With a surge of anger, he lifted the light girl and flung her across the room. She bounced off the bed, struck the far wall and fell over the side.
Kenyon stumbled back into the wall, shattering a framed painting of a farm, the kind the world used to subsidize. He fought against the urge to puke, and kept his eyes on the bed, waiting for Anne to reappear. And when she did, the gloves would be off. He would try not to kill her still. She was his golden ticket, though he didn’t really understand what made her so valuable. But he had every intention of beating her to within an inch of her life. No more kid gloves.
Anne vaulted around the back of the bed, charging him head on. “Asshole!”
He swung with the knife and realized too late that Anne was also armed and swinging. At first glance, he thought it was a baseball bat. When it struck his knife hand, lancing pain up his arm, he recognized the weapon as an oversized rubber phallus, which she wielded like a cudgel. The knife clattered to the floor, but Kenyon wasn’t holding back now. She might have caught him off guard—again—but she couldn’t stop him. Not with a dildo.
With his hand free of the knife, he grasped onto her wrist and squeezed hard enough to elicit a scream of pain. Then he flung her like a trebuchet. She slammed into a dresser, above which was an ugly gold mirror.
Anne groaned and started pushing herself up.
“Stay down, Anne,” Kenyon said, stalking toward her.
“You can stick that big—”
Kenyon kicked her in the gut. She buckled forward, gasping for air. Didn’t even fight back when he leaned down and wrapped his fingers around her throat. She kicked when her feet came off the ground, but she lacked the energy to hurt him. She raked her nails over his arm, drawing blood, but as the oxygen to her brain dwindled, so did her efforts.
Not too hard
, he told himself. He wanted her unconscious, not dead.
“Just go to sleep,” Kenyon cooed. “Close your eyes. That’s a good girl.”
Despite the pain she’d caused him, he really did like Anne. When they’d trekked through the wild after first leaving ExoGen, he’d even let himself see her as something like family. A God-daughter. Maybe even a step-child someday. It was a fantasy, and one that would likely never be realized now, but things like anger and hate can fade over time, especially when you’re safe and well fed.
Anne’s eyelids flickered as consciousness drifted.
Just another second.
Kenyon blinked. His view of the room shifted. Made no sense.
What the hell?
Instead of looking at Anne, and his own reflection in the mirror behind her, he saw a sideways view of the floor. Anne was still there, no longer in his grasp, but the world had gone from horizontal to vertical.
How did I end up on the floor?
Pain was his answer, throbbing at the back of his head along with a spreading liquid warmth.
A foot stepped into view, barefoot and feminine. A decorative butter churn dropped to the floor beside it. A woman dressed as a maid crouched down between him and Anne. She shook the girl gently, whispering before turning to the door and yelling, “Help! Someone help!”
Eddie could hear movement in the house.
People shouting. People screaming.
Gunshots rang out, inside and outside. Something bigger than his bedroom scuffle was going on.
Get up,
he told himself.
Get up and get out.
While the maid was focused on Anne, he slid across the floor, reached beneath the bed and took hold of the dropped knife. His body ached with every movement, but he fought against the pain.
Save it for later, Eddie. Just fucking move!
Eddie swung the knife.
Metal slipped through skin, muscle and tendon. The maid shrieked and dropped like Achilles, but without the legendary build up. He wanted to kill her, but he sensed there wasn’t time. While the woman writhed in agony, Kenyon got his feet beneath him and stood.
Footsteps approached the doorway, rapid fire, coming to help.
He threw the knife.
A woman walked into it, taking the blade in her chest. She toppled over beside the maid, still alive, but not even close to putting up a fight. Kenyon pulled the assault rifle over his head and laid it on the bed. He then hoisted Anne off the floor and slung her over his shoulder, balancing her limp form. Next he retrieved the weapon and turned to the window, prepared to kick it out. But there were bars on the far side of the glass.