“And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.”
Beyond Good and Evil
Friedrich Nietzsche
He sped home as fast as he could. The world was going to hell in the literal sense; the fires and riots were everywhere, and if he was going to die, he had some unfinished business that had to be dealt with, some loose ends to tie up.
The highway had been jam-packed with refugees fleeing the city, but he knew the backways that led to his small unassuming home in the wilderness of his rural hometown. It was not that far from the city, but it was far enough, and this worried him that he would be fried before he could even make it there.
The missiles had been launched from everywhere. It was the end, and now he was going to make things right; he was going to do something he should have done a long time ago…
He stared down at the stolen shotgun in the passenger seat and smiled in vicious expectation of this much needed retribution.
He thought back on the child and shivered as all of the unholy moments of their past came back to haunt him. She was only four, but in those four long years he had seen things that no one should see. The girl was evil incarnate, and he was certain she was not his but some devil spawn squeezed out by his cheating whore of a wife.
That worthless trim riled him to new heights of anger as his thoughts brushed over her. She was a liar and a whore, a cheater and a succubus sewn together by a hunger for his hard-earned money. Several times he had put her in her place, but the woman had always threatened to leave after a few bruises; she was a liability that he was going to permanently end now…along with that thing she called their daughter.
It had all started when the girl was just a baby…He would hear whispers and see shadows move at night, and they were always around the girl’s crib. Doors would open with no one there, and the hair would stand up on the back of his neck if he got up in the middle of the night to answer the call of nature. No, something was definitely not right, but it still wasn’t as bad as what had been happening recently…No, that was in a category all its own.
It was those pads of blank paper that his whore of a wife kept buying the child…That girl scribbled with her crayons on that pad day and night, and what she drew was always disconcerting. He thought about the pictures he had seen, and a nameless fear gripped him over those pages. That fear was something he could not describe but was ever-present, as if it had existed as long as children had existed and the dark had existed, and that fear was what he was going to end today, and quickly.
He thought back on the crayon scribbles of the old woman lying dead on the floor, a crudely drawn bathtub in the background behind her. After he’d seen that picture, that old bat, Mrs. Harrington, had been found dead in her bathroom…She had slipped and fallen, and that had been the end of her.
And then there was the picture of the building fire…There were people in flames screaming in agony, and that had happened too when the Agnes Markov Building had caught fire and had burnt to the ground a few days after the girl had drawn that fateful scribbling of colored crayon on white paper.
There were numerous pages of these foretellings, but he had specifically avoided dealing with it; he was secretly terrified of the girl, and he had told himself a long time ago that he wasn’t…but that was a lie.
But today was different. Last week he had seen the drawing of the missiles landing and exploding in great nuclear mushrooms, and this had relieved him somewhat, because there was no possible way that prediction could come true…but he’d been wrong. It was happening and it was happening now, and the world had gone completely mad as those missiles streaked forward toward a final, end result. But even so, he was going to finish this today…He was not going to die without justice being done.
He pulled into the gravel driveway and got out of his small compact. He grabbed the shotgun, and it was already loaded and ready to dispense its justice, that justice a long time in the coming.
He rushed to the front door only to discover it locked; perhaps his brainless meat sack of a wife was not so brainless after all.
It took him a full minute to fumble with his keys and unlock the door, and then he quietly closed that door and relocked it behind him. There was no one out here at the edge of nowhere, only trees and bugs, but he was not stupid, so he took that precaution without thinking twice.
The dumb broad he was hunting was in the kitchen looking for who knew what. He did not hesitate to pull the trigger, and half her head exploded and splattered blood and brains and skull all over the sink area. He laughed as her body fell to the floor; he had wanted to do that for a long time.
Now there was only the girl…Oh, yes, there was only the girl.
He tromped upstairs and figured the child would be hiding after hearing the loud blast of the shotgun. It didn’t matter anymore, though. He would find her and end her with one pull of the trigger.
“Come out, sweetie!” he said happily. “It’s time to come out!”
He opened the door to the child’s bedroom and was greeted with…nothing. The closet door was open, but said closet was only stocked with the child’s clothes. The underneath of the bed was bare, and there was nowhere else she could hide…It was odd.
He was about to leave when he noticed the unassuming drawing pad upon the blue carpet of the floor. That nameless fear spiked in him again, and he didn’t want to pick it up, but he reached for it as if he were controlled by someone else. It was an unassailable urge that provoked him, something he simply could not fight, so he picked up the pad, though he most certainly did not want to.
He opened the new pad and studied the first drawing. It was of him—he was sure of it—but he was crudely drawn as a wolf in a suit with a fedora on his head. He was in the car, and next to him was the shotgun…
He was afraid of what might be next, but he turned the page anyway.
The next picture was innocuous, just a picture of the girl in her bedroom drawing on her coloring pad, but it was the next picture that froze his blood in his veins; it was something he had suspected but had never forced himself to believe.
The next picture showed the open closet door, but there was nothing in it but a pitch darkness, and in the center of that black were two glowing red eyes that seemed alive, even if only in crayon…
He flipped the page and saw a long, dark, and clawed hand clutching the girl; it was pulling her into that pitch black, and that was all there was of her.
He flipped the next page and saw the picture of his now deceased wife lying on the kitchen floor, blood drawn everywhere with red crayon scribbles…
He flipped the page yet again and saw himself, the wolf in the fedora, holding the open drawing pad…
She had known everything; it was all right here. She had seen it all.
He held his breath as he slowly flipped the next page, and time slowed as he did so…He knew he couldn’t stop himself from flipping the page even if he had wanted to, and so the page was flipped.
The page flipped, and his brain stopped functioning.
In crudely drawn crayon was the wolf, but the window in the bedroom was bright with fire, as if a large blast had gone off in the distance. He flipped the final page he would ever draw eyes upon to see the wolf bursting into flames as the fire from the previous page reached in and consumed said wolf…
He looked up to see the bright burst of light through the second story window. The mushroom cloud lifted in the distance, and he screamed in rage as the blast incinerated everything in one terrible sweep.
*****
“I first met Jack in the sagging and torn shanty-cloth hovels of the Shame; he had come at the last moment to save me in that dark time. For some reason, I knew him, as if I had met him before at some other time, but I was only six, and my memories of the time before the Great Purge were nothing more than a series of strange dreams when I slept at night. No, it was there in the Shame that my memories first began, and those memories were always hand in hand with Jack.”
Maria clutched the ratty and torn teddy bear that was her most prized possession. She knelt down before Old Nan, but the withered crone that was her only guardian had stopped moving two days ago, and now she was starting to stink. Somewhere inside her young mind, she knew Old Nan was gone forever, but she didn’t really want to believe it.
She shed a single tear that lazily dripped onto the remaining glass eye of her bear, and that was it; she would waste no more feeling on Old Nan.
She looked around for a moment before poking her small head out of the shanty-cloth tent she was kneeling within; the sun was bright outside upon the rocky and scrub-torn wastes of this campsite…It wasn’t called the Shame without reason. This place was little more than a collection of these now abandoned shanties, but people had lived here just yesterday, and people in groups had food and water, and that was a good thing.
The tent she was in was made from old sail-cloth, but it was full of holes and caked with countless months of dirt and whatever else floated out there in the constant cutting, grit-filled wind. She crawled back into the safety of that small dark hovel, and she took a glance back at Old Nan before crawling over the old woman and to the back of her little shelter.
Nan stank like mad, and she had flies buzzing around her, but that wasn’t necessarily bad. Her stench kept others from investigating this tent, and others were not something desirable.
Everyone else was gone from Shame; where they went, she had no idea, but Maria suspected they had been picked off one by one by the bad things at night, and so she made extra sure she would get her sleeping place ready for that very possible occurrence. She made it a priority to sleep underneath Old Nan’s stinking body, and her blanket was little more than the bits of trash she used to conceal herself.
In fact, their tent was nothing but trash. Old rusty cans and bits of cloth and shreds and scraps of this and that…There wasn’t anything of value here…except that there was.
Maria dug through the trash to find her hiding place, not the hiding place where she stored herself, but the hiding place for the four precious cans of food that Old Nan had hidden. Four cans were nothing, and she knew that, but Maria was still hopeful she could find more if she just looked around. She picked up a can that still had an old weathered label on it…She could not read, but she was pretty sure it said something like “food.”
The picture on the can was of some kind of green straw things; Old Nan had called them “beans.” She took out the can opener from the stash and took to opening her food; the can opener itself was more valuable than the actual cans she had hidden. She diligently worked the can opener, but it was tough; the old metal was unforgiving in its stubbornness to open and reveal its life-giving secrets to her.
The first thing she did was drink the juice from the can. It was precious and just as valuable as the “beans” inside. She then picked out the short green straws one at a time with her little dirty fingers, and those “beans” were delicious to her starving palate.
She had water, of course. It was kept in something Old Nan called a “can-teen,” and though she didn’t understand why some cans were teenagers and why some were not, she simply went with it. She unscrewed the cap of her can-teen and took a long drink. There was more water at the well, and she was going to have to fill up on it anyway, so she ventured outside her little hovel and made for the center of Shame.
Maria was small for her age, with a round and dirty white face, a button nose, and dark-blue eyes. She had on her faded and dirty blue print dress with flowers on it. Her feet were not bare, thankfully, but wrapped in sock tether and surrounded by what was left of some small leather shoes. Her curly black hair was long and disheveled, but that was to be expected, considering she hadn’t washed it in some time.
She was careful now as she went to the well. Though most of the nasty things came out at night, there were still things that could kill her during the day, wild dogs for one. Old Nan had always warned her about dogs…There were whole packs of them in some places, and they would not hesitate to rip a child apart without provocation. Old Nan had killed a couple of dogs in the past few months, and they had eaten that meat, but it was tough, even after putting it in the pot to stew.
She walked up to the well and drew up the bucket. The wooden bucket was on an old rope pulley, so it was not so heavy that she could not bring it up, even when it was full of water. After bringing up the bucket, she latched the rope to the rusty metal pipe latch an adult had affixed to the well. This kept the bucket from falling, but because the well was low to the ground, the brick wall of the square hole only a foot high, she had to be extra careful not to fall in, or that would be the end of her.
The water here was still good, and that’s why everyone had stayed here for so long, but there was talk of a better place up north, and that place had walls and people with guns to defend it.
Old Nan had told her to beware of other people, had told her about the terrible things they would do to her, but other people were nothing compared to what came out after dark. This little shanty town that was Shame?…It was ripe for being picked off any day now. That’s why everyone had left…Well, almost everyone.
“Well, look what we have here,” came Paige’s voice.
Maria dropped the bucket back into the well but was careful not to drop her can-teen. She screwed the lid back on and was prepared to run if Paige tried anything. The older girl sauntered up to her and looked her over, and Maria did not like that look.
“Why are you out here?” asked Paige in a not-so-nice voice.
Paige was sixteen, and though she had a pretty face and was pretty on the outside, she wasn’t pretty on the inside. Old Nan had kept Paige away; the girl had a reputation with kids, mostly other girls, and it was not nice.
Paige’s tanned head was shaved; the boys had done that to her, and they had beaten her and done other bad things to her as well. Maria did not know what those other things were, but she did know that Paige sometimes did those things to kids, and she did not want to be one of those kids.
Paige was dressed in sewn-together hand-me-downs from the boys, a dark-green patchwork sleeveless shirt and tattered black pants, but unlike Maria, Paige had on real footgear, old black boots with frayed laces. Boots were rare, and Maria couldn’t imagine how Paige had acquired them in the first place…She really didn’t want to know.
“Old Nan is waiting for me,” lied Maria.
It technically wasn’t a lie per say; Old Nan was waiting in a sense.
Maria’s voice wavered in fear, and she wasn’t very convincing, but Paige seemed to believe her anyway, and the older girl scowled in disapproval.
“Tell that old hag she should just drop dead so we can stop wasting our food on her,” said Paige angrily. “Not that it matters. Everyone left before dawn. That stupid old bat was supposed to go too, but it looks like she’s stranded here.”
Maria knew something wasn’t right. She wondered why Paige had not gone with them, because being alone out here was suicide. Of course, Maria was alone, and she knew that, but what else was she going to do? She didn’t know anyone else or anywhere else, and this little place was all she knew…It didn’t look real good when she thought about it, but she did know she was better off staying here than going with Paige.
She decided to tempt fate and ask why Paige had stuck around.
“Why are you here, then?” she asked.
Paige scowled and spit on the ground.
“Because I didn’t want to go,” she frowned.
Maria looked up to see another girl exit from one of the hovels, and she immediately recognized her as Cory. The young girl was dressed in an old, tattered, green print dress, and she had weathered, strapped sandals on her bare, dirty feet.
Cory was fourteen, and she was supposed to be looked after by Margaret, but it was clear she had been left behind, too. Cory had naturally sandy-blonde hair, and she was always laughing and running and playing with the other kids. Maria had played with Cory a couple of times in the past few months, but for the most part, Old Nan had kept Maria away from the others…or at least she had until two days ago.
However, none of that mattered at the moment. Cory’s green eyes watered as her face collapsed into tears…She had obviously heard what Paige had just said.
“Everyone’s gone!” cried Cory. “But I was supposed to go with them! I can’t believe… Paige, why didn’t you say anything! You know what’s going to happen to us without them?”
Paige cursed and backhanded the younger girl, and Cory fell to the ground with a shriek and a subsequent wailing of tears.
“Shut up!” barked Paige. “Get back inside!”
Maria did not like this at all. Paige was nothing but a bully, and bullies were bad. Of that much, she was certain.
“Stop it!” she yelled in her little voice.
Paige glared down at her, and Maria backed up a step. She was ready to run in case the much bigger girl decided to hit her.
“Or what, you little abortion?” hissed Paige.
Maria did not know what that meant, but it sounded bad, so she shot back her own threat, and consequently it was the only threat she actually knew.
“I’ll tell,” she lied in her boldest voice.
In reality, there was no one to tell, but that little detail was left unsaid. Paige cursed again, reached down and grabbed Cory by one of her spindly arms, and dragged her to her feet.
“Stop bawling!” yelled Paige. “We’re leaving tonight! We’ll catch up to them easily. We just have to wait until it cools off a little, and then we’ll grab the stuff they left behind.”
“But you said—” wept Cory, but the older girl cut her protest short.
“I know what I said!” snapped Paige. “Get back inside! We’re going to grab all the stuff they left behind and get going soon. Right now, I want to have some fun.”
“But I don’t want to do that anymore, Paige!” cried Cory. “I want to go! We have to catch up!”
“Like I care!” yelled the older girl. “Get in there!”
Maria stood helpless as she watched the older and bigger girl drag Cory back into the tent. She did not know what was going to happen to Cory, but she was not stupid…She was not going to find out. She hustled back to her own little hovel and tied the dirt crusted flap of her tent/shanty closed.
It was one thing to threaten to tell somebody, but it was entirely another to actually tell somebody, especially when there was no one left to tell.
She sat down next to Old Nan’s body and felt herself fall inward from her own sadness. Now there really was no one left, and she had to either stay here or venture out by herself…and she was not going with Paige.
She cried for a little, but the truth was she was way past crying at this point. Old Nan had let go a long rattle of breath two days ago, and then she had stopped breathing altogether. She was as stiff as wood now, and she stank, and Maria didn’t really want to be around her anymore. Still, the old woman had taken care of her for as long as Maria could remember; she just didn’t feel right about leaving her here like this.
There was one thing that gave her a small jolt of excitement, though, and that thing was her coloring pad. Old Nan had kept it safe for her, but there had come a point when the old woman hadn’t let her draw in it anymore. That had stopped after the first couple of times Maria had drawn in it.
Old Nan was afraid of that coloring pad, but why,the old woman never had said. Maria had asked Nan many a time to have it back, but Old Nan had just said no. The old woman could have lied and had said she’d thrown it away, but Nan had once said that she never lied, so Maria just had to trust in that belief.
She crawled over Old Nan and dug out Nan’s lockbox. It was stuck shut by something called a “lock,” a device meant to keep people from opening it, but Maria knew that it could be opened with a “key.” Old Nan had that “key” on her, and now it was only a matter of finding it.
Maria winced as she reached into Old Nan’s pocket on the woman’s tattered brown smock. She dug around and felt something moving, and that sensation caused her to quickly pull out her hand.
She peered inside the pocket, reached in, grabbed a large bug, and then tossed it out. The bugs weren’t really a problem unless there were a lot of them, and some of the folks in Shame had liked to eat them, but Maria was not big on eating things with so many legs.
At any rate, and with that little challenge over, she reached in and pulled out the metal “key.” She held the metal thing up between the small index finger and thumb of her right hand and studied it.
It was a strange thing, this “key,” but like so many other things in her life, it was merely a tool to be used and then thrown away. She played with fitting the key in the small lockbox before getting it to truly fit, but she didn’t know what to do, because the box still wouldn’t open.
The box was big and covered with tattered leather, and it had a broken handle at the top. Old Nan had called it a “breef case,” but what a breef was, she had no idea, but that hardly mattered, since it wouldn’t open anyway.
Maria stared at it in frustration before angrily twisting the key between her fingers. The lock gave and turned along with the key, there was a loud click, and then the “breef case” popped open. Inside the breef case was Maria’s book, along with her worn but precious box of color rods. She picked them up and felt a surge of happiness, and that feeling was rare, but it was well deserved at the moment.
She sat down and opened her coloring pad to reveal the crisp and clean untouched white pages. She felt funny inside as her fingers ran over the first blank page; it was a pulling of sorts, like a call from someone from somewhere way far away. She opened her box of colors and pulled out the brown one…It had been a long time since she’d seen or handled these.
They smelled good, as did the paper. Her fingers were dirty, so she was careful not to smudge too much of that on the page before her. There was only half-light inside her shanty, but that was good enough for her. She was going to draw now because she needed to; it was the only comfort she had, so drawing in half-light was not so bad.
Maria began to draw with strange purpose, and what she drew made her feel cold inside. She used the various color sticks when appropriate, but it was as if she only knew what she was drawing when she was drawing it, not what she actually wanted to draw. It was all very confusing.
The lines and scribbles began to form a picture, and it was not a nice one. She drew the angry, unhappy figure of Paige, but the hard-nosed bad girl was not so bad in the picture…No, she was being carried off by something far worse. The bad people were taking her away, and though Maria did not like Paige one little bit, she did not want that to happen to her.
She decided not to think too hard upon it, because something else tugged at her in the back of her mind. She flipped the page and took out various colors for the task at hand because she wanted to know more, and she was positive that the only way to learn more was to continue coloring. There was something about her pictures that had scared Old Nan, and now she was beginning to grasp what that might be. Her pictures were bad, they showed bad things, and that in itself was disquieting.
Her next picture was not much better. This one showed Cory, and she was bleeding from her left arm. There was blood running down her leg and a large pool of red under her feet, and Maria did not like that at all…but she wasn’t finished. She filled in the rest of the picture and thought at first that she was drawing a big dog, but then she realized that it was larger, much larger, and it had blood dripping from its huge, sharp teeth.
She flipped the page and drew again, but this time she concentrated on thinking good thoughts. If she thought good thoughts, then good pictures would appear, but she found that she did not know which good thoughts to think, or even if they were good.
Her mind centered around food, floating around the different and various tastes of certain things she had eaten in the past, but most food was just that…food. She ate most things without asking what it was, because if she didn’t, it would spoil, and then she went hungry.
She thought hard about the things she had eaten in the past. She’d had meat sometimes, mostly wild animals…dogs, cats, squirrels, some birds, sometimes cans of something called “deviled ham,” but that was rare, sometimes cans of fish called “sar-deens,” sometimes other cans of fish called “toona’, but most of what she ate was some type of “beans,” whatever those were.
There was once a long time ago that Old Nan had found a jar of something called “peeches” that was still good. In fact, its taste was so “sweet,” as Nan had called it, that Maria could barely eat it. She had not eaten anything that “sweet” before. Nevertheless, she liked it, and so she thought on that. “Peeches” would be her go to good thought; it was all she had at the moment.
She looked down at her book in order to draw while thinking of “peeches,” but to her surprise, she discovered she had been drawing the whole time.
She studied the picture, but it gave her a strange feeling.
Maria had never drawn a picture with herself in it, at least not one she could remember, but there was something familiar about the shadowy figure standing in front of her crudely-drawn presence. This person was tall, a man maybe, but he was dressed all in black, and his face was hidden behind a mask, the kind of mask that the men with guns wore from long ago. He stood staring out from the page, his hand held down and back as if to shield her, and Maria thought, or hoped at least, that he was trying to protect her, and that was a good thing, wasn’t it?
She did not know the answer to her own question. What she did know was that this feeling of dread she held over her own drawings was not imaginary. She could feel it clawing at the back of her mind, and she knew, knew it deep down and with utmost certainty that something bad was coming.
She decided then and there that staying in Shame any longer was probably a bad idea, and though she was not entirely certain if she wished to do so, perhaps traveling with Paige and Cory was the lesser of two evils. She shuddered at the thought of Paige touching her in a bad way; Old Nan had warned her about Paige and those older boys—they were not nice—but maybe Cory would keep Paige away, at least for the time it took to catch up with the others.
Maria didn’t waste any more time thinking about it and decided to get her stuff together. She took Old Nan’s leather knapsack and put in her book and color sticks. She took the three cans of food she had hidden, stuffed them into the sack, and then tossed in the can opener for good measure. Her can-teen was full, so that was good, so there wasn’t any reason to worry about water for now.
Maria went ahead and hid the knapsack near Old Nan, but the old woman was really starting to stink. No one would look for it next to her; who’d want to? She actually had a reason for this; she had to go wee, and that was going to take a little time. You only went wee when you absolutely had to, and you did it away from the center of Shame; no one wanted to step in that. Still, Old Nan had always watched out for her before, but ever since the old woman had stopped breathing two days ago, Maria was forced to venture out for that by herself. It was a hassle, but it was necessary.
She did her business out by the old rags, some shanties that were so beaten down that even the original residents of Shame had abandoned them, and after that was finished, she made her way back to the tent as quickly as possible. She never wasted time when outside the confines of Shame…That was asking to be eaten by something, and there were a lot of things that roamed this wasteland looking for an easy meal.
Maria was hit by that awful smell as she opened the flap to her hovel. It was bad enough that Old Nan was gone, but to live with her in this state was…necessary. She had no doubt the smell would drive away most creatures and mask her scent as well.
Old Nan had explained some of these things, how the bad people hunted, and how other things in the dark hunted, and that information was being put to good use right now. Old Nan would have been proud of her, but Maria felt a tinge of uneasiness at leaving the old woman thusly and in such shape.
She picked up her teddy and held it tightly. Things were going to get bad, and she wasn’t sure what to do now or where to go. Everyone had left except for Paige and Cory, and they didn’t count because there was no way they were going to be able to protect her and take care of her. She didn’t really want to go with them now; her pictures had shown her something that she was afraid was going to happen, and knowing that, going with those two was…not good.
She cried a little, but the truth was that she was not much for crying. It was scary what was happening; she should have told someone that Old Nan was…that…but for some reason, she just couldn’t let Nan go. Telling someone would be letting the old woman go, and she couldn’t let go of Old Nan, because the old woman was all she’d had in this world, and going on without her guardian was…hard.
She decided to lay down next to Old Nan for a while, and though the old woman stank, it didn’t bother Maria if it meant getting some sleep before having to venture out. Venturing out was going to be hard, and it was going to be scary, and that was too much for her at the moment.
She clutched her teddy and rested her head on the mound of rags she had piled together for that very purpose. She stared at her teddy’s one good glass eye and closed her own dark-blue eyes. She had never given her teddy a name—there was no reason to—but that didn’t matter in the end anyway. Her teddy was just a toy, and though good toys were rare, they were not something you could eat or drink or use to defend yourself. Still, she valued her teddy above everything else she owned…except for her book and colors…but the bear did give her the comfort she so desperately needed.
She drifted off into sleep a moment later, and that was rare, because she was usually really active around this time, but her weariness in spirit had caught up with her, and that was that.
*****
Maria awoke to dim light. The sun was going down, and she struggled to rise and get herself awake. She had not intended to sleep this long, and now her chances of making it out of Shame were that much slimmer.
She slung her big can-teen over her shoulder and was careful not to let the already worn straps on it tear any further. She grabbed her knapsack and grunted at the weight of it. She stuffed her teddy inside, hefted her knapsack, the big bag that Old Nan had once called a “purse,” and peered outside her hovel…
She shrieked as she was immediately grabbed and hauled to her feet. Paige clutched her arm and then tossed her aside like wet rag.
“You little turd!” hissed the older girl. “Now I know why it stinks so bad over here! Old Nan’s as dead as a doornail, and you’ve been lying this whole time! Give me that purse!”
“No!” shrieked Maria, and she tried to run.
She made it about ten feet before Paige grabbed her from behind. She struggled for a moment, but Paige swatted her on the back of her head, and it hurt a lot. Maria shrieked and started crying, and she didn’t want to cry, but she was scared of Paige, so it was justified.
“Shut up!” hissed Paige.
The older and very mean girl picked up Maria’s precious knapsack and opened it. She did a quick look through her things and snorted in pure derision.
“What is this crap!” she asked angrily. “Three cans of food and an opener? What in the hell were you thinking? You won’t get four feet with this crap…Ugh…Stupid bawling baby. I should leave you here for the dogs.”
“Leave her alone, Paige!” protested Cory.
The other girl walked up and knelt down next to Maria. She helped Maria to her feet and then glared at Paige with an angry scowl.
“Or what?” asked Paige angrily. “Are you gonna grow a backbone now?”
“S…Stop it now!” stammered Cory. “You’re being a bi…a…a…uhhh…”
Paige barked out a laugh and shook her shaved head.
“You scared of saying a dirty word?” she snorted.
Her false amusement fell away as her face twisted into an angry caricature of itself. She had been very pretty once, but ever since the boys had shaved her head and had done those bad things to her, she wasn’t pretty anymore. Paige wore her new ugliness in her voice; it was an ugliness of spirit, and Maria simply wished the older girl would just go away.
“Look around, stupid!” yelled Paige.
Paige vibrated like a wire as she motioned her right hand in a circle at the dirty and tattered “homes” around them. Her voice was choked with anger and tears as she spat out an angry rant, a rant that had clearly been coming for a long time.
“This is all there is!” she cried out in hostile tone. “There isn’t anything else! There’s no one around that cares about you or your dirty mouth!…You don’t know anything at all, Cory. You don’t know what it’s like with the others around…You think I’m mean to you and this little turd, but you don’t know anything! You don’t know what they did…”
“Yes, I do!” replied Cory in a quavering voice. “I know they did those terrible things, Paige, but they got thrown out for it…and now you’re acting just like them! You can’t do this anymore! You can’t treat me or her or anyone else like…like…uhhh…What…What is that?…What is that awful smell?”
Cory winced as the stench of Old Nan reached her nostrils. Paige choked out a bitter laugh as she motioned toward Maria’s tent-shack.
“That’s Old Nan,” she said bitterly. “That old witch has been dead for days now, and this little turd has been living in there with her the whole time.”
Cory’s face widened in open shock.
“What?” was all she could say.
“The old hag died!” hissed Paige. “This little turd’s been living in there with her corpse!”
Cory stepped forward and gingerly opened the flap of Maria’s tent. She gagged and stepped back as the rotting stench of Old Nan hit her square in the face.
“Oh…Oh, that’s gross,” she said in disgust.
Cory turned, knelt down, and looked Maria in the eye. She grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her gently.
“You can’t live here anymore, Maria,” she said firmly. “You…You can’t. Old Nan’s dead. You can’t live in there with her…You…You have to come with us.”
Paige stamped her booted right foot into the dirt and cursed.
“What!” she barked. “To hell with that!…N…No! I’m not babysitting this little brat! She’ll only slow us down!”
“I’m not leaving her behind!” snapped Cory. “I wouldn’t do that to you if you needed help!”
Paige swore under her breath as she stepped forward. She lifted her hand to strike Cory, but this time the other girl glared back at her in open defiance.
“Go ahead and hit me then!” said Cory angrily. “I’m not afraid of you anymore! If you’re willing to leave behind a defenseless little girl then…then you’re nothing but a monster!”
“You little bi—!” swore Paige.
She grabbed Cory by the front of her tattered green print dress, and they struggled for a moment. Paige was bigger and stronger, however, and she easily overpowered the younger girl.
Cory released an angry wail as she was thrown to the ground a second later.
“Stop it!” shrieked Maria.
She didn’t like to see them fight; she couldn’t bear it, especially after everything else that had recently happened to her. It was bad enough Old Nan was…was dead…but it was Maria’s own picture book that was really bothering her. That feeling of dread was hitting her hard now; she could feel it way down in her bones and guts, and that feeling was getting stronger by the second.
Cory started crying as Paige hauled her up off the ground.
“Shut up!” hissed the older girl. “Quit your bawling!”
“Let go of me!” shrieked Cory. “I don’t want to be with you anymore!”
Paige let her go and stepped back, a look of surprise upon her angry face.
“What?” she asked in disbelief. “I’m the only thing that’s keeping you—”
“Stop lying to me!” choked out Cory. “You can’t do anything! You can’t protect me! You can’t even protect yourself!”
It was Paige’s turn to cry. It was fascinating to watch the mean girl cry; Maria watched in rapt surprise as Paige’s tears crawled slowly and deliberately down her own dirty, tanned face, but she wiped away some of those angry tears and stared at Cory with hurt-filled eyes.
“After everything I’ve done for you?” she asked in bitter reply.
She looked truly upset, and Maria couldn’t help but feel a little sorry for her.
Cory apparently felt the same way; she frowned and looked down at the ground.
“You can’t be like this anymore, Paige,” she said unhappily. “You’re no better than they were. If you want me to stay with you, then you’d better take Maria with us. I’m not going to leave her behind…She’s just a little girl.”
Paige wiped away some angry tears and then tossed Maria’s knapsack back to her. Maria picked up the knapsack, snapped it closed, and then hefted it up on her small right shoulder.
“Let’s go,” said Paige angrily. “Go grab the sack, Cory…”
Her voice trailed off as the last rays of the sun dropped below the horizon. All three of them stopped and stood stock still as a slight breeze whistled over them. That feeling of dread came back to Maria, pulsed over her like a shock of tidal fear, and she did not even dare to breathe.
There came a rustling noise in the distance, and Maria looked up to see real and honest fear wash over Paige’s face. The girl used to be pretty way back when, but ever since the boys had gotten ahold of her and had shaved her head, she had taken a mean and hard look. Now that mean and hard look was at contrast from the genuine fear on the young teen’s face, and Maria knew right then they were all in real trouble.
“Hide!” hissed Paige, and they scattered.
Maria immediately dove into her own tent, and she was nearly knocked down as Cory followed her in. Maria clutched her knapsack with a tight guard as she climbed over Old Nan and hid next to her, covering herself with trash in the process. Cory hid next to her, but she was bigger than Maria, and she had to lie flat next to Old Nan’s stinking corpse just to blend in.
Maria poked her head up for a second to look past Old Nan’s body. Cory had left the flap of the tent open, and the old sail-cloth had caught and snared on something; she could see out into the growing dark as the moon and stars granted a pale version of light over the outside that was Shame.
She watched in terror as big booted feet dropped down from somewhere above to land before her shanty.
“Check everything!” called out a gruff male voice.
There was some laughter, wicked in its sound, and then a loud and feminine shriek that could only be Paige. Maria watched in horror as booted feet and legs in patched pants trampled around the opening of the hovel.
“There’s always one!” came a woman’s voice, and the tone of her voice was not nice.
“Let me go!” shrieked Paige.
There was wicked laughter as Paige’s legs in tattered pants and her booted feet were dragged past the opening of the hovel.
“Somebody, help me!” screamed Paige.
Maria didn’t dare move, but a side glance at Cory told her the older girl was barely keeping from breaking down. The benevolent teen was in tears, but she had the sense of mind not to cry out…or even breathe, for that matter.
“Give her here!” laughed the first voice, the man.
Paige screamed as the man’s legs and her legs came closer together, and then she cried out a long and loud screech that faded after a few seconds. Some dark drops of some unknown liquid splattered to the dirt around Paige’s boots, and the toe of the older girl’s left boot ground into the dirt as her left leg twitched and shook. She moaned a second later, a low and very strange sound to Maria’s young ears, and then she stopped making any noise again.
Whatever was happening with Paige and this man?…It was not good. Paige slumped a little as her knees buckled and her legs bowed inward, but she did not fall, as the man before her was obviously holding her up.
“She’s good,” said the bad man after a moment. “She’s clean. Keep her alive…She has to last for a while.”
“But what about…” started another voice, another man.
“Don’t argue with me!” growled the first man. “There’s enough for everybody, you dumb, son of a—”
Paige started weeping in a loud and piteous voice, and Maria felt her heart pull toward her, but there was nothing she could do. However, that piteous sound was too much for Cory, and the girl let out a small whimper.
The pairs of legs and boots outside the tent stopped and stood still. Maria felt her heart leap into her throat at that moment, and she willed every muscle in her body to stop her terror induced trembling. She had never been this scared before, not that she could remember, so even if she had wanted to scream and cry, it was not possible for her to do so. She was frozen at that moment.
“Did you hear something?” asked a new voice, another woman.
“Quiet!” hissed the first man, the obvious leader of the group.
They stood still for a moment, and then there was a loud and low metallic howl that rang out in the distance. It echoed over Shame like an impending doom, a chill of bone-numbing terror in the form of ominous portent, and no one made a sound, not even the bad people outside. Even Paige’s piteous crying faded out at the sound of that terrible and terrifying howl.
“Damn!” hissed the leader. “Scatter! Back to the haven!”
The woman that had heard the sound in the first place spoke again, but what she said was not well-received.
“But what about the rest of these shacks?” she asked. “There could be others…”
“Are you out of your damn mind!” asked the second of the two men. “There’s nobody left here except a rotting corpse! This place is no good anymore, and I’m not sticking around to get shredded!”
That loud and low metallic howl rang out again, only this time it was closer and louder.
“Move!” yelled the leader.
Maria watched in terror as the man’s booted feet left the ground along with Paige’s own booted feet. They shot straight up along with the other bad people’s legs and boots, and Maria listened in stark horror as Paige’s shrieking floated down from high above to finally fade out to nothing.
Cory wept openly now; the older girl could not contain herself any longer. She sobbed twice before the loud and low metallic howl rang forth again…this time much closer than before. It was so loud that it sounded like it was coming directly from the center of Shame, so Cory silenced herself and froze, unmoving.
They waited in stark fear for what seemed like an eternity. Maria felt a presence upon them, a terrible and ominous black aura of death as a huge shadow spread before the opening of the hovel. Her eyes widened as the huge creature glided silently before the opening of the tent. It looked like a dog but much, much bigger, bigger than even a big man, and its huge yellow eyes gleamed in the pale of the moonlight and the silver casting of the stars above.
It padded forward before the hovel on all fours, and its huge paws kicked up scrub dust, particles of dust that glimmered in the moonlight like motes of fine ice. Its huge nose sniffed the air, and it turned its voracious attention toward the inside of the tent. It poked the first half of its enormous black body into the comparatively small hovel and took in a long pull of air through its fist-sized nose.
Maria did not move, did not breathe, did not give so much as a motion of indication that she had ever even existed. She could feel the hot puff of the monster’s breath as it sniffed over the corpse of Old Nan. It licked its huge black gums with a long, pink, snake-like tongue and sniffed again.
Maria was sure she was going to be eaten, but she refused to move, and Cory obviously had the same idea. They laid flat and did not move or even breathe at that tense and terrifying moment.
The beast sniffed one more time and then backed out of the hovel. It raised its enormous head and howled, and the sound was both deafening and terrifying at the same time. It padded off, and Maria listened as the sound of its huge paws faded in the distance.
They waited there in the dark of the shanty next to Old Nan’s rotting corpse for a few minutes. No howl or sound of padded feet came back to Maria’s ears, so she stirred from her painfully still position and stood. She grabbed her knapsack and hauled it up and over her shoulder as she left the tattered hovel, and Cory followed a second later.
The older girl wept again, but this time she wiped away her tears and looked about with fearful eyes.
“Is it gone?” she whispered.
To be honest, Maria did not know, but she certainly hoped so. Still, the pictures she had drawn filled her with a sense of dread, because Paige’s picture had come true…but Cory’s had not.
“I think so,” she whispered a moment later.
Cory clutched Maria’s shoulder as she looked around in open fear, and though her voice was choked with sadness, it was also filled with immediate and sensible purpose.
“We have to leave,” she whispered. “We have to catch up to the others!”
“O…Okay,” said Maria fearfully. “I don’t think there’s anything to take, but…”
She was going to remind Cory to bring the girl’s own sack, but then she saw something that made her stop. There was a trickle of blood running down the inside of the older girl’s bare right leg from just beneath her green print dress, and Maria stared at it in confusion.
“Did you cut yourself?” she asked nervously.
If Cory was cut, then it could get “infekted”…Old Nan had told her about “Infekshuns” and how they were little tiny bugs that you couldn’t see that got into your cut and ate away at you from the inside out. Cory, on the other hand, did not act like she was hurt, so maybe it wasn’t that bad of a cut.
“What?” asked Cory.
She looked down at her leg, saw the trickle of blood, and swore under her breath.
“Dammit all!” she said angrily. “Not now!”
The older girl looked around for her sack and opened it. She dug around for something and pulled out a wad of cloth strips. She wiped her leg with one of them and looked up at Maria to say something, but she stopped as if frozen in place.
Her voice died in her throat as she stared off into the distance with an expression of pure terror. Maria looked behind herself to see the source of Cory’s fear, and she immediately wished she hadn’t…The beast was back.
The huge monster had rounded one of the shanties in the distance, its big nose sniffing the evening breeze, and it stopped to look upon the both of them. It was only fifty or so feet away, and yet it took no judgement whatsoever to see that its immense size made it a true monster… It was most certainly not a wild dog.
They both screamed as the beast charged, and though Maria tried to run, the creature crossed the gap between them with a speed unbeknownst to anything mortal man was capable of, much less a six-year-old girl. The beast leapt, and one of its huge front paws smacked Maria in the back of the head as it sailed over her. She hit the ground rolling, and her knapsack flew from her little hands to flop down beside her.
She looked up in time to see Cory scream as the enormous creature merely nipped her, but its huge, four-inch-long fangs ripped open her left arm like a can opener tearing into a can.
Cory fell to the dirt screaming as she clutched her savaged left arm.
Maria stood and bolted as the monster wheeled around and focused its attention upon her. She ran, adrenaline and fear pumping through her, but in the back of her mind she knew this was the end.
The savage beast leapt from ten feet away to sail through the air like some great and terrible bird without wings, and it opened its huge maw with the intent of biting her in half.
Time slowed as Maria stumbled and fell. She spun around as her ankles twisted, and as she was falling backwards, she raised her right hand in reflexive defense. The huge maw of the beast opened up to devour her, its hot slavering mouth smattering the air about it along with a small amount of what was obviously Cory’s blood.
Maria was never exactly sure what happened next. She saw the black-gloved fist sail forward, she saw it smash into the side of the creature’s gaping maw, she saw three great white fangs break off and fly through the air in slow motion as the great beast’s massive black head turned from the tremendous force of that blow, and then this new person was upon the beast, and the fight was on.
This new man appeared from nowhere; Maria had not seen him come or even had a hint of his arrival, but here he was, and he had saved her at the last second, and he was fighting this creature without so much as a shred of fear.
This new person was dressed in all black soldier armor; he was covered from head to toe in this survival gear, and even his face was hidden behind a banded metal mask that beheld a slim black visor across the eyes…The only thing that was distinct about him was the long jet-black hair that hung down to his shoulders and blew wildly in the evening breeze. He wore a long black duster over his armor, and if he were hot or uncomfortable in that getup, he did not show it.
The beast was on this newcomer with a hot and slavering growl of pain, and the man stopped the creature’s jaws from clamping down upon him by prying open its huge maw with both gloved and armored hands. The great beast raged and tried to surge forward, but the man planted his big armored and booted feet in the dirt, spread his legs forward and back, and refused to budge. He was pushed back a foot as his big boots slid in the dirt beneath them, and the two figures stood locked in that pose for a few seconds.
The man adjusted his armored gloves to put his right hand on the beast’s nose and snout while sliding his left under the creature’s chin. He slammed the great jaws shut with such force that a spurt of blood shot forth from between the creature’s great and bloody fangs.
He wrapped his arms around the thing’s neck, grunted harshly, and then lifted the whole of the huge beast into the air. The great and terrifying creature flew off its feet to slam onto its long back into the hard ground below, and it was all Maria could do to scramble backwards and away to avoid being crushed beneath it.
The man in black kept ahold of the massive creature’s neck as the beast spun off its back and back onto its four great legs, but he took this opportunity to straddle the creature and press it down as he pulled up and back on its huge head. They struggled in that position for a moment, but the man continued to pull and twist at the same time. There was a very loud “CRACK!,” and then the creature stopped struggling…In fact, it ceased to move at all.
The man in black dropped the massive beast to the dirt and left it there without a second thought. Maria stood and stared at him in shock, and she would have stood and stared even longer, but it was Cory’s terrible screeches of pain that snapped her out of that strange daze. It was clear Cory was badly, badly hurt this time, and Maria didn’t know what to do about it or if there was even anything she could do about it.
That really didn’t matter, however, as the man in black did not give her any time to collect her wits. He stepped forward and grabbed her by the arm with one armored and gloved hand, and his grip was cold, as cold as any nighttime chill.
“We have to go,” he said, and his voice was so rough that it reminded Maria of sand in vocal form.
“Let go of me!” she demanded.
She struggled a little, and he let go of her arm without any effort.
“We have to go,” he said, but the tone of his voice had not changed.
Cory was still shrieking, but her cries and weeping were getting weaker. Maria knew she couldn’t leave her friend behind; the injured girl was the only person left that she knew in Shame, and she did not know this mysterious man in black.
She studied him carefully, and her first impression was not good. There was something fundamentally wrong about him, wrong on a level that probably didn’t register with adults, but a wrong she could sense just the same.
He gave off an aura of fear, a black glow of the spirit that registered within her own deepest nightmares, but he did not seem hostile…to her, anyway. Nevertheless, she would not leave without Cory. If Cory stopped moving and breathing…if Cory died—she really hated that word—if Cory died, then it wouldn’t matter, but for now she had to try.
“I’m not leaving without Cory,” said Maria in her best and most demanding voice, little as that voice was.
The man’s cold and black visor peered down at her as if studying her.
“She’s already dead,” he said roughly.
Cory was clearly not dead, as she was still weeping and calling out for help and crying out in pain.
“No,” said Maria quickly. “I won’t leave without her.”
“So be it,” replied the man in black.
He walked over to Cory and picked her up with the ease of a man picking up a sack of grain.
This man was tall and slender; Maria could tell that, even though he wore a long black duster, but he was obviously stronger than anyone she’d ever met. He had picked up the giant dog and slammed it to the ground, broke it in half like a twig, and she didn’t know of anyone in Shame that could do that.
Cory, on the other hand, cried out in pain and fear as this man picked her up and slung her over his shoulder as if she were nothing.
Maria nearly gagged while looking at Cory’s left arm. It was savaged from the merest nip of that great beast that the man had killed; that creature’s fangs had ripped off a great chunk of skin and muscle along the top of Cory’s arm above the elbow. Cory was bleeding a lot from the arm, and of course, bleeding a little from whatever cut she had beneath her skirt on her leg.
The young teen in the man’s arms could do nothing but cry and moan as he walked with her slung over his right shoulder. He stopped in front of Maria and nodded toward the end of their “town.”
“We have to go,” he repeated gruffly.
“Where?” demanded Maria.
“North,” said the man.
“Where is that?” asked Maria.
“Follow me,” said the man in black.
He walked “North” without another word. He stopped a few feet away as Maria gathered up her knapsack and can-teen; both articles had been tossed about during the attack of that massive dead beast, but they were hers and she wasn’t leaving them. She adjusted for their weight and then followed the man in black as fast as her little legs could go.
They walked out of Shame, and the man leading her did not even turn to look to see if she was keeping up. She had a strange sense of being about him; it was as if she had met him before, knew him from somewhere else, but this feeling of familiarity only confused her. Even stranger, however, was that she knew deep down he knew exactly where she was at all times. She had the sense that it was no accident he had shown up at exactly the moment she was about to die.
Cory looked down at her with a pale face and crying eyes. She was slung over the man in black’s shoulder, his right arm around her waist, and she bobbed up and down a little as he walked. She moaned a little as they continued to walk forward, and Maria felt really bad for her. She raised her little voice to make sure the man in black could hear her.
“Hey!” she called. “Hey!”
“What is it?” asked the stranger in black soldier gear.
“Is Cory going to…to die?” she asked.
The man in black answered her without tact or remorse, and he didn’t even look behind himself to speak to her directly. He did not even slow down his relentless march forward.
“Yes,” he replied.
Cory cried out in despair at his cold statement, but she didn’t struggle or complain as they continued to walk “North” into the wasteland. Maria was sure “North” was the direction the others had gone, so at least they were following the only people she had ever known.
Still, there was something familiar about this strange man, a deep feeling she had seen or met him somewhere before, but she could not remember where, and certainly not when. Even so, her thoughts were on Cory and whether the young teen was really going to die or not, so she pressed her luck and asked the most obvious question she could ask.
“Why?” she asked. “Why is she going to die?”
“Because everything dies,” answered the man.
That really wasn’t an answer. Maria did not know if this man knew what was going to happen or not, so she pressed further upon the subject. If he did know, then maybe he would tell her, but if he didn’t, then it didn’t matter whether she asked or not.
“Is it because of that big dead dog?” she asked.
“It isn’t dead,” said the man firmly.
Maria didn’t like the idea of that. The creature that had attacked them was scary enough, but if it could get killed like that and come back to life…
“What is it then?” she asked. “It looked dead. I thought you killed it.”
“It’s down,” said the man in his gruff voice. “I don’t have the weapons to kill it.”
This was also surprising, but she did not question the stranger about that. There was something about him that told her he did not lie, so if he said it wasn’t dead, it wasn’t dead. He did not seem like the type to lie…She had a strange feeling that he did not need to. Still, he hadn’t answered her question about Cory.
“What about Cory?” she asked.
“What about her?” asked the man in his harsh voice.
“Why is she going to die?” asked Maria.
“She’s been bitten,” said the man.
“I know,” replied Maria. “Can’t we help her?”
“No,” replied the man in black.
Cory wept and moaned in piteous fashion as they continued onward into the night. They walked for a good while until Cory finally stopped crying…but she stopped moving, too. Maria didn’t want to ask, but she needed to know the truth, so she asked anyway.
“Is Cory…dead?” she asked. “Is she…dead dead?”
“No,” said the man.
“What’s wrong with her?” asked Maria.
“She’s been bitten,” said the man in his rough voice.
His short replies weren’t particularly frustrating for her. Maria was too young to take an adult stance of offense at them, so she continued to ask again as only a young child would.
“So will she die?” she asked.
“Yes,” said the man.
“Why?” asked Maria. “Is it because she’s bleeding?”
“No,” said the man.
Maria felt like she was getting nowhere with him, so she remained quiet for a bit. It occurred to her, though, that she did not know anything about this man or even what his name was, so she broke her silence by asking that most rudimentary of questions, the question of his name.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“I have no name,” said the man gruffly. “In the past, people confused me with something that wasn’t real. They called me “Jack,” because I did not have a name.”
“Jack,” repeated Maria. “That must be your name then. Are you taking me to my friends, Jack?”
“No,” said the man named Jack.
Maria did not like that answer. She was getting tired of walking, and it was dangerous to be out at night anyway. She was hungry and thirsty, but she didn’t want to part from this “Jack” just yet. He had saved her from the big dog, and if that dog wasn’t really dead…
“Are you going to protect us, Jack?” she asked.
“I will protect you,” replied Jack.
“Why?” asked Maria.
“Because I must,” said Jack roughly.
She knew she was not going to get much more from him, but that mattered little, as their conversation was interrupted by a very familiar and terrifying howl from the darkness of where they had just been minutes before. That howl echoed over the scrubland they had trudged across, and Maria was immediately gripped with fear from it.
“It’s back,” she whispered, more to herself than to the man carrying Cory.
This “Jack” stopped and set Cory down upon the scrub dirt below. Maria could make out his motions in the moonlight, and he looked around as if to study the area.
“We need fire,” he said gruffly.
“Why?” asked Maria fearfully.
“To kill it,” replied Jack. “Stay here with the girl. Watch her closely.”
“Why?” asked Maria.
“It wants her,” he said in his rough voice. “She didn’t die. That means she’ll change…soon.”
“Change how?” asked Maria.
He ignored her and walked off.
“Change how, Jack!” she called.
But he said nothing more, and Maria decided not to argue with him as he trudged off into the distance. He’d said he needed fire to kill it, and though she did not know exactly how he was going to get fire or what exactly that it was he was looking for, she did not want to get in his way.
She sat down beside Cory and felt a morbid sense of curiosity overwhelm her. She wanted to look, but she also didn’t. It was going to be gross and scare her, but in the end her curiosity got the better of her…
She looked down at the older girl’s bloody arm and immediately winced at the sight of it. Still, it had stopped bleeding, and it actually looked better for some reason. It shouldn’t have looked better, because that was weird, so she puzzled over this as Cory stirred and moaned in pain.
The older girl looked up at Maria as her eyes snapped open. She struggled to sit up, and Maria tried her best to help her, but the young teen was heavy.
“Water,” rasped the older girl.
Maria handed her the can-teen, and Cory fumbled with the metal cap before greedily gulping down half of it. Maria gingerly took the can-teen from her and screwed the metal cap back on. Cory whimpered as she held her stomach and grimaced.
“It hurts!” she moaned. “Oh, it hurts! It’s burning!”
Maria did not know what to do. She did not want Cory to die, but she had no idea what she could do for her, or if there was even anything she could do.
“What do I do?” she asked. “I don’t know what to do, Cory!”
There was a loud cracking sound in Cory’s back, and the girl cried out in pain. Maria stood up and backed away as the older girl grit her teeth and squeezed her eyes shut.
“Oh God!” wailed the young teen. “Oh…It hurts!”
The loud and low metallic howl sounded out again, and Maria looked around in a panic. Jack was nowhere to be seen, and something was wrong with Cory, and Maria didn’t know what to do. Out here, out in the open, there was nowhere to hide, and they were both going to get eaten like this.
“It’s coming back!” cried Maria. “We have to get out of here!”
There was a loud cracking noise as Cory bent over to get on her hands and knees. Her back arched as she cried out again, and that cracking noise came back and louder this time. Maria’s eyes widened in the pale light of the moon as Cory’s gritted teeth sharpened into fine points. There was a loud cracking noise as her arms lengthened like they were being stretched by an invisible rope.
“I…I can’t…” gasped Cory. “Can’t…I can’t…It…It’s too late…You…have to…to get out of here!”
“I can’t leave you behind!” said Maria in a panic. “Jack said to stay here…”
Cory cried out in pain, sat back, and practically tore off her weather-beaten sandals.
“Get out of here!” she said urgently. “This…J…Jack…can’t…help…”
That loud cracking noise occurred again, and Cory screamed this time. Maria flinched at the loud and unforgiving noise, and it was followed by the long and low metallic howl in the distance. The young teen tore at her faded green print dress and pulled it off a moment later. She was naked now, and Maria watched in horror as the young teen’s dirty white skin writhed as if something were beneath it.
“Oh, God!” screamed Cory. “Oh…Oh, my God…Oh, my God…OH, MY GOD!”
She got onto her hands and knees again as her back arched, and Maria watched in cold fear as the older girl’s legs cracked and bent backwards at the knees. Her hands and fingers and feet and toes puffed up like swollen larvae fat on a rotting carcass, and her back bent inward as she thrust her big bottom outward; her spine pushed upward in visible measure, and her tail bone pushed outward with her pale skin still wrapped around it.
She looked at Maria with wide yellowed eyes, and she spoke as her voice deepened to almost that of a boy’s.
“I…I…I know…” she choked out. “I know now…M…Monsters know…M…Monsters know about….a…about Jack…”
She spoke one last time even as her mouth widened and pushed outward with its sharp and growing points of ivory white.
“Jack is…is…is…tr…tr…true…evil…” said the older girl, and her deepened feminine voice lowered into an unintelligible growl of spittle and pain.
Maria stepped back as Cory’s skin pushed out rows of thick, sandy-blonde fur, the same color as her hair. Her face extended outward as if being molded like clay, and she puffed up in body and form as if filled with air or water, but this was neither air nor water, and Maria knew that. This was new muscle accompanied by an even bigger hunger-filled rage, and one look at the new Cory sent Maria into the flight portion of the fight or flight response.
Maria still had her can-teen and her knapsack; it took less than a second for her to scoop up the knapsack and run. She did not know where she was going in that open space of scrubland limned in pale moonlight, but that was not exactly a priority at the moment.
That howl rang in the distance opposite of the direction she had decided to go, but it was soon answered by another higher pitched but identical howl, and Maria did not look behind her as she ran. She was grabbed from behind a moment later and lifted into the air in the same fashion as she would lift her own teddy. She was up in Jack’s right arm a moment later, and he ran with her like she would run with her teddy, but toward where, she did not know.
He stepped over a line of broken twigs and scrub and dropped her unceremoniously to the dirt. He looked down at her and stared at her for a singular hard moment, and she knew right then that she’d better do whatever command he was going to give her.
“Put your head down and close your eyes,” he ordered. “Do not look. Don’t open your eyes until you hear me put my mask back on.”
He reached up with both hands to his mask, and there was a loud click and a hiss of captured air as he began to take off the facial gear. Something inside Maria screamed to avoid looking at him at all costs, and so she did as he commanded. She dropped her head down, closed her eyes, and put her hands over the back of her head.
There was a sound like fire roaring, the feel of heat on her dress, and then the sound of crackling, burning wood. There came a click and a strange hiss noise, and then Maria was dragged to her feet. She looked up and saw Jack looking down at her from behind that strange mask of his.
“Stay in the circle,” he ordered.
Maria looked around at the burning circle of twigs and scrub grass that surrounded them ten feet from every direction she turned. The flames roared high, much higher than such a pittance of wood and dry heath would allow, and that heat was terrible. Jack’s command to stay in the circle was largely irrelevant; she could not have passed through the flames without being charred to ash anyway.
Jack walked forward and through the flames as if they did not exist. Maria huddled down in the dirt and flinched at the raging heat that came in from every direction. She was terrified at all of this, but she was not stupid or suicidal. She waited for something, anything at all to happen, and she was not disappointed.
Jack and the beast came tumbling through the flames to roll in the dirt before her. Maria backed away about a foot or so, but the heat of the flames surrounding them would not allow her to retreat any further.
The beast was far more ferocious this time around. It bore down upon Jack as its huge jaws attempted to bite down on the man’s masked head. Jack’s armored black gloves pushed up on the creature’s maw as it futilely attempted to shake itself free. He pushed up on one leg as his whole body strained with the effort of lifting the creature off of him. There was another loud “CRACK!” sound, and the beast backed away a second later. Its lower jaw hung down at an odd angle, as if it were disjointed and off its skull, and it slavered forth blood and saliva from its huge maw to splatter that foul liquid upon the dirt below.
Jack struck it with his right fist and turned its massive head to its own right; he followed up with a left that turned its head to its own left, and each blow backed it further away from Maria and toward the roaring wall of flame behind them.
Jack rushed forward and gripped it around the chest as he forced it back into the sadistically hot flames. It did not even howl as it went up, like old tallow dipped in oil, and it burned with a strange green and blue flame as it immolated in a writhing pyre of anguish. He held it there as it writhed and burned, and though he was plunged in the flame along with the monster in his iron grasp, he did not burn like the beast.
It stopped moving after a few tense moments, and then it just burned. It burned and burned, and Maria knew it was finally dead.
Jack stepped back from the flames, and though his black armored clothes smoked and wisped with embers, they looked undamaged, as did he. The flames of the circle died down to a low burn, and the great beast that had pursued them burnt down to a grotesque husk that stank like charred meat.
Jack turned and looked down at her for a moment, but Maria did not know what to think of him. There was something fundamentally wrong with Jack, she knew that, but she had no other choice but to trust that he would protect her. She had no other option.
“We have to go,” he said in his rough voice.
There came another long but higher-pitched howl in the distance, and Maria looked past the smoldering embers of the circle to see a second beast waiting in the pale light of the moon. Its fur was light in color, and it was only half the size of the creature that Jack had just killed, but Maria had no doubts as to who that new beast was and who that new beast had just been. The creature looked at her for a long moment, stared directly at her from that long distance, and then it turned and ran off into the night.
There was a lot on her young mind at that moment, and the only person with any possible answers was standing behind her.
“I don’t understand, Jack,” said Maria quietly. “Where did these monsters come from? Where did the bad men that took Paige come from? Old Nan said they weren’t around from before…before the world burnt up.”
“They were always here,” replied Jack. “This world?…It is an old idea. This is not new…Man has always waited for the end, secretly wished for it, and now that they have it, they don’t want it. The Apocalypse is an old idea…and old ideas are dangerous…but that doesn’t matter right now…You are all that matters…Come. We have to go.”
Maria followed him as he walked off into the open scrubland once more. She was scared, she felt sick, and the things she had just witnessed made her want to huddle up into a ball and hide. Old Nan and the others had always talked about the bad things in the dark, but she had suspected they had never seen one of these things, and now she knew why.
“We lived in Shame for a long time, Jack,” said Maria quietly. “Why didn’t these bad things kill us all then? That big dog could have killed us all. It didn’t even stay dead the first time you killed it.”
“There are rules,” said Jack in his rough voice.
Maria could not imagine what rules that massive and now very crispy dog had followed, but she had to trust that Jack was right. If there were rules, then she wanted to know what they were.
“What rules, Jack?” she asked.
“Too many,” said Jack gruffly.
His voice was like gravel on sand; it was as if he had dirt in his throat. Maria felt strange inside to think upon this man in black who was leading her out into the night; if Old Nan were alive, the old woman would have scolded her for being so stupid. Still, there were a lot of unanswered questions about…well…everything…and Jack was the only one who could answer them. He seemed to know the answers anyway.
“Why did you save me, Jack?” she asked cautiously.
“Because I must,” he said roughly.
“Why?” she asked in return.
“Because there are rules,” he said.
She decided not to pursue that line of thought and instead switched to something else.
“Was that other big dog…Was that Cory?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said.
“Why didn’t she attack us, then?” asked Maria.
“I don’t know,” said Jack.
This was the first time he had sounded unsure. Maria guessed that meant he really didn’t know everything about the monsters, but she kept asking anyway. He obviously knew some things.
“She changed into that monster,” she said. “Was it because she got bit?”
“Yes,” said Jack.
“Then why aren’t those big dogs everywhere?” asked Maria. “If one little bite can do that, then they should be all over the place.”
“Because they eat whomever they attack,” said Jack. “She wouldn’t have changed if I hadn’t shown up. She’d be in pieces in its stomach.”
“Oh,” said Maria. “It just…It just happened so fast. She got bit, and then it wasn’t very long, and then she…she became that thing.”
“I know,” said Jack.
“What’s going to happen to her now?” asked Maria.
“She’s cursed,” said Jack. “There’s nothing you can do to help her.”
“Oh,” said Maria unhappily. “Does that mean she’s going to die?”
“She’s already dead,” said Jack. “There’s nothing you can do to help her.”
“You said that already,” said Maria.
“I know,” said Jack.
There was obviously nothing more he was going to say on that matter, so she left it at that. She followed him out into the night, this mysterious soldier in black, and she didn’t know why, but she knew she had to follow him, and that there really was no other choice in the matter. She was going with Jack to wherever “North” was, and then maybe she would find out who he was, and why he had to protect her.
The Shame Copyright © 2025 bloodytwine.com Matthew L. Marlott
The Shame Copyright © 2019 Jack Be Nimble Matthew L. Marlott
Author’s Note: The picture for this story and Maria’s picture with Jack were generated via artificial intelligence courtesy of Canva.com. Jack’s Original Form was generated via artificial intelligence courtesy of SendFame.com.