Elizabeth T. Grey
A young writer, and always trying to improve. Feedback accepted and encouraged. ❤️
Elizabeth T. Grey
A young writer, and always trying to improve. Feedback accepted and encouraged. ❤️
A young writer, and always trying to improve. Feedback accepted and encouraged. ❤️
A young writer, and always trying to improve. Feedback accepted and encouraged. ❤️
The key they'd given me still fit the lock, but the house was no longer there. My front door was lying flat on the ground, half submerged in mud. The mud was up to my calf as I walked back to my car on the cleared street. But I couldn't leave, could I? This was my new normal. Homelessness. Starvation. Freezing.
I had to lift my legs with my hands, or the boots would come off. The stench was unforgiving. Dead things, everywhere. Wildlife. Pets. People. They were in the trees, the bushes, the roads, the river banks, the houses, the rubble, the mud.
It was inescapable.
My house was flattened. Everything was gone. There was a new river where the shed had been. Sediment and river rock where the garden was. The ground sparkled from minerals. In other circumstances, I would have called it pretty; the ground had diamonds in it. Nothing looked the same.
I had worked so hard to get everything I had. And now it was gone. Leveled in less than a day. I waited for the tears to come, the anger. But it didn't. I was in shock.
The tears wouldn't come until days later when I realized this was real. That it wasn't going away. That my new normal was this apocalyptic world I now lived in.
The anger came when the help didn't. And now I'm ready to go to war for my people. You claim to love serve and protect then send the protectors to destroy our resources. For what? Money. More of your useless metals to build your empire at the sake of your own country. The love of money; the root of all evil. Greed. Destruction. You've brought it upon yourself and now everyone who would've stood behind you has abandoned your agenda. Isn't that a familiar feeling? Lost. Abandoned. Helpless. You lay in the grave you dig, and yours is deep.
But we are not helpless. And we refuse to be your stepping stones.
(A/N slight variation but I needed to write something :)
Sitting at my desk, I stare at the picture of the girl. She was dead. At least, she should have been. But here, in the photo in my hand, she was smiling, alive, happy. And unaware of me, standing away from her, taking pictures of the trails and trees.
They had told me she was dead and had shown what I thought had been proof. They were lying, it seems. I slammed the photo onto my desk, standing so suddenly my chair hit the wall across the room.
Pacing, I picked up my phone and called them.
"Hello?" The voice on the other side said.
"You said you had taken care of it," I snapped.
"What are you talking about?"
"The girl. You told me the girl was dead, that you killed her. It seems you lied."
Silence met the accusation.
"Tell me the truth, Grim," I said. "All of it, no lies this time."
When I was little, my biggest fear was my mother wouldn't come home from work. Even as a child, around four or five, I understood that war was everywhere. If not a physical battle, the tension charged the air wherever you went. Even in our own home, dinner was eaten in stiff silence at the table. My father and mother disagreed on politics, Mother siding with the king and Father with the rebellion.
My brother was twelve, and I six, when our home became a battlefield. The soldiers gunned our door down, then my mother. Blood had streamed from a slice on her forehead, her chest just barely moving. Alex pulled me away and shoved me out a window. I broke my wrist, but he'd slapped his hand over my mouth so we wouldn't get caught.
I heard my father scream, then gunshots. Then, blessedly, silence. We thought the soldiers had left. I'd clawed at my brother's hand still on my face, tearing his skin with my nails, blood mixing with my tears. He hissed, jerking me.
"Stop it," he'd whispered, voice hoarse. It was dark, but I could tell he'd been crying too. "We have to leave. We have to find Mary." No one in our town would help us. Raids were common, and people talked. They wouldn't risk bringing the soldiers on themselves. At least, that's what Alex told me. Our aunt, Mary, lived several towns over. It would take days to reach her.
"Stay here and crouch down so no one will see you. I'm going inside to get some things," he'd said. We never should have split, even for a few seconds. I never should have let him go. That was my first mistake.
He had to go through the back door to get into the house. That was the second mistake. The third was believing silence meant absence.
My brother was killed that night. I heard him scream, heard the shots. I had run, and they shot at me, too.
So there should be no reason for him to be standing in front of me now, almost 14 years later, dressed in a uniform meant for the murderers who killed my family. There should be no reason for him to be pointing a gun at my head, finger ready to pull the trigger.
"Wait," I gasped out. The other soldiers had grabbed me by the arms, pushing me to my knees after tying my wrists behind my back. My face was bruised, my lip split, and my head throbbing. "Wait!" I said again, but louder. My brother didn't wait as he moved the gun to Wren, pulling the trigger. I watched as her head snapped back, the back of her head hitting the floor, blood immediately pooling under her, staring vacant.
I stopped breathing. Wren. My best friend since the beginning. She was dead. I would never talk to her again, or hear her laugh. She would never make fun of me or see how the war ended. She'd never-
The gun was back in my face. I wasn't sure what was happening. Everything moving in slow motion, I met his eyes.
"Aaron," I whispered, begging. He frowned, eyes hardening.
"What did you just say?"
I tried to swallow but it felt like someone was squeezing my throat.
"How do you know that name?" He asked. I couldn't speak, couldn't move. But I could still see Wren's blood, feel it seeping through my clothes and touching my skin. It was warmer than I thought it would be.
I cried out as Aaron gripped my hair, tilting my head back to fit the barrel of the gun under my chin. "Answer me."
"I'm your-" I gasped as he pulled harder. "I'm your sister." My confession was met with silence. "Aaron, plea-"
"Shut up!" He released me, throwing my head forward and shoving me over. "I don't have a sister." My stomach dropped to beneath the floor.
"Aaron, it's me! I'm Kalea, it's me!"
"Even if you were telling the truth, my sister would never associate with rebels. She'd never betray the crown with such filthy affiliations."
"Aaron-"
"Stop calling me Aaron. That man is dead. And so are you."
He moved to point the gun at me again, and I let my head drop. My own brother, dressed in the same clothes as the ones who murdered our family, was going to kill me, too.
When he'd imagined her coming down the aisle, he'd never pictured her in a casket. The sun shone down on the coffin, setting off a gleam to the sleek black that could only be accomplished with the backdrop of death. Simon stood with his hands clasped behind his back, a blank expression masking his face. To his right, Bethany dabbed at fake tears with a tissue. James had his arm around her, a solemn look on his features.
Everywhere else, most people showed the same thing; expressionless, bored, and sweaty from the heat. Besides Simon and the dead girl's family, they only pretended to care. She was their classmate, after all.
They lowered the casket, people slowly walking back to their cars. Simon stood frozen, staring as the dirt began hitting the thick wood. It sounded like a death march. You're next: it whispered. He jumped, someone touching his shoulder. Mrs. Carteel, the girl's mother, stood tear-stained and worn in front of him. She offered him a tired smile.
"Thank you for being here, Simon," she said. "I know she was your best friend." He lowered his head, allowing the grief to shadow his face. Tears began to form, but he blinked them away. He wouldn't cry. Not here. Not where everyone could see. Mrs. Carteel looked to where the casket was almost fully covered by soil. "She loved you. You were like a brother to her."
He choked back a sob. A brother would have been there. Stopped her from going. Helped her. Instead, he'd ignored it, ignored everything. He had failed her. So blissfully ignorant. So stupid.
"We love you, too you know. You're family." She dropped her hand, patting him on the back. "If you ever need anything, let us know."
He felt awful. He was supposed to say those things; not her. She lost her daughter; he just lost a friend.
"You too Mrs. Carteel. Anything I can do, call me ." Call him. Just like Addie had tried too. Had called him, but he was too drunk to pick up. Called him for help, and received nothing. No answer. Alone.
She gave him that soft, sad smile again and nodded, turning to her husband. His head in his hands, shoulders shaking. Broken. She hugged him tightly, silently crying with him. Addie had looked so much like her.
Simon felt the tears pool again, a sharp pain stabbing through his chest. Turning, he practically sprinted to the near-empty parking lot. As he passed the headstones, he thought about how Addie would have one just like it. She would be nothing but a name and a date to be remembered. The press would have a field day with this.
"Seemingly perfect seventeen-year-old dies under suspicious circumstances." Going to school would be torture on Monday. It was no secret Addie and Simon were friends; the camera crews and the attention were more than he could bear right now. Inside or outside of school. They wouldn't be permitted to go onto school property, but the gossip and attention from his peers would be more than enough to set him on edge.
He reached his car (if you could call it that) and sped down the road to the beach, finally letting the tears fall when he parked at Cooper's Peak. It was one of the few places he came to hide. It was rare anyone was ever up there, and the only other person he shared it with was Addie.
Gosh, Addie. Why?
There was no note, no clues, no reason why she did it. Police thought it was murder. They brought Simon into questioning several times, implying that he did it. They never really looked any farther than that. In their neighborhood, mysterious deaths weren't uncommon, but it wasn't usually to someone so young.
Sighing after several more minutes of pathetic sobbing, he backed out of the parking lot, heading home. His mother wouldn't be there, as usual. Work became the object of her full attention when his dad left three years ago. Her job came before everything; Even her son. Addie would always be there to make him laugh when he had days like this. It made everything all the more depressing to know that she would never make him smile again and that he would never see hers.
He slammed the brakes down as he went to pull into the driveway. A woman was standing there. He blinked, then shook his head. No. That's impossible. She disappeared years ago. The police said she was as good as dead. He leaned over the steering wheel, his hands gripping it until his knuckles turned white. She was older, much older than when he last saw her. That is if she were the same person. But she couldn't be. She was dead.
She started to approach his window. The closer she got, the more she resembled the little girl he used to know. When she stopped beside him, he realized "woman" was an overstatement; She was no older than eighteen, tops.
Still old enough to be her, he thought.
The girl grinned, a mischievous, conniving grin as she stood there. "Long time no see," she said. He gulped as his stomach dropped. That smile. The look on her face that screamed trouble. It was the same smile that had flashed through his brain over a billion times.
It was her.
As the hazy light filtered through the trees, I examined the body in the water. She was covered in blood, nearly unrecognizable. I took the moment of peacefulness and stayed there. A cool calm fell over me, my breath suddenly becoming steady, my mind clear. And then, I pulled.
The girl gasped and sat up. For a moment, she stayed in the shallow water, staring up at me with ice-blue eyes. Silence reigned between us before she spoke.
"You're late," she said. I took a breath. I should have let her stay dead.
"A thank you would be nice," I replied. She stood, her clothing soaked and dripping back into the lake.
"We don't have time for thanks, we need to leave," she snapped at me, running her fingers through her tangled hair. I gestured behind me, the stolen SUV idling. I tossed her the keys.
"There's a change of clothes and some towels in the trunk."
She trudged up to the car, the mud sucking at her feet as it fought as though to keep her. I turned my back to her as she stripped her shirt off. I admire the dark, glassy surface of the water. So peaceful, yet so foreboding. It reminded me of her. Beautiful, serene to look at, but underneath the water it was cold as ice, filled with brutal unknown creatures.
My stare is interrupted by a splash. She had thrown the shirt into the deepest parts of the lake. After a few minutes she shouted from the passenger seat.
“Let’s go we don’t have all day!”
“We should really work on your people skills,” I say, going anyway, because she’s right. It’s only a matter of time before they find us. And that would be a death sentence for us both.
Love is sick. I Poison. Kill. Destroy. Yet here you are, standing before me, asking for it. Wanting death from a kiss, to have and hold the one thing that cannot be obtained. Your fingers, skidding over my body, dangerously near destruction.
Should we? Both dying together? It's poetic, no? Breaking open each other's rib cage, holding our most vital organs. Seems as something lovers would do. This is what loving feels like: Vanishing. Sinking. Happily drowning within another's soul.
There's joining of us. Lips. Tongue. Teeth. Hands everywhere. Bliss. Euphoria. Thus, dissolution. Torn apart by cursed fate. Separation. Darkness.
Amidst waters vast, engulfing space, Slowly descending, a delicate pace. Blindly seeking, my hand finds yours, Reassurance sought in dark contours.
In the sinking abyss, a glimmer appears, Light surrounds us, calming fears. Chest burns, yet joyous voices rise, Found you, found you, my heart replies.
Cold hands entwine in the darkened sea, Rising swiftly, our spirits set free. A trade of lives, decay awaits, Voices may falter, but spirit elevates.
In the quick ascent, a new life blooms, Echoes of a song, as the old consumes. Rising swiftly, towards the unknown, A journey of spirits, together we’ve flown.
Once upon time, there was me. Me, knowing exactly who I was, comfortable in my own skin. Perfectly fine with who I was and who I had become.
Now?
I don't who I am anymore. Now, I don't think I've ever been that person. That good girl. The girl who loved herself, and loved other people. Now, I don't think I ever wanted to be that person, but I never did anything to challenge it.
Always being obedient, following the rules, even when they go against what I believe. The poster child for a good girl. Pretty. Smart. Stayed out of trouble.
It gets old after a while. Exhausting. All the pressure to be someone you never were to begin with.
Maybe, just maybe, I don't want to be perfect. Maybe, I want to make my own decisions, not have everyone telling me what choices I should make.
Of course, I didn't tell my mother any of that. I couldn't. She would flip if she knew what I'd gotten myself into. She still saw who I was. Now, I'm the girl who sleeps around, who parties on weekends, who destroyed our teacher's classroom because he gave us extra work. I hurt people on purpose because it makes me feel better about myself.
What my mother saw, was not me. So I lied. I told her what she expected of me.
"I was studying with some friends."
She smiled at me, kissed my forehead. I have never felt so guilty yet so relieved when she spoke. "You're such a good girl, Andrea.” My stomach turned. "I never have to worry about you like other parents do with their kids."
I breathed a bit easier, but the thought still remained. My mother trusted me, and I was lying to her about everything.
I woke up screaming. Blankets and clothes stuck to my skin, drenched with sweat. I ripped the covers off, knees bashing the concrete floor. Air. I needed air. I couldn't breathe. I was dying. Where was I?
Doors slammed shut in the distance, footsteps pounding. I didn't care. I couldn't breathe. My stomach twisted in on itself, and I hurled. Hands tried to lift me off the floor, but I fought, lashing out, scratching, biting, kicking. I did anything I could to get them off me.
Sharp, distinct pain pierced the back of my neck. I blacked out.
……..
When I woke, I wasn't screaming. It was still dark, and I was in a bed. I went to get up, to see where I was, but I couldn't move, strapped down to the frame.
I started to hyperventilate. My memories were shattered, only shards standing out to me, broken into pieces. I couldn't remember, mind blank. I couldn't remember what they did to me after they stabbed me with the needle.
Awake. I was awake briefly afterwards. They did something. Something to my body that I didn't want. My head was pounding, fighting against the strain of whatever they gave me.
The door to the room opened, allowing a sliver of light to seep in. I held my breath. A man stepped inside, and the light disappeared.
My breathing became shallow, panic beginning to set in again, gripping my lungs. I could hear him walking towards me, coming closer. His hand covered my mouth.
"Don't move, speak, or make any noise. I'm going to get you out of here," he said. His hand left my face and pulled out a pocket knife.
I laid there in shock as he sliced the straps.
"Who are you?" I asked, a whisper. My chest hurt. He'd said no talking. I was still partially strapped down. He'd have the advantage if he wanted to hurt me.
"Someone you used to know," he said. What in the hell did that mean?
"Where am I? Why are you helping me?"
"Shh," he said, equally as quiet. "No more questions now. We need to be fast."
He'd finished up with the straps, and helped me stand up. My legs were numb, weak and wobbly beneath me. I started to fall back.
The stranger caught me by the arms, holding me up.
"Just hang on to me, we're getting you out of here."
I gripped his arm tightly, walking to the door. He opened it, looking both ways before stepping out and dragging me with him.
My heart was pounding. I didn't know this man, or where he was taking me. There was no reason I should trust him. But something in my brain was nagging at me. He was right. Somehow, I recognized him.
White walls surrounded us, leading down a long hallway illuminated by fluorescent lighting, hurting my eyes. As we walked quickly, I noticed through blurry vision the doors we passed. Each showed a different symbol, and I wondered fleetingly what had been on mine.
My mind was fuzzy, memories blurred together and didn't make any sense. Time was only a suggestion, and my brain refused to follow it.
The hallway split into three ways. The man paused, glancing at his palm. There was writing there, in a language I couldn't recognize.
"Left", he said.
The more we walked, the more our surroundings changed. The smooth white walls turned to stone, the light becoming scarce. It reminded me vaguely of a castle.
Abruptly, he jerked my arm back, stopping. He tilted his head, listening for something. I held my breath, trying to hear what he did. Suddenly I was shoved into the wall, the uneven stone digging into my back and shoulders.
I strained my ears, but was still unable to hear whatever had scared him. My breath came hard, heart fluttering. Every inch of him pressed into me, each breath pressing us closer. I was so confused. Why was my body acting this way? I didn't know him.
Footsteps. That's what he'd heard. They were right on us, eight feet away.
"Soldier!"
The man turned his head towards them, dropping his hand from my arm to his hip. I looked down.
There, a belt rested lightly, three daggers ranging in different sizes only on that one side.
He glanced down at me. "Breathe, love," he whispered.
"Where are you posted?" A deep, rough voice asked from the group coming towards us.
As the hazy light filtered through the trees, I examined the body in the water. She was covered in blood, nearly unrecognizable. I took the moment of peacefulness and stayed there. A cool calm fell over me, my breath suddenly becoming steady, my mind clear. And then, I pulled.
The girl gasped and sat up. For a moment, she stayed in the shallow water, staring up at me with ice blue eyes. Silence reigned between us before she spoke.
"You're late," she said. I took a breath. I should have let her stay dead.
"A thank you would be nice," I replied. She stood, her clothing soaked and dripping back into the lake.
"We don't have time for thanks, we need to leave," she snapped at me, running her fingers through her tangled hair. I gestured behind me, the stolen SUV idling. I tossed her the keys.
"There's a change of clothes and some towels in the trunk."