Apocalypsis: Book 3 (Exodus) (23 page)

“How old is he?” I asked, once I had him situated, finding it impossible not to grin at his goofy face.  He looked up at me with chocolate-brown eyes that reminded me of Paci.  I thrust the image of him immediately out of my mind.

Concentrate.  Get Bodo’s location and get the hell out of Cannerville.  Nothing else matters.
  I said the words to myself, but this baby looked up at me and it was so innocent, so beautiful … I just knew I wasn’t going to be able to walk away, let alone kill it.

“I don’t know how old it is.”

“Well, that’s just ridiculous,” I said softly, smiling at the baby still, using softer tones so as not to frighten it.  “You have to have a general idea.”

Winky spoke up.  “There was a girl here.  A Native American girl named Celia.  Did you know her?”

Brittney shook her head.  “I knew no one.  I stayed here.”

“You never looked out the window?  Never looked down by the pool or the pool house?” pressed Winky, now standing in front of Brittney, hands on her hips.

“Maybe.  Sometimes.”

“Did you see Celia?  She had an arm taken off.  Did you see
that?”

Winky was getting mad.  I shot her warning looks that she ignored.

“She’s our friend you know.  And all those kids that were in that house?  They’re at
our
house now.  Being taken care of … fed.  You could have done that, you know.  You have all that food in there.”

Brittney shook her head slowly, staring off into space again.  “No.  I couldn’t do anything.  But I saw the girl.  She climbed a tree.  She was stronger than the others.”

“How old was your baby when she climbed the tree?” I asked.

Brittney shrugged.  “A month?  Two?  Three?  A hundred?  Don’t ask me.  Ask the demon’s father.  He’s the time keeper.  He’s the keeper of the children.  He’s the keeper of me.”

I couldn’t stop the shiver that spasmed through my body.  I felt like it was her I should be killing.  She was suffering, that was certain.

“Where’s Bodo?” asked Winky.  “I’ll kill your damn baby for you.  Just tell us.”

Brittney perked up immediately, her expression ecstatic. 
“Really?! 
You’ll do it?”  She stood up and grabbed Winky by the upper arms, jumping up and down a few times before pulling her into a crazed hug.  “I
knew
you would.  I
knew
you were a good person as soon as I saw you.  The indian kids were always nice to me when I saw them in town.”

“Native Americans,” corrected Winky, looking at her with wary caution in her eyes.

“Winky, you’re not …” I started.

Winky gave me a stern look and coughed the words:
shut up
at me.  Then she turned her attention to Brittney who’d raced into the adjoining room and was talking from within.

“Come in here and pick your weapon!  We have
so
many to choose from.  I think the axe would be best, don’t you?”  She stuck her head out.  “Come on, silly!  I told you, your friend doesn’t have much time.  There’s going to be a ceremony, you know!  As soon as the moon is highest.”  She grinned and then disappeared again.

Winky mouthed,
A ceremony?
at me, before turning to join Brittney.  She made it to the entrance, before I heard her say,
“Whoa,
wow, hold on a second there, looney bird.”  Winky was backing up out of the room, Brittney in front of her holding up a shiny and very lethal-looking axe.

Brittney was smiling like she was posing for a pageant photograph.  “How about this one?  It’s reeeaally sharp.  You can cut off its head with one
chop!”
  She moved the axe in a slight downward motion, giggling before lifting it back up and gazing at its sharp edge above her head.

Winky and I exchanged a look. 
The girl is certifiable. 
We had to get this baby out of here and let her think we’d killed it.  It was the only way to get out and find Bodo.

“Here, let me take that bad boy from you,” said Winky, reaching up to take the axe.

Brittney pulled it against her chest, getting suddenly angry and suspicious.  “Wait a minute.  Not so fast.  How do I know you’re really going to do it?”

Winky shrugged.  “You can watch if you want.”  She was deliberately acting casual about it; I could tell from her posture and expression.  I was hoping Winky was right that this mother, even though she was obviously very far gone, didn’t have the stomach to watch her offspring be decapitated.  There’d be no way to fake that gruesome task.

“No, no.  That’s okay.  I don’t need you to do it here.  You can do it outside.  Let’s keep this room and my parents’ room niiiiiice and clean.  When they come back they will have an absolute
fit
if their carpet is dirty.”  She smiled and giggled for a second.  “Man, are they ever uptight about that stuff.”  She rolled her eyes and gave us a look that said,
Parents, right?

Winky nodded, her eyes bugged out and her voice deceptively calm.  “Yeeeah, let’s make sure we keep the parents happy.  I’ll go kill the baby out on the front lawn so we don’t mess up the carpet.”

“It’s not a baby.  It’s a
demon
,” said Brittney looking at Winky closely, squinting her eyes a little.

Winky stared her down, first shaking her head, then nodding it.  “Yeah.  Of course.  It’s a demon, all the way.  Nasty little canner demon.  I’m going to go kill it right now.  You can tell Bryn about Bodo and then we’ll just be on our way.  Okay?”

Brittney smiled.  “Okay!  You go kill the demon.  And as soon as you bring me back its head, I’ll tell you about the ceremony and the Amazons and the garden of Eden and aaaall of that fun stuff!”  She looked back and forth between Winky and me.  “Okay?  Do we have a deal?”

I nodded, not knowing what else to do, lost in the insanity.

Brittney’s voice took on a business-like tone.  “Give her the demon, Bryn.  She’s gonna go chop its head off for us.  Then we’ll do some girl talk.  Gossip and stuff.”  She flounced down on the cot beside me, crossing her legs and folding her hands over her knee.

“Okaaaay,” I said, standing and gently handing the baby over to Winky, giving her crazy bug-eyes, trying to ask her silently how she was going to show this wackadoodle a baby head without
actually
showing her a baby head.

Winky took the axe in her other hand, balancing the baby in her opposite arm.  “Okay, Bryn.”  She nodded her head at the looneybird.  “Brittney.  I’m gonna go chop off this demon’s head now.  You guys go ahead and start talking.  I’ll just be a few minutes.  And then I’ll be back.  With a baby head.”  Winky’s head was shaking in disbelief as she disappeared up the stairs, leaving me alone with the Charles Manson of mothers.

***

Brittney swung her top leg up and down, her gaze roving around the room as we waited.

“So,” I said, breaking the freaky silence, “tell me how you know about Bodo.”

She stopped bouncing her leg and looked at me through narrowed eyes.  “I’m not going to tell you how to find him until the deed is done.”

“No, I know.  I’m not asking where he is.  I’m just wondering how you know about him since you’ve been up here in this room the whole time.”

“I saw things.  I hear things.  People tell me things.”

“What people.”

“Sean.  The minions.”  Her voice took on an edge of pride that was more than a little disturbing.

“The minions?”

“That’s what Loco called them.  The minions.  They were the ones who had to do my bidding, since I was, well, you know…”

“I’m not sure I do,” I said, hoping I was wrong about my suspicions.

Brittney smiled in a ghastly sort of way, her face with a far-expression as she spoke.  “I was the Queen.  I was repopulating the earth.”

“And Loco was the King?”

“That’s what he liked to say.  But I was going to pick another King.  One I liked better.  He just didn’t know it.”

“Why did he let you keep all those weapons?  Wasn’t he worried you’d … pick another king or whatever?”

“He never saw this place.  He thought I lived in the bathroom.”

I frowned.  “He’d be pretty stupid to fall for that.  The toilets don’t work up there and neither does the water.”

She shrugged, smiling to herself.  “I threw some poo out the window now and again.  He fell for it.  He brought me stuff to eat and water to drink.  I always gave it to the dogs.  They stood below my window every day waiting for their meals.”  She giggled, obviously proud of herself for outwitting her suitor.

I had to nod and give her the respect she deserved.  She’d taken a more than crappy situation and found a way to survive. 
Maybe that’s why she’d left her mind too.  Survival.  Could I have stayed present and sane after being raped and wooed by a cannibal named Loco?
  I felt a little sorry for her, then.  I still didn’t think I would have the same urge to kill my baby as she did, but at least I understood where it might be coming from.

“You’re a very strong person, to have gone through all of that.”

“Maybe.  I don’t know.  My brother helped.”

“Where is he?”  I had seen no signs of the kid in the family photo, but the faces downstairs were hard to picture as they had been.  The death mask was too different.

“He’s gone.  He left.”

“Where’d he go?”  I couldn’t believe a sibling would leave like that in the middle of all this.

“He went to the barbecue.”

I instantly felt sick to my stomach again. 
Oh, please don’t let this mean what I think it means.

“You’re not saying … that Loco ate your brother, are you?”

“No.  Not just Loco.  Everyone.”  She turned her head slowly and looked at me, dead in the eye, and said,  “Everyone ate my brother. 
Eh.
 
Vry. 
One.
”  Her mouth thinned into a line.  Then she took a deep breath through her nose, opened her mouth, and screamed with all her might, right in my face. 
“EVERYONE!”

My hand rocketed out automatically, and slapped her hard.  Twice.

Her face slashed first left and then right with the force of it.  She recovered quickly and was crying and screaming at the same time as she leaped at me, her jagged nails poised to rip my eyes out.

I jumped to my feet, dancing out of reach.  I wanted to lay her out on her funeral bed with my bare hands, but her story was the only thing standing between Bodo and me, so I couldn’t kill her, much as she might have liked me to.

She rushed me with zero finesse, rage against the world her only guidance.  It was pretty effective, since I had to focus so much on not hurting her.  I let her hit me with her body, using the backward force to bring us to the wall.  I tensed myself for the impact and used the couple seconds she needed to recover to put her in a bear hug.

I slammed her face with a head butt, earning myself an instant headache in the process.  Blood poured out of her nose and ran down the front of her face to her neck.  The stains spread across the white of her dress, hideously gruesome.  She looked like she’d just stepped out of a low-budget horror movie.

She was snarling and screaming and moaning, trying to get away from me, spitting at me and even trying to bite me.  I bent us both over the side and released her just enough to slam my elbow into the side of her head, dropping her to the floor.

I took a few seconds to wipe her saliva and blood off my face, disgusted that I’d let her get into a position to do that.  I hated having to fight and hold back at the same time.

“I’m going to
kill
you!” she yelled from the floor.  “You’ve ruined my dress.”

I shook my head.  “And here I thought you were going to kill me because I beat your ass.”

“Why don’t you just finish it?” she said, now sounding depressed instead of angry.  “Take one of those guns in there and blow my head off.  I don’t care anymore.”

“You can blow your own head off when I leave.  I want to know where my boyfriend is, first.”  I nudged her with my foot.  “Get up and stop feeling sorry for yourself.”

She whipped her head up, grabbing my ankle.  “Feeling sorry for myself? 
Sorry
for myself?!”  She got up on her hands and knees, using my legs and then wrists to get to her feet and steady herself.  She was facing me again, her head and shoulders stooped, bodily fluids dripping off her face.  “What do you not understand about my life?”

I shrugged.  “I understand everything.  You were raped by a canner.  He made you eat your brother.  You gave birth to his demon child.  You’ve been stuck here in this hole for almost a year.  You have the worst life of anyone I’ve ever met.”

“And?  So?”

“And so what?  Now you want to be a baby murderer?  You want to kill me too?  You want to commit suicide?  So do it.  No one’s gonna blame you.  Give up.  The world sucks, anyway.  What do you care?”

She looked at me aghast.  “I thought you were a nice person, the way you came in here and looked at my baby …”

I pointed at her.  “Ha!  Gotcha.”

She looked at me, confused.  “You got me, what?”

“You just called him your baby.”

“No, I didn’t,” she said, frowning, looking mutinous.

“Yeah, you did.  And if you wanted to die so bad, you have about eighty ways to get that done hanging on the walls in the next room.  Same for the baby-killing part.  Regardless of what’s happened, you still want to live.”

She shuffled backwards until her legs hit the cot.  She dropped down to sit on it, never letting her gaze leave me.  “This is a shit life and I don’t want it.”

“Then leave your hole.  Go out and talk to some other kids.  You’re taking good care of your baby down here, so keep doing that.”

“I can’t.  I can’t, don’t you
see?”
she said, now weeping with actual tears.  “I did horrible, evil things.  I … I ignored all those kids … all those
kids!”

I shook my head, frustrated with the world how it was now, feeling sad for a girl I also hated.  “Whatever you did, you did to survive.  I’m not saying eating kids is an okay way to survive.  But you did it to save yourself from being murdered probably by your … child’s father or whatever.  No one’s going to hold that against you.  Or maybe they will and you just have to move on from it.”