The Shattered Genesis (Eternity) (17 page)

             
I picked up the pen and wrote three words on the clean piece of paper. They were the last three words my parents would see before they were consumed by the flames. In their last moments, I doubt
ed they would care about my final message. But just in case it meant something to them, just in case it would bring them some infinitesimal amount of solace at the end of their lives, I wrote them.

             
James watched me write and then raised his eyes to look a
t me.

             
“That is the best I can do.” I stood to leave the room, avoiding his eyes now. As I passed him, he reached out and grasped my wrist. Then, he turned me towards him and wrapped his arms around me, squeezing me for a moment of comfort I did not realiz
e I needed. My own arms, by their own will, threw themselves around his neck and grasped him desperately for every last moment of life I had left on that world and the one we were escaping to. I turned my face to his, burrowed it in his neck, and allowed m
yself to feel whatever I had to in order to keep moving. The complex storm of emotions raged in a valiant last effort to stay alive but I swiped them all away like God erasing evil from the world in a fabled great flood. I pulled away from James and nodded
.

             
We turned without a word, hearing the car horn blaring as Maura grew impatient waiting for us. Once we were inside the car, she eyed us both suspiciously and I gave her an almost imperceptible shake of my head to assure her that nothing she had so unwil
lingly imagined had occurred between James and I while we were in the house for a minute and a half longer than she and my sisters had been. I wanted to add that if something had occurred in that short space of time, something was physically wrong with eit
her one or both of us, but I thought better of it. It was not exactly the time for plucking her nerves, as they were frazzled and dangerously high voltage as result. I knew all too well not to jest with her when she was in such a state.

             
Maura kept her arm
s around Violet and Penny in the backseat but they still jumped up to watch our house shrink further and further away until it was out of sight.

             
I kept my eyes trained forward. In those three words, I had said all that I needed to say. I had my closure. I
had left behind something for them to see, to take comfort in. I took care of things and said that which my sisters couldn't say, as I had since the day I understood that my role as their old sister meant that I had to be their most indestructible force o
f protection.

             
My last words to my parents were different from what theirs would have been. They surely would have said, “I love you” as they had not been so embittered by the two as I had been. But my choice of words was more important than any proclamati
on of love, in both meaning and significance.

             
They were the first, last, and only favor I would ever grant my parents.

XXX

             
We made no haste in our journey from then on. James sped down back roads, his eyes constantly darting to the shadows in the land s
urrounding us for hidden policemen. The last thing we needed was to be pulled over. The time it would take to be given our ticket was time that was wasted.

             
“Did I ever tell you how I found out that the Reapers could change form?” James asked me quietly at
one point in our journey. I had been turned around, looking at Maura, Violet, and Penny as they slept. My own tired eyes stopped moving to focus in on the luminescent green digital clock on the dashboard: 1:17 AM. I was honing in on two days with no sleep
.

             
“Are you going to try to scare me into staying awake right now?” I asked, turning sideways and laying my head against the headrest so I could look at him while he spoke.

             
“No. It just popped into my mind. Or I guess I should say, 'They just popped into
my mind.'”

             
“Who?”

             
“Two of the kids I met. I had only ever encountered one Reaper and besides knowing that it was a female, I was too afraid to really study it. It followed me while I was out in the fields one night.”

             
“What fields?”

             
“My ex and I lived o
n a farm.”

             
“Oh.”

             
“I just turned around and there she was. No tricks. No ruses. Just some hideous, demonic thing following me home.”

             
“So what did you do?” I asked.

             
“I just kept walking, telling myself that I was imagining it. But every time I looked bac
k, she was there. So anyway, I told you about the 'summit' that we all had.”

             
“Yes.”

             
“Well, more of us showed up than I ever could have imagined. We consumed the entire top level of that Mexican restaurant on 78
th
. There was a group there from Iran. Only
one of them spoke English and was constantly translating. There was a family of three from Norway. A man from China, a couple from England, another family from Czechoslovakia... But the two that interested me the most were from right here.”

             
“Which state?”
             
“Maryland. They were this young couple. They had obviously just graduated from high school.”
             
“How could you tell that? Were they still wearing their caps and gowns?”

             
He gave me a jocular glare of scorn. I chuckled softly to myself.

             
“No, smart-ass, the
y just looked so young. They said they had traveled for two days to get to us. I asked where their parents were. I asked if their parents would be worried. And the girl kind of shut off, looked away from me, didn't really say anything else. And the boy too
k a long time to respond. When he finally did, he said, 'It's just us now.' I prodded him a little further, trying to get him to tell me what had happened. You can guess the rest.”

             
“The same thing you saw?”

             
“A few differences. Theirs was mutated even mor
e than mine; besides arms, legs, a torso, and a head, there was no way that it had ever been human. Mine still had some qualities about it that made me believe that it
might
have been a human, do you understand?”

             
“I do. Well, what exactly convinced you th
at it wasn't a human? What made you start questioning that?”

             
“Besides the huge slash in its face where the mouth was supposed to be and the pointed teeth, I knew by the way it felt. It's hard to explain it. It was just...
evil
, you know?”

             
I nodded, study
ing him.

             
“Synchronicity... You and those kids.” I muttered and he murmured his agreement.

             
“Alright. Your turn.” He told me after a minute of quiet ensued.

             
“What are you talking about?” I had just closed my eyes but opened them again at the sound of his
voice.

             
“You have to tell me something.”
             
“Something strange?”

             
“With you, I'm sure it's going to be strange whether I ask for it or not.”

             
“Indeed.” I grinned. “Well, since we're on the subject of the impending apocalypse...”

             
“Is there really any other s
ubject to discuss?”

             
“No,” I replied, “Not when it's this close. I haven't told you this because I've been too afraid to tell anyone.”

             
“Well, that's an intriguing start to the story. So it turns out Brynna Olivier does fear things.”

             
“Only sometimes.” I
rolled my eyes.

             
“You feel something other than disdain.”

             
“Do you want to hear this story or not?” I asked him, losing my patience with his constant psychoanalysis of me. As I acknowledged the annoyance in my mind, I immediately realized how hypocritical
I was for thinking it. At the same time he was trying to analyze me in order to be able to communicate, I was doing the same to him in order to reach whatever small level of trust could be achieved between us.

             
“I do.” He told me, “Genuinely, I do.”

             
“Alri
ght, then. Well, obviously you know who my parents are. You know my mom is a senator. You know my dad works for the news.”

             
“Your dad
runs
the news.”

             
“One more interruption and I lapse back into my thoughtful silence, James Maxwell.” I snapped at him and
he held his hands up in surrender. “Well, I'm sure you remember the rather sudden deaths of Michael West and Rachel Lilien.”

             
“Yeah, I remember that. Those two were from that news website, weren't they?”

             
“Indeed. I don't agree with my mother on a lot of p
olitical issues strictly because she is who she is. I feel that any opinion she holds surely can't be the moral option amongst her choices. These people felt the same way about her and the people like her. They also hated my dad and said he was running the
news so that it would work in the favor of the current administration. Manipulation of stories and facts is nothing new, as I'm sure you know.”

             
“I didn't know that.”

             
“Well, now you do. I've always been fascinated by how fear governs our lives without us
ever realizing it. What does fear do, James? It gets people in a stir, makes them docile, makes them accept things that go against our most basic freedoms. It is all very subtle. It's unnoticeable, actually, if you're not paying attention. Picture it this
way: a younger man goes on a killing rampage. It's happened before, so the idea of a new, fearful trend is perpetuated in the media. We get bans on violent video games, censorship on television and even in films, to a certain degree.”

             
“But is that really
so bad?” He asked me.

             
“I'm not looking to have a debate with you on the necessity of censorship. I'm telling you this to tell you the rest of the story. This same kid checked out
Mein Kampf
from the library. Even though his teachers said it was for a his
tory project, we still get new legislation that allows agents to access our library records, regardless of criminal history or lack thereof. Then, the news tells us that this kid was accessing websites about guns and how to use them. Legislation goes throu
gh to keep an eye on what we're looking at online. In a world where everyone has gone electronic, we have not one speck of privacy.” I lit a cigarette and rolled down the window, “Obviously, if the killing rampage occurred, it would be a horrendous tragedy
. But to use that terrible and very rare occurrence to keep an illegal eye on things, that's horrendous in its own right. So I presented that imaginary scenario to you in order to tell you this story.”

             
“Can I have one of those?” He asked me suddenly and I
pulled a cigarette from the pack to give him.

             
“Those two journalists died three days apart, both of 'natural causes.' One had no history of heart problems and the other was only thirty years old. The latter, according to the death certificate that I foun
d online, had no preexisting medical conditions. They just dropped dead. Now that means one of two things: either God is cruel and takes healthy people from the earth long before sense would tell us they're ready or there was foul play at work.”

             
“Weren't
they both sitting on something?”

             
“Yes. It was something exponentially damning, too. It was some sort of bombshell about several of my mother's colleagues. Maybe they even had something on her, too. They were going to post it on April 7. They died on April
6. On April 7, my father's channel reported on the so-called bombshell. But it was fake. My father was on the phone the night before the story aired and as I was walking by the door, I heard him say,' ...
just
enough to make it plausible.'”