The Shattered Genesis (Eternity) (52 page)

             
Night seized us like a faceless threat. Immediately, some of the braver people flocked to the end of the campsite to watch the trees that had gone still suddenly. My heart pounded in
anticipation as my arms locked around Penny. I was ready to make our escape.

             
“Maura, when I say to run, you need to run with me.” I told her and she looked away from the trees to stare at me.

             
“What are you…”

             
A native zoomed up to her out of nowhere, evo
king a scream of surprise from both of us. Out of reflex, she reached out and punched him hard in the face. It had been a punch thrown with every bit of force she could possibly muster and still, the native didn’t stumble. In fact, hitting him had only inj
ured her. I spun Penny around so she was on my back and ran forward, bringing my own fist back.

             
When
my
fist hit him, he flew backwards and landed on his back. Remembering that I had Penny attached to me was enough to stop me from going after him and fini
shing the nasty, bloody work.

             
“Run, Maura, run!” I shouted at her. Before she could obey my order on her own, I had grabbed her hand and began pulling her with me as I took off running at a speed that she couldn’t achieve, being only human. I was forced t
o slow in order for her to keep up.

             
“Do not let go, Penny!” I yelled over the symphony of screams, running feet, slashing skin, and the pounding of bone on bone. Penny was crying through her own high-pitched wails of terror but her grip on me was strong
enough to pull my skin away if anyone tried to snatch her off of me. Even my little sister was beginning to gather the inhuman strength that had awakened in some of us.

             
“Where are we going?!” Maura screamed frantically over the overlapping, deafening soun
ds.

             
“We’re just running. DUCK!” I reached back and forced her onto the ground as a native soared through the air towards us. I whipped around, waiting for him to turn and charge us again. But his target hadn’t been Maura, Penny or me; it had been a man fi
ve feet behind us whose throat he had just bitten into. I went to jump up, only to see several of my dad’s guards storming towards us, machine guns in their hands.

             
“Stay down!” I yelled to Maura. I pushed her down below the fallen log that I had only just
seen kids practicing their balancing skills on the day before. I pulled Penny off of my back and wedged her in between Maura and me before laying both of them on the ground. Just as the gunshots rang out, Maura forced her way up from beneath me and covere
d Penny and I with her body.

             
The guards jumped over the log, firing blindly and through Maura’s arms, I saw more of our number being taken down by the spray of bullets than the natives, who moved in a blur so quickly that shooting them was nearly
impossible. I can’t begin to describe how horrifying it was, to see people I had begun to recognize by both name and face struck down by my father’s guards. They were good people who had survived the end of the world only to be shot by cowards firing blind
ly into the dark at targets they could not see. I knew that my father would not grieve their untimely, accidental demises. In fact, a part of me knew, and was sickened by knowing, that he would see their deaths as an all too welcome relief.

             
Once the men w
ith the guns had passed us, I held Penny to my chest, waiting for her to wrap her legs and arms around me before we took off running again. Our hearts pounded and our lungs threatened to collapse with each deep, heaving breath, but we didn’t stop. Our legs
propelled us forward until we had broken into the cover of the trees.

             
“We need to keep moving!” I shouted over my shoulder to Maura as my eyes scanned every shadowed corner of the forest frantically.

             
“I can’t… I can’t…” Maura gasped out after collapsing
onto the cold, pine-needle covered ground. I turned around and watched as she struggled for breath, knowing that until she had gathered
her strength back, we couldn’t continue on into the trees.

             
“Maura, I know it’s hard, but we have to keep going.” I urg
ed her as I continued to look all around. “If they want us, they’re going to follow us in here!”

             
“They live in here! We just have to wait them out. We can’t go any further!” She managed to exclaim despite her growing inability to breathe normally.

             
“We ca
n’t stay at the campsite! They’re going to keep coming back! They’ll kill us all, Maura!
             
“Elijah… your father…” She paused for a long time before adding, “Brynna…”

             
“Look, I love Dad but he made this worse for us!” I knelt down so that I was level with he
r and able to look imploringly into her eyes. “We can’t stay here with him!”

             
“So what are we going to do, darling?” She asked and I was stunned to see that her eyes were ablaze with anger, “You’re going to do what Brynna tried to do and abandon him? You’r
e going to leave him the way Brynna left your mother?!”

             
Even as my need to keep moving stayed firmly rooted at the forefront of my mind, an animosity I couldn’t comprehend took hold of my heart. Maura was suggesting that Brynna’s abandonment of my mother
saddened her. It took no intensified understanding of things for me to know that that was simply not true. Through my mother being left behind to burn on the earth, Maura had gotten my father. She was now the “wife” of the leader. After years of being beat
en down by circumstance, she held a privileged position.

             
“If you want to stay, then you can stay.” I shot at her after standing back up. “I want you to come with me because you’ve always been there for us, Maura. But if he’s more important to you than we
are, then you can stay.” I turned away with tears welling in my eyes as I realized that Brynna’s dark feelings towards Maura might have been warranted. It’s a tough thing, seeing someone’s darkness at such a young age when before one had seen only light.

             
“It’s not that!” She told me after walking forward and grasping my arms. “Darling, you need to come back to the camp with me. Come back and we’ll talk, alright? Of course I want to go with you. I don’t want to be anywhere else. But we cannot leave him to f
ight this on his own.”

             
“Do you really still see
good
in him, Maura?!” I shouted at her. Penny broke down into tears again. “
Shh…
” I whispered as I ran my hand down the back of her hair. “I’m sorry, Penny. I’m sorry.”

             
“I do. I do because it’s still there.
What he’s doing…” She shook her head slightly. I knew that she was trying to think of a convincing explanation for his heartless actions. “It is the difficult decision but unfortunately, it’s also the right one. He has to keep a firm hand on these people
or there will be chaos. You are young. You do not understand that.”

             
“No. Contrary to what you may believe, I understand more than you do.”

             
I wanted to remain firm and angry. I wanted her to see no signs of pain on my face as I realized that she cared mor
e for her father than she did for us, the children she had raised. But I loved Maura dearly because she had always been there. She had stepped into the role my mother had so willingly abandoned. For Elijah and I, at least, Maura was the only constant in ou
r lives.

             
Tears streamed down my face as I turned to her and whispered, “Goodbye, Maura.”

             
Like the naïve child I was, I expected her to follow me. Even if she was cursing me under her breath, I still believed she wouldn’t let me walk away.

             
Her sobbing wa
s drowned out by the noises that had come back to the forest. My feet moved me forward, carrying Penny and I closer and closer to an uncertainty that would never become clear. I knew Elijah and Brynna would find us if they had survived, but then what? What
would we eat? Where would we sleep? How would we avoid the natives?

             
I forced my tears to stop for Penny’s sake. But inside, a terror as old as Earth and Pangea roared as it took its first breath.

Brynna

             
I did not care if the natives heard me. The soun
ds in the forest had resumed their deafening musical number and I screamed over the noise for Elijah, Violet and Penny. Once or twice, I even called Maura’s name, though to see her when I expected to see only my siblings would have been truly sickening. I
almost chuckled at the thought of vomiting right on her designer tennis shoes.

             
I had been walking for hours, knowing that the attack on the campsite was over and that the natives were back in the woods. I was exhausted beyond feeling any degree of fear. I
was hungry enough that when I passed by a bush stocked with orange and black berries, I actually stopped to pick a few. I held them to my nose, sniffing them for a reason that I could not fathom. It didn’t matter how they smelled; I did not possess any le
ngth of knowledge on plants that were edible versus plants that were deadly. However, my heart began to beat erratically fast, even tripping over itself a few times. The second I dropped the berries to the ground to grasp my chest, my heart had resumed its
normal gallop.

             
Alright, instincts. Message received.

             
“Elijah!” I called as my eyes widened in the darkness. I could see the clear outlines of the trees and the shadows that moved between them. I looked up, seeing the twinkling of a billion stars overhea
d. The canopy created by the clustered mass of abnormally large willows blocked their light. I was seeing in the dark because my body was forcing itself to see.

             
The space around me was open and yet I felt as though I had been shut inside of a coffin. All
around me, I was surrounded by the hodgepodge of trees. Their age yielded a silent knowledge of all that had passed, from the beginning to the present. Despite standing for thousands upon thousands of years, they still smelled as youthfully fresh as they h
ad when they were mere saplings planted by the Gods.

             
Such strange thoughts to be having…

             
I broke into a clearing, knowing I had put miles between the campsite and myself. There was no turning back now. My sense of direction had always been skewed but in
that case, it was downright nonexistent. I’d starve or die of dehydration before I found my way back to the campsite. Not that I wanted to return, of course…

             
My thoughts turned to my mother quite randomly. If my father had been on the ship, then common se
nse would dictate that he had not been with her. They had been living together even though their marriage had long been over. My father had so many mistresses, I used to say he had a harem. His age did not diminish his good looks and as a result, many wome
n, even those my own age, had desired him. Power certainly had something to do with their attraction. Thoughts of acquiring a fraction of his wealth surely aided their ability to devote themselves to him. They had disgusted me, those dirty little girls. Ho
w they could look at such a terrible man with even fake affection in their eyes, I did not know. But then, for once, I did not
want
to know.

My mother had an on-again and off-again relationship, as they are called, with a good and honest man named John. I
had been stunned to learn that he was the foreman at a construction company that specialized in building expensive homes. That was how they had met; he had built our sprawling fortress that we called our house. Their relationship had begun shortly before w
hat had happened with Michael. I remembered how he was the only male I trusted enough to allow in my presence after those unspeakable events with my godfather. In fact, my mother had taken me to stay with her at his house several times, just so I would fee
l safe. Once there, I spoke and laughed as though nothing at all had happened. I was, quite simply, a normal nine-year-old girl once again.

Remembering this makes me very sad.

             
I had always liked him. Despite his gender, I had trusted him. For a moment, I
prayed to God, the Gods, or the empty space above my head that he had been with my mother when the event had occurred. I prayed that even though they had not been on good terms in many years that he had held her and assured her that they were going to be a
lright. They would not feel any pain. Everything would be over in just one millisecond and he would hold onto her even after they had passed over to the other side.