The Shattered Genesis (Eternity) (62 page)

             
“Consider me elated, honey.”

             
“Oh,
elated
... I've done well.”

             
Later, I watched as he unrolled the sleeping bag on the flattest part of the dirt. We crawled into it,
the small space forcing me deep into his arms. I would not have wanted to be anywhere else, anyway. He locked his arms around me and I was warmed wonderfully by the heat from his body.

             
“I’m going to stay up and keep watch. But you need to sleep, Brynn.”

             
All lighthearted joking and teasing had dissipated between us. Now, we were gravely serious.

             
“I don’t want to sleep. I always have such terrible dreams, James.”
             

             
He kissed my forehead.

             
“Don’t you remember what I told you on the ship when you took that
pill?” He whispered after  I had looked up at him. The kiss he planted on my lips sent that delightful shock-wave through my body.  “I’ll watch over you, baby. I’ll wake you up. Right now, you have to sleep.”

             
I was so warm and snug there in the sleeping b
ag with him. Every part of me was drained from the day of walking and worrying. My body was seduced into sleep by the heaviness of my eyelids.

             
“We’ll figure this all out tomorrow.” He assured me gently. “We won't stop until we find them, I promise.”

             
I no
dded, believing him. I
needed
to believe him. I could not picture Elijah, Penny or Violet being hurt. I could not stand the image that forced itself to the front of my dozing mind; I saw them crawling on the ground, searching for food as their lives draine
d slowly and painfully like water from a bucket stuck through the bottom with a nail.

             
My Penny… If there was one person I could admit that I felt actual love for, it was her. I loved that dear child. I prayed to the faceless deities or the one God to keep
them all safe, but I prayed for Penny above all else. Her childish mind was as pure and good as the planet we were currently residing on. I feared for the demolition of such purity. I would fight the destruction of her innocence with the same malicious vi
olence that the Pangean people had used to fight us.

             
I wished someone had fought so viciously for me.

             
James’s heart was beating steadily in his chest, lulling me further into that blissful sleep. I grasped him tighter, drawing in his intoxicating scent.
I wanted to stay there with him forever and forget every unspeakably horrific thing that had happened.

             
“
You love him.
” My mother’s voice told me, and I could hear the faint gleam of a smile in her words.

             
Shut up, Mother.

Quinn

             
We laid staring up at
the tent above our heads. She was as far away from me as the space we were lying in would allow. I didn’t look at her. She didn’t look at me. Neither one of us said a word.

             
What the hell was my problem? There was no reason for my anger. I knew how pointle
ss it was. I knew I was wrong. But of course, I couldn’t admit that out loud. I couldn’t allow myself to realize that our problems had nothing to do with her new-found craving for human flesh. She was my last reminder of home and I was hers. That was a lin
k I never thought could be shattered. In truth, it was that grim fact that was tearing us apart.

             
What was Alice? She was my girlfriend of two years and I loved her, of course. But our final days on Earth had been fraught with such terrible things. Our par
ents’ deaths had occurred in those days. We had been fleeing the great explosion. There had been such uncertainty. Through that uncertainty, great fear was born. I associated her with those unpleasant feelings because she had been with me as those awful ev
ents unfolded. She was a constant reminder of what we had seen. What we had seen were sights no one, especially not two seventeen year old kids, should ever have to see.

             
“I wish I could understand why you’re so mad, Quinn.” She said to me suddenly. The ra
ndom break in the uncomfortable silence triggered an irritation in me that was unwarranted. I should have known that she would want to talk about our problems. In fact, I should have wanted to talk about them, too.

             
My unwillingness to discuss our issues l
ed to another question: Did I really want them to be fixed?

             
“Are you just going to ignore me?” She pushed.

             
“Yeah.” I answered shortly.

             
“Why?” Her voice was trembling with the threat of tears, “Quinn, I did what I had to do. Why can’t you understand that
? Would you have wanted me to let myself get killed just so I wouldn’t kill someone else?”

             
I didn’t respond. I had made it very clear what I would have wanted her to do. I had so much to say but lacked the energy or the motivation to discuss and resolve t
he tension between us.

             
“I don’t understand you!” She exclaimed and now, she was crying. “I never would have seen you differently. If you had killed those things, I wouldn’t have cared.”

             
“I know you wouldn’t have. And I told you that you could have just k
nocked them out.”

             
“I tried. They were so fast. They’re tough. It takes a lot to knock them out. They’re not like those guards, who were only human. The natives are monsters, Quinn. They're worse than those things that took my mom and dad, even.”

             
“I’m not
going to apologize for wanting to find other ways around things. I’m not going to apologize for not wanting to kill people. I don’t want to mutate into whatever you’re mutating into. You’ve forgotten everything that you’ve ever believed in.” Just as I had
begun to believe that I wouldn’t be telling her a thing, I was letting it all flow out like toxic, volcanic ash. “You were the one that told Elijah not to go into the ship after Brynna and start shooting people. You were the one on Earth who was always ta
lking about God and how we should live a Christian life. Do you remember any of that? Or has whatever freakish thing that’s taking over you made you forget?”

             
She put her face in her hands and cried harder. I was being unnecessarily cruel and unforgivably
immature. I didn’t realize that at the time. We never realize just how awful we can be when we’re fighting with people we love. In fact, it’s those we love who receive the worst of our rage. They feel our innermost darkness because we inflict it on them fa
r more willingly than we would on strangers.

             
“Maybe you’re not even you. For all I know, you’ve been taken over the same way that your parents were. Maybe that’s a sign, that it was your parents and not mine that got possessed by those things. Maybe you
were always…” I searched for the right word before settling on one that was far and beyond anything I should have said, “Maybe you've been
evil
this whole time.
”

             
“I’m evil because I defended myself? I had to kill both of my parents. I did it because they
were stuck somewhere terrible. If you knew what I had seen and what I had felt, you would never throw that in my face. If you knew how fast and strong those two natives were and how strongly I had known that they were going to kill me, then you wouldn’t ca
re that I had killed them first. I didn’t want to get
ripped apart, Quinn. I didn’t want to die. I might have been the religious one on Earth but you were the logical one. You were the one that believed in Darwin and all of that ‘survival of the fittest’ s
tuff. Weren’t you?” I didn’t answer, “Weren’t you?!”
             
“Yeah, I was. That has nothing to do with this.”

             
“Yes, it does! Remember when we used to argue about God and evolution?”

             
For a minute, I remembered those heated debates we used to get into. We had alw
ays been so interested in the things we learned, which was odd, considering the way others our age didn’t care in the slightest. We used to debate and discuss all the interesting things we had read or been taught by our teachers. The arguing was never mali
cious. It was just spirited.

             
“You always used to say that as humans evolved, they adapted. You always used to go back to Darwin and ‘survival of the fittest.’ Isn’t that what’s happening to us?”

             
Perhaps we couldn’t fully support Darwin’s theories as the
reason for why we were changing, but it was certainly something to lean on. She was right and I was so very wrong.

             
I couldn’t admit it.

             
“We’re changing to adapt to a new world. There are threats here that we couldn’t face if we were just human.”

             
“So why
are we the only ones that are doing it, then?” I demanded as I stabbed blindly at her arguments, just to cut them down and prove that I was right.

             
“There are other people that are doing it! James and Brynna are evolving! You’re not getting on their case
about it!”

             
“Because they’re not my responsibility!”

             
“I’m not your responsibility, either!” She snapped at me as angry tears still streamed down her face. “I can take care of myself!”

             
“You’re going to prove that now because I’m not watching your back any
more! I don’t care about you anymore! If you want to embrace whatever this is, then fine. But I won’t! I don’t want to evolve, or whatever you want to call it! I want to be normal!”

             
“Well, newsflash, little boy, it’s happening whether you like it or not!
And it doesn’t just come down to science! It’s God’s will, too!”

             
“You have a lot of nerve talking about God and His will, don’t you? Isn’t the number one rule in His little book not to kill people?!”

             
“Will you stop harping on that?! When will you underst
and that I had no choice?!”

             
“You’ve made stupid choices before. You let that thing into your house and if I hadn’t shown up, you would be dead right now!”

             
“It talked to me in my mother’s voice! It appeared to me as her! I didn’t know! And in case you’ve
forgotten, I was the one that shot it! So don’t tell me I would have been screwed if you hadn’t come along!”

             
“I’m glad that you’re so happy that you shot your parents, Alice!”

             
“How can you say that?! I am not happy about it!”

             
We were fully screaming at
each other by that point and not caring if James and Brynna heard.

             
“How could you ever say that I’m happy about it?! I had no choice then, either! They were suffering!”

             
“You don’t even know that for sure…”

             
“Believe me, I do! And just because you didn’t
kill your own parents doesn’t mean that you didn’t kill them! You left! You had one after you, too!”

             
“Yeah, it was your dad!”

             
“It wasn’t my dad!”

             
“Well, your mom was outside of your house and the only other creature we know of was your dad! So yeah, it
was him!”

             
“That wasn’t his fault, if it was! But it wasn’t him! We’re both responsible for what happened to
our parents! Something was after us and we ran from it! We didn’t realize that we were running but we were! So they possessed my parents to get clo
se to us! And somehow, through some chain of events, they’re all dead now! Nothing else matters except that they're dead now, Quinn!”
             

             
“You don’t need to question the chain of events! We know how it happened! And it was your fault! If you hadn’t called me
that night, I would have been there to stop that thing before it killed them! My mom and dad were outside of my door! They had been trying to hide me from it! And I wasn’t even there!”