The Shattered Genesis (Eternity) (91 page)

             
“I could slap that smirk right off of your face right now. Instead, I am simply going to put Penny to bed. Come along, Penelope.” I grasped her hand tightly in mine and huffed away.

             
“Just to verify, though, you won't be mad at me if I eat one?” He called after me. I was tempted to use a very vulgar hand gesture to answer that question. Instead, I ignored him.

             
“It is a strange day when you have to start asking someone questions like
that...” I heard him mutter to Aisha.

             
Just before ascending the stairs, I turned back to see Don sitting at the far end of the room in a high-backed wooden chair. Behind his chair, a fire blazed in the grate; that light darkened the space around him. If
ever there was a symbol of doom, that was it. I could have shouted a warning to the others. But in their eyes, I saw a need to consume the berries that were being offered to them. They wanted to let go.

             
I
wanted to let go.

             
It had been several weeks since
our arrival at Don's house. Though James and I were finding it easier to relax after getting to know so many kind people there, we still found it necessary to keep our eyes open and our heads clear at all times. We were not afraid of many in Don's house,
but there were some that sought to please the man who ran the show. They, and the man himself, were worrisome folks.

             
But if I ate that berry, I would forget all of that trepidation and anxiety. I would forget how afraid I was for the lives of Penny, Viol
et, Elijah, and James. I would forget the regrets and sadness that attempted to plague me daily. My mind would empty and even out, quite wondrously...

             
“No.” I said out loud to sway my temptation. Only verbally could I express my desire to suppress the urg
e. Internally, I was craving whatever “psychedelic state” was brought on by the berry.

             
“But I didn't say I was actually going to do it!” Penny exclaimed as she looked up at me with wide, terrified eyes. “I just think it would be funny!”
             
“What did you say
?” I looked down at her as we walked up the stairs.

             
“I didn't
say
anything. You heard me thinking about it!”

             
“What were you thinking about?”

             
She blinked up at me for several seconds.

             
“Nothing.”

             
I lost it. I was laughing hysterically and covering my mo
uth to stifle the sound. Her huge eyes looking up at me betrayed the guilt she felt at some fleeting thought she had only briefly mused on. I didn't even care what exactly it was that she thought would be humorous. It was more than likely an innocent prank
that would cause no harm.

             
I did not stop laughing until after she was changed into her pajamas. I remembered how every night on Earth, I had always fought her to go to bed. At first, I had been stern, informing her that only one story would be read and t
hen she would have to promptly go to sleep. Somehow, she always managed to get at least three stories out of me. By the time I turned her light off, we were giggling ridiculously at jokes no one else could possibly find funny. The memory warmed me and as I
sat with her that night, stroking her hair until she fell asleep, I knew that we would be doing that bedtime routine forever.

             
I could have cried. The thought was more beautiful than any Pangean sunset.

             
After she had drifted off into a peaceful slumber,
I tucked the blankets in even more tightly
around her. As always, I carefully eased my light weight off of the bed and slunk back away from her, watching her as she slept until I had reached the door. After closing it behind me, I walked back downstairs, s
till smiling to myself.

             
Batteries must have been found on the ship because I could hear an old White Stripes song playing boisterously in the living room downstairs. I knew that several people in the house had brought their portable iPod players with them
from Earth. They had also brought batteries of their own. Some people were quite skilled at remembering every last necessity and convenience that they wished to bring with them on our collective, one-way journey.

             
Curiosity got the better of me. If I had
simply gone to bed, I never would have tasted the sinfully sweet juice of the Peace Fruit. I would have never known the full extent of the activities Don allowed and encouraged to occur in his house.

             
“Brynna!” Violet's arms were around me the moment I wa
lked into the room. She nestled her head against mine several times before rubbing her face into my neck. When her hair tickled my skin most irritatingly, I jerked away from her.

             
“Will you stop that?” I whispered fiercely to her after I had pulled away.

             
One look at her face and I could have murdered James and Elijah.

             
Her eyes were glowing with the same cerulean color of the juice that filled the red skins of those berries. The lazy smile that was spread across her face and the way her eyelids drooped ev
ery so often confirmed what I was dreading mentally: She had been offered that natural drug and instead of refusing, she had taken it.

             
“You love this song.” She said as she twirled a strand of my hair around her finger. “That's what James said! He loves y
ou, Brynna...”

             
People all around the room were lounging in the elaborately designed furniture, laughing quietly and in some disturbing cases, caressing each other quite inappropriately. Don, for instance, was being fondled by one woman around his age and
another around mine. They whispered of his bravery in sentences far too intricate for the intelligence level I knew they possessed. At one point, they muttered in a language they had never learned. His glowing blue eyes glazed over in both lust and satisfa
ction, quite to my bemusement. How he could emanate both at the same time, I was not sure.

             
I almost heaved forward at such a disgusting sight of human frailty. Perhaps I was being what most would call “a stick in the mud”, but their behavior was proof of
their inferior standing to me. They had all allowed themselves to become high on a mysterious berry from the forest, simply so they could engage in conscience-free “relaxation.” I shuddered to think what would occur in that room.

             
“Don says that while the
juice from these berries flowed through his veins, he saw the one God.” Violet informed me. Her eyes were rolling back in her head as her hands ran through her hair. The soft texture was enough to intoxicate her further.

             
What I was witnessing had to be qu
ite close to the effects of ecstasy. Or perhaps LSD. My heart dropped heavily into my stomach when I recalled another drug, one that had been manufactured and outlawed immediately after an unfortunate issue arose involving cannibalism. Something about a ba
th... I could not remember. I prayed that the effects of the berries would not take a dark turn for the worse.

             
“You should have been here. Just as we were starting to feel the peace, Don told us that story. It was beautiful, Brynna.”

             
I frowned at her whe
n abnormally large tears began to fall from her eyes.

             
“The world will be at peace, just like this right now, as long as Don lets us live. As long as we let people live. Live and let live.”
             
“Alright, this is ridiculous!” I grabbed her arm. Her over-dramat
ic gasp would have been quite comical had she not been genuinely horrified by me grabbing her so aggressively. She jerked her arm away and rubbed the spot where my hand-print was still visible.

             
“Ow...” She moaned with a terribly depressing frown on her fa
ce now, “Meanie, be nice.”

             
“That last statement was completely redundant and utterly puerile but then, I sincerely doubt
that you remember the definitions of those fifth-grade level words.”

             
“So mean...” She sighed heavily and wiped a tear that had fallen
from her eyes away. “I love you and you love me, too. We love each other even though we fight so much, Brynna. That doesn't matter. You're my sister and I love you. Even when you're mean...”

             
I exclaimed in irritation and then began to scold her in a shak
ing voice:

             
“Violet Mae, this kind of idealistic, drug-fueled rambling was not cute in the 1960's when those mindless people that called themselves hippies were spouting it off to people or to walls, whichever would listen. It most certainly is not cute no
w.”
             
“The walls are standing still. So still, like the core of Purissimus...”

             
I felt like a mother sent to pull her child from what the young people called a “rave.” I felt like at any moment, people would pull pacifiers from their pockets to suck on befo
re waving glow-sticks in my face. Yes, I will admit that I was extinguishing the life of the party. But imagine for a moment stumbling across a group of people, both young and old, engaging in such reckless foolishness. Some, including Alice and Quinn, wer
e beginning to remove their clothing. If there was ever a toxic environment from which I needed to forcibly extract my sister, I was standing in the dead-center of it.

             
I actually covered my eyes for a moment because I was so incredibly embarrassed for the
people around me. When I looked up, Violet had swayed off into the crowd of those dancing by the open windows. The light from the fire was lower, creating a commanding darkness that I could scarcely see through. I became aware of smoke tickling the inside
of my nose. While normal smoke would have burned my nasal passages, whatever that was only made me want to smile. I did not even want to sneeze.

             
The sweet smell of that smoke mixed with the wonderfully brisk evening air; the breeze gently stung my face a
s it flew by me. I found myself smiling as a lightness suddenly took hold of my heart. I was looking around, feeling the coolness of the night wrapped around me. I was reminded of the days at home on Earth when the summer had finally faded away into fall..
.

             
Autumn... I was supposed to be taking her upstairs where I would tuck her into bed and begin to prepare my lecture for the morning...

             
A quick stab of horror pierced my already fallen heart when I saw Don crush one of the berries on the table. As the l
ight blue juice was exposed to the air, it seemed to fizzle. Afterward, where the liquid had been, there was only thick, black powder. I watched Don brush the dust into his hand and carefully siphon it into a pipe fashioned from the wood of one of the old
trees in the forest. That intricately fashioned smoking device could only have been a gift from Adam. The pipe was far too excellent to be crafted by Don's hand.

             
After lighting the end of his pipe and inhaling deeply, Don blew the smoke into the older wom
an's open mouth.

             
My head was starting to spin. The dizziness that rattled my brain was not unpleasant, though. A memory from when I was three years old overtook me; I was on a merry-go-round, waving to my mother every time she came into my view around the
bend. Elijah was beside me, riding a huge, black horse with yellow eyes. We were giggling the way children do, shouting to our mom and smiling for the camera she was holding up.

             
Why had I left her? My face was buried in my hands as the delightfully happy
feeling that had accompanied the long lost memory died away. It was replaced by a regret so excruciating that I had to grasp my chest. Surely my heart would literally fall from my body. Surely, it would fall to the floor where I would see just how blacken
ed it was from my years of hating her, my father, Maura, Michael...

             
James's hands gently grasped mine. As soon as he pulled them away from my face, his lips pressed to my forehead, my closed eyes, my nose and both of my cheeks.

             
Warmth. Luminescence. A
desire that burned from my heart to between my legs so deliciously that I could have cried. All around us, people were standing up to leave. Soon, they would disappear into the rooms of the house where they would rectify their own erotic urges. Some were s
till just
lounging, whispering to one another and laughing quietly to themselves.