Page 40 of Decimation

The air reeks of wet earth and decay. I gulp it down, breath after breath, each one a small death, ignoring how my skin, so long untouched by anything but pain now riots with sensation, every pore feeling like a wound reopening.

My body shivers, and the shivering feels like the aftershock of a violation, a trembling that begins deep in my belly and radiates outward.

Above, the moon is glinting not with light but with a sickly pallor, like a mirage of hope that might at any moment curdle into nightmare. It is beautiful, almost hauntingly so, a reminder that I have been trapped in another world, one beneath the skin of this one, and I am not certain I have returned whole.

My mother carries me past the barren stems of bushes, the silent, judging trees, onto a track that sucks at her feet with a wet, obscene sound. Each squelch feels like a whisper of the earth trying to drag us back. Her breath comes in ragged gasps, and I feel the tremor in her chest, the terror she has swallowed for years now leaking out in hot, panting bursts against my cheek.

We reach a parked car, and it’s so ordinary looking it seems a lie. She unlocks it with hands that shake only slightly, helps me fold my broken body into the seat, and then she sprints around to the driver’s side. I didn’t know she could drive. When did she learn? The question is a splinter in my mind; what other secret selves has she been forced to birth in the dark?

“Blankets in the back,” she says, her voice a frayed thread. “Cover yourself and get warm. When it’s safe, I’ll stop and we’ll find you clothes.” Clothes, the word is foreign, a memory of a time when my skin was not a map of depravity.

I nod, reaching for a wool blanket that rasps against my fingers like a thousand tiny teeth. I wrap it around my shoulders, and the contact is a revelation of ruin; my skin has become a single, exposed nerve, every fibre a scalpel tracing the memory of other textures; silk, leather, the wet heat of a mouth that should never have touched me. I am used to nothing touching me, and now this scratchy wool is both a torment and a perverse comfort, a penance for the sin of being alive.

She drives without headlights, the car a blind beast slouching through the dark. It tells me she has rehearsed this flight in the theatre of her mind until the script is etched into her muscles; the exact distance, the precise turn, the moment when the risk of light becomes less than the risk of darkness. I watch her profile, a cameo carved from shadow, and I realize something; she has become a stranger, a woman forged in the sins that unmade me.

“How long have you been planning to run?” My voice croaks, the words scraping out of a throat raw from screams I no longer remember making.

Her aura flickers, a jaundiced yellow, the colour of old fear. “Long enough.”

“Mother?”

She exhales, and I hear so much pain, so much emotion in that one action. “Three years. Perhaps four.” The headlights flare on as we turn onto a larger road, and the world resolves into the mundane of tarmac and hedgerows, the ordinary that hides so much. Her aura steadies into a determined green, the colour of old bruises healing.

“When your father gave him Cass. I began moving money, small, irregular, nothing to pattern-match. Accounts no one knows. Identification they’ve never seen.” She recites it like a litany, a spell against the dark. “Enough to keep us safe for years, Leandra. Several years, if we’re careful. More if we’re clever.”

The word clever lands like a blade; cleverness is what got us here, the cleverness of monsters.

I stare at her. Her colours hold steady, truth, resolve, and beneath them a deep, unspoken grief, a river of sorrow she has dammed up with sheer will.

“You knew. You knew it might come to this.”

“I knew it could.” She pauses, and her aura softens into muted blues, the colour of a bruise fading. “There’s a difference. I hoped I was wrong. I hoped…” She shakes her head, a violent, desperate motion. As if she could dislodge the tears that now stream down her face, each one a tiny, liquid grief for the daughter she couldn’t protect.

“What about Hector? What about father?” I don’t care about my father, his name is a curse I spit out but I need to know he is gone, that she understands he is as much a predator as Ezekiel. That his hands, too, are stained with more than one member of our family’s blood.

“Hector is gone,” she whispers, and her aura darkens to the grey of ash, of extinguished embers. Loss. Resignation. The words are a tombstone.

“Gone where?” The question is a child’s, desperate for a geography of grief.

She draws a breath that sounds like tearing silk. “He went with your father. They’ve gone to ground. Astrid’s husband… he sacrificed himself. He took Ezekiel’s place in the trap meant for Antonio.” Her voice cracks on the word sacrificed, and I hear the unspoken, another body on the pyre of our family’s madness.

“Is Antonio dead?” My voice is a shard of glass. Antonio is a Guardian, a man who claimed to be Esau but whose colours screamed liar in hues only I could see. No one believed me then. They believe me now, I suppose, when it’s far too fucking late.

“He lives,” she says, flat as a death certificate. “Unharmed, by all accounts.” The words are acid; the devil walks free while we flee into the night.

“How is that possible?” The question is a howl trapped in a whisper.

“The devil protects his own,” she says, and her bitterness is a taste in the air, copper and salt.

I think that Antonio is a devil, but Ezekiel, Ezekiel is something worse, something that wears a man’s skin like a borrowed coat. I press my hand to my mouth, as if the thought itself is a sin that might summon him back. My mother glances at me, her eyes dark pools of understanding, and says nothing. There are no words for the monsters we have known.

Outside, the countryside hurtles past, hedges like jagged teeth, trees with skeletal fingers, all shrouded in a darkness that seems to breathe. We take corners with a sickening lurch, and my mother navigates without hesitation, as if the route is carved into her nerves. At a junction, she turns right, and we plunge deeper into the night.

“Where are we going?” I blink back tears that scald my raw cheeks, each one a tiny exorcism.

“Tonight, a safe house.” She glances at me, and her aura settles into a calm, steady blue, the colour of a frozen lake, thin ice over black water. “After that, options. I’ve been building options like a rat builds a nest in a sinking ship. We won’t stay anywhere long. We’ll go to Europe, vanish into the cracks.”

“And if they look for us?” The if is a lie; we both know they will.