Ocean’s mother drove the shard of metal down with a growl. Summoning what little strength she had, the young girl rolled her shoulders with a savage jerk, throwing her attacker’s center of gravity off just long enough for the weapon to clang ineffectually off the concrete. Seizing the opportunity, Ocean raked at her mother’s eyes with her hands, feeling a soft squish as her index fingers drove into the moist orbs.
Her mama’s hands flew instinctively to her face as she yowled with pain. Adrenaline gushing through her veins, Ocean found a strength she never realized she possessed and she thrashed on the ground. Her mother toppled over as if she were nothing more than one of the glass figurines in the car, and now it was Ocean’s turn to grapple for dominance. As she pulled herself over her mother’s squirming body, she drove her knee between the woman’s sagging breasts, throwing as much of her weight into the blow as possible. The air whooshed out of the woman’s lungs and left her gasping for breath… but it wasn’t enough to drive the fight out of her entirely.
She grabbed a handful of Ocean’s hair and yanked so hard that it felt her scalp were about to be pulled right off her skull. At the same time, the other woman’s free hand was scrambling across the concrete, her fingers clutching and grasping at the empty air.
Tears streamed down Oceans’s face, cutting paths of clean skin through the filth and grime. She was vaguely aware of her own shrieking voice. “No, Mama, No… stop it! Stop it!”
“Bitch! Slut! Little fuckin’ whore!” The woman’s hand finally found the object it sought and, with an inhuman roar, she rammed the end of the twisted scrap of metal into her daughter’s arm.
Ocean screamed as the pain shot from her elbow to shoulder. Undaunted, her mother continued to stab again and again as blood spurted from the puncture wounds, to spatter against her face.
She’s going to kill you, she’s going to fucking kill you, you have to do something. DO SOMETHING!
Ocean buried her face into her mother’s neck, just as she had done when she was very small and had awoken from a nightmare where the rotters were about to get her. Only this time, there was no comfort to be sought in the warm skin, no reprieve from the anxiety and fear; there was only one last chance at survival.
She sank her teeth into flesh, clamping down so tightly that her mouth was immediately flooded with the metallic tang of blood. Her mother screamed and thrashed, still jamming the metal into her daughter’s body.
The pain caused Ocean to throw her head back and there was a wet, ripping sound as the skin seemed to peel away from her mother’s throat. Something warm and sticky sprayed over the girl, but she was terrified to the point that the most real thing was that voice in her head chanting: she’ll kill you, she’ll fucking kill you, you know she’ll kill you….
Spitting the rubbery chunk of tissue from her mouth, Ocean plunged her face toward her mother’s throat again. Chewing, ripping, snot bubbling from her nose as her tears mingled with the blood, she tore away flesh and muscle again and again until it dawned on her that she wasn’t being stabbed any longer. In fact, her mother was sprawled motionless across the ground, a dark pool seeping away from the ravaged remains of her neck.
At that moment, all of the fear and rage that had propelled her simply seemed to vanish. She collapsed over her mother’s body like a cast off rag doll, her back hitching with sobs as she pressed her face into her mother’s chest.
“Mama… Mama, talk to me… please, Mama. Please!”
She wasn’t sure how long she laid there, clutching her dead mother in her arms as though she could somehow squeeze life back into those now useless lungs. Eventually the crying tapered off and the throbbing pain in her arm seemed to fade; Ocean’s entire body, even her mind, felt numb. It was like all of her thoughts had poured out of her head with the snot and tears. She was nothing but a hollow, empty vessel as she stared into the distance, seeing nothing.
At some point she must have drifted to sleep; the next thing she knew her body was covered in dew and thin tendrils of fog crept across the ground like miniature phantoms. She could see through the windows of some of the wrecked cars encircling her and the fog was thicker on the other side. It was a roiling, gray veil that made the ruined city appear fuzzy and indistinct. She thought she could see a dark silhouette out there, beckoning to her with outstretched arms.
“D-daddy?” Even cloaked in the morning mist, she could recognize his general shape and outline. “Daddy!”
Her heart fluttered with hope as she raised her head and a smile crept over her face. The smile faded however, as quickly as the image of the man in the fog, and she was left with only her mother’s cold, still body beneath her.
Ocean scrambled backward and pulled her knees to her chest, wrapping her arms tightly around her knees as she rocked back and forth. She was shaking her head, silently saying no again and again, and she could feel the tears returning. Mama was gone. Mama was gone and now she was entirely alone in the world.
The blood had dried on her face overnight and her skin felt stretched too tightly over her skull. She was sticky and dirty and wanted to throw up, but could only wretch and heave as traces of bile stung the back of her throat.
“You’ve got to do the rite of the dead,” she told herself. “You’ve got to give Mama the rite.”
The strange yet somehow familiar voice in the back of her mind whispered again. What? She was going to kill you! You had to do what you did, even if she was you mother. She doesn’t deserve any type of burial ritual, don’t you get that? Mothers don’t try to kill their own daughters…
Ocean wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and stood, brushing the dirt from her clothes. She closed her eyes for a moment and took a deep breath of cool, clean air. The clearing within the circle of cars was so silent that there was a faint ringing in her ears, so she cleared her throat and spoke her thoughts aloud.
“I’ve got to do the rite. Mama did it for Daddy. And I have to do it for her. That’s all there is to it.”
She walked across the shelter and felt as if she were moving through a dream. Somehow, her arms and legs didn’t feel as if they were actually connected to her, like she were going through pre-programmed movements that she was powerless to control.
She snaked her index finger through a dark hole in the trunk of an old Cadillac until she felt the little lever dig into her skin. After a slight flex, the trunk popped open with a click, and a musty odor wafted out from the interior. Her father’s things were folded neatly inside, his glasses atop the stack as if he might someday come back to lay claim to them. But I’m not here to think about Daddy… not now.
Reaching into the darkness, her hand closed around cold, smooth metal. She raised it tentatively, surprised at how heavy the slender rod actually was.
“I’ve got to do this.” Even her own voice sounded as if it were coming from someone else, as if there were someone standing just behind her shoulder who narrated her thoughts.
“It’s the right thing to do.”
The trunk closed with a thud and she walked back to her mother’s body. There, she dropped to her knees and placed one palm against the woman’s cheek.
Cold, so cold, people shouldn’t be so cold….
Ocean thought she would just be able to lightly push her mother’s head to the side, that it would roll over slowly and easily. But the muscles had stiffened during the night and she had to put her weight into it. Finally, there was a sound, something between a pop and crackle, and the woman’s head rolled to the left.
Ocean pushed the thin locks of hair away from her mother’s face, revealing the little dip of skin between the corner of her eye and her ear.
She took the tire iron in both hands now and took a deep breath. She held it… counted to three… and then drove the beveled tip down into her mother’s temple. The crunch of the bone seemed to rise up through the metal and tingle her palms. There wasn’t as much blood as she expected, nothing more than a dark sludge that oozed slowly out of the hole.
Ocean practically leaned on the tire iron, driving it deeper into her mother’s head and, when she was satisfied it had gone far enough, gave the entire thing a twist by pulling on the end that was bent at an angle.
“Rest in peace, Mama. Rest in peace.”
Standing, Ocean took a final look around the only place she had ever called home. The rising sun was just beginning to filter through the tarp which usually infused their living area with an almost magical quality. On this morning, everything looked as flat and one dimensional as some of the paintings she’d found scattered through the debris of the city. Whatever had imbued this space with light and emotion had fled during the night, running far, far away from the horrors it had witnessed.
She knew she couldn’t stay here any longer. There were too many memories… too much pain.
“Goodbye, Mama… I… I love you, Daddy.”
She didn’t know where she would go, but there had to be somewhere, out there. Somewhere safe where she could try to put all this behind her. She would take her figurines and the few clothes she owned and make her own way in the world, now. There really was no other choice.
She was just beginning to squirm into the backseat of her room when she paused for a moment. Crawling back out, she ran across the clearing and scooped up the dead rat her mother had dropped the night before.
At least she wouldn’t be hungry. Not for a while, at least.
The rest of the day passed in something of a daze. The once familiar gridwork of streets and landmarks were nothing more than a blur that existed in some fuzzy dimension outside her own body. Ocean was aware that her belly was full and that the greasy taste of rat still lent its tang to her saliva, but other than that, she was numb. She drifted along aimlessly without even the odd voice in her head to keep her company.
Even though it had been left back in the clearing, she could feel the weight of the tire iron in her hand.
By the time the sun had begun its descent in the sky, the first traces of normality had begun to reassert themselves. It started with the slow realization that she had no idea where she was. None of the buildings looked familiar; the faded graffiti on the walls and buildings that still stood were not the recognizable loops and swirls of her childhood… the names of streets on their bent signposts sounded foreign and usual.
But maybe that was for the best, a fresh start, a new area. She’d have to be more careful, of course. She didn’t know all the hiding places in this section of the city, all the secret places that she could scuttle through in an emergency.
The smell hit her, almost as though her thoughts had conjured it into existence, thick and stagnant, forcing its way into her mouth and nostrils, filling every inch of the hollowness she still felt inside.
She could hear them. That shuffling scuffle and scrape. So close.
Her body tensed and the rat seemed to sour within her stomach.
How the hell could she have allowed herself to get so close? Where the hell had her head been?
She turned to run and felt the fear squeeze tightly around her neck… they were there… right behind her.
There looked to be between fifteen to twenty rotters in the pack. They walked forward with a limping gait, stretching out their arms as if they could somehow claw their way to her even more quickly. Hints of bone contrasted with dark, shriveled flesh, somehow looking brittle yet leathery at the same time. One of them had a jagged, gaping hole in its chest and slivers of broken glass jutted out from its face at odd angles. Mummy-like carcasses that had dehydrated slowly in the sun, wheezing with escaping gasses, reaching out while their teeth gnashed and clacked… they stumbled toward her.
Shit.
Ocean spun around. She was still weak, but her rodent breakfast had given her system a shot of protein so maybe she could get away from them and—
Another group of rotters shuffled around the corner, blocking her only path of escape.
You shoulda kept the tire tool, damn it. Why did you drop the tire tool?
The rotters were closing in quickly, tightening the ring about her as Ocean spun in slow circles, hoping to see some chink in their offensive, some way that she could break through the cluster of walking corpses that surrounded her, but there weren’t any.
They were packed so tightly together that by the time she pushed one out of her way, three others would already be grabbing at her shirt and hair. She knew exactly what they would do, she’d seen it countless times before. They way they’d tear into her flesh would make what she did to her mother’s throat look like play acting.
She wanted to scream for help, to shout until it felt like her vocal chords would snap beneath the strain, but that wouldn’t do any good. Even if there was anyone around to hear, they wouldn’t come. They’d stay safe within their hiding places, would remain as silent and still as possible, as they alternately whispered a prayer for the person screaming and gave thanks that it wasn’t them out there.
No… she was on her own, with a pack of rotters rapidly closing in, nowhere to run and nothing to fight with. She was staring Death right in the face, for the second time in as many days, only this time, she really didn’t see a way out of it.
She would die out there on the street; maybe at some point in the future, some little girl would sit and envision pictures from the stains her blood would leave upon the dirty concrete.
Maybe it was what she deserved. She had, after all, killed her own mother hadn’t she? She certainly deserved to be punished for such a horrible act. She’d killed her mother and stole the dead woman’s rat—maybe this was the universe’s way of setting things right.
Ocean closed her eyes, bracing herself for the first touch of rough, decaying flesh, for the first scratch and bite. The first flair of pain.
She readied herself for death.