Out of the Dark (Light & Dark #1) (25 page)

Chapter Twenty-Nine.

#29. Piles of bones should frighten us.

“Lilly,” I whisper against her cherub cheek, placing a soft kiss where my breath touches.

Her mouth hangs open, her head flung back, but when I whisper her name she snorts a little and closes her mouth. Her eyes stay shut, though I think she is waking up, slowly.

“Honeybee,” I whisper, and give her another kiss. I place this one on her forehead, and when I pull back she is smiling, eyes still closed.

Her skin is translucent almost, and I can see the darkness running in her veins along her throat and cheeks. My sweet Lilly. The blackness is spreading quickly. She opens her eyes, and for a moment we are both startled. I see red eyes staring back at me, but they vanish when I blink. I think I must have imagined them but then Lilly looks equally as frightened as I am, and it’s then that I know that she saw the world through blood-tinted glasses like I have done many times.

“It’s okay,” I say, unclipping her belt and pulling her from the seat.

She snuggles against me. Her body is warm and sweaty. She doesn’t let go of the tomato in her hand, but she doesn’t eat it, either, and that’s okay.

“There’s water. We can go wash if you like,” I say against her neck, and I feel her bob her head in a
yes
.

I bang my hip against the door of the truck, closing it, and I start to walk us down to the water. I thread us through the broken path, with the strangled weeds on either side clawing and grasping for purchase at our ankles. We break free of them and I stumble, almost dropping Lilly when I see the piles of bones.

Piles and piles and piles of bones.

Both animal and human and monster. As if we are all one huge surrogate family. The air sticks in my throat and I try to swallow down the wedge that is blocking the air’s passage to my lungs. I feel dizzy for lack of it. Dizzy with fear and dizzy with hunger. Ravenously so. I can smell Lilly, her blood fertile and alight to my taste buds. I pant, my mouth filling with water, barely able to see…

“Mama?”

The balloon snaps and I am me and she is she, and the world is filled with bones again, but I no longer want to add to the piles. I pant and choke on sobs that escape me, gripping Lilly with force.

“I’m okay, I’m okay,” I say to her and to me. “I’m okay.” But I don’t know if I believe myself anymore. I am not okay, I do not have long left. The thought is soul-destroying, heart-breaking, and I feel the depths of who I am shattering inside of me.

I don’t want to die.

We stumble onwards, toward the shore and to the water, ignoring the mounds of bones as if they were merely mounds of sand. Inconsequential, inconvenient, invisible…

I put Lilly down on the muddy earth, her back facing away from the piles of nothing, and her feet sinking ever so slightly into the thick goop of the shore. Then we both sit, feeling the goop sink around our bottoms. It is cold, but I don’t mind. I begin to take off my shoes. Lilly’s laces are knotted too tightly, so I have to help her untie hers. I pull off her worn shoes and see that her socks have a large hole in near the big toe and I say sorry that I don’t have nice socks for her to wear but she only shrugs, unconcerned. I feel bad, though. It’s another stab to my heart. Like I have failed her again because she has holes in her socks.

We slide off our pants and then shrug our T-shirts over our heads. We avoid looking at each other’s bodies, though. There’s no point in seeing that destruction. Not on each other, and not on ourselves.

I stand and take Lilly’s hand, and then she stands, too, and I guide us into the water. It’s cold, chillingly so, and we shiver as the water laps lazily against our broken bodies. I help to wash Lilly, letting the water turn brown with the filth that comes away. I rinse her hair, trying to pull my fingers through her knots. She has nits, and I feel even worse. What kind of mother lets her child get nits? After I have washed her face, I see that her lips have turned a little blue because she is cold, and I tell her to splash around to warm up. I don’t want her to leave the water yet—I think it’s good for her body to be exposed to air and water. We might not ever have this chance again, I think. Because as I scrubbed at Lilly’s back with my hands, I did look at her veins, and in turn, my own.

We don’t have much time left. It’s almost over.

Lilly stands looking confused while I wash myself. Her body trembles from the cool water and the air that licks her. Her fingers flick over the top of the water, unsure as to what to do, and I realize that she doesn’t know how to splash and play in water, not deep water like this, because she never has before, and my stomach hurts with the realization that she has never swum in the ocean.

I finish washing, rinsing my own hair in the water, and then I turn to Lilly. Her wide brown eyes stare back at me blankly, her lips a soft blue, her skin pale but for the black lines criss-crossing over her skin. I smile. It’s hard and hurts my cheeks to do it, but I do it regardless. Then I flick some water at her and she gasps, her mouth opening in a large
O
. I flick her again, making sure the water splashes her face this time. She gasps again and looks down at the water, at her hands grazing the tops of it, and then she flicks me back.

The water hits me in a series of cold drops, and I raise my hands up to block them. I look between my fingers and see that she is smiling too. Her eyes have a little life back in them, and I can see her teeth because her smile is wide. She flicks me again and giggles, and then I flick her back, and before I know it we are both throwing water at one another and laughing and smiling until our bellies hurt.

Lilly comes forward and throws her little body at mine, her chest still rising and falling with laughter.

“I don’t want to die, mama.” She whispers against my cold skin.

I hug her tighter. “I know, neither do I,” I kiss the top of her head, her hair damp against my lips, “we can sleep soon and forget this all happened.”

“Promise?”

“I promise,” I reply.

I don’t know how I should feel about that. Happy that this will all be over soon, or sad that this will all be over soon. I wonder, for a moment, if we will be together when this is over, or if we will each be with our respective families. Up until now, I did not believe in heaven, or anything else after this life, but right now, as my arms are tight around Lilly’s frail body, I hope and wish and pray that there is something afterwards.

I want to see my family again.

And Lilly, because she is a part of me now. Forever.

Her hands are cold so I pluck her out of the water and kiss the top of her damp head again, and then I carry us from the water back to the shore.

I help Lilly dress first, forgoing my own needs for hers, like I always do. Like a mother should. When she is dry, huddled with her knees to her chest and a smile still on her face, I finally get dressed, sliding my dirty clothes back on my semi-clean body. I kneel behind her and thread my fingers through her curls, separating each one until there are no more knots. We keep our backs to the piles of bones and move further down the shore, and we take long drinks of the water until we are both sated.

“My belly feels swishy,” Lilly says, her voice a whisper.

“Mine too,” I say and smile.

She doesn’t smile, but she does take my hand, and I feel her warmth thread through her fingertips and wrap around me. Her cheeks have a little rosiness back to them, her curls are drying and they bounce lightly when she walks, her lips are no longer blue but a soft pink, and her eyes have their spark back in them. I feel happy that she looks like my Lilly again. Like a little girl. Right now, in this moment, we are mother and daughter walking along the beach.

We walk back along the overgrown path, back toward the truck, and when we get there I help Lilly inside it, buckling her back into her seat. I grab some of the fruit and vegetables from the plants in the back, and then I sit next to her and we eat with the windows open, the sound of the water hanging all around us and the fresh air cleaning out our smoke-damaged lungs.

The tomatoes are incredibly juicy and I moan when I bite into one, my mouth salivating, desperate for more. I swallow it down, almost certain that I can hear the fruit hit my stomach with a resounding
splat
. I look over at Lilly every now and then, watching her eat with gusto, biting carrots and tomatoes, eating beans and lettuce. Her eyes begin to get heavy again, and I smile and tell her to go to sleep.

When she’s snoring softly I get back out of the truck and slide myself up onto the hood, and I smoke my very last cigarette. It seems fitting to smoke the last one now. We are clean, and fed and watered, she is happy—she even laughed today. I feel something that might be happiness. So yes, I smoke my last cigarette to finish off the brilliance of this day. I do not think about Peter or Mary, or the monsters that are chasing us. I decide that if today can be this good, then tomorrow could be even better. That tomorrow we could find the safe spot on the map and they would open their doors to us, and we wouldn’t need to run and hide any longer. I decide that the people there will be good and true, that I can trust them. I pretend that I don’t have a haze of red blanketing my vision right now, and that it isn’t nearly time for me to die. That the tomatoes were really good, and that I didn’t crave Lilly’s blood the entire time I was eating, and that I can’t hear her little heart thumping in her chest, slow and melodic. The sound soothes me; it reminds me that she is still alive and there is still a reason to keeping on living myself, to keep on fighting.

I pretend, and I force myself to hold on. Because I have to. Because that’s what mothers do. I am Lilly’s mother and I will protect her until I can’t.

I fall asleep on the hood of the truck, the sun warm on my face and body, my blood pumping languidly through my dying veins. I sleep, but I don’t dream of anything. I feel content in my sleep, I know this, even with the lack of dreams.

*

When I wake, I see that the sun is beginning to fall and the sky is becoming darker. Rain is coming, making the daylight fade faster than it should. My heart stills for a fraction, my ears pricking and searching the world for the first wicked screams of the monsters. It’s still quiet though, barring the crack of the storm brewing somewhere in the distance. I am panicked, frozen in fear because I fell asleep and I have slept for far too long.

The first screams pierce the sky like a balloon exploding. It is sudden and loud, startling me enough that my body jumps and I slide a little off the hood. I sit up, finally free of my terror-filled stupor, and I jump down from the truck, glancing in to see Lilly’s brown eyes staring back at me. Her face is blank, her eyes a bloodshot pink like I know mine are. She is frightened, and that forces me to move, to conquer and move past my own fear.

“It’s okay,” I say as the first drops of rain begin to fall.

I tip my face up to the sky, letting the drips splat on my hot skin. I dart my tongue out, flicking it across my parched lips, and then I look back in at Lilly. She is still watching me, her eyebrows pinched together. Another scream echoes out to us, and I know she feels it too, though possibly not as strongly as me…the pull. The pull of the scream. My heart constricts, wanting more of the scream, my body feeling the tug of the call.

I swallow, knowing that they are coming, that they are searching for us right now. They can feel us like we can feel them. I can almost hear their panting thoughts as they hunt us down. And they are close because I didn’t drive us far enough away. I didn’t put enough distance between us and them. Instead I slept, in the sun, letting my happiness kill us both.

The next scream is so loud it chills my blood. The rain is coming down harder and plastering my hair to my face, and I sob because I’m stupid and they are here. My breaths are coming too quickly for me to keep up with, and I feel dizzy and sick from it.

“Mama!” Lilly screams.

Her face is panicked, and I know—as my mouth fills with blood, as I feel the pinch of too-long nails and deformed toes in my boots—that I am almost gone. I shake my head, as if dazed and needing to escape from the cage in which I am trapped, and I run around to my side of the truck just as the first monster charges out of the trees. I drag the driver’s door open and jump in, slamming the door shut behind me. With a scream of agonizing pain I force the door back open and release my now broken hand, and then I slam the door closed again, clutching my crushed and bloody fingers to my chest as I cry loudly.

“Mama, Mama, Mama!” Lilly calls my name over and over as we are surrounded by red, glowing eyes and angry screeches. “Please Mama!” She begs and begs, but I can’t stop shaking, can’t stop the red and black blood from dripping from my crushed fingers.

A monster slaps my window with its own deformed hand, and I look at it and see the pearl necklace hanging at its throat. It snaps its teeth at me, looking almost gleeful, which is peculiar as I’ve never seen any expression other than anger and hate on their twisted and bony faces. I reach across my own body and turn the key with my left hand, and try to grip the wheel with my right hand while I change gears with my left, but it hurts so much.

“Lilly, I need you to help me,” I say, my voice sounding far away, like I’ve been swallowed under water. I am almost not me.