Humbirds

Today is Elden’s eleventh birthday. He wants to find a cake or shoot a gun - whichever comes first. He stands before the threshold of the MiniMart at a tall-for-his-age 4 feet and 8 inches, an old snubbie sweaty at his hip. Though he’s held it close for months now, he’s never used it. How lucky he is, he thinks, to be such a coward. To spend ten years alive like this. And what will Eleven be? Another year of childhood; of holding his breath, all tucked away in corners, praying that whatever’s in the room with him would pass right by? Or will he man up this year, stare the creatures in the face, pull the trigger?

He remembers his daddy’s words. “Right between the eyes,” he’d say, tapping two fingers at the hollow space between his brows. “Else they don’t die.”

It’s a wild, windy heat outside. Summer has snuck in like a mischievous child. It’s been years since Elden saw the end of the world; months since he saw his daddy dead on the ground in Wildwood; weeks since he’s seen any other person at all. An alive one, that is. He thinks he’s in Georgia now - never saw a sign but he noticed the license plates of the cars, all left messily along the sides of the highways, their paint peeling like big blisters in the sunlight.

The air is too thick to breathe in, so Elden sweats into a bandana tied around his face. His hair kicks out in wet duck tails around the nape of his neck. He tries hard to mimic his daddy’s gait now, pushing against the door and stepping brazenly into the MiniMart. He holds his breath once he’s fully inside, keen as he can be to any movement or sound. Nothing, yet.

The floor before him is covered in empty cartons and packages, a dried red patch at the foot of the cash register. He checks the other rooms slowly: a small office area, the bathroom and its stalls, even the pocket that once housed the bags of ice. The whole building is still.

Until it isn’t. Just minutes after Elden has begun rummaging through the containers for any remaining food, there’s the snap of a door opening. Elden’s whole body flushes with fear in an instant, dropping down beneath the front counter. His knees smack the tile so hard he fears he’s broken them. Plucking the revolver from his waistband, he peeks around the side of the counter to see the office door, swung open at the hinges like a fractured jaw. And it’s in place: a girl.

She’s small, blonde, unthreatening to the naked eye. But he won’t take any chances.

“Hello?” he yells at her, less like a question and more like an accusation.

They’re maybe ten feet apart, a sea of trash separating the two. Elden has his arms outstretched, both hands tight around the pistol, shaking so hard it would be laughable to even try and shoot it. The girl is ghost-like, dressed in a tattered white nightgown and big brown eyes. Elden can’t see her feet from where he stands, behind the counter, but he pictures them in old Mary Janes, floating above the floor.

The girl is quiet, unflinching. Her glassy eyes look straight through him.

Elden swallows. “I’ll shoot you if you don’t say something.”

She doesn’t. Instead, she cocks her head just slightly to the side, like a dog desperate to understand. Elden sets his jaw. He can’t remember the last time he saw a kid like him. In all fairness, she doesn't look like a kid like him, but she’s not trying to kill him, either. It doesn’t make sense.

“Can you hear me?” he asks. He’s like her now; desperate to understand.

The girl blinks, slowly starts to pull up an arm. When it’s fully outstretched, a necklace unravels from inside her fist, sways and then stills.

Elden thinks he should shoot her. Wouldn’t it be easy? Isn’t this what he’s waited for? If she’s not human, she deserves it.

But he doesn’t. Instead, he moves to the side of the counter and starts to slowly close the gap between them. He swears it takes him ten, maybe fifteen minutes to get to her.

Up close, the girl is hard to look at. Her eyes have sunken deep into her sockets, the cliff of her brow casting them into two starless blackholes. He can see the veins beneath her skin, all purple and green. She looks bruised, beaten. A crater of a welt sits snugly into the pocket above her collarbone, peaks out from beneath her dress just enough to sicken him. She is almost unrecognizable as a little girl. Yet, something about her feels familiar to Elden.

“Are you… alive?” he whispers.

Briefly, he recalls an incident his dad told him about at their last camp, the one just before Wildwood. There was a young boy chained up in the basement of a house there. His dad said the boy whimpered to be released the same way anyone would, but there was something off about him.

“Seemed delusional,” he had said, “Violent, almost. Ain’t look right.”

“Think he got bit?” Elden asked. His dad just shrugged.

He had left the boy there. Cowardice runs in the family, maybe.

“Me,” the girl says finally. The word comes out guttural and raspy, like it’s been stuck in her mouth for years. Her eyes flick from his face to the locket she holds, still outstretched and dangling.

Elden lowers the gun but keeps it flush to his side, his finger always hovering over the trigger. He takes the locket from her. It’s gold, heart-shaped, and rusted around the edges. He picks absently at the slit with a thumbnail.

“You,” the girl says. Her voice has gained some confidence now.

Elden’s nervous to take his eyes off of her but he does anyway, glancing into the locket. Inside are two tiny, sepia-toned photos of two kids. One looks like her, younger, from before, though it’s hard to tell exactly. She has the same hair, eyes, skin so pale it reflects the sunlight like a sheet of metal. The other looks like him.

In the photo, he’s maybe five-years old, dressed in a light-colored button-up. He’s sat criss-cross on the ground, a tuft of grass peeking out in his outstretched fist. A toothy smile on his face. At the sight of it, the boulder in him is made soft, if just for a moment.

A memory is exhumed from somewhere deep in his brain. He remembers now. It’s Easter morning, just after church. His mom and dad spent forever talking to their friends out in the courtyard before they all left for brunch. Elden and Maggie, always too energetic, would see who could climb the furthest up the trees before their mom would see. She’d call them her little humbirds, tug them down, and sit their butts in the grass. It was this way every year, actually, until it wasn’t.

He looks back up at the girl, tears running already. “Maggie?” he says, hoarse.

Unearthing the memory of his baby sister has winded him, made him nauseous almost.

Her eyes darken.

“You...left...me,” she says. It seems to take a lot out of her to say it, move her lips and tongue the right ways to form the right sounds. It takes a lot out of Elden to hear it.

“We thought you were dead,” he says. He’s full-on sobbing now, snot bubbling from his nose. “I saw it bite you,” he continues. Gasps escape his mouth as he tries to compose himself. “Dad said you were-”

He’s interrupted when Maggie jerks towards him, an elbow connecting hard with his jaw. His body lurches around and he stumbles, losing his footing. His knees cave in. The gun slips from his grip and clatters to the floor, sweeping across the tile until it collides with the wall. Maggie crawls atop him in an instant. Her sharp nails scratch their way through the skin of his arms.

Elden squirms under her weight. Atop him like this, she feels heavy as a sack of cinderblocks. She has his legs pinned beneath her knees and his torso stapled to the ground. With her face mere inches from his own, he steals a glance at her. She’s disgusting up close, her mouth all bloody and frothing. He can’t breathe around her putrid stench.

“You left me,” she says again. There’s a filthy film of mucus covering her yellow teeth and as she writhes, a big glob drips onto Elden’s cheek.

Time stills for a moment. Elden thinks of his father; the way he lived beside a whisky bottle, how he prayed every night to be a better man tomorrow. The way Elden watched the light leave his eyes, that exhausting day, the old snub-nosed curled closely to his chest.

Elden wonders if Maggie knows today is his birthday.

Probably not.

In a rush of adrenaline, he pushes hard on Maggie’s shoulders, sending her off of him long enough to crawl his way towards the gun. But Maggie’s there in a second, tackling him again. They somersault around each other, wrestling like they would six years ago. Maggie closes her own fist around Elden’s, the revolver buried deep beneath their tangled fingers.

It’s all going too fast and nastily to tell who has it or where it’s pointing when it goes off. The gasp of the gun silences the world instantly. The two of them freeze. Elden shuts his eyes tight, terrified for the rush of the sting.

But it doesn’t come. When he opens his eyes again, he sees a gaping hole pierced through Maggie’s left shoulder, like someone’s pressed clean through her skin with a cookie-cutter.

“Maggie?” he says, quietly. His ears are ringing so loud he can’t hear himself speak.

He watches as Maggie’s limbs go limp, stunned. She falls to the floor at his side, her body reduced to doll parts.

Today is Elden’s twelfth birthday. He longs for a quieter, easier year than Eleven. This time last year he yearned so badly to grow up. Now he’d kill to go back.

He steps up to the door of the MiniMart, sticks a key in the big lock at the handle, turns it until it clicks.

“No cake,” he says, shutting the door behind him. The familiar stench of rotting flesh enters his nostrils, swirls like moist dog breath between his temples.

“But I did find a peach tree in someone’s backyard. I guess they’re in season.”

He pulls a different key from his pocket and unlocks the office door now. He flicks on a flashlight, shines it deep into the room. The beam falls on Maggie, hunched over and broken-looking, her ankle chained to a beam in the middle of the room. Her skin is more yellow now than purple. It keeps rotting away no matter what Elden feeds her.

In the light, Maggie screeches, lunges towards him with no regard to the lock clasped around her ankle. Elden swears he can hear her bone snap from the force of it.

He swallows hard, tossing a peach inside the dark room. Maggie stops struggling long enough to tear into the fruit, devouring it, pit and all, in less than ten seconds. Elden reaches into his pocket, runs his fingers over the metal of the locket like it can help him. He takes a few steps towards Maggie now, stops just out of her reach.

“I love you, Maggie,” he says. “I’m sorry.”

Slowly, he takes the snubbie from his waistband, pulls back the hammer, points it between her eyes.

He dares himself not to cry, takes another second to look at her. Her gaze is wild, unforgiving. There’s no semblance of who she once was.

Who either of them were.

He closes his eyes. He pulls the trigger.