Mother's sin

The sign once red Top-To-Bottom, but three of the letters were missing and those that were left flickered on and off slower than car blinkers. Its windows had been replaced by slabs of wood rowed atop one another. Beyond the metal enforced door was a skimp light barely strong enough to show the racks of sprawled children’s clothes. Out through the door she came.

She was no older than eleven years old, and along with that innocence was a sense of carefreeness in the form of skips and melodies blown through her pinched lips and twisted tongue, while the glass beneath her feet were the instruments that backed her blowing songs. She wore a white dress free of any marks exempt for a missing sleeve which was most likely from the result of a tussle of tug-and-war.

She stopped near escalators that were now simply petrified metal stairs that housed seemingly one piece of furniture from each of the dozens of surrounding stores both upstairs and down. Her ears flickered to a sound down the hall to the right of the escalator, past barricades built to guard stores like trenches. Through her lightness and petite, she climbed and crawled through the many barriers until the sound she was after narrowed down to a single door.

What was left of the room made it difficult to know what the store once sold, but with the number of bodies dressed in swat gear littered across the floor, a funeral home would make the most sense. The young girl scanned through the many lifeless faces until she found one that expelled the feeble air that was the charm to the girl’s ears.

“Yo-You!” said the downed man. He had his back to the wall and legs that extended toward the door. Blood trickled down his face and onto an armor collar that covered all that was between his chin and shoulders. His helmet was near where he sat, and so too was his assault rifle amongst dozens of shells that’d been spat from the gun’s warm mouth.

The man felt the sharpest pain when a weighted item fell on his ribs. When he looked down, he saw that the young girl was hugging at his side like any daughter would her father.

“Tell me something,” the young girl said.

“Wh-What about?”

“Your mother. You can start wherever you’d like.”

“I’m dying.”

“You choose to start there, with your mother’s death?”

“No… it’s me who’s-“

“I know what you mean. I simply speak in jest, in kinship, hoping my courtesy will be returned.”

“What courtesy? What do you know of that word!?”

“A lot.”

“Really? How many have died because of you-?” he coughed.

“How many have lived?”

“None!”

“None? What do you call this, then?”

“Hell…”

“Hell?”

“How many times have you heard of that place? In how many different renditions of people condemned you to it, in how many different civilizations and languages?”

The young girl smiled. It was once of crooked lips while trying her best to keep it straight. She soon gave up on the gesture and returned her head to the man’s shoulder, causing a world of pain that she ignored.

“What was the first thing she said to you?”

“Wh-What?”

“Your mother.”

“I wouldn’t know. Our senses aren’t like yours. We don’t hear for blocks or smell for miles or keep memories for centuries. We are just…” the man winced in pain.

“Did she send you here?”

“She… no. It was my decision to come.”

“She had no say?”

“Not really. I felt it a duty to…” the man’s fingers flirted with the rifle handle on the ground.

“I asked her her opinion on joining this task force, yes, but my mind was made once he died. My brother-“

“Would she take your place?”

“I-I assume she would.”

“Then why isn’t she here?”

“My mother’s an old woman. She would stand no chance-“ the man stopped himself to a slight smirk on the young girl’s face.

“Then why do you keep coming?”

“To reclaim our city.”

“To die for fathers who deem you all expendable.”

“Is that your beef then? The men who call the shots?”

“No. I have no beef at all. I simply exist. It’s your side who wants me gone.”

“You are unnatural…” the man tried catching the word with the edge of his tongue, but the tongue was too slippery to hold.

“Am I? I am no different from you. No different from your mother.”

“You would have come here in place of your child to fight to kill something that has proven for years it will not die?”

The young girl sprung to her feet with the urgency of a prairie-dog. “They come… The children.”

“Th-The desperate ones…”

“You’ve made them this way. You and your fathers.”

“Us!? It’s you who turned them on the city – dogs without leashes, eating as they please. You allow them to run through the food supplies – people – like they were nothin’, fighting over blood like savages, creatin’ more of yourselves to vie for food that would inevitably run out.”

“And now you’ve spoiled yourselves with this putrid injected blood that sickens them from just a taste. You wear armors to protect the spots where the blood tastes its best.”

“Like I said, it’s a fight to win our city back.”

“Are you so sure that is what your fathers want? They can blow it all up in hopes of killing that which has proven unkillable; that’s never been a solution off their tables before, until now. Perhaps they don’t want the unkillable to die.”

The sounds of metal clanging like rain beating at a rooftop sounds through the door.

“Death is near now,” said the man. “Ma-make me proud. That’s the last thing I heard her say.”

“Your mother?” the young girl said with a reinvigorated surprise.

“She said we were like a chain, a link connected by the heart of those willing to let us leave to this fight against evil. The information we’ve passed to each other through our sacrifice has revealed much about your weaknesses. The toxic blood injection, the armor, not that they affect you since your thirst has simmered throughout the decades, but the desperates. My mother wished a better death than them.”

“Did she wish for me?”

“Perhaps. As long as I went out with a fight.”

The man’s finger reached rifle, and with his last strength her brought the gun to his chest and pulled. Sparks lit the store from outside. A few seconds later the noise was over. In came a new sound – a stampeded of two dozen men and women, all with pale skin and stalagmite teeth on each side of their mouths. The “desperates”.

The desperates shot through the door like bulls with riders on top, but at the sign of the young girl kneeling with her back to them, they halted like trained horses to a jockey’s pull.

“Mo-mother,” one of the desperates said.

“Is he still warm?”

“Is there anything left in him?”

“Just a bite.”

“A simple taste will satisfy me.”

“Nothing will satisfy you, you filthy fiend.”

“You’re in no position for name-calling. Iv’e watched you eat an entire family without sharing a drop.”

“He’s gone,” the young girl said. “Useless to you all.”

“How useless?”

“Spoiled.”

“I… I do not care how spoiled, as long as he’s still warm.” One of the desperates said. He leapt through the crowd and slid to the newly dead man’s neck. Where there once were armor plates, the man’s neck was bare but red and wrinkled thin with small fingerprints around it smooching the skin as though it was made of wet clay.

The desperates bit into the neck. Blood spewed onto his tongue. He sucked until his eyes went red. He coughed and heaved, blood flowing from his nose and mouth. He fell on his back and seizure until his body went stiff.

“He’s gone,” said the swat team leader. He was perched in a building with a split down the middle like a slice in a cake, and a large circular hole at the top of the roof. In his hand was a walkie-talkie with a green light constant. A red light was on the other end, it belonging to the walkie-talkie to the man who’d just died to the hands of the young girl.

“What’s this thing about mothers now?” the swat leader asked. None of his crew mates knew.

“Fool,” said one of the desperates.

“Mo-Mother?” said another as the young girl pressed through a line in the crowd. “What next? How can we survive when we cannot feed?”

They were all emaciated to the point where their ribs latched to the skin. Cheeks were curved in indented. Eyes were weak and blackened. Their hair was thin and shaving on their own.

“What happens now!?” one of the desperates roared.

“I’ll be a mother.”

“You’ve tried that for long. Tried everything you could, but until they start sending unspoiled, warm bodies in here, all except you will die.”

“I’ll try one last thing,” the young girl said as she left.

The desperates looked to each other and decided to follow.

They walked through empty streets with cars rolled to their sides, heads and atop other cars. Buildings wore scars like tattoos, most without lights and others with slow flickers on the verge of losing life for good. Bodies hung on lampposts, some rotten in cars, some in alleys frozen with their children in hands as their final moments. Uniforms hung like flags, most with badges on them, and blood stains on the pads that strapped around shoulders.

Behind the young girl was her hundreds of ducklings a few paces behind her destined steps.

“Mo-mother, we’re nearly out of time. How much farther will you go?”

The young girl said nothing.

One of the desperates stopped. “That’s too far.”

One by one, pairs of feet slowed to a halt.

“Mother!” they all yelled at once.

“Find cover!”

“We have company!” one of the swat crewmen said. Through his binoculars he spotted the group outside the building. “She found us already?”

His leader took over the binoculars. “Pretty sure she always knew we were here. But… what is she doing?” he looked over his shoulder to a sun on its way from the depths of the earth. “Is she-”

“A mother,” said the young girl. “I thought I gave them all a life, but… what life is this?” she looked to the desperates scampering to find cover from the growing light.

“We have to stop her!” the swat leader said.

“How!? We have no time to get down there!”

“We have to or it’s our ass!”

“What can we do!?”

“I see now after so long… so, so long,” the young girl said. “I introduce them to life to have them live in a world to ruins them. All the mothers, all the same. I cannot watch them die another day. I will spare them from this… hell, while encouraging them to find their way. The only way… That makes them the monster then. More monster than myself, those who are not here in their son’s place. For I am more mother than them in my ability to right my wrong, breaking this chain that I am.”

The sun lit the young girl’s skin. She did not scream as the sun touched all of her. The squad leader let out the most howling of all yells, while the radios in the building all shared with similar voices.

The young girl turned to nothing in the matter of seconds. Ashes blew with the first morning breeze. On the floor the sun shined through the building’s shadow, forming a light on the ground where the once girl was of a heart shape connected by shadowed links.