This was last spring, and although the flashbacks and what (I hope) are only nightmares still plague me, I think I can finally write something that is semi-coherent without screaming. I will be drinking throughout. I still can’t dive into these memories without it. There are things that therapy will never fix.
The fine ash floated from the sky as she sat cross-legged in the damp moss beneath the gnarled dead oak, frozen, like a cold marble statue. Unmoving even to blink, her chest lay still, if she continued to breathe there seemed to be no visual sign of it. Her waist-length white-streaked auburn hair hung in greasy plaits over her tiny, hunched frame, partially obscuring her vivid green eyes. Those piercing eyes, that usually bored into your soul were glazed with catatonia as she stared into the distance, deep into nothing. Yet something in her expression was exploding with activity. A terrifying electricity pulsing beneath her petrified form.
I was reminded of dances in the school gymnasium, walking through that long, cool dimly lit hallway to the two massive, closed double doors. Hearing the barely controlled chaos of hundreds of middle school students chattering and giggly dramatically over the cheery pop music pumping through the crackling, aging sound system. Standing outside those doors felt surreal, but safe, as if all of those disjointed sounds were swirling and bounding around the room. Plucking all of the body heat and flashing lights, mixing it with the pungent odor of sweaty, barely-pubescent hormone-filled bodies generously coated in Axe body spray and cheap perfume and combining it all into one enormous, hot, wild, smelly and cacophonous entity, that was trapped inside. Bouncing off the high glass block windows, down to the overly polished wood floor, up to the exposed steel rafters, over to the accordioned bleachers and screaming towards the other side of the door, desperate to be freed. An invisible living thing pounding, pulsing, throbbing, swelling against the metal reinforced fire doors, desperately waiting to envelope me.
I hated opening that door, the assault on my senses, too many lights, too many sounds, too many scents, too much of everything all at once. And as much as I hated the memory of that initial blast of sense-raping overstimulation, I knew that the torrent of information she would unleash once she was freed from her suspended state would make openings those doors seem like a welcome warm breeze on a cool summer day.
We called her Eve. She couldn’t remember her name, but she thought maybe it had been Evelyn or Evangeline or something similar in her “before life”, or maybe those were names of people she knew, or just names she liked she wasn’t sure. She didn’t talk much, either about her before life, or her current one. If you wanted to learn more about her you had to be constantly vigilant for short snippets of memories and brief comments that were peppered randomly throughout her long rambling sermons. If you later asked follow-up questions, or even mentioned something vaguely personal she had said, she would stare at you as if you just started randomly speaking ancient Elamite.
Although, after knowing her over the past weeks, I would half expect her to respond in kind.
It was disconcerting how much Eve knew and how much she didn’t.
She also didn’t know her age, and looking at her, it could not easily be estimated. Her tiny frame, all of 5 feet and 90 pounds on a good day, gave the impression of a pre-teen, neither obviously male nor female yet. The white streaks in her hair could be chalked up to recent traumas she vaguely alluded to, as were the scars, but her face was fresh and unlined aside from the deep creases between her eyebrows. Her deep-set eyes drooped with the seeming weight of centuries of life lived. She was quick and lithe like a cat when necessary, yet generally she carried herself with the slow and slightly hunched fragility of an octogenarian worried about breaking another hip.
When I met Eve I didn’t even mentally assign her a gender for there was nothing in her appearance that leaned to one. It was a week into knowing her before she let slip the first of the Evelyn / Evangeline comments and another week before Gus accidentally called her Eve, and although she looked confused, she also looked pleased. As if the soft mist of a pleasant memory briefly flitted through her mind and settled on her face,
She would also occasionally mumble song lyrics that we couldn’t quite place but recognized them as long before our time. Eve never actually sang the words, but spoke them in a tempo that implied an accompanying tune. One of the most frequent, and haunting, mentioned running and it being too hard living, but afraid to die, but it was the way she spoke what I believed to be the chorus that sent chills up my spine every time. The way her voice would deepen slightly, her eyes would stare, clouded with a malice we didn’t understand and the way the corners of her mouth would show her unnaturally shaped canines as if toying with a devious smile.
“It’s been a long, a looong time coming, but I know, a change is gonna come…Ohhhh, yes. It. Will.”
The song felt so familiar to me at the time, yet I couldn’t place it. Maybe it was the lack of a tune, or her ominous delivery but it always felt….wrong. Like she was attributing a darker meaning to something beautiful, akin to a demented serial killer forcing a spoonful of arsenic down someone throat while dead-panning the usually jaunty line “just a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down”.
I wish she wouldn’t “sing” it quietly at night.
There were four of us in the group at that time, aside from Eve. All watching not only her, but also the tree line surrounding the small clearing we found ourselves in when she dropped and went silent. Both the creatures and the staff of the facility had been after her since the beginning, she was the only thing protecting us from our human pursuers, they needed her. But, she was also the main thing endangering us from the creatures.
They hungered for her.
Gus was pacing manically, Eve made him nervous as hell, which he tried hard to cover with jokes, but his eyes always betrayed him. He rarely had any jokes when she was like this, just a silent bundle of raw nerves waiting for the other show to drop. Gus had been part time security at the facility, he didn’t know or care what he was protecting or who he was protecting it from, just a guy working for a paycheck and hoping for full time hours so he could replace his “POS truck”. Although I never understood why. Once you worked at the facility it’s not like you had anywhere you could go.
Janaya had been one of the supervisors in payroll and was a self-described “by-the-book-bitch”. She stood rigidly, scanning the area like a sniper on patrol. She mumbled the occasional curse under her breath, and, as always, looked visibly irritated by the whole thing, and life in-general probably. She didn’t like anything that would deviate from the mission, which was currently shelter, and she especially didn’t like being in a fairly open area. It was clear that if she thought she could get away with it, she would snatch Eve by her hair and drag her off to a more protected area, like a caveman with a prize kill.
Unlike Gus and Janaya, Tiana and I were sitting back-to-back, thankful to be on a small parcel of dry land and for the break from wading through the cold desolate marshes that wove together the many lakes and rivers of the Northern Minnesota / Southern Canadian border. I had a memory of my Grandpa warning check for leeches and ticks you have no idea the areas they can get into! I waived off the memory as it seemed pointless when we had no idea how much more shit we had to muck through before we set camp for the night, and saying that is playing fast and loose with the word “camp”.
Tiana had been with Eve slightly longer than the rest of us. She didn’t talk much, but said she and Eve had been in adjoining areas of their building when it all started going to shit, and they found each other in the woods almost immediately. The rest of us held out for another few days before also fleeing into the woods and eventually banding together.
I met Tiana and Eve about three weeks ago, just a day after I escaped. I found a long abandoned out-building while looking for a dry place to hole up out of the rain, but they had beat me to the punch with this pathetic piece of real estate that was barely fit to properly protect a shovel from the elements. Eve never said a word, just stared through me while Tiana listened and waited, white knuckling a rusty old axe and sizing me up. I waited for her to plant that axe into my forehead as I stammered that I had just barely gotten out, I didn’t know what was going on, I wasn’t one of them, I just wanted to get far away and need a few hours of rest out of the cold spring rain. After about 15 minutes of my ramblings and Tiana’s silent glare, Eve finally curled into a little ball in the corner and closed her eyes. That was when Tiana ushered me in to share their four walls without saying a word. I had no idea what to think of the whole exchange, but I was anxious for the rain to let up so I could move on, away from this odd pair. My initial impression of them that night was of a fierce Amazon warrior and her simple-minded feral pet.
I never was a good judge of character.
A deep, rattling sigh followed by the soft thump of Eve’s head landing on a moss-covered tree root as she crumpled to the ground immediately broke us out of our individual reveries, Tiana and I were up in a flash, quickly moving to scoop Eve up to jointly carry her along between the two of us, led by Janaya with Gus to the rear. As a group we dove headlong into the dense stand of old spruce to the North of us, moving as quickly and quietly as possible, fervently searching for a place to shield ourselves from the eyes.
Just because we couldn’t see or hear them didn’t mean they weren’t nearby, and we needed to move to a more protected position as quickly as possible. Eve would come to soon, and we had to be ready.