Page 5 of Calico Descending

With her pants torn away, my mother’s leg is completely exposed and already crawling with small flies. Taking her flayed ankle in hand, I go to drag her toward the nearby grave, but pause at a tearing sound. Before I realize what it is, I’m holding my mother’s torn limb in hand. Stringing meat and bone dangle from my grasp, the sight of which makes me light headed.

Another round of bile fizzes in my throat, but I set the back of my hand to my mouth to cap it, swallowing past the lump, and toss her leg into the grave. Instead of dragging again, I fall to the ground beside her, setting my hands against the most flesh-covered parts of her body, and push her across the dirt. Most of her face is eaten away, and only one eyeball remains intact, a visual that’ll haunt me for the rest of my life.

Over the edge of the hole, her body crumples into the grave, and palms plastered to the ground, I clamp my eyes shut, not wanting to look at her disheveled body carelessly tossed away. Not my mother. The woman who held me all hours of the night, when I came down with a fever. Those same arms carried my sister and I across harsh desert terrain, with little food, or water, when we were young. The same woman who held off three Ragers with nothing more than a shovel, to ensure my sister and I could scale the fence as we fled our hive.

“I’m sorry, Momma,” I whisper, grabbing the street sign from beside the hole.

With weakened muscles, I push the dirt to cover her, feeling relieved when I can no longer see her body. This is when Bryani finally comes to stand beside me, and kneels down at her grave. She presses the beads of the bracelet into the soft dirt, in the shape of a cross, over her grave.

“Why did she do it?” she asks, her voice thick with tears. “Why did she think she would live?”

“She wasn’t right, Bree. They get loopy when they’re first bitten. Remember Sanchez?”

He was an old man who fixed things in our hive. He built traps around our camp to keep the Ragers out. One night, he stumbled through the camp, talking jibberish, and attacked a man from our hunting party. Members of the hive managed to subdue him, and that’s when they found two bite marks on his arm. They took him out past the hive, to the open desert, and returned without him. I’m pretty sure Sanchez is the reason our hive was raided, though. When he died, no one bothered to build new traps.

“Sanchez was crazy, anyway.”

“Maybe so, but he’d never have attacked anyone.” With a sigh, I stare down at my mother’s grave, still feeling lightheaded. It hasn’t yet fully hit me that she’s gone. It will, when the shock wears away, and the memories begin pouring in. For now, I need to put as many miles between me and this grave as I can, because when the pain finally catches up to me, I know it’ll crush the life right out of me. “Are you ready now?”

Wiping away the tears, she nods and places a hand on Momma’s grave. “Faith, hope and love.” My mother was always religious, but not overly so. She believed in God as much as she needed to, and taught us the Bible in a way that didn’t make us resentful.

As a nurse, before the Dredge hit, her beliefs had always been rooted in science, but she somehow made room for the idea of Creation. In her eyes, the Dredge was God’s punishment for all of us being so stupid. For letting politicians decide what mattered most in the world. For society losing sight of things that were right under their noses, while they were busy posting pictures of themselves. Selfies is the term my mother always used. Bryani and I used to laugh at the visuals she planted in our heads, of people stopping to take pictures of themselves besides various things. Dangerous things. Like a man who apparently took a picture beside a Rager early on in the outbreak, and had half his face bitten off. He didn’t bother to post the image, because he died immediately, but according to my mother, about ten versions of the tragedy, recorded by nearby witnesses, hit what she referred to as the Internet--another concept I can’t fully grasp.

Life before the Dredge is one I don’t know, so for me, this is merely evolution. Finally getting knocked off the top of the food chain by a bigger predator. In our world, it’s kill, or be killed. There’s no time to take pictures.

Swiping up my pack from the ground, I note the position of the sun in the sky. I grab a fallen tree branch, about three feet in length, and mark it’s shadow in the dirt, labeling each side west and east. “We keep the sun at our backs,” I tell Bryani.

“What if the other hives won’t take us?”

Her concern isn’t unfounded. It’s dangerous to approach another hive, as quite a few will kill on sight, especially those who’ve spent too much time out in the Deadlands. It’s not just the other hives, either. Marauders, too, comb the desert, for women, in particular, because women happen to be in short supply these days, thanks to Ragers, who capture, rape and ultimately kill them. It’s why the horde came after the three of us. Three women roaming the desert is about as dangerous as my mother throwing herself to the Ragers the night before.

“Then we keep going, until we find one that will.”

Chapter 4

Present day

Female subjects are assigned Champions with whom they are compatible. And compatible apparently means: the Champion didn’t strangle said female completely to her death.

Medusa leads me to one of the two chairs in front of Doctor Ericsson’s desk. He’s the Chief Medical Officer at Calico, the lead researcher in charge of this particular wing. The one man in this craphole who scares me more than anyone else. Alpha Project seems to be his baby, and the slimy, bright smile on his face tells me he’s elated by the news of my meeting with Valdys.

Hands rubbing together, he reminds me of a child asking his mother for a peek at the gifts she’s brought home for him. “Tell me. Tell me everything.”

On the screen behind him, an image of Valdys holding me by the throat has been paused, as if there was something notably thrilling about that part of our meeting. It’s striking how small I look beside the beast. How completely fragile and at his mercy.

“There’s nothing to say that you haven’t already seen.” A flare of pain hits the base of my throat where tender bruising marks the evidence of my encounter with him, and I flinch, running a finger over the red band left behind.

“You realize he could’ve snapped your head clean off. Like a dandelion!”

I suspect the only reason he didn’t had to do with the fact that I broke one of many rules, by using his name.

“He didn’t. Which is the first step in binding.”

I glance over to Medusa and back to the doctor. “Binding? What is that?”

“Every detail about your encounter with the Champion was a threat. The food you offered him. The way you smelled. The fact that you are female. He trusts no one but his handlers, and the research staff, of course. It’s how they remain obedient. Loyal.”

Bastards. They threw me into a lion’s cage expecting that I’d get eaten alive.

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