Page 74 of Hideaway Whirlwind
The tiny nicks on my bottom lip sting when I smile.Yes, it will. I turn that smile on my mom. “Put the rocks in your apron pockets, Mezzarx. As many as you can fit.”
Her mouth gapes open like a fish—how fitting—when she stammers out, “W-Why?”
I roll my eyes. “So you’ll sink to the bottom of the creek and drown, duh.”
Terror-stricken but trying not to show it, she says, “I demand—”
“Child abusers don’t get to demand shit,” Paul shouts, shooting the ground near her feet, the buckshot pitting the earth.
I clutch my ribs, laughing when she screams and dances a jig, closer to the creek.
Elliott is at my back when we move to the pile of rocks. “Go on, Mezzarx,” I say, picking one up and pelting her with it, making her duck and yelp, covering her head. “You’ve spent the, what, last twelve years dreaming of the day you’d die and get to fight for Zeraxy? Your husband is supposedly up there, too, right? Aren’t you excited to see him again?” I throw another rock, harder this time, and she bows when it strikes her side.
“You’re evil! Infected by the evil of the Gonarfans! You all are!” she screams, twisting to run away, only for Trace to yell at her toback the fuck up!
“Seriously? Do you not hear how insane you sound?” I throw another stone, my voice growing harder as my humor fades. “If I’m evil, then you made me this way when you chose some lunatic and his fucking fairy tales over me. Forced me to get married when I was fourteen! How could a mother do that?” She parts her chapped, bloodless lips to no doubt spew more of her science fiction bullshit, but I cut her off. “A vile, hateful bitch who doesn’t give one shit about her own flesh and blood. I could never do that to my kids.”
“They are not yours! They are Zeraxy’s!” Mom screams before her hacking coughs take over again, her eyes now bulging out of her head in such a grotesque manner that nausea churns my stomach.
I kick the remaining rocks toward her with the side of my foot. “They are mine! I’d kill for them. I already have. But you would have killedme, wouldn’t you, if Pazcart or the leaders had told you to?” My stepfather’s name rolls off my tongue like moldy slime,wretched and foul.
When I finally managed to kill Guxxer, I was set to become my stepfather’s fifth wife. Really, I couldn’t have planned it any better myself, gaining unsupervised access to Sydney and copious amounts of evidence within his much larger, concrete block house so I could grab my sister and run the night before the marriage ceremony.
“Now, chop chop,” I say, motioning to the rocks. “We don’t have all night.”
Mom’s eyes flash, and I don’t know if it’s my imagination or not that I see a tiny flicker of doubt or guilt. But then she blinks twice and wheezes out, “Zeraxy will choose when it is my time to die, not you.”
“Wrong.” I lift my gun and hold her gaze. “Put them in your pockets or you’ll go to Zeraxy without your fucking head attached!”
When she begins to tremble uncontrollably, swaying worse than before with her blood loss, and raises her colorless hands to the sky to chant a bastardized prayer of protection, I shoot. It’s not a direct shot, but I’m sure she felt the wind as the slug whizzed past her ear.Elliott is a good teacher. I mentally pat him on the back.
“Not so sure you want to join Pazcart anymore, are you?” I ask. “Are you scared it was all a lie, Mezzarx?”
“No,” she says with more conviction than she probably has. She looks behind her at the creek that we’ve all been slowly backing her toward, her hand shaking when she bends to pick up the first rock, hesitating to drop it in her pocket, still gripping that knife of hers.
I laugh. “What about now? Afraid your little galaxy isn’t real?”
“No!” She drops the rock inside her apron with contempt,then picks up another. “I’ll join my husband and be rewarded.”
“You really are a special kind of gullible, aren’t you?” I nod to another rock.
“I see the truth. You will rot in the ground while I—”
“Oh, shut up.” I fire another slug over her opposite shoulder. Three down, three more to go before I’ll have to reload, though I doubt we’ll get that far, since that cough of hers tells me she’s already knocking at death’s door. When her pockets are full, the ties digging into her hips with the weight, I tell her, “Now jump.”
Her nostrils flare, and she raises her weak arms again, squinting to see the stars through the canopy of trees and thunderstorm clouds, searching for her make-believe galaxy as she begins shuffling backward. Storm and I move with her, the men silent as they form a firing squad at my sides. Mom falters at the swollen, marshy edge of the creek bank, still clinging to the last shred of her galactic brainwashing. It’s all she has at this point. When Storm barks and lunges to nip at Mom’s ankles, Mom leaps back with a frightened, hoarse cry, and over the edge she goes.
I reveled in the death of Guxxer, Quincy, and even Priscilla when I found out. But my mother? She’s the worst of them all. She started me on this path. Wasted what remained of her life in servitude to the worst of mankind. Turned from the mother she had been when I was a child into this cruel, pathetic shell of a human. Or was the caring mother of my childhood simply a mask she wore, like Quincy, waiting to be shed? Is this who she’d always been at her core—the kind of mother who would eagerly justify abusing her own daughters time and again? And for what? To be the third wife of a disgusting, fanatic pig?
I spit toward her as she flails, gasping for air and choking onmuddy water while kicking her feet. She was never a strong swimmer, and with her muscles atrophied from malnutrition and whatever illness she carries, it doesn’t take long for her energy to deplete. I smile so hard and wide that my cheeks ache when none of the men go to her rescue like I thought maybe, just maybe, they would with their strict—if not a little unconventional—moral codes. But it’s like Paul said, child abusers don’t get a pass, and my abuser is too panicked to think to pull the rocks out of her pockets or untie her apron so that she will bob to the surface. I smile all the more, counting to sixty when she finally fully slips under the water, then start over. For every year I was forced to live in that cult, I count.
Then I scream, scrambling back, falling into Elliott’s arms when a lightning bolt strikes a fat, old pine tree not ten feet from us, splitting the trunk in half, the smoking branches toppling into the water. Right. On. Top. Of. Her. I laugh as I rise, then again when she floats to the top, face up in the water, her eyes unseeing, mouth open on an endless, soundless scream, her hair catching on a smaller branch, her pockets empty.
When I can catch my breath, I spit toward her again. “Guess you stopped believing in the end. No reward for you, Mezzarx.”
“This is so fudged up,” Russell says from my left, shifting on his feet as he stares at the water, his gun hanging limply at his side.
“Then why didn’t you stop me?” I ask, cutting him a look.Not that I would have let him.
