The men with empty eyes and cocked pistols settled into the ratty La-Z-Boy chairs across the room. They watched, and waited. Angie was able to brace herself. She understood something of what could be done, what one human could do to another. She put no limitations on what might happen to her.

  But Kaya?

  Angie looked over at her daughter, who was now cradling her shattered wrist and crying softly.

  Why should she ever have to know this? She’s still pure. Maybe…Maybe what? Can I kill her before they get to?

  Angie felt Rusky’s fork through the fabric of her pocket, and wondered if she could plunge it into her daughter’s neck.

  If I was strong? If I was quick? Could I do it?

  She looked over at her daughter again, and knew that it could never be her hand that ended Kaya’s life. It was an act she was incapable of, even in mercy. She looked over at her daughter again, and the girl looked miles away, tiny and ancient, like an Indian woman wrapped in a shawl, waiting for harvest moon.

  The acid’s kicking in. Shit. Think straight, think straight for once.

  She had no chance to think. The men with the guns, the men she had once known, but who now wanted to eat her alive, were up from their fluffy domestic chairs and walking toward her and her child, their sharp skulls and razor faces intent on cleaving her skin from bone and leaving her fragmented.

  “Rourky, check the little one’s eyes, see if she’s ready. I doubt she could even figure out how to attack you now.”

  Angie could smell the men’s breath from across the room, like motor oil, semen, and old blood, all mixed up and heated in reptile engines, fed by an old black pulse.

  O’Rourke tilted Kaya’s head back. Angie watched him peer into her eyes, squinting. “Yeah, Cyph, she’s good to go. Panting almost, man. Her little hummingbird heart’s gonna blow.”

  “If it does, man, then that’s a ‘que sera sera’ type of deal. We’ve still got mama bear over here.”

  Angie tried to move her legs and found herself immobile. Her brain was receiving too much stimulus. Her signals were crossed; sounds were registering as scents, scents as colors, everything swirled together and pulsed rotten around her. She could feel branches scratching against window panes, old souls tired from the weather, wanting a good sleep, the smell of her dead mother’s sweat on the couch beneath her, the sick smell of Cypher’s breath, the sharp odor of her daughter’s fear. Too much, again, like that night in the woods. Angie would be a witness to her own undoing, two hyper-sensitive eyes taking in the last moments of her life, and Kaya’s.

  Motion, from too many directions, and she felt things going wrong so quick, and so surely. It felt like her fate was winding up at fever pitch, anxious to move on to the next soul. She knew Cypher was sliding her sweatpants off, and that he had set the gun down when he recognized how gone she was. When Cypher dropped her pants there was a dull pinging sound—perhaps the fork falling from her pants pocket, she thought—but he paid it no notice. His full attention was on her.

  She tried to move again, tried to lift her arm to smack Cypher away from her so she could get to her daughter, but her attempts at motion turned into twitches, light muscle-spasms. Her flesh was deep in mutiny, immobile and begging for death.

  Everything was allowed into her head at once, the sound of crickets in the woods beyond her house, the rasp of her underwear sliding off of her thighs, the low thrum of the voice inside her head, not even speaking words anymore, just a low, deep note that vibrated through her skin and pulled her heart closer to the ground like gravity amplified by sound. She heard whispers, that’s a good girl, just like mama, and looked over to see Kaya sucking on one of O’Rourke’s index fingers, and she knew that her daughter was being tested, that O’Rourke was scared of biters, and that her daughter was going to know too much, too late, and she turned to scream, to turn her voice into a mallet that would crush O’Rourke’s skull and splinter it to pieces, but found that her vocal cords were as numb to her as her legs. Kaya must have caught the motion of Angie’s head though, because their eyes made contact for a moment, and then Kaya’s eyes reflected fear and she was looking down at where Cypher had ignited a long, butane utility lighter.

  The flame shot out of the end, coming to a sharp point that swallowed the air around it. Cypher had the lighter turned on full; Angie could hear the gas whipping through the long tube to the point where it became a blazing spike. The sound became a taste, boiling blood on her tongue, the sensation turning carbon black, converting to a cry that her lips couldn’t form.

  Cypher had become silent, intent. He drew the flame lightly and quickly across the surface of her body. She could feel her skin tighten against the heat, but he never kept it in one place long enough to really burn. He brought the flame close to her face. She shrieked inside as the heat came across her open eyes. The flame was close enough that her eyelashes curled back toward their lids, singed black.

  She could imagine the moment when Cypher would press the fire into her skin. Would he burn her face first, or did he want to watch the pain in her expressions? Would he ignite her hands, each finger a blackening candle? Would he open her up between her legs and re-ignite the long metal snout inside of her, like a sick, mechanical butterfly rooting deep in a flower? She pictured the flame, burning through her from inside…

  Her panicked thought was thrown from her mind when she felt the flame settle home on the inside of her left thigh. Cypher left it there for only a moment, long enough to blister the surface of the skin.

  The feeling came to her as searing, white-hot pain and waves of sound, freight-train insect laughter that sped her pulse until she felt she would pass out. She struggled against unconsciousness, and shock.

  If I black out, this ends. If I black out, Kaya ends too. Fight!

  Cypher moved the flame close to her thigh again. Watching his steady hand and slightly smiling face, she knew she would be burned slowly. That Cypher would help her to understand what it is to burn, to feel skin blacken, boil, and turn to ash. Her pants were off for a reason. Cypher was going to give her an exact understanding. He had not forgotten what she had done, and would exact angry-God, Old Testament revenge. Slowly. He would keep her alive until her body quit fighting.

  Angie inhaled the thin smoke of her skin, a sick smell that filled her senses. The room was heavy with it, even though her burn was barely the size of a quarter. She saw smoke floating to the ceiling, pooling in tiny wisps that swam over each other.

  I can’t take much more. It’s not right. I shouldn’t…

  She turned her head away, as much as she could, unable to stop anything, and saw O’Rourke trying to force Kaya’s jaw open again, to push his slicked finger back into her warm mouth. She shrieked, staring at her mother wide-eyed again, clearly not believing that a man could be slowly incinerating a woman in front of her.

  O’Rourke seized upon the scream and slid his finger back into her mouth. Angie saw the look in Kaya’s eyes. She’d become feral. She bit down hard, tiny jaw muscles clenching, and Angie saw the blood from O’Rourke’s finger trickling from the corner of Kaya’s mouth. He tried to pull his hand away but only succeeded in stripping skin from bone. He balled his other hand into a fist and swung at the side of Kaya’s head.

  Kaya thumped back onto the couch, and Angie watched her daughter’s body cut through a thin layer of smoke as it hit the cushions.

  Then O’Rourke was upon her daughter. His hands were around Kaya’s throat. He was raising her up in the air, squeezing as hard as he could.

  To her left Angie could see Cypher’s face illuminated by the flame from his utility lighter, smiling behind a tiny plume of black smoke rising from her right inner thigh. He was letting the pointed flame bore in now, melting away skin and fat and muscle, waiting to blacken bone and boil marrow. The pain was so great that her senses sent it through her whole body, an agony-vibration that wrapped razor-wire tight around her heart and sent her pulse inter-stellar.

  To her right, she was watching her daughter die, a man’s hands tight around the girl’s throat. The pain, the shock of it, seemed muted by comparison.

  The vision was here. It was real, and she had returned to save her daughter. Or maybe she had just returned to bear witness. An allowance by the thing from the woods, one final grace note to ensure Angie’s destruction.

  I can’t fight this. I can’t fight this anymore.

  STOP ALL STOP NOW QUIET UNDER QUIET UNDER QUIET.

  Angie let go. She stared into her daughter’s eyes as they began to bulge from her head. It didn’t make sense. Nothing made sense. This world was not for her. She let go and watched.

  The voices were right all along.

  She tried to communicate with her eyes. She tried, as a last effort, to comfort Kaya by keeping her sight on her. She let her eyes say, “Let go. Just let go, and sleep.”

  Kaya looked back with hatred.

  Her eyes looked directly into Angie’s, despite the large hands that were wrapped around Kaya’s throat. Angie realized that this was the last thing she would ever see.

  Angie could not accept this fate. She tried to move, tried to yell to her daughter, but could not make a sound.

  Angie’s eyes filled with fresh anger, a fire in them begging to be let loose, to scorch this atrocity from the face of the earth.

  She would not watch her daughter die. She had to do something, or she’d face an eternity staring into her daughter’s hate-filled eyes. There was no greater hell.

  Still, she burned in silence, listening to the soft rasp of Cypher’s laughter, and noted that he now had his free hand wrapped around his flaccid cock, and was stroking it as if his revenge could somehow feed it, or give him back what he’d lost. He was a man who didn’t understand his fate.

  Angie saw motion behind O’Rourke; her eyes picked up a flash of steel that left silver tracers across her field of vision. Whatever, or whoever was moving in the dark behind O’Rourke, was waiting for an opening. A distraction.

  Angie forced her lips to part. She inhaled, and then released her anger the only way she knew how. Her scream tore through the room, high-pitched, ragged, the shriek of an animal moments from death.

  Cypher and O’Rourke turned to Angie at the same time, unable to ignore the wounded bellow that she forced from her chest with the last of her strength.

  Angie saw motion again, from the dark. Silver tracers arcing down, exploding in a spray of dark red. Angie couldn’t make sense of the sight. Her pupils were blasted, taking on too much information. She was saturated in color, the echo of her scream.

  She forced her eyes to focus and saw that O’Rourke was on the floor. Curtis Loew was on top of him, pressing down on the hilt of the survival knife that he’d buried in O’Rourke’s belly, just beneath his rib cage. Angie could see a bit of gleaming white skull peaking out from the back of Curtis’ head, but somehow he was still moving, pushing down on the knife, grunting, growling. O’Rourke’s hands were flopping across the shag carpet like asphyxiating fish.

  Kaya was looking straight at Angie. The hate had drained from her eyes, replaced by something stranger. Through her crushed voice she managed to say, “Mom.”

  Then Angie was fighting, trying to pull away from Cypher, who was on his knees and had her left leg pinned with his right arm. She struggled, but could barely find the strength to move. She saw Cypher reaching back for his pistol, ready to re-assert control over this unexpectedly fucked scenario.

  The sound was small, barely there at all. Still, Angie heard it from her right ear, a terrible, small screeching noise that struggled to be heard. The fury in it, though, brought goosebumps to Angie’s skin.

  The high-pitched noise was emerging from Kaya’s crushed windpipe as she charged at Cypher with Rusky’s old fork in her hand.

  Curtis saw it. Angie saw it. It couldn’t have been real, and yet they both saw the attack. Kaya, their delicate angel, had become something darker, an old harpy hungry to tear flesh from bone as if it was all she understood.

  Cypher never reached his gun. The fork went into his throat first, then again. Kaya wasn’t stabbing, she was digging. She bent the fork as it went in and pulled out as hard as she could. Cypher’s throat opened up wide, covering Kaya in arterial spray with every pulse of his heart. She stabbed his throat again, tearing at his larynx so that his cries became a gargled gasp from the hole in his throat. Then she went for his belly, stabbing, over and over, tearing skin loose in thin shreds.

  Cypher never even fought back. He never had a chance to raise one hand in defense. The look in his eyes as he flopped to the floor said, “This can’t be real.”

  The look was mirrored in the eyes of everyone in the room.

  They had reached their understanding.

  ~~~

  Kaya turned and looked back at her mother, and over her right shoulder at Curtis, who had slid off of O’Rourke’s corpse, and appeared to be unconscious again.

  Kaya was soaked in blood and shaking. She dropped the fork to the floor.

  She tried to shout to her mother, but only managed a whisper.

  “Can you hear them, Mom? Can you hear them?”

  Then she stood, turned toward the front door, and ran off into the dark in her bloody nightshirt. An after-image remained in Angie’s iris, a thin light thousand-fold trace of her daughter.

  Angie’s legs were a bleeding mess, pocked by muscle-deep burn marks. The black and yellow blisters that surrounded the burns looked as if they were moving, boiling.

  She tried to stand, but her knees buckled beneath her. She tried again, squeezing her naked thighs tight despite the pain that shot through her burns. She cried out at the feeling, a raw noise that sounded as if it were torn from her throat before it could become a sound.

  Still, she kept her feet under her and ran out the front door. Angie rounded the corner of the house in time to see a white shape about Kaya’s height running into the woods behind Colleen’s house. Angie crossed the back yard, her bare feet tearing up old dry leaves and weeds as she ran.

  Angie knew that the woods skewed north and were bordered on the west by more suburbs, on the east by farmland. She knew Kaya would stick to the woods, and the agricultural area that bordered it. She could feel it.

  Entering the forest, Angie frantically swung her head from side to side, searching as her eyes adjusted to the dark of the woods. The canopy had cut off much of her moonlight and a mist was rising from the forest floor. Angie moved toward the barbed-wired border on the eastern side where the light was better and followed the fence line.

  She listened for footfalls and heard none. Kaya was smaller than she was, and much faster. There had been such terror in her eyes, such disbelief. She was running fast, burning on an engine stoked by fear without end, without comfort.

  Time compressed as she stumbled along. Is this taking hours or minutes? she wondered, then had her answer as she saw the sun was coming up, rimming the hills to the east with a sickly yellow glow.

  Angie could feel a presence to her right and she turned. There was a cow pond with an old fence post rising from its center. A corpse hung on the post. It smiled at her with its leaves. It spoke without moving it’s brittle, wooden jaw.

  FALLEN FOR A MOMENTS FIGHT NOTHING.

  Angie ignored the voice and turned away, but shivered at its confidence.

  If it’s fate, then it’s going to happen anyway. Why listen to it if I can’t escape it?

  BRING HER BRING HER LAST LINE BURNT DOWN NOW.

  Her? Kaya? You can’t have her.

  SHE YOU ARE US ALREADY JUST QUIET SOON NOW QUIET.

  “No!” Angie ran on, burning inside as her traumatized leg muscles fought to keep her upright and moving.

  I can’t lose her. Not after all this. If I was her, where would I be headed? We’re blood, if nothing else. If her fate is mine, then she must be like me. So where would I go?

  Angie stopped and breathed heavy at the answer.

  I’d go deeper into the woods. I’d get as far away as possible from what happened in the house.

  And if the voices are in her now, that’s exactly where they’d want her. Far away from anyone else. Alone.

  Angie turned away from the fence and the open fields, and moved as quickly as she could through the forest. She turned where she felt she should and hoped Kaya had felt the same way. There were times when she thought she was lost, completely lost, that Kaya had headed in any other direction than the one Angie had taken, and she could barely command her legs to keep moving. She felt serum running down her legs as her blisters burst.

  As the sun began to fill the forest, Angie had nearly lost hope. The light shone too bright into her acid-scorched eyes. She could find nothing, no evidence of Kaya’s passing, no footprints on the forest floor.

  LOST JUST SLEEP SHE IS WITH US NOW JOIN HER.

  The voice kept Angie going. If Kaya really was dead, then why would the voice bother to say it? If it was true, then Angie was as good as dead too, and the voice knew it. It knew everything that passed through her mind. Why would it bother to pound away at her, if her fate was sealed?

  The sunlight that was creeping into the sky was dangerous. The more Angie could see of the forest, the less she wanted to.

  She felt as if the forest floor could open up at any minute and swallow her. She felt the floor of the forest sucking at the bottoms of her bare feet. The earth itself was pulling her in, ready to fill her lungs with dirt and leave a bit of her hair blowing in the wind across the forest floor.

  To her left, a pile of dead wood, surrounded by rhododendrons, was twisting, creaking, whispering to her.

  Fighting for nothing. So tired, child. So tired.

  “Quiet!” Her voice echoed in the woods, but nothing stirred.

  She yelled for Kaya, as loud as she could. Nothing. Then, the voice, crashing through her head.

  YOU WILL FALL AND NEVER RISE.

  Sunlight, a bright burst in her eye, and she was on the forest floor on her knees with one hand pressed against crackling leaves, and her belly was emptying itself out on the ground. Her heart was beating and intact, but her insides felt like they were trying to leave her body. Angie’s vomit was pouring out in a constant stream, a sick gush of bile and acid that foamed on the soil.