Unfinished Business

CHAPTER 17: I EAT A FOOT AND FALL ON MY ASS

My lungs burned as I dashed after the Eye For An Eye. Apparently, being dead doesn't exactly help your whole respiratory system. Ethan was running next to me. Somewhere in our dashing, he had taken my hand so he didn't get lost. I was fine with it as long as he didn't try any funny business. (Knowing him, he eventually would. He hadn't yet, though.) With the other hand, he was still trying to find the right page in his massive book. That proved to be a bad idea, though, because he dropped it in what I assumed was a puddle of mud. At least, I hoped it was mud. 

I didn't notice he had dropped the book until he was yanking me backward, at which point I let go of his dirty, clammy hand and turned around to see what was happening. As it turned out, what he dropped it in wasn't mud, but the substance did rhyme with that. Thick, already-coagulating blood was gathered in the parched dirt and on the raised roots of trees.

And then I saw the body. She was young, white, and dressed like a sexy duck. There was a yellow plastic bill in the dirt next to her, slick with red smeared by shaking hands. Her midsection was entirely eviscerated, exposing torn-out intestines; they were ripped open to show what was left of what she had been digesting. I couldn't look away. I would have reminisced about this girl, who I vaguely knew was named Claire Tonks, but I knew there was no time for me to mourn someone I really didn't know at all. 

And I didn't. Know her, that is. Or mourn for her. Or either.  

So, I snapped myself out of it and kept running, leaving Ethan behind. I already did that with Willa. Hell, I already did that with my entire fucking family. With my lungs burning and my shoulder aching from the effort, I launched myself onto the Eye For An Eye's back once again. I had every intention of strangling it, or caving in its skull with my fists, or something. 

I looked back at Ethan, who was still picking up his blood-soaked book, and behind him, at Willa. She was still stuck in place.

Blanche had caught up, though, thank god. She was in the trees and, in an act of weird altruism and protection, illuminated herself and made the loudest noise she could. To be fair, it was just a bunch of insults levied at the monster. Despite her best intentions, her efforts proved to be in vain.

Actually, that's not fair. Blanche lighting up her whole body did do something. In fact, it illuminated Claire's corpse however many hundred feet it was behind us. It lit up the whole forest and exposed both of us to Sandy, who just went pale and kept running like she had seen a ghost. In a way, she had. Blanche grimaced and sighed simultaneously, then seemed to try to leech the light from all over her body to her hands, where she tried to convert it into a blast of some kind.

It was a huge whiff and a miss. Blanche stopped glowing altogether. Now she was just obnoxiously neon and more than a little embarrassed. It showed through the makeup on her over-blushed cheeks. "Sorry," she said sheepishly, expressing something other than pure cocky arrogance for the first time I had ever met her.

"Don't be sorry, just be better!" I replied, parroting my father while trying to wrap my hands around the monster's neck again. Its bones were sharper, somehow, than they had been before. No matter how I tried, there was no comfortable way for me to choke this thing out. 

That wasn't working, so I drove the bottle into its back. Somehow, I was instinctively able to transfer that glow that was so innate to what I was from my hands to the glass I was wielding. It seemed to do more damage, making the Eye For An Eye's flesh sizzle where I wounded it. I stored that information away for later (namely that it wasn't confined to my hands and that this thing seemed to be connected to it). I did't know how I was doing this. It's not like I was given a handbook. I was just thrown out here, expected to immediately know what to do. No training, no preparation-- just monsters, just vengeance, just chunky black blood coating my hands like water and flour. 

At some point, Sandy outpaced Blanche, the monster, and I; the Eye For An Eye tried to buck me like I was a disobedient toddler on a bronco. I flew off of it in the way that same toddler might, managing to dig my fingernails into its body on my way down, rending its flesh once again and getting skin flakes under my already-dirty unpainted fingernails. I hit the ground with a thud that should have cracked several ribs. I wouldn't have been surprised if it did. It wasn't like I could feel the pain of it anyway. 

It stepped on me with nothing but acrimony on its face. It was unmistakable, somewhere between mirth and pure ill will. Then it melted into the ground again and my eyes could no longer track it.

While I pushed myself up, I looked back at those I had left behind. I had every intention of checking on Willa. Instead, all I saw was Ethan, who was cleaning off his book rather slowly. It didn't look like there was all that much corpse juice on it, except for on the outside.

"How do you kill this stupid thing?" I yelled back at him.

"I don't-- I don't know! The pages, the blood, the-- the blood, the Claire, it's--"

I can't keep myself from rolling my eyes as I stood and got ready to jump back into the action. I rolled my neck and clenched my fists, no longer looking at Sleazebag Ethan. "I don't know why I thought you would be any help. You never were."

As I set my eyes on the Eye For An Eye and decided that kicking this bitch in whatever was between its legs was my goal, it looked back at me and did the same old bullshit. I thought I was wise to its tricks and tried to steel my mind with the kind of cockiness Blanche usually wore like an accessory, but that didn't work.

I don't know how to describe the rest of the fight. Do I put it in terms of it pummeling me into the ground? Do I put it in terms of hands in the cavity of my chest and darkness covering my eyes? In terms of Blanche laughing when I hit the ground like this was the world's greatest joke? When the Eye For An Eye put its foot in my mouth and I could feel none of the pain but all of the discomfort of my teeth and its nails going down my throat in reverse kind of vomiting I had no control over? Do I put it in terms of the broken glass in my hands? In terms of everyone realizing how truly useless I am? Is it a crime to mention how Willa threw a rock at the monster so that I could git up and, with the taste still in my mouth, try to reorient myself?

Or maybe it would be more palatable to describe it in frank terms: it was a futile effort. We tried. We failed. No-- I failed.

And, when that was obvious, Blanche set to looking for the bunker, which was around here. She remembered that much. It took a bit of convincing over the sound of the Eye For An Eye bellowing roaring in pain, but she got everyone to get down there.

Everyone except me. I went down last. I don't know why. Maybe I was trying my hand at redemption. Maybe I was trying my hand at some sort of "save yourself, I'll hold it back" protection pipe dream. Either way, I was the last one down.

And I went down in tense snippets of cognition. My foot was stuck. The Eye For An Eye was charging. My foot was stuck. It was getting closer. Stuck. Closer. Stuck. I tugged, but nothing happened until I took off my shoe-- and then everything happened. I fell on my ass, the door slammed shut, the people who gave a shit had half a mind to gasp. And I could hear the monster trying to get at us, scratching at the door relentlessly.

Blanche stepped over me and scaled the ladder to make sure the door was secured. When it was, she took great care to step on me.

Our situation was incredibly clear to me. We were stuck here and, if we were going to be stuck in here, it was only fair that we should know what we were stuck in.

I looked back at Blanche with one hand still on the metal shelf closest to me. "Hey, Blanche? What's going on here?"

She didn't look at me. She just kept messing with one of her dirty, chipped nails. "What do you mean?"

"What's going on here?"

"How am I supposed to know?"

I shrugged, then turned away. I had other, more important questions to ask. I looked out at everyone else, at Will and Sandy looking for a first aid kit, at Ethan, who was sitting at the kitchen counter and trying to fix his book, at the rest of the bunker. "What's the plan, guys? What do we do next?"

But nobody knew. Nobody knew. Not even me.