Interno

Chapter 9

Remilia opened her eyes slowly. She had just taken quite a fall, plummeting to the edge of Boston. She sat up a little too fast and specks dotted her vision. Her head hurt and she closed her eyes to keep it calm. Rachel fell face down and picked up her scratched face. Scarlet was propped up on her elbows and looked to be in immense amounts of pain.
Claire had fallen without a single scratch.
Right. Mommy's precious baby.
When the girls finally regained their senses... And feeling in their faces in some cases... Scarlet spoke.
"Uh... So what do we do?"
"Murder." Claire had said sweetly.
"With no training whatsoeve-"
"Follow me." The shorter girl said, sprinting in a random direction.
The girls, with not a goddamn clue of what was happening, followed along.
They ran for quite a while, Rachel lagging behind. She looked like one of those girls who energized off pure sugar and crashed quickly. She huffed, puffed and screamed on several occasions. Claire shushed her on every complaint. Remilia rolled her eyes. Scarlet ran with a bored expression.
They finally came to a hault in front of a gray house with broken shutters. Remilia felt a horrid wave of familiarity with the bumps of the ground and the smell of the air.
Ugh.
Blood and cherry medicine.
Claire raised her sickle and slowly pushed open the door with it.
She had obviously done this before.
They walked in slowly, careful not to squeak the floor. Remilia followed her close, pressing down on her exact steps. Scarlet followed boredly. Rachel complained.
"Do we have a plan?"
"Follow my lead." Claire said again.
The girls walked slowly and gently through the main entrance and stopped in the kitchen. The doorway downstairs was on the left of the group, close to their entrance. Claire blew and the door squeaked open a bit. She very, very slowly and carefully opened the door with her sickle, afraid to make any more noise.
This noise gently startled a woman sitting at the kitchen table. She looked up from her book with dark eyes and pursed her red lips.
"Blimey, Max is working downstairs again..." The woman said. She turned a page with her long fingers and continued to read. "I do hope he comes up and shuts the door, I hate the sound of that power drill."
Claire opened the door a little further and gasped.
"What?" Rachel asked
"Shut up." Was Claire's only reply.
The door was fully opened and the girls snuck through the opening. Claire contemplated aloud.
"But this can't... The same Max... But..."
Remilia was thoroughly disgusted and faced a great deal of deja vu. She remembered herself lying bleeding on the ground as life ebbed away from her body.
But she remembered screams of agony from Max.
He was supposed to be dead.
She remembered hearing him scream, remembered as a male voice boomed:
"It was once said
that God will seed out the evil
and bring the good to righteousness."
Remilia felt faint but couldn't faint. Dehydration without thirst and the pain in her back and hands with no blood or scars.
Just memories.
Just as they hit the end of the stairs, Scarlet stepped awkwardly and a loud squeak echoed through the room.
Max turned, his grin faltered.
"Oh. Your kind again."
Claire stepped foreword.
"You're long overdue. Ezekiel should have had you killed weeks ago."
Remilia held her head and moaned. She died only three Interno days ago.
This wasn't real, none of this was real, time isn't real,
time...
Time.
She always needed more time.
More time to think. More time to act. More time to think before acting. More time to think before running foreword at Max with a sickle up and out of her belt, screaming and avenging the deaths of many.
Max held out a meaty hand and stopped her with brute force.
She hit the ground.
But Max didn't look like he wanted a fight.
"Take me." He said. "Like I give a damn. You'll just keep coming back." And he lifted his right pants leg to reveal a prosthetic.
"Your blue haired kid. He chopped off my leg and thought I bled out. I had only fainted. My wife ran downstairs, swaddled it all up and called an ambulance."
He looked down at Remilia.
"Ah, you we're that girl with the long fingers." He said. "Dead, i know. But they recruited you to the realm of bad taste and tacky uniforms. Here."
Max turned around and dug through the darkness. He knocked over a few things and Remilia sat up. She didnt have time to react before a pair of decomposing human hands were thrown at her.
She couldn't speak. Having her own hands in her own hands was surreal. Red painted nails and a strawberry birthmark that encased part of her right hand mirrored the ones in front of her and back. She dropped them and they smacked against the cold floor of the basement.
Max turned to Scarlet. "I believe one of your little brothers was in my grasp as well. Cute little thing with a pure heart... Quite a pretty heart..."
Scarlet looked tense for the first time since Remilia had seen her.
"So go on." Maxwell said with a grin "Come! Murder away! God will have me!"
"God will never have scum like you." Claire said, hands shaking around the base of her sickle.
Max grinned. "But I pray. Of course he'll take me."
"You're sick." Scarlet said before stabbing Max in the heart with her sickle.
He grinned on the way down.
A cloud of light began forming and shone down on the corpse. Claire sighs.
"He was right."