||Series Removed|| OTB

25 - A Survivor's Burden

25

I must have been drooling like a vegetable into the dried farmland for the entirety of the sunrise. When I finally found the bravery to roll onto my bruised back, the sky was a wispy-light blue... The thick black smoke was gone, or at least reduced to a dreary translucent-grey.

The heat of the flames had finally subsided, or perhaps they had finally worn my senses down into permanent numbness. I couldn't be sure of anything at this point, with my brain fried and my body as broken as my will to live.

"Shoot, is your girl dead?! H-Hey! Still alive down there, greenhorn?!"

My bloodshot eyes creaked open once more, and the blurred image of a young fresh-faced teen clouded my vision. He seemed familiar, only a million miles from where my current state of mind had tucked itself away.

"J-Jamie?" I wheezed dryly, only to blink and lose myself in the darkness. The next thing I saw, was the boy heaving my good arm around his shoulder and carrying me away from Blessing's corpse towards a charred-black rectangle. The farmhouse...

It was Tanner. He survived the fire-bombing, after all. I cursed myself for not checking up on him and Charlotte sooner, but given my lack of certain limbs, I was pretty sure that they would forgive me.

"It's Charlotte." He spoke all of a sudden, invading my ear drums with a spike in muffled volume. "She's... She's okay and all, but... I don't know what to do, I'm freaking out. She listens to you for some reason, so please... Help me talk to her. It's not safe in there, the whole place could come down at any minute."

I patted him on the back, letting him know that I was okay to stand on my own. I wasn't, of course... Elizabeth's bullet was still lodged deep in the arch of my foot. It took me several tumbles, but I finally managed to hop my way through the sticky blackened tall grass and slam my body against the front door.

Everything was out of focus; all I could do was follow Tanner's directions, without question. If I stopped to try and take in my surroundings, I knew I would start screaming into hysterics. I had to pretend the bodies weren't there, that I was stepping on bricks and not bones.

The main lobby's staircase was brittle and fractured, crackling under my weight as I hovered between the burnt steps, praying that it wouldn't collapse. The sheer drop would be enough to finish me off, and for half a second, I was almost tempted to test that theory.

I could barely recognise Charlotte's room; the once-minimalist furnishings had been given a permanent coat of white ash and glowing-red embers, still eroding the intricate fabrics of her bedding.

Neither of us would've even known that Charlotte was there, if she hadn't flung the closet doors open and built herself a little nest inside.

Peering around the shuttered wooden panels, I could've sworn that her face was Millie's for a split second. Her look of complete shell-shock took me back to Barbados, seconds after our docked boat had been blown to smithereens and my best friend's life cut short.

"Charlotte?"

"..."

"Tanner sent me. He's awfully worried about you... I am, too."

"...She warned me, that Daddy would cause all of this pain someday. That he would never stop hurting me. She was always right."

My eyes lowered to her chest, where she gripped a tiny yellow box tightly against her body. She must've rushed upstairs to collect her most valuable possessions, before they burnt to a crisp.

"What's that you've got there?"

"..."

She was ignoring me again. I glanced back towards Tanner, and he accidentally took a wrong step and put his weight through the weakened floorboards. The lumber below us growled in discomfort, and threatened to send us all crashing down an entire storey.