Vicious Memories

Chapter 107

Bev was about to leave. I turned around to survey my friends, wondering if anything would go wrong before we made our escape.

Moonlight darted between the overhanging branches of the monkeypod tree and lit up half a face here, a section of arm there, a colorless forest of people as mismatched as you could imagine. We were oak trees with pine needles, dogwoods with white bark, towering trunks with roots coming out the top while leaves dug into the earth below. We weren't who we were supposed to be - we certainly weren't who we had been before - but in some way we'd all settled on what kind of tree we wanted to be in the end.

Knowing this gave me a sense of comfort, even if these identities would be wiped away soon enough. We would have to go through the process of growth again, the people we were at this very moment lost and forgotten for all time. This Oliver was about to die. This Alice, my Alice, the one who was fragile but strong, unsure but commanding, was about to die, too.

I kept looking around.

If anyone was going to lose their calm before we could escape, I kew it would be Gabriel.

His joke about irony had come out so cool, so casual, that we'd all taken it for what we thought it to be. What we should have remembered was that Gabriel never joked. And at the moment he looked ready to kill with his bare hands, tall and glowering, his eyes pools of swirling darkness that had only one target.

I looked over my shoulder at Bev and saw what Gabriel must have seen: the woman who had killed Jessica, the girl he'd loved like a sister.

Shit, I thought.

I saw it unfold delicately before my eyes. The dam would strain, bending and whining and rending itself apart until it broke into a shower of useless debris. When Gabriel attacked Bev, mob mentality would take hold, and more people would follow him. The guards would open fire. Nobody would be left standing.

No amount of shouting could have averted what was coming.

I never counted on a whisper, though.

"I never believed it was true," someone rasped. "I thought that, in the end, it was part of a larger hoax. I could reason my way around that. But I can't anymore, can I?"

His attention broken by the pleading tone of voice, Gabriel looked away from Bev.

"What's that, Neema?" Finn asked.

"I kept waiting for her to say that it was all a lie," she said. "To take it back. But it's true. And I can't possibly forget it. Not this, not when she's my one memory. No god would forgive me. I... I..."

"What are you talking about?" Alice asked. We were all disturbed now. "What's wrong?"

The manila folder still clutched in Neema's hands trembled violently. She looked around, devastated, heartbreak in her words. "My other file was incomplete. This one says... I killed my daughter, too, trying to get at him. I killed her, and nothing will ever change that."

Someone gasped while everyone else held their breath, frozen for the moment. Time slowed and I imagined that even a solitary leaf swirling through the forest behind us would have been courteous enough to pause in its descent in order to see what happened next.

"Wait," Finn yelled. "Neema, stop!"

The world ceased spinning. Pollen and water molecules floated past my face. Bodies shifted behind Bev as her guards began to react.

But Neema didn't listen to Finn. She didn't stop as she took off at a dead sprint toward Bev, a runaway pendulum with no center to halt its progress. I got one final look at her sharp face, her eyebrows drawn together over narrowed eyes full of tears.

She made it halfway across the gap between the villagers and the guards. Two men had already stepped in front of Bev to protect her, their guns leveled.

"Wait," Bev said.

A gunshot snapped.

Neema's body dropped to the ground mid-stride, sliding several feet across the wet grass. She never made it all the way to the line of flowers.

"Neema!" several people shouted, too late.

The two guards in front of Bev followed the track of Neema's body all the way to their feet. She didn't move again, and my mind churned with horror. That was it. That easily, she was gone, taken somewhere we could never reach. The body before the flowers was empty, and it lay there like an accusatory beacon, letting us all know what she had thought in the end about our right to continue living.

Birds and bugs shot into the sky for a mile in every direction. Their shrieks filled my ears, both alarmed and alarming.

There comes a point when a person has simply seen too much death. At that extreme, two things could happen: either death lost its meaning and its power to hurt you; or you broke down, and each new tragedy became too much to bear. I didn't know which one was scarier - losing what made you human, or becoming so human that it hurt just to think.

"Back up! Hey, get the hell back!"

Half the guards swept forward, their rifles at the ready. They moved as a team, their steps practiced, gun muzzles swiveling left and right to make sure nobody could get around or behind them.

"I said back the fuck up," one of them barked at Tana, who'd taken a stupefied step toward Neema's body.

She glared at him, but didn't move any closer. One of the guards bent down and checked Neema's pulse. Time passed. He shook his head and they retreated behind the flowers again.

The void left in their wake sucked us forward like a bubble bursting underwater. Tana and Arun rolled Neema onto her back. Cooper quickly took off his shirt to gently cover the angry red ruin that had been her face. Death was always ugly, but in this instance it was horrific. Several people stumbled away, gasping for air.

"Oh, Neema," Gabriel said, sinking down next to her. Alice knelt in the mud next to him, taking Neema's hand and whispering softly under her breath.

There was no doubt in anyone's mind that the last few moments had played out exactly as Neema had intended them to.

The madness had fled our village for tonight. The spell was broken, the anger replaced with sadness. I remembered everything that had been lost, but also everything that hadn't; there was always more that could be taken away - Neema had reminded us of that

Bev watched us inscrutably.

"You have two hours to make your choices," she said. "I'll be back for you then."

She disappeared from sight, her blonde hair swiftly swallowed by darkness, leaving the rest of us to pick up the pieces and try to stitch them together again.