Overhead, the sky grew rapidly grey. In not much time at all, the previously luminous sky was smothered. The clouds weren’t so much full of rain- in fact, a storm seemed impossible -than they were simply lazy and drawn out. A blanket of depression. Annoyed at the dust kicking up around him, Burgandy rubbed the stuff off his muzzle with the back of his hand. They weren’t supposed to have ran, though what they were trying to do was extremely obvious. Lead him away from the refugee soldiers who lived here. He equated this error to a misjudgment on his part. They, for some eccentric reason he didn’t understand, had recognized the fox, abandoning their former Liberation caregivers, mumbling something subtly, and running at breakneck speeds across and away from the town center, heading southwest into the city.
Naturally, their running jeopardized what Entaru wanted to do. But it was alright. Burgandy had a tracking device on him. So long as he kept up with them, then so would the entire Fourth Reich keep up with them.
Bothersome itchy dust gone, he moved onward. The stolen gun shook in his hands. He did not know exactly what would pop out at him, and certainly the Reich supervisor was an artist, not a fighter. The suburban street was desolate, but desolation had become such a common thing after the bomb it was easy to overlook. Back behind the row of townhouses, elm trees, most half-destroyed, others charred, lying on their side, sang as a newly powerful wind tugged at their branches, their leaves.
“Hey, you two,” Burgandy called, side-stepping a damaged chunk of asphalt road, where water from a broken, exposed pipeline spewed and streamed. He got up on the sidewalk. “It isn’t very nice to run from someone who just wants to meet you.”
He scanned the houses on this side, the houses on the other. He even strained his eyes trying to distinguish the movements in the forest from one another. Nothing. But they couldn’t have just disappeared. Could they? After all, he’d only lost sight of them for a few seconds. Impossible. Ridiculous. They must have been but a small distance ahead, cleverly hiding.
Then a door slammed across the street, so loudly the echoes reverberated off of Burgandy’s skull. Crying out, he spun to face the noise. Gun at ready. But there was no assailant. No super-child suddenly turned psycho. Just an empty street.
Maybe it was just the wind that shut it.
Maybe not. He was going to go check anyway.
“Ready or not, here I come.”
****
Moon laughed, the first laughed she had mouthed in a long time. She turned to face Atreyu. That was awesome, she thought.
“Thank you. I try my best. It’s pretty much the only thing they don’t know about me. My little secret.” The boy stretched just like a proud wildcat, pushing his hands forward, the muscles in his back rippling, tail coiling. He had succeeded in slamming a door across the street using a telekinetic connection in his mind¾ tempting Burgandy away from their position. The two of them recognized him immediately as a major war leader for the Reich. Moon was mute, not deaf. She hadn’t found it that difficult to eavesdrop on her captors ‘back in the day,’ when they were kept in Germany. And Atreyu had been devilishly good at sneaking around inside the lab. They’d seen and heard their fair share of facts.
What now? We can’t stay. They know we’re here. It’ll be dark soon. But…we also can’t just…
“Just what?” Atreyu came over to her side, and plopped down by her on the old couch, still keeping an eye on the window, in case Burgandy decided to turn back. It wasn’t much of a hiding spot, this house. A quarter of the roof had been ripped back, revealing a hazy sky. Water leaked from an upstairs bathroom, pouring over the edge of the stair steps and pooling in the living room. An old, shattered Lightscreen television that was amazingly still in service played black-and-white movie, probably a hundred or so years old, with soothing jazz music. Dust was everywhere. Both the normal kind and the bomb’s resultant. Wind swooned through the eaves.
We can’t just leave either, Moon thought. This might be serious. Maybe he wasn’t looking for us. Maybe we were just a bonus of something else. The people here could be in danger. I’m not going to let another person get hurt just because we decided to take off again, okay?
“But what could we possibly do about it? Get ourselves captured? Get even more people hurt because we heroically decided to step in the Reich’s way? Invincibility and telekinesis can’t do everything, heck, my power only works on little things.”
I know, I know. God. But, I…I don’t think I can…go…like this… Sobs welled in the girl’s throat.
“Shush.” Atreyu took her and pulled her close to him, holding the back of her head, protectively, as his little sister. “It’s okay. All we need to do is wait for him to move on, then we can backtrack and find a way out of here. “
Moon’s white fur was still as soft as tufts of silk, luxurious almost, her tail being the softest of all. If she was an animal rather than a person, he imagined fur collectors would be all over her, in search of turning her into a fur coat to sell for thousands. Luckily, she knew how to walk upright on two legs. Even after being shot in the back of the head numerous times, even after being poisoned by an unholy amount of arsenic, shoved inside an incinerator and then having to crawl back out hours later, even after all the medication, the needles, and the beatings, she was still beautiful.
And she could still feel pain. She still bled. As did he.
Invincibility wasn’t a gift, it was a curse. It gave them the ability to survive any attack, regenerate any body part, overcome any toxin or poison.
But being shot in the head hurt just as much as you’d imagine. Regenerating an arm had proved an incredibly painful process the first time the Reich scientists had attempted it, leaving Moon screaming and begging to be put to sleep, and Atreyu in tears- before, he had never cried. Neither even wanted to think about when, during the final round of the “executions,” the Reich had put every effort they could into trying to kill them, ending with a direct ticket to the incinerator. Only to be proven wrong. That, yes, there were indeed subjects who had came out successful...in the form of two charred children pushing the metal door of the burn-house open and stumbling back into the open. Alive.
With the realization that death could not come to them, a newfound fascination for the children grew in the Reich. They were still experimented on, tortured even, but with a new, special, “valuable” label.
Atreyu knew this all very well. Had it memorized. It had been his world since he was born.
And he would rather succumb to a lifetime of false deaths than see Moon be sent back with them.
Topic: Our Plagued Reality: Us and Them (Read 23107 times)