Muts Page 4

  “What about that Terrence guy?”, I questioned them, “What’s his deal, I mean? How did he end up with his mutation?”

  “He’s an old friend of the family who’s lived with me since before everything.”, Carrie said, her tone a bit too tense, “He never really outgrew his Grateful Dead days, and he happened to be as high as a giraffe’s nuts when the bombs fell so he’s trapped in his trip. Luckily he’s easy to distract.”

  I was learning it seemed, I knew that tone meant that I had hit a nerve with Carrie, and I was saved from having to fish around for something else to say. I recognized our surroundings.

  “We’re here.”

  As we approached the still place where my bag rested we all fell silent and kept glancing around with our hearts in our throats. At least when they usually dealt with cannas they were safely at the house where they could see who was approaching and they had a plan in place. Now every tiny sound and every breath of wind made us flinch. There wasn’t a plan out here, and just knowing that I met cannas here once made my skin crawl. Even with the two battle-seasoned women as backup, I felt that we couldn’t get out of there soon enough. As if we weren’t already on edge, a dark cloud rolled over what was left of the dim sun and plunged the shrubs around us into distorted, dizzying shapes. The fading light faintly sparkled off of Carrie’s skin, and Sasha’s dark fur caused her to blend in with the shadows almost too well. I followed behind them, whipping my head behind me every few seconds at the sound of every tree’s dead limbs caressing each other. The deeper we walked off the path, the thicker the silence was until even my heart beat seemed too loud.

  I eventually caught sight of the canvas bag thrown against a tree, and my breath released from my chest with a rush. I didn’t even realize that I was holding it in. I dropped to my knees and quickly started sorting through it, making sure everything was there. They kept their backs towards me, keeping an eye on the shifting patches of shadows all around us. Everything was where it should’ve been, and I felt a tightness in my chest loosen. Halfway done. Now we just have to get back to the house without any problems. We quietly walked back towards the road. The road was finally visible through the gaps in the trees, but before I could take a relieved breath, the distinctive snap of a nearby branch caused all of us to freeze. That wasn’t the wind.

  Instinctively, I raised the bat in defense. I swung around to catch a glance of a twitching mut with long, bloody gouges down her face and hair that was matted with blood and god only knows what, streaking out from behind a tree towards us, screeching like a banshee. She was flying straight at me, and without thinking, I swung the metal bat in a wide arc towards her. I had a brief flash of victory when my swing met its mark. I barely had time to register it bouncing off of the mut’s skull with a solid crunch before the bat swung back to hit Sasha squarely in the side of the head, and she crumpled to the ground at my feet unmoving.

  I froze. All I could see was the trickle of blood running from Sasha’s hair and down into the fur framing her face. Behind her lay the mut I just killed, twitching in the throes of death. I just killed someone. I just killed another person. I might’ve killed Sasha too. Carrie dropped in front of Sasha and started smacking her in the face, trying to wake her. Sasha’s eyes slowly fluttered open and landed on the twitching woman laying next to her. She started to scramble away, but she moaned painfully and covered her head in her hands.

  “Don’t move, don’t move,” Carrie said frantically, her hands pushing Sasha lightly back down into the dead leaves littering the ground. Carrie prodded the injury with her fingertips, causing Sasha to hiss through her teeth.

  “It’s probably just a minor concussion, I’m happy that you woke up so quickly,” Carrie raised her head to glare at me, “Good job, you klutz. Why don’t you try paying a little more attention next time?”

  She glanced back at the now still mut on the ground, then shook her head.

  “You’re going to have to carry her, Clint. We have to go. Quickly. We can’t run the risk of that one having friends nearby.” Carrie stood and snatched the bat away from me. I didn’t even fight her. I didn’t want the damn thing in the first place, and this is exactly why. Brute strength? I had that in spades. But aim or grace? Not a chance. I reached down to gingerly cradle Sasha in my arms. Another line of blood started making its way through her fur and onto the skin on her neck, and I had to choke down a lump of guilt.

  “I’m so, so sorry, Sasha. You know it was only an accident, right?”, I asked her. I could hear how pitiful my voice sounded, and I didn’t really care. She tried to nod, but that seemed to cause another wave of pain to crash through her skull and she had to grit her teeth to not make a noise. Carrie watched my movements from afar with obvious rage as she slid her machete in between her belt loops, but she kept her thoughts to herself for the moment. I was eating myself up with guilt enough, I didn’t want to hear her lecture yet. We quickly took off through the trees, but I had to slow at Sasha’s pained groan as I tried to hop over a grove in the dirt.

  “I will barf. All over you.”, she grunted out in warning. I shifted my arms, and we slowed down a little.

  “Hold on…”, Carrie told me as she walked back over to us. She pulled my bag off of her back and pushed it into Sasha’s arms. I was confused until another wave of nausea hit her, and she instinctively curled her body around the bag.

  “Thanks, Carrie…”, she moaned as Carrie nodded and resumed her determined march through the trees.

  “No worries, every time I had a particularly fun night out, it always helped me to hold onto something in the morning when I was feeling sick. I figured it would help now.”

  We finally managed to reach the road, and Sasha immediately relaxed in my arms as my strides evened out. She held her gun in one hand in case of an emergency, but I didn’t trust her with it. She couldn’t even hold it up, much less accurately aim. In the silence, I realized why the rabid muts made me so nervous. They reminded me of those ridiculous zombie movies Abby forced me to watch with her. They only wanted to eat. There was no reason behind their eyes. They always gave me the creeps. To distract myself, I committed to memorizing the entire way back to the house. I didn’t exactly pay attention the first time. Sasha was starting to drift off to the sound of our even steps when I had to stop when I saw what was marking the start of the lanterns.

  “Carrie… you might want to take a look at this.”, I said, my voice low. We were in the middle of a small intersection, which had an odd assortment of signs nailed to a tree. Sasha tried to focus her eyes on the swimming letters, but she couldn’t make them out.

  “What do they say?”, she questioned me weakly, but Carrie read them aloud in a tone I couldn't identify. “Six muts. Good walls.” she read slowly, “Follow the lanterns…”

  She was silent for an endless moment, sightlessly staring at the words. Then the bat whistled through the air, and glass shattered as she hit the lantern hanging over the signs. The sudden sound caused Sasha’s eyes to jerk back open again to watch her. Carrie stared at the now shattered lantern hanging haphazardly on a branch, a look on her face I couldn’t easily identify, breathing heavily. Sasha and I shared a worried look, then we watched Carrie and waited for her next move.

  “This is such bullshit!”, she shrieked as she swung her bat again, this time knocking the broken lantern to the ground. She swung the bat down, again and again, destroying it completely, “This is why we’ve been having to kill so many people?”

  Again the bat swung down onto the broken metal, but it didn’t seem like Carrie had exhausted her venom yet. She was in full freak out mode, it seemed.

  “I used to have a life! I had a car, a job, friends, relationships, a family! And now… Now I spend my life in my house full of muts I didn’t even get to meet until they were already living with me after the fucking apocolypse!”, her swings punctuated her words now, but she wasn’t even hitting the destroyed lantern anymore. Every sign and branch around her was in danger of her wrath, “
I look like a fucking cartoon character. My best friend is turning into a fucking deer. I have to deal with Richard’s patronizing, misogynistic bullshit. I spend my days making sure Allana and Maria don’t destroy what little I have left in one of their temper tantrums. Then what do I get to do with my leftover time? I now spend it murdering other muts! I wasn’t supposed to know how heavy a dead body weighs, or how much human corpses truly stink after a few days unburied! I know things like how the DOW is doing or when it’s the off-season in the Alps! I was supposed to get married, have a daughter, and name her after Jess! I was supposed to take over Daddy’s business! Now I have no family, no life, and I’m stuck in this bullshit wasteland where mutated psychopaths try to kill us because it’s a fun. Fucking. Challenge!”

  We just watched her rage and screech, both of us too shocked to say anything. After she finally exhausted herself, she pushed her sweaty hair out of her eyes and faced us with rage still burning in her eyes.

  “I’m destroying every lantern I see on the way back to the house.”, she hefted the bat in her hand and smacked it against her palm, “You’re on look out while I do that.”

  Sasha and I looked at each other in understanding and followed her silently for way too long for me to feel okay. Even though it killed me to break their attention away from our surroundings, I couldn’t take the tense silence left behind by Carrie’s rage. I needed a distraction. Any distraction. As if Sasha could tell, she provided me with the perfect way to fill the void left by Carrie’s outburst.

  “So, what's the story about your sister?” Sasha asked me in a hesitant voice. Carrie’s step faltered for a second, then she continued marching ahead while staying within earshot. Well, I wanted a distraction. I tried to figure out where to start, but the words just flew out of me without thought. I wasn’t able to ever tell this to anyone else, and it felt good to finally tell someone still living.

  “Abby was always...special. We, my parents and I, first noticed it when she was about two and would make her toys fly into her hand instead of reaching for them herself. Eventually, she got to the point where she could control things like turning on and off the lights, stuff like that. It wasn’t uncommon to see toys and other things flying all through the house to her. But, she was always in control. One day, one of her close friends ended up getting a terminal illness, and Abby stayed with her until the very end. We could see how it was affecting her, but we knew that it wouldn’t be right for us to isolate her from her friend when she was dying. It would be a scar that would never heal. We kept telling ourselves that all kids have to learn about death eventually. Then… she started having the nightmares.”, I paused and followed Carrie with my eyes as she swung her bat at another lantern. I took a deep, steadying breath, this part hurts just to think about.

  “One night, she had a really, really bad one. Her furniture was spinning around the room, and my parents couldn't get close enough to wake her up. The closer they got to her, the more they got beaten by everything flying around, and the more they yelled the more frightened she became. I managed to wake her up by throwing water from a vase on her, but the damage was done. They even ended up having to stay in the hospital for a few days. They slowly pulled away from her. First, not talking to her as much, then not even staying in the same room with her. When things would happen, I tried to explain that it wasn’t her doing it deliberately but they just wouldn’t listen to anything I said. Abby and I grew closer and closer over the last few years, I basically became her parent. I ended up getting in another big fight with them about how they were treating her, and, for once, they actually agreed. They even said that they were going to take her out for ice cream the next day to try to make up for all of it.”

  I watched Carrie’s long ponytail bounce along in front of us, trying to steady myself. Just talking about this was causing me to shake with rage, and I didn’t want to jostle Sasha again after I had already hurt her. I took a deep breath and continued, watching Carrie stomp towards another lantern hanging ahead of them. In a weird way, I understood her rage. Keeping to the trend of angry white men, there were few walls in my family’s house that didn’t have at least one fist sized hole in them by the time I left.

  “They didn’t come back with her. They said that she got pistachio ice cream, and they didn’t realize it in time. And that there wasn’t an EPI pen. We had a small memorial for her, but the whole thing didn’t sit right with me. I waited a while, slowly piecing it all together. Then one night, I broke into my father’s study, where he kept all of the important paperwork for the family. I found a folder with Abby's name on it, and found what I expected in there at first. Birth certificate, death certificate, bills from the funeral, stuff like that, but I also found this…”

  I awkwardly fished out a thick piece of paper from the front pocket of my bag and handed the thick stationery to Carrie to read. She took it from me to scan as I explained its contents to Sasha.

  “It’s a letter saying that they would be happy to accept Abby into their facility and that they would pick her up on the same date that she ‘died’.”, my voice turned venomous on the last word, “It also talks about how their facility will ready a room for her that will be made to the proper ‘specifications’. I confronted my family, and they denied knowing anything until I flashed this. Then they admitted everything. They said they sent her away because ‘she was becoming dangerous and needed special care that they couldn’t give’. I couldn’t stand to hear it, their excuses meant nothing to me. That same night the bombs hit, even though I didn’t know if she even survived, I knew that I had to find her. I had to protect her from whatever this place really is and whatever they’re doing to her. Everything else is irrelevant. After I finally woke up, I took everything of use from the house I could. I didn’t know if my parents had even survived the blast, they went out of town to escape me, but I wasn’t going to wait around to find out. I drove until I ran out of gas, then I started following my GPS until it died. I’ve been lost since then…”

  “Clint… how old are you?” Sasha asked me quietly.

  “Twenty.”, the word came out as a whisper. My insides ached from telling the story and having to think of it all again. It had been nearly two years since the bombs dropped, but it felt like two hundred. Neither of them seemed to have anything to say, and we walked all the way back to the house in silence. The swing of Carrie’s bat destroying the lanterns was the only thing that occasionally broke the dark silence. I kept my eyes ahead but I could feel Sasha studying the emotions flashing across my face. I couldn’t help wondering what Carrie was thinking, as we walked she swung the bat with less and less force. I remember trying to wrap my mind around an entire building of natural born muts, and I still couldn’t do it.

  I wanted to storm into that mysterious building and free anyone that might be locked inside, even if Abby wasn’t there. The idea of people being locked up like that made me sick. Now though, being here with two muts and seeing how much the bombs changed them I had a terrifying thought. What would the people at the institution even be like? If the bombs caused normal people to mutate like this, what would it do to people that already had powers? What if they went mad too and now there was a building full of cannas that already had powers before? Before my brain could implode we caught sight of the long, winding driveway, and Carrie finally slowed down to walk beside us. We were almost to the porch steps when she spoke.

  “You can stay here with us, but you’re going to have to tell everyone in the house about this, you know? If there really is people who were muts before the bombs hit, then we need to be aware.”, she told me. I nodded as she opened the door for us to walk in. We made it back and only had to deal with one canna, and Carrie gave me permission to live here. I still felt like crap about hurting Sasha, but I couldn’t help but to be relieved.

  Luckily, it seemed like the pounding in Sasha’s head had dulled and her eyes weren’t glazed anymore. As we entered Maria popped her head out of the kitchen, and with one glance at
Sasha resting in my arms she hurried off to get Richard. Carrie’s face clouded when Richard came down to check on her and I made a mental note to ask her about that later. I may be just a human, but if there’s someone causing problems in the house I need to know, even if it's just drama from the past. There’s too much I don’t understand right now for me to not know what was happening where I was living, and maybe I could help if he was a problem. After barely glancing at Sasha’s head Richard agreed with Carrie that it was just a slight concussion, but that Sasha should stay awake for the next eight hours just in case. He was in the room for a minute max, which only made Carrie’s expression sour further. She caught me studying her expression and quickly plastered on a bad fake smile and turned to Sasha.

  “Well, you’re in the clear Sash. Clint, will you carry her upstairs to my room so I can keep an eye on her? I’ll show you your room on the way.”, Carrie asked me, and I followed her after picking Sasha up again. I had to spend last night sleeping on one of the downstairs couches because nobody trusted me yet, and the thought of having four walls with a door was too exciting to process. My speed must have picked up while my thoughts were going crazy. I noticed Sasha was clenching her teeth again, and I could feel how tense her body was in my arms. I slowed to almost a crawl as we came to Carrie’s door.

  “You must feel really, really bad.”, Carrie directed at Sasha while I followed behind her bouncing ponytail down the plush hallway. She gave one more slight smile to Sasha as she swung her door open. “You never let me call you ‘Sash’ without a fight.”

  When I gently lowered her onto Carrie’s pillows, Sasha opened one eye to shoot her a dark glare. There was that rage again. Carrie seemed adamant that Sasha was all mellow, but I knew that she’d be terrifying if she got truly mad.