Angelfall (Penryn & the End of Days #1)(44)

My pack feels much lighter. We won’t have anything we need should we need to camp outside, but I do feel better knowing I can run faster. I also feel better having a new pocketknife attached to my belt. Raffe found it somewhere and gave it to me as we headed out. I also found some steak knives and stuck a couple into my boots. Whoever lived here liked their steaks. These are high-quality, all-metal German knives. After holding these, I never want to go back to serrated tin with wooden handles.

It’s a beautiful day. The sky is a vivid blue above the redwoods and the air is cool but comfortable.

The sense of ease doesn’t last, though. My mind soon fills with worries of what might lurk in the forest, and about whether Obi’s men are hunting us. As we walk along the hillside, I catch glimpses of the gap in the forest where the road must be to our left.

Raffe stops in front of me. I follow his lead and hold my breath. Then I hear it.

Someone is crying. It’s not the brokenhearted wail of someone who’s just lost a family member. I’ve heard plenty of those in the last few weeks to know what they sound like. There is no shock or denial in the sound, just pure grief and the pain of accepting it as a lifelong companion.

Raffe and I exchange glances. Which is safer? Go up to the road to avoid the griever? Or stay in the forest and risk an encounter with him? Probably the latter. Raffe must think so too, because he turns and continues in the forest.

It’s not long before we see the little girls.

They hang from a tree. Not by their necks, but by ropes tied under their arms and around their chests.

One girl looks to be about Paige’s age and the other a couple of years older. That would make them seven and nine. The older girl’s hand still grips the younger girl’s dress like she had tried to hold the little girl up out of harm’s way.

They wear what look like matching striped dresses. It’s hard to tell now that the print is stained in blood. Most of the material has been ripped and shredded. Whatever gnawed on their legs and torso got full before it reached their chests. Or it was too low to the ground to reach them.

The worst by far are their tortured expressions. They were alive when they were eaten.

I double over and throw up kibble bits until I dry-heave.

All the while, a middle-aged man wearing thick glasses cries beneath the girls. He’s a scrawny guy, with the kind of look and presence that must have had him sitting alone in the cafeteria through his high school years. His entire body trembles with his sobs. A woman with red-rimmed eyes wraps her arms around him.

“It was an accident,” says the woman, soothing her hand over the man’s back.

“This was no accident,” says the man.

“We didn’t mean to.”

“That doesn’t make it okay.”

“Of course it’s not okay,” she says. “But we’ll get through this. All of us.”

“Who’s worse? Him or us?”

“It’s not his fault,” she says. “He can’t help it. He’s the victim, not the monster.”

“We need to put him down,” he says. Another sob escapes him.

“You’d give up on him just like that?” Her expression turns fierce. She steps back from him.

He looks even more forlorn now that he’s unable to lean on her. But anger stiffens his spine. He flings his arm toward the hanging girls. “We fed him little girls!”

“He’s just sick, that’s all,” she says. “We just need to make him better.”

“How?” He hunches to look intensely into her face. “What are we going to do, take him to the hospital?”

She puts her hands on his face. “When we get him back, we’ll know what to do. Trust me.”

He turns from her. “We’ve gone too far. He’s not our boy anymore. He’s a monster. We’ve all become monsters.”

She cocks back her hand and slaps him. The crack of her palm against his cheek is as startling as a gunshot.

They continue to argue, completely ignoring us as if any danger we might pose is so irrelevant compared to what they’re dealing with that it’s not worth their energy to notice us. I’m not sure what they’re saying exactly, but dark suspicions edge my mind.

Raffe grabs my elbow and leads me downhill, around the mad people who ignore us and the half-chewed girls hanging grotesquely from the tree.

The acid in my stomach churns and threatens to come up again. But I swallow hard and force my feet to follow him.

I keep my gaze on the ground at Raffe’s feet, trying not to think about what’s just uphill from us. I catch a faint odor that clenches my stomach in a familiar way. I look around, trying to pinpoint the scent. It’s the sulfurous stench of rotten eggs. My nose leads me to a pair of eggs nestled in the dead leaves. They’re cracked in several places where I can catch a glimpse of the brown yolk inside. The stain of faded pink still shows on the delicate eggshell where someone had dyed it long ago.

I look uphill. From here, I have a perfect view of the hanging girls between the trees.

Whether my mother placed the eggs here as a protective talisman for us, or whether she is playing out the type of fantasy the old media would have headlined, “The Devil Made Me Do It,” I’ll never know. Both are equally possible now that she is completely off her meds.

My stomach cramps and I have to double over again to dry-heave.