Apocalypsis 03 - Exodus

movie.
    She was snarling and screaming and moaning, trying to get away from me, spitting at me and even trying to bite me. I bent us both over the side and released her just enough to slam my elbow into the side of her head, dropping her to the floor.
    I took a few seconds to wipe her saliva and blood off my face, disgusted that I’d let her get into a position to do that. I hated having to fight and hold back at the same time.
    “I’m going to kill you!” she yelled from the floor. “You’ve ruined my dress.”
    I shook my head. “And here I thought you were going to kill me because I beat your ass.”
    “Why don’t you just finish it,” she said, now sounding depressed instead of angry. “Take one of those guns in there and blow my head off. I don’t care anymore.”
    “You can blow your own head off when I leave. I want to know where my boyfriend is, first.” I nudged her with my foot. “Get up and stop feeling sorry for yourself.”
    She whipped her head up, grabbing my ankle. “Feeling sorry for myself? Sorry for myself?!” She got up on her hands and knees, using my legs and then wrists to get to her feet and steady herself. She was facing me again, her head and shoulders stooped, bodily fluids dripping off her face. “What do you not understand about my life?”
    I shrugged. “I understand everything. You were raped by a canner. He made you eat your brother. You gave birth to his demon child. You’ve been stuck here in this hole for almost a year. You have the worst life of anyone I’ve ever met.”
    “And? So?”
    “And so what? Now you want to be a baby murderer? You want to kill me too? You want to commit suicide? So do it. No one’s gonna blame you. Give up. The world sucks, anyway. What do you care?”
    She looked at me aghast. “I thought you were a nice person, the way you came in here and looked at my baby …”
    I pointed at her. “Ha! Gotcha.”
    She looked at me, confused. “You got me, what?”
    “You just called him your baby.”
    “No, I didn’t,” she said, frowning, looking mutinous.
    “Yeah, you did. And if you wanted to die so bad, you have about eighty ways to get that done hanging on the walls in the next room. Same for the baby-killing part. Regardless of what’s happened, you still want to live.”
    She shuffled backwards until her legs hit the cot. She dropped down to sit on it, never letting her gaze leave me. “This is a shit life and I don’t want it.”
    “Then leave your hole. Go out and talk to some other kids. You’re taking good care of your baby down here, so keep doing that.”
    “I can’t. I can’t, don’t you see?” she said, now weeping with actual tears. “I did horrible, evil things. I … I ignored all those kids … all those kids!”
    I shook my head, frustrated with the world how it was now, feeling sad for a girl I also hated. “Whatever you did, you did to survive. I’m not saying eating kids is an okay way to survive. But you did it to save yourself from being murdered probably by your … child’s father or whatever. No one’s going to hold that against you. Or maybe they will and you just have to move on from it.”
    “Do you have a brother? Or a sister?” she asked through her tears.
    “No.”
    “Then you cannot possibly understand what I’ve gone through. My soul has been destroyed. I have no life to take. Don’t you think I would have killed myself already if I thought it would do any good?”
    “Uhhh, yes?”
    “No. If I do that, I’ll just have an eternity of the same torture to look forward to. At least here, I can pretend for a little while that I’m not damned.” She dropped her head and stared at the floor, looking like a robot that’d had its power turned off.
    “You’re not damned. There’s forgiveness for people who are forced to do bad things.”
    “Nobody is forced to do anything,” she said in a monotone, still staring at the floor. “We always have a choice. I made the wrong ones, and now I have to live with that.”
    I sighed, giving up finally on the idea that I could make her suddenly sane or able to live with the things she’d done and suffered through. Some things in this world were going to remain damaged, irretrievably broken and tortured until death came to take them away or time wore all traces of them from this earth.
    “Brittney … will you please tell me about Bodo? You said I don’t have a lot of time. He’s a really good person and he doesn’t deserve to be