Lib Novel Page 2
I… I can’t remember. He’s not going to like that. I sit up, trying to wake myself so I’ll remember. My mom’s name is…
“Her name?” he demands.
“I can’t remember.” My new trainer Maru said there’s value in honesty, that it’s more precious than gold. The anger simmering in Mr. Frost’s eyes scares me. I’m not sure his currency is the same as Maru’s.
“Where are you in this frame?” He pauses the grainy black and white video and waits for my answer.
It’s a small store. That’s all I know. “Why does this even matter? It’s a store.”
“Stores like this sell more than meets the eye. From the outside, they sell gasoline so that people can fuel their vehicles.”
“Vehicles?” I ask. Everyone knows all the vehicles are dead.
“Why were you there?” he asks, pressing play on his remote control again.
A woman with dark hair leads a child into the store, holding her hand. They walk down the perimeter aisle and the woman opens a glass door and plucks a white jug from the shelf. She keeps hold of the girl and leads her to a desk where she lets go of the child to search her bag for money.
I’m still not sure if I am the woman or the girl. The image is too grainy.
A shadow falls over the windows, followed by a moment of silence, when the female clerk and the woman look outside where the sunlight has disappeared.
The little girl doesn’t notice that the light is gone. She tugs on her mother’s shirt as a man pushes the door open, a small bell attached to the door announcing his arrival.
The woman pushes the girl behind her while the clerk reaches under the counter and ducks into a door behind her, quickly locking herself in and the woman and child out.
The woman looks nervous. She shifts her weight back and forth, slowly but steadily pushing the girl farther from the man with whom they’ve been left.
The newcomer looks sick, his pale hair long and greasy. The woman whispers something to the girl. I read her lips.
“What did she say?” Kael asks.
“She told the girl to run,” I answer. Just then, the girl dashes out a door on the opposite side of the building. On that side of the building, in the middle of the street, there is a sliver of blinding bright sunlight. The girl hides inside the warm light.
The man watches the woman intently. As he stalks toward her she runs down an aisle, putting distance between them. But he’s fast. One minute he’s on the opposite side of the store from her, and the next he’s at the end of her aisle. Unaware of his new location, the woman sprints toward him, looking over her shoulder at the spot he’d stood in just a moment ago.
She screams when his arms close around her, and I see the man has fangs. Though she fights him furiously, she can’t get away from his iron grip. He throws her into the glass doors she’d opened just minutes before, then he bites her neck. Inch by inch, she slides down the glass. The fight she has at the beginning of the attack is gone by the end.
The man exits the store from the same door he used to enter it, not sparing a parting glance.
The woman’s lips move as she angles her head toward the girl, still waiting in the shrinking sliver of sunlight. Though I register the movement, I can’t take my eyes off the girl in the sliver of gold.
“Do you want to know what she said?” Mr. Frost asks.
I shake my head. I don’t want to hear it. Imagining a hundred heartbreaking words, nothing is as bad as what he says were her actual ones.
“She said, ‘Eve, stay in the light.’”
My eyes well with tears. I open my mouth and shut it again, cobwebs of saliva stretching and then gumming in the corner of my lips. “The little girl was me?” I finally ask.
“Of course she was. Don’t you remember?”
I don’t. I don’t remember it at all. How could I have forgotten my own mother?
“Don’t worry, Eve. I will help you regain your memory. And before long, you’ll never forget where you came from or why you are here.”
The only problem is that my name isn’t Eve. I can’t remember what it is. It’s right there on the tip of my tongue… but it’s not Eve. The girl in that video is not me.
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