H Romero - The Girl Who's Made of Leaves - Post Apocalyptic Science Fiction

To my wonderfully talented, patient, and brutally honest Beta Readers,

Misty, Meggie, Angelique, Crystal, Lauren, Rachel, Dawn, Amy, Susanna, and Sally.

YouTube.com publishers, authors, producers, friends,

Self-Publishing with Dale, Thank you, Dale. You know the meaning of building a brand and not forgetting those who support you.

Kelli Publish, Thank you, Kelli with an “i”. You are a truly a woman who knows her craft. Thanks for sharing.

Jenna Moreci, Thanks to the only Pegasus-riding, cyborg I know.

Thank you. You are appreciated. Enjoy.

Rum and tobacco caress her skin, leaving behind a thin film of notes, hinting of chocolate and earth. The girl wants to tumble deeper into a restful state of sleep. She has a driving need to dig her toes into the blankets, desiring a feeling of comfort and safety, but here, there are no blankets in which to burrow.

The harsh clank of metal instruments, falling upon a bare metal tray, scrapes at her nerves, making the ends stand at attention. The sharp clamor of the noise pours ice water over her and tells her to wake up, right now.

The aroma of cheap drugstore aftershave soothes and reminds her of better times, but of times she cannot remember. Recollection is a phantom, floating through the room, evading her when she reaches out for it, eluding capture.

Sliding downward again into the sweet molestation of darkness, soft and shadowy tendrils of empty promises coax her into giving in to it. She tries to nestle down into the bed, escaping into the narrow fringes of sleep again. There she can hide within the sanctuary it will provide.

A smart, repetitive slap from the back of a hand, one to each cheek, angers her. She’s awake and annoyed.

“Do you remember anything, R – Zero – Five – E?” says a man, whose lovely face she glimpses only briefly before it fades out again, taking the light with it.

The child hears the question; it’s distant. It’s a ghostly nagging whisper, filtered through a confusion of echoes, bouncing around on the inside of her head, pounding on her tympanic membranes with little tack-hammers, and so, not knowing the question is being directed to her, she ignores it. Who am I? Why am I here?

“Do you remember…” repeats the man, pausing to glance at his watch. He winds it, and then turns to study a nearby chart before continuing his question. “…how you came to be here… at Camp Able?”

The question is more defined this time, taking shape and meaning. Why won’t this man let her just fade into the beckoning abyss. It tugs at her, pinching at her playfully; giggling, grinning, and coercing her to give into blessed unconsciousness.

Only a girl of nine, she lays here, like a fatted lamb, on an abused and stained hospital gurney. The sheets are stretched tightly across it, and tucked in with hospital corners. Its striped pattern is faded along with the dying breaths of the building which houses them. Both are in much in need of a good cleaning.

She struggles to open the lids of her eyes. They flutter like clipped-winged butterflies, confronting their own mortality as they falter. Heavy, unwieldy, curtains of skin, unwilling to comply with her urgent need to let the light in. They are sticky from the insides. She’s been drugged, and the drugs are working.

Like other subjects, who came before, it’s taken three times the recommended, safe, dose to induce a satisfactory level of sedation. If one was to ask the voice speaking to her, it might confirm that it’s typical of her kind…. the mutation… or whatever ‘it’ is. It causes the host’s body to be resistant to the meager collection of pharmaceuticals available on Camp Able’s medical wing.

Who am I? She doesn’t know, so why ask her anyway? When finally, she manages to open her eyes, the world is spinning wildly around her; a carnival ride guaranteed to make her puke. And puke she does.

The girl’s bombarded with external stimulation and visual noise that clatters, and clangs, and turns everything upside down. The world makes no sense to her, whatsoever. Where did she come from? Why is she here? She has not a clue.

She’s an under-baked embryo, emerging from the nurture and protection of a cadaver’s womb. Emerging… no. Instead, grasped by her ankles and yanked out, breech. She’s thrust against her will into a cold calamity of a dying world.

Her throbbing head pulses excruciatingly, at the temples, feeling more cumbersome than it should. The drugs can partially be blamed, along with severe dehydration.

Something’s encircling her head like a soft crown, threatening to cut into the skin. A thin, mesh fabric conceals an injury that she can’t remember receiving. She suffered a blow – to the head – somehow.

Any attempt to raise her skull from the mattress only causes it to loll suddenly, to one side or the other, with a lack of grace that only an alcoholic could so vividly display after a long night at a bar.

A line of concentrated saliva drools from the corner of her mouth intermingled with specks of vomitus.

Waves of nausea grind into her gut, like a punch from the world’s strongest man: he’s a brutish man with a handlebar mustache, and a bald head. He wears a red-striped, one piece. He twists her intestines into great looping knots, the likes of which even the most experienced sailors would be envious.

This room is cold, and also moon-burned white. The lighting from above, from the two oversized and obnoxious surgical lights, is intense. Having no care what the mortals of this world think about them. They are what they are, with no pretense or wishes to be anything else but lights. They laugh at oddities, maladies, and the occasional death from their perches above. They cast a surreal illumination; a false, dead sort of light, having a quality about it that reminds one of a nightmare, and this nightmare is as real as any could be.

There’s a large mirrored glass hanging from one of the walls. Time and humidity have crept in along its edges, slowly finger-nailing the reflective material away from the bubbling back of it and leaving the edges to blacken as the reflective nature of it is leached away to the passing of the years.