Mark Tufo - 'Til Death Do Us Part

I kept walking for what else was there, and then, in the hazy distance, there was an irregularity. At first I could not discern it and then it began to dawn on me that I was seeing objects not of nature. Man made? Could it be? My heart leapt, that of course was until I began to think of where I may or may not be, would I want to come across anything made by the sentient beings of this place, because that would mean the sentient beings were around also. Maybe that would be preferable, one quick death instead of this long drawn out crap.

Typical Talbot, jump headlong into the teeth of the tiger instead of gently skirting around. I guess I just work better with the gun pointing at my head rather than having to think my way out. Well when you have as little going on in your head as I do you could see why I tend to go with my strengths! As the day wore on I began to see wisps of smoke coming up from a variety of homes, I guess huts might be a more apt word. Well shit, if I want to get honest, more like earthen mounds with a thatch roof.

“Hello,” I said, I wanted to yell it, but I still felt like a stranger in a strange land and until I knew the customs I wanted to be as discreet as possible. I began to peer inside of a hut when the flap of deer hide used as a door began to rustle. I stepped back as a heavyset man. No…that was the wrong terminology, he wasn’t fat, he was thick as if he were hewn from one solid block of wood. There wasn’t a curve on the man, he was all hard angles. I had height on him and that was it, his arms looked as thick as my legs. He walked right past me and I couldn’t have been more than six inches from him. I wanted to shout at him to look at me, but the square set of his jaw outlined in a scowl made me think twice.

I could hear guttural talking inside, it sounded Germanic but the brutish words issuing softly made even the harsh modern day German language seem French. The only reason I dared peek in was the voices sounded young, I might be able to take the off spring of the thick man that had just passed me by. You’ll notice I said ‘maybe’. “Hello?” I asked as I walked in. I had a girlfriend back in college that was taking German as a second language. She used to speak it all the time around me. You’d think I would have at least retained the word ‘hello’ in German. Nope not me I was too busy staring at her tits, sue me. I’m sorry if what every male on the planet does offends you.

Listen, the planet right now is in the midst of a near extinction event, I can help with the repopulating of our home. It’s VERY, VERY simple, because if you’re a woman and a guy is next to you, he wants to have sex—except for the obvious exceptions, related, dead, or zombie. Other than that, if he’s had a good sandwich today, humping is the only other thing on his mind. I mean now that sports have literally been wiped off the table, what else is there really?

I think I’m avoiding this next part; I’ve been sucker punched in the gut with less wind knocked out of me. The inside of the hut had a stone fireplace off to the side, a small table was in the center and a pile of filthy animal skins was in the far corner where I imagine the family, I use that word loosely, slept. A girl with long raven hair was leaning over a table, tears fell heavily from her face, her torn and worn skirt was draped around her shoulders, her skinny legs caked in dirt were shaking violently, an even younger boy was facing away from the scene he kept repeatedly banging his head against a stout branch, the sobbing and the hollow knocking were the only sounds in the small enclosure.

“Are you okay?” I asked. My heart was thumping wildly in my throat. I couldn’t think of anything else to say. The girl had been raped and the young boy, I figured to be her brother, had not dealt with the violence very well. What kind of monster does this? I put my hands up in as non-threatening a posture as possible and approached. I had made up my mind, I was going to kill that man or die trying.

“Miss,” I said trying to sound as comforting as possible. Her tears and mutterings kept up, the boy was now rocking back and forth crying heavily himself, he was saying something, but even in a foreign language I could tell it was gibberish by its tone and cadence. The girl had still not acknowledged my presence as I approached. She looked up wildly when she heard a noise behind me.

Zombie girl? Was the first thought that came through my head, she was a dead ringer for the thing that had kissed me albeit an earlier version, this girl couldn’t have been more than twelve or thirteen, it was tough to tell with the amount of malnourishment she seemed to be sustaining. I stepped back as her intense, frightened gaze bore holes through me, then I realized she couldn’t see me at all. She was reacting to the thick man who had come back from whatever errand asshole rapists do.

He yelled at the girl and she immediately stood up and placed her dress back into place. She stood there with her head down, looking completely beaten as the man kept berating her. This wasn’t just some stranger. The longer I stayed and witnessed the interaction, such as it was, the more I came to the realization that this thing that called himself a man was the father of the two children in the hut. He yelled until they began to do menial work around the house. The boy was fixing holes in the walls where light was spilling through and the girl took the pile of skins and brought them outside. She placed them on the branch of a small tree and began to beat the bugs and dirt out of them with a stick. Oh how I wished she would use that on the man.

I was a ghost here. I had no more influence than a flying piece of dust. No that wasn’t true, dust could carry germs. Germs could be inhaled and the host could become infected and die. I shuddered at the thought (airborne germs I mean) not me being a ghost part. I watched as something in that girl was dying, she had lost whatever semblance of innocence she had possessed, it was early in her development but I thought I could see the foreshadowing of what she was to become. Abuse takes so much that is good from our children and replaces it with so much that is dark. Her scales had not yet been tipped but the process had begun.

Her brother came out and lay by her feet. He was still crying. The girl alternated between beating the skins and rubbing his head.

They began to utter that guttural language that I could not discern so I filled in what I thought they were saying merely by their tone and posture.

Tomas looked up at his sister, his tear-soaked face lined with muddy runnels. “Are you okay, Lizzie?”

A quick narrowing of the eyes, then a softening when she realized who she was talking to. She got down on her haunches and stroked his face. “Tomas, I have to leave this place.”

Then and there I realized that Eliza had sacrificed all that she was and could have become to shield her brother from the man that they called ‘father’. “He’ll stop, Lizzie! Please don’t leave,” he begged, clutching onto her.

“Oh, Tomas,” she cried. “He’ll never stop.” And in that she was right. But I think Eliza feared what would become of her brother if he was left behind to face the wrath of that sick bastard.

That was Eliza. She had been a small girl in a brutal world and she should have died after a pitiful existence. The dialog between the two siblings had no sooner finished when I felt a loud whooshing noise pass around my head, much like if you were crazy enough to stick your head out of a car moving at a hundred miles per hour down the Autobahn. I was at what looked like an alleyway abutting up to a small market; although I had not moved my feet so much as an inch. As I began to orientate myself, I noticed an older Eliza being dragged along by her father. He had one large meaty hand wrapped completely around her forearm and was pulling her towards the back of the alleyway.