Blood Relations - Chapter 19

Scotland, 1939

Vicky woke up still burning under the full light of the midday sun. Her battered face pulsed with agonizing frequency, and her shattered ribs rubbed against each other, driving hot spikes into her lungs. Her left forearm was broken, as was her elbow, and every wound was a hot angry throb that couldn’t be relieved.

But from her legs, she felt nothing. She eased her right hand down to try and feel her thighs, and instead, her fingers froze when she felt stickiness between her legs. She drew her hand back and found her own blood.

Mixed in the sticky fluid were chunks of something black. Vicky sniffed at the gritty black specks, but she couldn’t make out what they were. Maybe some of the road filth had risen in a plume during her impact, and it had stick to her shattered pelvis?

She reached down again, trying to find where a bone was poking through her skin. The process was agonizing, because her pelvic bone was broken in so many places that the chunks were almost floating under her loose muscles.

But there was no hole. Vicky supposed that it was possible that she’d been out so long that the wound had already healed. But the possibility was improbable to her, even in her tortured mental state.

She found a hard lump when she pressed in on the flesh just above her pubic hair. The lump didn’t feel like a bone, and when she pushed her fingers down more firmly, she could almost swear that she felt a chafing sensation inside her body cavity. The second time she attempted this, the lump broke into many more sections, and then cool, fresh blood trickled out of her, almost like a human menstrual period.

Vicky stopped playing with the lump.

All around her, people walked the street, and yet not one person noticed her. No one would even park their vehicles near her. It seemed impossible that they should miss all six feet of Vicky lying partway on the street, her useless legs splayed out over the sidewalk, which told her that she wasn’t alone.

She’d barely completed the thought when a voice in her mind commanded, Roll over and lay in the gutter where you belong. Lay on your back and look up at the sun.

The angry voice was impossible to fight with, and Vicky pulled herself into the gutter with her right arm, then laid on her back to stare up at the sun.

The voice returned with more force, the cold malice in the man’s projected thought a weapon all its own. You want to die already, but you will live, and you will learn your proper place in the world. If you ever see a halfling again, you will drop your eyes and move on.

Vicky thought nothing to resist the voice, and still he assaulted her, magnifying the heat of the sun by a compulsion. She felt as if a fire were stripping away her skin, reducing her every last nerve to ash. But the process never ended, and her tortured flesh smoldered throughout the boiling summer afternoon. No matter how much she tried to scream, the halfling kept her throat locked tight.

The psychic attack ended only after the sun slipped behind the horizon, and once the pain subsided, Vicky realized she could feel a myriad of prickles in her legs. She still couldn’t move them. Vicky started to worry that she would be caught when the hate-filled voice sent, No, Vicky, you will not be caught. I’ll make sure you can crawl out of town and get away safely. We’ll grant you mercy if you go back where you came from.

Vicky made no arguments. She first dragged herself through the streets, then crawled when her legs healed enough to bear her weight. She got up to stumble at a slow walk, and as soon as she could, she broke into a full run.

She didn’t stop running until the first signs of dawn. Then she buried herself in a shallow pit, a low, animal habit that would have shamed her parents to see.

Only a common animal would sleep under the earth. Her mother spoke with disdain in Vicky’s mind.  That filth belongs to the worms and the dead humans.

She never slept in a hole again.