Chapter Text
Part I: The Beginning of the End
When I come to, everything hurts. It is hard to imagine what normalcy felt like at any point in my life, because the past that I think of now only feels like a dream. Memories feel like weapons, and many of the dreams I have in my unconscious state taunt me with images of what life was before my abduction.
It’s strange how you don’t realize how good life was before something detrimental happens. Before my mother died of alcohol poisoning when I was fifteen, it was easy to look past all the shitty parts of my childhood and pretend my life was perfect. Even though my mother was consumed by money and liquor, and my politician father worked more hours than he spent at home, I was happy. I was beautiful, rich, and I was ignorant enough to believe all my fake friends truly cared for me. But after my mother’s death, and my spiral, I saw life for what it really was: a never-ending battle to remain happy and stable.
As soon as I left home at eighteen and dove straight into my college career, I never looked back. My visits to home to see my father and his wife became fewer over the years, and now I can’t even remember the last time I hugged him. I don’t know if I’ll ever see him again.
The hood is taken off my head, and I blink furiously, vision blurry from being knocked out multiple times and head pounding from the severe concussion I no doubt developed. My captors were not gentle, and neither was I with them, resisting every chance I could.
I make out the inside of a church, tasting the iron of blood on my tongue. Wooden pews before me, colorful glass mosaics line the walls. All the feeling in my body comes back in a rush; my bones trembling, wrists rubbed raw from being bound by rope, head throbbing. Cold concrete nips at the backs of my thighs as I sit up and realize just how freezing cold this church is, as if no life exists within these walls. Rain pounds down on the wooden structure, as if asking to be let in.
The only form of light comes from the many candles lit around the church, and as my eyes adjust, I watch shadows move around me. Figures in robes chant a strange hymn in Spanish. From my studies in the language, I am able to make out only a few words in my state.
Plague.
Rebirth.
Sacred body.
I look behind and above me to find a large window made up of red, green, and blue stained glass, all fragmented as if none of the pieces fit. Chaos. A symbol, what looks like a dragonfly with broken, jagged-edged wings presents itself behind the colors. I swallow the sandpaper in my throat.
More chanting begins as the shadows increase in number, the figures all hidden under their robes. Cowards hiding behind the sacred word of their god.
Finally, the man I’d seen in my nightmares emerges from the shadows. The smell of carrion hits my nose with an unrelenting aggression. I notice the…thing the man holds in one hand. Shaped like a staff, lean and tall, but moving like it’s alive. Tentacles slither up and down the staff, snaking out and flowing as if on a phantom breeze. Bile burns in the back of my throat, the acid of an empty stomach.
“Sacrificial lamb. You will receive our most sacred body,” the man says. Glowing cerulean eyes meet mine, and I can’t help but suck in a breath, scrambling back at an attempt to escape this monster. Grayish, purple skin spreads thin over cracked lips in a wide smile.
“It begins now.”
I feel a sharp, stinging prick in the side of my throat, and I gag at the pain, attempting to scream but finding my voice raw. I thrash, but the pain overcomes me, my body freezing up and going numb as if I am no longer in control.
It doesn’t take long for the darkness to claim me, offering me relief from this nightmare once again, if only temporarily.
~
I tend to relive the past in the form of nightmares.
It is 1998, and I am back in that little apartment in the city. My aunt and uncle’s apartment they loved so dearly. My cousins: the eldest girl, two years older than me at the age of sixteen, the other a little boy just shy of turning six. My mother is there, too, sober for once. We take a trip every year at the end of summer, just the two of us, to Raccoon City where her sister lives with her family. The city is a sprawling metropolis nested in the Arklay Mountains, and I love it because it feels so isolated from the rest of the U.S., despite being a somewhat large city. My aunt and uncle moved here before my littlest cousin was born after they found jobs working for the Umbrella Corporation. They’ve lived in the same area for years, and will likely never move, my mother says. They are too content in this city to even consider it.
I love this trip my mother and I take, not only because it is the very few times a year we get to see family, but because my mother acts like her addiction is non-existent. She puts on a facade for her sister, her niece and nephew, that she is a present mother, a strong woman. A woman married to a politician she loves deeply, a hard-working, full-time mother to her only daughter. When the truth is my mother loves drinking more than she loves my father, sometimes more than she loves me, I think.
But this trip pushes all those thoughts away, and my family is led to believe my mother kicked her addiction. And during this time with my family, I believe it as well.
We wake up early on a Saturday to play video games in the living room of my aunt and uncle’s apartment in downtown Raccoon City. My cousin and I get competitive with shooters, so my baby cousin is forced to watch as he is too little to play, and neither of us have the patience to teach him. My uncle has run out to the store to get ingredients to make pancakes from scratch, so my mother and her sister wait, chatting at the kitchen table over steaming cups of coffee. Their laughter booms over the sounds of gunshots on the TV. Their laugher turns to whispers, sharing secrets over steaming mugs.
My uncle arrives with grocery bags, a fresh bouquet of autumnal flowers in one hand. He refills the flower vase on the kitchen table, and the adults begin cooking to music while the kids play.
My cousin takes down an enemy on screen while the smell of bacon hits my nose. She yells in defeat as she watches her character die on screen. My baby cousin and I laugh at her expense, and she passes the controller over to me.
The doorbell rings. Everyone continues on, waiting for one of the adults to answer. It rings again, refusing to be ignored.
My aunt calls from the kitchen for my older cousin to answer it. It’s likely just the newspaper, or maybe a neighbor asking us to keep the noise down. But as I watch my cousin near the front door, I want to scream. I want to yell at her to stop—to not open the door. I want to run to make sure all the doors are locked, the windows. To convince my uncle to grab his gun from the safe.
But my body locks up, and as hard as I try to scream, nothing comes out but air.
My cousin answers the door, and a man leaps out to grab her by the throat. He strangles her, and she tries so hard to get his fingers loose from around her neck. But the man isn’t human—he isn’t even alive, it seems. He thrusts my cousin’s neck towards him, and sinks his teeth into her shoulder, biting deep. He pulls away, I hear the snap and I see the blood oozing from his mouth, the muscle and sinew dangling from his teeth, a piece of my cousin.
Her screaming doesn’t stop as he goes for another bite, ruthless in his hunger. His face comes into clearer focus and I realize his lips are gone, his skin pale and wrinkled, eyes so light he looks blinded. A corpse. A body reanimated, straight from the grave.
My cousin collapses to the floor, a deep maroon staining her pajamas, the blood pouring from her creating a puddle on the wooden floor. My mother, aunt, and uncle run to the scene, screaming out when they see my cousin’s body bleeding out on the floor. My baby cousin cries hysterically, snot oozing from his nose.
The intruder bites my uncle on the arm and the wound begins festering immediately. I watch, paralyzed as he turns on my aunt, tearing her apart limb by limb until she is unraveled like thread, entrails and gore painting the apartment.
My mother shakes my shoulders, trying to wake me from my dreaming state. But I am drifting too far from the surface, drowning in my fear. My mother’s face becomes distorted. When I meet her eyes again, they are glossy, blood oozing from her lips as she pulls out teeth. They are slippery in the blood.
The world becomes dark, a veil of night descending upon the city. I am alone.
Within the darkness of the apartment, a figure emerges from the front door, shining a light too bright for my night-adjusted eyes. His voice is young, and I think he’s calling out to me, trying to help. I can sense his kindness runs deep, feel in my bones that he wants to help…
But I will never know his face, because I am thrust from sleep to a new kind of hell.