Chapter 8

Eli

The two of them followed the light to an emergency staircase. Sasha watched the back of the boy walking before her. She was worried whether it is okay to trust him. More often than not when she was approached by many men, they were all just acting tough.

However, that train of thought stopped when they spotted a stray Ghoul, busy gorging itself on a dead body.

The surprise almost made Aleksandra want to scream, but Jude clasped his hand around her mouth and gestured for her to stay silent. He then pulled her down to hide behind fallen wooden café table a few meters behind the Ghoul.

“Can you shoot it?” he asked her.

“I’ll try,” she replied as she took aim. However, when she pulled the bowstring back, she found that her hands were trembling. Jude noticed this and spoke. “Sasha, are you okay?”

“I…I can’t…” she said, as she slowly put the bow down. “It’s too much like a human.”

“…alright. Watch me.”

Jude took out his knife and slowly made his way forward, eyes glancing left and right quickly to make sure there was no surprise around. He took one shallow breath and sprinted up to it, held its neck in choke and buried the knife deep into it back.

It struggled for a few seconds before falling limp. Its dead body leaked black blood. After a few seconds, it turned grey and crumbled into ash.

“Look,” Jude took a few steps back, eyes gazing at his handiwork. “Ashes to ashes. These things may look human, but they aren’t.”

“I…I see,” the girl was taken aback by the creature, but she was more bewildered by the uncommon expertise Jude showed when taking it down. “But, Jude. Did you have some training before?”

“My dad taught me. He was in the military,” he said curtly as he averted his eyes. “Let’s continue. Keep your eyes peeled and ready to shoot.”

As they walked near a staircase, a number of the unsavory monsters came at them from an empty storefront.

Jude stabbed the enemy in front of him with his knife, withdrew and slashed backhanded the chest of the one behind him using the blade from the gauntlet. It shrieked and swung its arms to gouge his flesh. However, Jude had already slipped to the back and swung the serrated blade. The blade slid smoothly as it severed the head from the torso.

The boy breathed out as he wiped the sweat with his sleeves. He himself was amazed. His body is more powerful than it was. As if something inside him had changed.

While pondering this, another one leapt from a dark corner. He dispatched it with a flick of his arm.

Aleksandra was left without anything to do. The more she saw of him - his reactions and his movements – she wondered what kind of things his father taught him. It mad her go crazy trying to reconcile his current strong and efficient image with the meek and unremarkable person she saw just this morning.

He used not only his newly acquired arm as a weapon, but also the environments. Ramming enemies against the wall, dropping them off the sides. When he was preoccupied with two enemies, Sasha saw one hanging on the ceiling.

“Jude!” Without thinking about it, she raised her bow and shot an arrow which hit its torso. The creature fell on the ground in pain before crumbling away. Seeing this, Jude raised a thumb with a nod. Which Aleksandra responded with an appreciative smile.

The two continued like this. Whenever they had to fight, Aleksandra stayed at the back, picking off the stray ones that he did not get with her arrows. She picked up the fallen arrows as they go.

After a while they arrived in front of the elevator. Its steel door was slightly bent.

“Can you open it?”

“No. How about the emergency stairs over there?”

Sasha jiggled the door handle forcefully. “It’s jammed. Looks like there is nothing blocking it though. Maybe...”

“Step aside,” Jude kicked the door open. The door burst open - hinge and all - before it hit the wall and fell on the floor, broken. “That…wasn’t supposed to happen.”

“You should try to control your strength better. It’s fine when fighting enemies, but it’ll make other daily actions harder.”

“Ungh,” He replied with a cock of his head. “Let’s go. We should be able to avoid meeting those monsters with this route.”

However, things did not go that smoothly. The stair ended at the fourth floor. The rest was gone. “Now what?”

“Look. There is a part jutting out form the third floor. Can we jump over the gap?”

Jude crouched and mentally measure the distance. “That’s a bit far. But I think I can make it,” Jude saidd as he got to a crouching start. Propelling himself with the edge of his toe, Jude jumped over the ledge.

“Hng!!”

To his surprise, his leg sent him not just over the gap, but also through the door and he crash landed on a wooden table, which cracked under him. Jude blinked in bewilderment, surprised at his newfound strength. “Gotta get used to this...”

“All right over there, Sasha? Jump over and I’ll catch you!”

The white haired girl looked down, measured the distance with her mind and jumped. Her legs was also stronger than she anticipated and she was propelled further. Her eyes were staring in horror at the darkness on the other side of the railings. Fortunately Jude was fast enough to catch her.

They tumbled down to the floor, rolling backwards until the wall stopped them. They looked at each other.

“Not practicing what you preach, eh?”

A smile broke out on their lips and they laughed a stifled laughter in case there are enemies abound. Their laughter died down and Sasha’s expression suddenly turned dark. “Jude...we haven’t seen anyone other than us for awhile now. You think...”

“You know what I think? Shower. A nice hot shower. You should get one too when we get home,” he said.

Sasha nodded and got up, her flawless wings folded. “Yeah...”

Suddenly, a shriek came out from behind a hot dog stand.

“Sasha!!”

A crawling torso leapt towards the girl. Instead of backing away, she opened the palm of her hand and a spire of ice about a meter long and ten centimeters wide had struck its spine and went out the other side.

“Are you okay?”

“Y-yeah,” she stared at her hands as if they were deadly weapons. A feeling resembling joy crept up from her heart and a faint smile graced her lips. She knew she shouldn’t, however, it felt...nice.

“That’s amazing. How did you do that?”

“I don’t know. I just sort of...wanted to defend myself. And it came out, just like that.”

“Oh...” he sighed. “This is shaping up to be a weird day.”

“So...Where are we now? I don’t go to the mall often.”

Sasha snapped out of her trance and spread her wings, using the faint silver glow as light. “Ah, this is Cafe Du Marc. We should be near the Food Court now. If I remember correctly, there should be an employee lift there. We can use it to get to the first floor.”

“Would it even work? I don’t want to be trapped in a metal death trap in the middle of all of this.”

“We are not going to use the elevator, Jude,” she shook her head. “We are going to use the maintenance ladder.”

They walked cautiously as they entered a large hall filled with a large number of cheap tables and plastic chairs. Jude lifted a half finished bottle of soda, was tempted to finish the rest, but decided against it. Who knows where it’s been?

Sasha touched a lone baby stroller and moved it around. “There are a lot of unfinished meals. Where are the customers? Even if they are dead,” she said uncomfortably, taking a baby toy and rattled it slowly. “There should at least be bodies, right?”

Jude did not know how to answer. He found it harder and harder to make sense of anything right now. But he had an inkling. “Perhaps…we’ve been looking at them all along.”

“What do you mean?”

“The Ghouls. We saw them wearing human clothes, right? Perhaps…”

The sudden understanding made Sasha lost for words. She also had that thought, but hearing it put into words were horrifying still. “But there are also dead bodies! Human bodies! You saw it too!”

“It’s just my thought, but you often see this kind of thing in horror movies, right? Especially zombie movies. Not all the dead bodies turned into zombies in those movies. Some just end up as, well, corpses.”

Then they hear something move.

“H-help...”

“A voice!” Sasha exclaimed. She sprinted towards the source. She looked over a McKing Chicken counter. There, beside a serving trolley, hunched up and trembling with his arms tight around a small bag, was a little boy. The boy was crying quietly with a voice that was small and broken.

Sitting with him, a woman clutched at her side, leaning with her head back, her blonde hair dishevelled. Red liquid had stained her blue striped uniform. Her face as pale as a ghost. When she tried to stand, she fell over. All her muscles were taut and contracting.

Aleksandra quickly helped her up.

“Are you okay?”

“P-please...! Kill me...kill me before I turn into them!”

“I-I don’t understand. What are you saying? You are just fine. We can help you!”

“No, you don’t understand! There is nothing we can do! Please just kill me. Kill me now!” Her voice suddenly rose to a hellish shriek. “KYAARRGH!!”

“Sasha, get back!!” Jude yelled. Reacting to his order, she grabbed the boy who was too stricken to move and ran to Jude’s side.

Her body jerked, contorting nauseatingly. Bones and sinews cracked and ripped. Skins hardening. Eyes bulging and teeth grinding. When the terrible change ended, what was standing before them no longer resembled the waitress. It was something out of a nightmare.

The corpse leapt with its jaw ready to crush their bones.

Jude grabbed its neck mid-air and slammed it down on the ceramic floor. He held it down by the throat, his eyes watching it squirm with sadness and regret. “I’m sorry.” In one move he thrust his blade into the chest. The ghoul twitched for a few seconds before it finally stopped moving and crumbled.

“So, this confirms it.”

“S-she was...and she turned to-. Oh my God. Then the ones we killed before are...!”

“Sasha!” Jude said out loud, retracting his blade. “The ones that have turned are no longer humans. You saw it just now. Just focus on surviving for now.”

“O-oui. Of course,” she hesitated. Her eyes glancing at the floor which cracked as if something heavy had landed on it, even though the thin frame of the dead body scarcely weigh that much.

As he helped her up, his eyes fell to the little white tag that fell on the ground. On it was a name.

“Anna Hills,” he said quietly.

His father once told him about when he was on a tour to a region in the middle of a forest. One of the guides got shot in the lung from a dissident. The wound was fatal and the blood flooding his lung was choking him to death. They were out in the middle of nowhere, and the closest hospital was five hours drive. So he did what he had to do. He ended his life before he suffered any longer. He remembered how the tough man’s face stiffened as his eyes gazed into the past, indescribable emotion filled the dimming reflection of his eyes.

Mercy killing. To kill someone to relieve their pain.

I just killed a living human. That realization made him feel slightly weak on the knees. “I am sorry,” he muttered under his breath. “Sorry.”

He felt like such a hypocrite after saying such things to her, while here he was; feeling like shit after what he did.

He pinched the bridge of his nose as he watched the girl wrapped in ice trying to console the little boy. His chocolate hair was cut sloppily and his clothes - a mish mash of child sized jacket and pants of white and purple one size larger than him - was dirty and looked like they came from a bargain bin.

“Jude...look at his neck.”

When she motioned towards his throat, the boy let out a stifled scream and slapped her hand away. His eyes were fearful and his body trembled. Jude realized where those small eyes were looking at. He quickly hid his gauntlet behind his back.

“Don’t worry. I’m not going to hurt you,” Jude said. “Can I, please?” He continued, moving gently so as not to alarm him and lifted his chin with the tip of his left thumb.

There they saw a scar. A long, red and thick scar. Like a snake strangling his neck.

“What’s your name?” Jude asked, trying to keep his emotion in check.

“E-Eli.”

It was a heart wrenching voice. Weak and raspy.

“This is horrible. No wonder he can’t speak well, his vocal cord must be damaged.”

Jude bent down to look at him in the eye, trying to make himself as harmless as possible. Which was very hard as he just killed a Ghoul right in front of her. “Eli, where are your parents?”

“Mommy told me to wait for her here,” he answered. “The nice lady…was hiding me back there.”

“And your daddy?” he asked gently.

“I don’t have a daddy.”

While they were talking, Aleksandra noticed a small white envelope tied to the side of his small bag. She took it silently and read its content. What was inside made her expression turn rigid. So much that Jude asked about it. She handed it to him, her eyes full of melancholy.

He read the paper. His expression growing more distressed as he approached the end. His hand trembled and quickly he ripped the paper apart, wishing that he had not read the hateful message.

She abandoned him. Sasha mouthed the word, holding back tears as she placed a hand on his head with a look of pity.

“Miss, why is your hand so cold?”

A thin, bitter smile hid the sadness in her voice. “Eli. Listen to me. Your mother is...”

Jude grasped her wrist before she finished talking and discreetly shook his head. His expression grim. “You…should come with us. We’ll look for her together.”

“But Mommy told me to wait here.”

“It is dangerous here. We should go and look for her ourselves.”

“Really?” he gazed at him with innocent trust.

A tinge of guilt made Sasha hesitate but she steeled herself and smiled. “Yes. Really.”

“Smart boy. My name is Jude and the glowy lady here is Sasha. If you’re okay, let’s blow this joint.”

With the boy Eli in tow, Jude found the service elevator and pried it open. Soon they were descending down the ladder inside the elevator chute. Jude had Eli tied to his back with a cloth as he was afraid that his arms were too weak to hold the ladder. As Sasha began climbing down, she noticed that there was a similar mark by the door.

When they got to the end of the line, they dropped onto the top of the lift and Jude forced the hatch open and jumped down. Sasha passed Eli down to Jude. As he held him by the waist, he noticed how thin he was.

He put Eli down and caught Sasha as she edged herself down the hatch.

Jude felt a tug on his trousers and saw Eli pointing at the hallway beyond.

“Mon dieu,” Sasha exclaimed, horrified.

Bullets had pierced the ceiling lights which were now turning on and off as flies feasted upon the scattered innards of the corpses that had been disemboweled by something extremely sharp. Some of them were holding firearms, which had melted. Sasha cringed as her boots stepped on something soft and wet. She did not dare look down.

Five dead bodies were scattered along the hallway, all wearing the same uniform. High tech gask mask with night vision attachment obscuring their faces.

“These uniforms...they are Praetorians! My father’s private guards!” Sasha exclaimed. “Why are they here?”