6
She came to on a slab of cold concrete, her clothing in tatters, her body torn and disfigured. She lay there a long time, stunned and unable to process what had happened to her. Finally she made an effort to move, dragging herself across the concrete, crawling and bleeding. At first, all was dark and foggy. Unseen, unintelligible voices murmured all around her. She saw a light. She staggered to her feet and limped toward the light. And there she beheld a shocking sight. In that pool of light, a one-hundred-year-old man was blowing out candles on a birthday cake. She stared in disbelief. She had never seen an old person before. She’d had no idea people got old. She recoiled with a gasp, retreating into the fog. But now, in another pool of light, a second figure came into view, emerging from obscurity. It was an old woman lying on a bed. Her lower jaw and part of her face were gone, taken away by a thing called cancer. She backed away again, and came to a third pool of light, which illuminated a person lying on the ground. After staring at this sight, she came to understand that this was a corpse—that the person was dead. The corpse was in the process of rotting and bloating with gas. An emaciated man in robes knelt by the corpse, bowing down, muttering strange phrases.
Death had always been something in books she could never understand. She’d had no idea it existed for real.
And a voice spoke: “Behold, the four passing sights.”
In the grips of horror, she turned and fled. Abruptly, the fog lifted. She found herself wandering a vast and hellish landscape. It appeared that a great war had ended, leaving behind a postapocalyptic world of smoking ruins, bombed-out churches, and buildings reduced to broken walls and heaps of rubble. It appeared she was somewhere in Europe. Here and there, a skeletonized tree stood, branches splintered and scorched by blast damage. All around her was death in abundance, that strange state she had never seen or known of. The rubble-strewn streets were scattered with body parts and bones. As she dragged herself along through the acrid smoke, she passed a hairy human leg, the small white arm of a child, and then a defleshed skull being fought over by two dogs.
She dragged herself through the ruins, stupefied, looking for a place of refuge. She needed food and water, but there was nothing to be found except foul puddles of rainwater crawling with worms and floating with bits of suppurating human flesh. But then she saw, inside the hollow shell of a bombed-out bank, some people moving. She cried to them for help. But as they came running out, she realized her mistake. These were not friends. They were filthy, tattooed men dressed in body armor and carrying weapons. They were recreational killers, they were having fun, and they were coming to destroy her. Was this some sort of sick game?
She turned and ran, and they gave chase, shouting and hooting with the sport of it. She fled down an alley, through a ruined school, and finally was able to hide behind a burned-out school bus as they passed by, shooting every which way in their bloodlust, calling out to each other as they searched for her.
She waited a long time after they were gone, breathing hard, too frightened to move. But she did finally move. The sun was now high in the sky and the heat came up in waves, bringing with it a stench of corpse gas rising from the bloated bodies that lay about.
As she crossed a ruined playground, the next group of killers surprised her, bursting out of a wrecked building and coming at her, firing their weapons. Through the ruins she ran, up and over blasted walls, leaping dead bodies, dodging down cratered streets. She came into a bombed square and took refuge behind an old truck, hoping to lose them. But this time they saw her. She was trapped behind the truck, with no place to flee. With shouts of glee the group let loose, firing on the truck, the rounds hammering the sides. She cried out to them, telling them she was only an unarmed girl, pleading with them to leave her alone, but the men were having too much sport and they fanned out across the far side of the square, calling to each other as they set up their approach. With skill they advanced upon her from cover to cover across the ruins of the square.
She looked around and saw an unexploded grenade lying nearby. She had a vague idea of how it worked: you pulled the pin and squeezed the lever. Or did you pull the lever? She grabbed it, feeling its heat from lying in the sun. There was the pin and there was the lever. Hugging it to herself with one hand, she crawled around to the side of the ruined truck. The men had now advanced halfway across the square, sprinting from ruined car to rubble pile to bomb crater. They were converging on her and were going to kill her.
In front of her place of refuge was a deep bomb crater; the bomb had punched through the ground, scattering cobblestones, and she saw by the men’s converging movements that the crater would be their last cover, before the final rush.
She lay on the ground, peering at them from the undercarriage. She heard more barked orders, more movement, more running. She waited. The first man scurried over and jumped into the crater, signaling the others to follow. They came shortly, leaping into the hole. The lip of the crater was only fifteen feet away, and she could hear their breathing, their grunted whispers, the rattle of their weapons as they prepared to charge.
She held the lever and pulled the pin. The lever sprang open. Hoping that it would work, she rolled the grenade from underneath the car toward the lip of the crater. It hopped over the edge and disappeared inside. The explosion came a moment later, showering her with body parts—a pattering rain of blood and brains and bone.
She jumped up and ran, trying to shake the gore out of her hair and eyes. She raced through the ruined streets, running crazily, randomly. But even as she fled, the men she had killed seemed to be rematerializing behind her, all fired up to continue the pursuit.
The Princess had done this to her. The Princess had thrown her into this dark, insane world. The Princess had betrayed and abandoned her. She felt a rage boiling inside her. She would track down the Princess. She would find out why she had done this to her. And she would exact her revenge.