On a sparrow's wings

Chapter 6 - Chasing after Michael

  She kept following the river downstream. She had figured that Michael would use it to get to Chicago. She had been walking for three hours when she came across a herd of greys that was standing around the river. The running water seemed to confuse them. Some of them openly walked in it and it dragged them away from the herd. Some tried to attack it resulting in water splashing at other greys that seemed to startle them.

  Anastasia got up against a tree a good distance from them. She looked them over and found a small gap in between them and the forest. There were a lot of them, too much to take on so she decided to sneak past them through the forest. She followed the trees and managed to get around any greys that would would wonder from the herd and to her. It wasn’t hard she had done it a thousand times before.

  She wasn’t as tall or as strong as Ethan so she had to use a different approach to dealing with greys. She learned how to walk quiet and how to not be seen. The greys didn’t have eyes but men did and sneaking past them was also useful. And she knew exactly how much distance to keep so the greys wouldn’t smell her. There sense of smell wasn’t any good it seemed so it was easy. After she made it to the other side of the wall of greys she kept going further downstream.

  After some time of walking she heard the sound of a guitar being played. She looked towards the forest and saw a small house hidden in the forest. Smoke was coming out of the chimney and she saw two men on the front porch. One was playing the guitar and the other was carving something with his knife. Anastasia quickly hid behind a tree and continued spying on them. They hadn’t noticed her yet.

  She wondered what to do. She stared for a bit longer. The men were a bit plum and they had round faces, raggedy hair and poorly shaven faces. They could be good people. And they could have food to trade or other supplies. Ethan had always warned her against approaching strangers but he wasn’t here to tell her off. She snuck to the house until the final line of trees. She looked them over one last time and decided to approach them.

  She walked up to them slowly and got their attention. The men turned around and stopped doing what they were doing.

“Hi there! My name is John and this is my brother Calvin.”

“Hi I am Anastasia.”

“Well, Anastasia what brings you to this part of the world?”, John asked, he was the one that had been playing the guitar. He was smaller than his brother and he had a polite smile on his face.

“You seemed like good people and I thought we could trade for food or other supplies”, she kept her distance a few feet from the men, enough to run if something happened.

The men grew quiet as footsteps were heard from inside the house.

  “Boys where are your manners? We have a guest.”, an older women came out of the house on to the front porch. She was plainly fat, where the men were plumb. Her footsteps were heavy and made the boards creaked as her heavy feet fell upon them. She had a smile fool of crooked and yellow teeth in between her thick lips and a patchy complexion with a wrinkled forehead. The woman came out close to Anastasia and looked her over.

“Well I am Bertha and these here are my boys. Sorry for their lack of hospitality. As hard as I try I can’t teach them to treat guests properly. You look hungry! We can take care of that. We have hot food and a bed if you need to rest before you head out again.”, Bertha moved her arms around as she spoke the flaps of fat on them shaking.

“No, no. I don’t want to be a burden. I wanted to check if you had supplies to trade, that’s all.”

“A burden? Oh no, no my girl! We’d love to have you!”, Bertha ushered her in. She showed her the dining room and told her to wait that and that she will get her something to eat.

  Anastasia looked around the house. The windows had boards on them, which was nothing out of the ordinary most shelters were boarded up, but Anastasia noticed boards on the top floor which wasn’t. It was old and some parts seemed to have been fixed recently. Some boards didn’t match and the paint was older on some parts than others. The facilities seemed fine enough. The kitchen was clean and stocked with food, weirdly so. They live out here in the middle of nowhere. How do they have so much food?

  Anastasia shuffled nervously in her chair when Berthan came out of the kitchen and placed a bowl of some kind of soup in front of her. Bertha took a seat next to her. John and Calvin came in and took seats at the table as well. They began to eat. Bertha threw a few glances every once in a while at Anastasia, urging her to eat. She nervously picked up her spoon and put it in the bowl. She spun the spoon a little trying to grab some of the harder stuff at the bottom. She took it out and tried the soup.

  It tasted fine. Nothing special, just plane old soup. At least it was hot.

“Well how is it deary?”, Bertha stretched out her meaty fingers out on the table.

“It’s great. I haven’t had hot soup in a long time.”, only a small lie. Anastasia didn’t want to insult her host.

“I am happy you like it!”, Bertha fluttered, “You know when I was younger my husband would love it when-”, she kept on talking, getting lost in her own story.

Anastasia’s attention was focused somewhere else.

  She felt a strange shape with her spoon. At the bottom of the bowl there seemed to be something bigger than the rest. She poked at it with her spoon and couldn’t seem to break it. Whatever it was it was hard. Anastasia scooped it up in her spoon and slowly lifted it to the top of the bowl. When she saw what it was her eyes narrowed into small dots, the air froze in her throat and I realised what she had been eating. In the broth of the soup, in her spoon floated a small human thumb. It was covered in grease, some parts of the skin had been teared off and others were barely holding on, flapping like a flag. The nail was missing and the blood inside of it was crystallize into a dark red. It was disfigured but Anastasia couldn’t mistake it for something else.

  She gasped, dropped her spoon in the soup and turned around to spit and cough what she had been eating.

“Oh deary is everything alright?”, asked her the fat Bertha, faining care in her voice but Anastasia knew it now.

Is everything alright? I ate human meat! You eat people! No, it’s not alright! Anastasia was screaming inside her head but she had to say something else if she wanted to get out of there alive. “I don’t feel very good. Could I use your bathroom?”, Anastasia held her stomach, partly to trick them and partly because she felt disgusted.

“Of course. It’s on the second floor, first room on the right.”, Bertha said, her tone sounding concerned but Anastasia saw what her intentions were in her eyes.

  Anastasia got up and headed upstairs, the brothers’ stares followed her up the stairs. She quickly got inside the bathroom and barricaded it with the towel holder, it wouldn’t buy her much time but she hoped not to need much. She craned her neck around and looked around the bathroom. It was clean, no blood, no filth anywhere. Anastasia noticed the boards on the window. She grabbed her knife and rushed towards it.

  She put it under the nail and pulled and after a few moments she managed to get all the boards loose. She looked out the window and saw that she was about eight feet above the ground. If Ethan found out about this, he wouldn’t even let me go pee alone. She tried to hype herself up to jump. She cracked her neck and knuckles, jumped up and down, shook her hands.

  She heard the floorboards creak as Bertha’s heavy steps approached the bathroom. Now or never. Anastasia jumped through the window and landed and rolled on the grass. She didn’t get hurt. The front door slammed open and the brothers came out.

“Grab ‘er Calvin!”, John yelled out and his silent giant brother followed his orders with a few groans and grunts.

He rushed towards Anastasia. She nimbly ducked under his big hairy arms and bolted for the river. The herd! It occurred to her as she ran.

  She dodged the trees and rocks on the ground, the brothers managed to follow her through the woods, it was their land and they knew how to hunt in it, but she was nimble enough to keep in front of them. The only chance she had to escape was the herd. If the brothers were distracted she could slip past them and continue on her way to Chicago and after Michael.

  She finally saw the herd and the brothers did too, they kept stomping after her nonetheless. She slowed her pace and headed into the herd. She stood in the middle of it when the brothers came. She kept making her way through it. When she heard the big one Calvin huff. He stomped with his foot and stormed through the herd, pushing away the greys that swarmed him. What is he doing? They are going to kill him! Anastasia though as she slightly turned her head to see him.

  His brother agreed with her as he screamed for him to stop and come back. But his brother kept pushing on, knocking the greys to the ground. But eventually it became to much for him. The greys swarmed on top of him, biting at his shoulders and legs, blood spurting out like a fountain. Their long tongues wrapped around his arms and legs, immobilizing him. He screamed and screamed and kept throwing them off but the more he screamed the more appeared to take their places. The screams appeared to make the greys even hungrier and more fierce as they attacked the man. The greys had also attacked his brother John but he didn’t fight them head on like his brother, he backed away slowly taking out a few with his knife. Anastasia gasped as she saw the man getting pulled apart by the greys and they would have noticed her if they weren’t distracted by the screams of Calvin.

  She shuttered and calmed herself down. She was not in the clear yet. She ran into the woods and kept running for as long as she could. She wanted to circle the house and get back on track as fast as she could. And it took all her strength and all the air in her lungs, but eventually she was back on track next to the river. She took a minute to catch her breath. She sat on a big rock that was standing next to the river. 

  She looked upstream. She couldn’t see the herd but she knew what was happening. Why did I have to go and say hello to them? A man had died and she felt like she was to blame. She should have thought about him walking into the herd. And if she didn’t go to the them in the first place none of that would have happened, she would have been with Michael by now if she hadn't done that. Why am I so stupid? Anastasia hit herself over the head, as much in anger as in guilt. She eventually noticed the sun setting and the moon rising and she looked around. I gotta find a place to sleep. She got up and continued downstream.