Covered from head to toe in dried and drying gore, Eve walked.
No. Correction: she ran. She ran, because she knew she might not return in time if she walked. She couldn’t be leisurely. She needed to go there.
Eve did not rest. She didn’t need to rest. Her body told her that if she rested, she might not get up again. There was no room to rest, not until she got there. Once she was there, she could rest all she liked, because that is where she’d decided she would die. She had to die there, because, really, there was nowhere else she could die, was there? Nowhere at all. It would be stupid to think of anywhere else.
daddy
mommy
yes, even that woman
i’m sorry for all the
no
wait
am i?
should I be?
i don’t know, daddy
i’m confused
but at the same time
i’m not
i’m not at all
Time passed. Eve marked the days by the movement of the sun and the moon, watching them track across the sky as she tore across the landscape. There was little to do besides running and eating, except, perhaps, to kill the things she would eat. She killed without preference or prejudice, eating in much the same manner: if she came across any sort of animal migration, she murdered every one of its members, then engorged herself on their remains before continuing her mad dash.
Eve didn’t know it, but through some natural instinct, most animals learned to avoid her, as if drawing on the experiences of their fallen kin from far away. She still found food each day, but there were more forced deviations from her one-minded track, more escapees driven by pure instinct. Eve could respect that. She still killed everything she met, but she respected their will to survive.
The Non had been merciless in their track across the Imperium, and so Eve met few intelligent forms of life. She destroyed only three villages: one a remote mountain town populated entirely by humans, the other two trading towns that had only just been repopulated by former inhabitants. No one lived. Eve held no respect for them, because they lacked instinct. They also all looked like that woman when she killed them.
that woman
she’s mommy
but she’s also that woman
it’s confusing
but it’s not
because even if i’m confused
i kill them anyway
so maybe
i just shouldn’t think about this anymore
maybe
i should just keep on killing
and find daddy
Though she never stopped, Eve watched the stars pass by every night. She let her body run on auto-pilot, avoiding obstacles on its own, as her chin tilted upward. She loved the stars. She’d always loved the stars. They were so bright and so simple. They were the only beautiful things she’d known that she could never kill, and she respected them for that, just as she respected the things that fell to her fists. The stars would never die, so far as she knew - or she, at least, would perish long before they ever did. She would always have stars to look at, so long as ragged breaths chugged in and out of her lungs.
By the time she reached the edge of the Imperium’s border with the Indy Plains, Eve was limping. She’d lost almost half of her blood, and many of her internal organs had failed entirely. Her muscles felt too hard and too thick, as if they were clogged with vital fluids, yet she drove them onward anyway. There was nothing else she could do. Her purpose was to move east, and she moved east.
She was going home. She was going home to die.
come find me, daddy
i know you’ll be there
you’ll come
you’ll come watch me die
and maybe
this time
we can go together
i think i’d like that
daddy
because
i love you
and
i finally want to show you that properly
so please
come find me, daddy
come find me
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