The Burial

Regan looked down at her mother’s body, silent tears trickling down her dirty cheeks.

She couldn’t believe it had happened, couldn’t believe that her mother had actually left them. Again. And this time, forever.

Little Brennen, just two years old, struggled in her arms, tears running down his face as well, but for an entirely different reason. He was hungry.

He was always hungry.

Regan hoisted him up, trying to keep his feet above the ground; the last thing she wanted was for Donovan to find him running around the camp. The last time that had happened, their mother had taken a hit to her left eye, leaving her bruised and swollen for days. Regan supposed that the same thing would happen to her. She was the one in charge of their little family now; there was no mother to defend them anymore. Not that she’d ever done much defending at all.

Brennen reached out for their mother, and an ear-splitting scream erupted from the little boy. He tried to dive out of Regan’s arms, tried to escape her iron grip on him.

Regan didn’t have a choice; she turned and walked away from the woman who lay on the ground, out into the field, away from the trees.

She could just keep walking, could keep going on and on until she couldn’t walk any longer.

“Where do you think you’re going?” came Donovan’s angry voice.

She paused; it took a lot of effort for her to remain standing.

“This is your mess to clean up,” he said.

Regan turned around, and she couldn’t help but let a couple of sobs out. She needed to be stronger now. She needed to protect the boy. That would be her job. Until they killed her, too.

“What do I do with him?” she asked Donovan, nodding at Brennen’s head.

Donovan shrugged. “Not my problem.”

It seemed that she was now faced with an impossible choice: she could set the boy down so she could drag her mother away from the group, or she could keep walking and take the risk of being attacked.

She turned her head toward the field again, weighing the options. Maybe if she had been alone, she might’ve been able to make a run for it, but Brennen wailed as he realized she wasn’t going to let him go. He smacked her with his little hands, then scratched at her shoulders with his tiny, sharp fingernails.

She couldn’t leave the group, couldn’t leave the little boy who was half her brother, half Donovan’s son. She walked back, passing Donovan where he stood with his arms crossed. He gave a short hissing sound as she walked by, and she shrank away. She was just a kid, but she’d seen what had happened to the other women in the group. She was risking her body being ravaged by staying, but she knew the boy would die if she were to leave him.

You’ll just have to find a way out. Maybe when they’re asleep.

But she knew she wouldn’t be able to both care for him and make it very far.

As she approached the group again, she wondered if she would be able to move her mother’s body on her own.

Then, like an angel’s grace, another woman, Rhona, held out her hands. “Give him to me,” she said. “I’ll watch him.”

Regan looked around, unsure, but a moment later, she saw Donovan turn and walk away. This was the closest she would come to getting his approval. She released Brennen into the woman’s care and quickly made her way back to her mother’s body.

Regan was relieved to find she didn’t look fearful in death. She stood over her and wiped her nose with the back of her hand. Then, she took each of her mother’s feet with her hands and pulled as hard as she could.

The body only moved a couple of inches. Regan looked around, but no one was paying attention to her anymore. She tried again.

Moving the body far enough away from the camp took what felt like an eternity, and when she was finally out of sight of the others, she fell down to her hands and knees, covered in sweat and out of breath.

It was just the two of them now.

She sat back and tried to figure out what to do. She didn’t have anything to dig with, and she wondered how deep the grave would need to be. Then, an idea came to her; she had once seen a sort of burial where stones had been laid over a man’s body. He was completely buried, not even a finger sticking out from beneath the many rocks covering him. Regan looked around and was relieved to find several small rocks littering the forest floor.

It would have to do.

She began collecting, and with each stone she placed over her mother’s body, she started to feel better.

After an hour of collecting and depositing the little stones, she approached her mother’s head. The blank stare in her eyes made Regan nervous.

Was she still in there?

She had two last stones, one for each eye, and she knelt down staring, trying to decide what to do.

Should she close them? Or leave them open?

Tears of fear and loss began to fall again. She set down the stones and carefully leaned over her mother, reaching out and closing her eyelids with all the bravery a child could muster.

That was it, then.

She delicately placed one stone over each eye.

There would be a time for more pain, for more terror and hunger and most of all anger. But for now, the deed was done, the goal accomplished.

Somewhere in the distance, the baby cried.

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