The Seven Habits

distance, seeing nothing.

At some point she must have drifted to sleep; the next thing she knew her body was covered in dew and thin tendrils of fog crept across the ground like miniature phantoms. She could see through the windows of some of the wrecked cars encircling her and the fog was thicker on the other side. It was a roiling, gray veil that made the ruined city appear fuzzy and indistinct. She thought she could see a dark silhouette out there, beckoning to her with outstretched arms.

“D-daddy?” Even cloaked in the morning mist, she could recognize his general shape and outline. “Daddy!”

Her heart fluttered with hope as she raised her head and a smile crept over her face. The smile faded however, as quickly as the image of the man in the fog, and she was left with only her mother’s cold, still body beneath her.

Ocean scrambled backward and pulled her knees to her chest, wrapping her arms tightly around her knees as she rocked back and forth. She was shaking her head, silently saying no again and again, and she could feel the tears returning. Mama was gone. Mama was gone and now she was entirely alone in the world.

The blood had dried on her face overnight and her skin felt stretched too tightly over her skull. She was sticky and dirty and wanted to throw up, but could only wretch and heave as traces of bile stung the back of her throat.

“You’ve got to do the rite of the dead,” she told herself. “You’ve got to give Mama the rite.”

The strange yet somehow familiar voice in the back of her mind whispered again. What? She was going to kill you! You had to do what you did, even if she was you mother. She doesn’t deserve any type of burial ritual, don’t you get that? Mothers don’t try to kill their own daughters…

Ocean wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and stood, brushing the dirt from her clothes. She closed her eyes for a moment and took a deep breath of cool, clean air. The clearing within the circle of cars was so silent that there was a faint ringing in her ears, so she cleared her throat and spoke her thoughts aloud.

“I’ve got to do the rite. Mama did it for Daddy. And I have to do it for her. That’s all there is to it.”

She walked across the shelter and felt as if she were moving through a dream. Somehow, her arms and legs didn’t feel as if they were actually connected to her, like she were going through pre-programmed movements that she was powerless to control.

She snaked her index finger through a dark hole in the trunk of an old Cadillac until she felt the little lever dig into her skin. After a slight flex, the trunk popped open with a click, and a musty odor wafted out from the interior. Her father’s things were folded neatly inside, his glasses atop the stack as if he might someday come back to lay claim to them. But I’m not here to think about Daddy… not now.

Reaching into the darkness, her hand closed around cold, smooth metal. She raised it tentatively, surprised at how heavy the slender rod actually was.

“I’ve got to do this.” Even her own voice sounded as if it were coming from someone else, as if there were someone standing just behind her shoulder who narrated her thoughts.

“It’s the right thing to do.”

The trunk closed with a thud and she walked back to her mother’s body. There, she dropped to her knees and placed one palm against the woman’s cheek.

Cold, so cold, people shouldn’t be so cold….

Ocean thought she would just be able to lightly push her mother’s head to the side, that it would roll over slowly and easily. But the muscles had stiffened during the night and she had to put her weight into it. Finally, there was a sound, something between a pop and crackle, and the woman’s head rolled to the left.

Ocean pushed the thin locks of hair away from her mother’s face, revealing the little dip of skin between the corner of her eye and her ear.

She took the tire iron in both hands now and took a deep breath. She held it… counted to three… and then drove the beveled tip down into her mother’s temple. The crunch of the bone seemed to rise up through the metal and tingle her palms. There wasn’t as much blood as she expected, nothing more than a dark sludge that oozed slowly out of the hole.

Ocean practically leaned on the tire iron, driving it deeper into her mother’s head and, when she was satisfied it had gone far enough, gave the entire thing a twist by pulling on the end that was bent at an angle.

“Rest in peace, Mama. Rest in peace.”

Standing, Ocean took a final look around the only place she had ever called home. The rising sun was just beginning to filter through the tarp which usually infused their living area with an almost magical quality. On this morning, everything looked as flat and one dimensional as some of the paintings she’d found scattered through the debris of the city. Whatever had imbued this space with light and emotion had fled during the night, running far, far away from the horrors it had witnessed.

She knew she couldn’t stay here any longer. There were too many memories… too much pain.

“Goodbye, Mama… I… I love you, Daddy.”

She didn’t know where she would go, but there had to be somewhere, out there. Somewhere safe where she could try to put all this behind her. She would take her figurines and the few clothes she owned and make her own way in the world, now. There really was no other choice.

She was just beginning to squirm into the backseat of her room when she paused for a moment. Crawling back out, she ran across the clearing and scooped up the dead rat her mother had dropped the night before.

At least she wouldn’t be hungry. Not for a while, at least.

The rest of the day passed in something of a daze. The once familiar gridwork of streets and landmarks were nothing more than a blur that existed in some fuzzy dimension outside her own body. Ocean was aware that her belly was full and that the greasy taste of rat still lent its tang to her saliva, but other than that, she was numb. She drifted along aimlessly without even the odd voice in her head to keep her company.

Even though it had been left back in the clearing, she could feel the weight of the tire iron in her hand.

By the time the sun had begun its descent in the sky, the first traces of normality had begun to reassert themselves. It started with the slow realization that she had no idea where she was. None of the buildings looked familiar; the faded graffiti on the walls and buildings that still stood were not the recognizable loops and swirls of her childhood… the names of streets on their bent signposts sounded foreign and usual.

But maybe that was for the best, a fresh start, a new area. She’d have to be more careful, of course. She didn’t know all the hiding places in this section of the city, all the secret places that she could scuttle through in an emergency.

The smell hit her, almost as though her thoughts had conjured it into existence, thick and stagnant, forcing its way into her mouth and nostrils, filling every inch of the hollowness she still felt inside.

She could hear them. That shuffling scuffle and scrape. So close.

Her body tensed and the rat seemed to sour within her stomach.

How the hell could she have allowed herself to get so close? Where the hell had her head been?

She turned to run and felt the fear squeeze tightly around her neck… they were there… right behind her.

There looked to be between fifteen to twenty rotters in the pack. They walked forward with a limping gait, stretching out their arms as if they could somehow claw their way to her even more quickly. Hints of bone contrasted with dark, shriveled flesh, somehow looking brittle yet leathery at the same time. One of them had a jagged, gaping hole in its chest and slivers of broken glass jutted out from its face at odd angles. Mummy-like carcasses that had dehydrated slowly in the sun, wheezing with escaping gasses, reaching out while their teeth gnashed and clacked… they stumbled toward her.

Shit.

Ocean spun around. She was still weak, but her rodent breakfast had given her system a shot of protein so maybe she could get away from them and—

Another group of rotters shuffled around the corner, blocking her only path of escape.

You shoulda kept the tire tool, damn it. Why did you drop the tire tool?

The rotters were closing in quickly, tightening the ring about her as Ocean spun in slow circles, hoping to see