Week 6 Story: Guns for Hands

Three minutes.

I left the grocery store for three minutes—just long enough to cross the parking lot and grab my wallet from the car—and when I stepped back inside, it had happened again.

All the fluorescents overhead had been taken out, which was my first sign. In the weak light from the streetlamps outside, everything looked pale, ghostly. The bulbs’ shattered glass crusted the linoleum floor like crushed ice, and when I glanced up at the hollow light bays, they stared down at me like empty eye sockets.

That much alone told me I wouldn’t want to see anything else. Already, a dull throb was starting up behind my temples.

But my sister was here somewhere, and I couldn’t leave her.

“Sloane?” I called. “Sloane, it’s me. It’s Reagan. Where are you?”

Nothing.

I pulled my cell phone from my jacket pocket, switched on its flashlight.

Fifteen feet away, on the other side of the fleet of shopping carts, I found the first three bodies.

They were slumped on the floor, halfway behind their checkout counters. Both women looked like they’d landed okay, but the guy had had a rough fall; his neck was bent at a funny angle. He looked maybe nineteen, barely older than Sloane and me.

All three of them were bleeding from their eyes, their ears. Even when they’d stopped breathing, the blood kept trickling. I stood there for a minute, staring down at them in the darkness. Finally, when one of those blood trails rolled out to touch the toe of my boot, I stepped carefully back and maneuvered around them.

“Sloane!” I snapped. “We seriously need to leave—”

And then I found her.

She sat huddled in the middle of the Halloween aisle, surrounded by monsters and witches and foam tombstones. Her long blonde hair hung in a sheet over her face, and I knew she knew I was there, but she didn’t look up. Behind her, a cheap Grim Reaper cloak swung on its hanger.

“Are you okay?” I asked after a minute.

She hesitated, then shook her head. I hesitated, too. Dad would’ve known what to do.

I sighed, then crossed the aisle and took her hand, tugged her to her feet. Maybe she should’ve had to look at the people she’d killed, but I didn’t want to see them again, so we skirted around them.

Dad would’ve known what to do, but he wasn’t here anymore. And the truth was, I knew what to do, too.

I just wished I didn’t.

***

I’d been destined to kill my twin sister since we were thirteen years old.

Really, since we were born, I guess. But I’d been thirteen when Dad sat me down and explained what was wrong with Sloane, why we moved around all the time. He’d quit trying to hide the bodies from me after that.

The thing was, it never should’ve been like this. Tons of people on Mom’s side of the family had abilities. I couldn’t remember her very well, but Mom herself had been scary powerful, and that had eventually gotten her killed. Even she’d been nothing compared to Sloane, though.

Because Sloane had gotten a double dose. Half of her power should’ve gone to me, but she’d gotten both shares, and it was too much for her. Too much for the people around her. Since Dad’s death, she’d only gotten worse, and it was supposed to have been my job to keep that from happening. To stop her from hurting anyone else.

Usually, I couldn’t even think about that. But it was easier now, with those dead grocery store clerks burned into my head, the smell of their blood still in the back of my throat. I couldn’t let that happen again.

Sloane was miserable, and I was miserable, and all we did was break everything we touched. For a long time now, I’d thought we were cursed.

Maybe we were the curse.

Later that night, I waited till Sloane had gone to sleep, and then I dug out Dad’s old pistol. When I stood, that headache had started up again behind my temples, but my hands didn’t shake. I wasn’t sure if that was actually a good thing.

But some small part of me, somewhere in the back of my head, had been planning this since I was thirteen.

***

Sloane couldn’t sleep without a TV on, so muted reruns of old cartoons greeted me when I squeezed into her tiny room.

For a minute, I just stood there by her bed, waiting for some kind of sign. Her back was to me, but something in the slump of her shoulders—the tilt of her head—made her look peaceful. Younger, too.

I lifted the pistol and took a deep breath, but I still didn’t pull the trigger. And then Sloane said quietly, “I wish you would, Reagan.”

“I know,” I said after a minute, lowering the gun.

“I wish you could.”

“Me too.”

She rolled over, staring up at the ceiling instead of at me. I wondered if she’d been awake all along. When we’d moved in, she’d stuck those glow-in-the-dark stars all over the ceiling, even though I’d made fun of her. Now we’d be taking them down and leaving tomorrow. If her outburst at the store had taken out the lights, it would’ve wrecked the cameras, too, but that didn’t matter.

It was time to move on.

“I thought I had it under control this time,” she said eventually. “I wasn’t going to let it happen again. I won’t let it happen again.”

“I know.”

Idly, I wondered which of us was the bigger liar, how many times we’d had this exact conversation before. How many times we’d have it again.

I sank onto the bed beside her. She held out her hand, so I took it.

We sat and planned our next move, and Dad’s gun sat between us.

Neither of us mentioned it.




Author's Note: This week, my inspiration came from "Gandhari and Dhritarashtra," an early story from the Mahabharata. In this story, when the king and queen’s first son is born, there are all sorts of terrible, ominous omens. The royal couple’s advisors explain that their son is destined to bring something terrible upon their kingdom, and that it’ll be better for everyone to just get rid of him while they can—sacrifice the part to save the whole, and all that jazz. But the prince's parents are fond of him—he's their favorite son—and they decide to ignore the omens and the advisors and the best interests of their kingdom, just to spare him.

I found that kind of compelling: the idea of a main character being close to someone and knowing that person will hurt all kinds of people someday, but not being able to bring herself to prevent it. The idea of her choosing to let everyone else suffer before she’ll let this one person die. To explore those themes a little bit, I used Reagan and her sister, Sloane, who’s kind of a gentle soul but also a ticking time bomb. The idea was that they both know Sloane is escalating and only going to get worse, and that both know exactly how to solve their problem—but they aren’t quite strong enough yet. So for now, they just keep running.

Bibliography: Mahabharata Online: Public Domain Edition. Source: Laura Gibbs's Indian Epics blog.

Image Credit: Two Hands by milivanily. Source: Pixabay.