Off The Grid (Kindred Series-3)

Background color
Font
Font size
Line height

Off The Grid – 1

            The Nephilim were on the earth in those days-and also afterward-when the sons of God went to the daughters of men and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, men of renown.” Genesis 6:4

            I feel the texture of the scarred wooden floor under my blood stained hands, then the warmth of the room.  My skin feels strange.  I wrench my eyes open.  The world around me comes into sharp focus; then dissolves into a world of haze and confusion. 

The smell. 

I know it is blood, copper and death.  How I know is a mystery to me.

It surrounds and covers me. 

My eyes adjust and I see the thin coat of blood, now dried, on my skin. 

I do not panic because I somehow know it is not mine. 

I do not feel hurt. 

I take mental stock of myself.  Unsure of how I even know what to do.  My eyes jerk over my body not knowing what I am looking for but looking anyway.

A woman lay just a few feet from me – legs and arms thrown wide at her sides. 

It is her blood.  I can tell.  She and the blood all over me smell the same. 

            I do not know how I know these things.  But I know.  Whispers in my mind tell me that I am all right.  I try to move towards her but my limbs are clumsy, uncoordinated.  The side of my face collides with the sun-warmed floor as I stumble towards her.  I reach out to her and touch her skin.  It is cold.  Even where the sun dances across the pale skin it is cold to the touch.  Her hair is dark, silky and lush.  I allow my fingers to delicately trace her features burning them into my mind.  Her eyes, still open, are also dark, black as coals.  There is blood on her too but not as much as on me. 

I am not cold.  Yet I am not comfortable.  I try to stand but falter and decide to stay on my hands and knees, close to the floor.  There is a large piece of furniture and I crawl to it, stripping the two blankets off and wrapping myself in them, making a warm cocoon of the fabric around me.  I rub the material mesmerized by the feel.  Smelling it.

            My eyes sweep across the room still trying to understand.  Why do I not understand?  My world is a blurry haze that my eyes struggle to pierce.  At her left I see something by her hand.  I edge myself closer.  Loops and lines are depicted there.  I crawl to the place.  I touch the images scrawled there, tracing them as I had traced her face.  They are written in blood, her blood, and  I find them dry.  How long have I been unconscious? 

            For that matter, who am I?

the finding

 

               The front door opens and two men come into the small cabin.  Their banter is loud and jarring,  the opening of the door lets in a fresh stream of air and sun.  The coolness wakes me from the stupor that I had fallen into.  The fine hairs on my arms stand.  My head snaps up and I stare.

            “Holy shit, Fred!” the first man says running to the woman sprawled on the floor.

            “Who the fuck is that?” asks Fred.  He drops a bag at the door along with a long object that clatters when it hits the floor. 

            “And that!” says the first man, pointing directly at me.

            My eyes widen.  I curl closer to the object behind me, pulling the scrap of covering close to me; hiding.  My eyes sweep over them and the fear clenches my belly and spreads through me now, making me cold.

            “Holy shit,” says Fred.  He shakes his head from one side to the other.  “I don’t know.”

            I did not know that shit was holy.  I do not know what either is.  I do not know where and how I know what they are saying.  I know what words are.  They make sense.  I pull the blankets tighter around me again, pushing with my bare feet against the wood of the floor wanting to be away from these men.  I can see Fred’s throat work.  “Um,” he kneels, “we’re not going to hurt you, little lady.  I’m Fred and this here is Roland.  This is our hunting cabin that you’re in.  How did you get here?”

            How did I get here?  Holy shit if I know!  I open my mouth but the words that have formed in my mind do not come out.  An odd garble of sounds bubble from my throat and once I know that what I wish to say will not come to light, I snap my mouth shut.

            “Call the cops, Fred, Jesus Christ, call the god-damn cops,” says Roland in a harsh whisper.

            Roland crouches down next to me, his head cocked off to the left as if he is studying me.  “Are you hurt?”

            I realize that he sees the blood on me.  I can barely stand or move how would I have done this?  I shake my head.  I know that “I do not know” is a shake of the head because the other man had just done that.  So I do this now. 

            “I was a medic in the Army; do you know what that is?”

            I shake my head again.

            “I took care of guys who got hurt, you know, in the war.  I’m going to look you over, okay?  If I do something you don’t like you shake your head or say no, okay?”

            His voice is calm and soothing and my grip on the blanket lessens.  He is older than the woman on the floor next to me.  There is some gray in his hair but his eyes, oh his eyes, are so very much alive.  I see my own fear reflected in them.  He is scared.  Of me? 

            I nod and he removes the blankets.  His fingers, impersonal, are looking for wounds and I hear him uttering under his breath, “Mon dieu.”

            A heated shiver runs through my body and I shift my shoulders.  He stops.  “You okay?  Does anything hurt?”

            I shake my head and I let my gaze fall on her. 

The woman. 

The dead woman. 

            “Do you know her?”

            I shake my head.  I do think I know her but I cannot be sure. 

            Fred comes rushing into the cabin, his hiking boots stomping off mud and snow.  “I got hold of the cops, they’ll be here soon.  Who is she?”

            “I don’t know and I’m not asking.  It’ll keep for the cops,” says Roland curtly. 

 

blank

            All I can do is shake my head or nod, mimicking the gestures that both men have done.  Words that work their way in my mind do not make it through my mouth.  Instead a mess of syllables and consonants tumble from my lips.  The police take me to a place they call the hospital where I am cleaned up and examined.  I remember everything they say.  They say a many things.   

I am flawless.  Their words not mine.  I see myself for the first time in the small mirror of my bathroom, chestnut brown hair with copper and gold strands running through.  My eyes are light colored, violet, not blue, not grey, with no flecks of any other ascertainable color.  A deeper ring of violet encircles the outside of the iris. 

Violet.   

I still stumble when I walk but I get better each time I go to the bathroom, which is often.  I like it in there, it is small and warm and there are no eyes watching.  So many people come to the door and look in.  Checking on the girl covered in blood; the mute who does not or will not speak – the girl who survived.  I hear them whispering outside the door.  Sometimes they talk about me while in the room as if I am not there.

            I play with the remote control that the nurse, Mary Jane, has given me.  She sat for a long time explaining to me how it worked.  It does not take long and I can mimic what she does.  How she gestures.  She smiles at me.  She is patient with me.  I copycat what people around me do; it’s my learning curve. 

The pictures on TV flicker in the darkened room, and I keep the volume down.  I watch intently at what plays on the screen.  Absorbing the things the people in the box do.  I jab a finger at the remote and bring the noise up.  Every so often I tap the up arrow and change the picture.  The face on the wall with the arms sweeps around, darkness and light are marked by the numbers there. 

No one has told me anything.  Then why should they?  I do not even know who I am.  I do not know who the woman was.  I know nothing.  No, that is not right, I just know certain things and I do not know how I know anything.

            I do not understand the passage of time; a few of the nurses ask me these questions.  I know that it grows dark outside and it grows light, an alternating pattern that does not change.  It happens several times before someone other than doctors and nurses come to see me.  I cannot sleep.  My body does not feel tired.  The nurses tell me to sleep but that eludes me.  I feel like I have just awoken.  Why would I sleep?

            A tall dark haired woman and a blonde man knock on the door after the food that they bring a few times during the day with smaller snatches of food in between the larger trays.

            Oh the food!  I devour it all sometimes forgetting to chew it is so good.  It fills me and that is wonderful, that feeling of satisfaction rushes through me but fades much too quickly. 

            The man sits and the woman does also, both on the same side of the bed.  I tug the blankets around me tightly and scoot to the opposite side of the bed.

            “My name is Connie, Remmiah,” says the woman.

            Remmiah?  So that is my name?

            I stare at them, unmoving.

            “I’m Fritz,” he says with a smile.  “I’m the officer assigned to this – case.”  He pauses and takes out a small notebook from the breast pocket of his jacket.  His skin is tanned and his blue eyes friendly, his blonde hair is a tussled mess.  He rubs a hand through it now.  “Do you know where you are?”

            I shake my head.  I shrug.  I know I am in a hospital, is that what he means? 

            “Can you talk?” he asks.

            I shake my head again. 

            “Do you know how long you’ve been here?” asks Fritz.

            Another shake of my head.

            “The doctors tell us that you’re suffering from complete amnesia,” says Connie in an all knowing voice. 

“We know that the woman with you was your mother.  The blood types and the DNA match.  Do you remember her at all,” asks Fritz?

            I frown.  My mother?  DNA?  I search for something, anything before the blood but nothing.  An abyss of nothing, a void hovers before me in my memories.  I think I stare too long because Fritz clears his throat.  I meet his eyes and shake my head. 

            “Her name was Ana Petri.  She was thirty years old and didn’t live anywhere near here, in fact, she lived in Miami up until about three month ago,” says Fritz.  “Then she disappeared.  They didn’t file a police report though.  I’m only telling you this stuff in the hopes that we can get you to remember something, anything about your mom or anything before her death.”

            I stare blankly at him.  Ana. Petri.  My mother.  Remmiah Petri.  I am Remmiah Petri and I was covered in blood.  These are things I know.

            “Remmiah do you remember anything at all before the cabin?  Or what happened in the cabin,” asks Connie?  “We want to try and jog your memory, if we can.”

            I shake my head.  She is digging.  She thinks that I am lying.

            Fritz seems struck with a thought.  He takes his pencil and his small notebook.  “Remy, can you write?”

            Remy?  Oh, that is me!  He called me Remy.  I think I like that.  I let the words rush around in my mind, distracted again like a newborn distracted by colors and flashes of light.  Connie leans into my view and I am called back to the moment.

            I shrug.  Taking the pencil from his fingers, I am careful not to touch him as I am not comfortable with contact.  He places the notepad on the table next to me; I struggle to grasp the pencil as he had.  Then I get it.  It feels wrong in my right hand so I take it with my left.  Ah, better.  I press the tip to the paper and it snaps off.  Connie, being helpful, pulls something from her purse and hands that to me.  A pen.  How the hell can I know what that is but not know what happened to me?  This is frustrating, I think. 

            I repeat the process and I try to scribble out the words in my mind but they do not come, lines and loops that mean nothing to me color the lined paper. I try and remember the lines and bubbles that I traced near my mother.  I can see them clearly in my head.  The tip of the pen to the paper, I try, without success, to copy what is in my mind to the paper.  It looks nothing like the marks next to her.   I push it away frustrated. 

            Fritz picks the notebook up and looks at me.  His gaze flicker to the folder on the end of the bed.  His eyes are filled with caring that I do not understand.  “That’s okay; we’ll figure it out, Remy.”

            Connie begins to talk now about how I am going to go live in a group home while the legalities are sorted and she explains these things also, but I don’t understand much of it.  I sit impassive. 

My mother is dead. 

I am alone. 

I was covered in blood. 

Whose blood? 

Mine? 

Hers? 

I need to know but no one will tell me, at least not yet, not until I can ask, or demand.

            “Remmiah?” asks Connie.

            My head snaps up and I look at her.  I do not like Remmiah.  I do like Remy, though.  I will have to tell people that when I can talk.  If I can ever talk.  I can think, there is that.  I meet her eyes and I see a flicker of something in her eyes – fear.

            Then I realize.  Yes it comes to me as I let my eyes meet first Fritz then Connie’s wavering gaze.  They think I killed my mother.

 

learning         

The group home is hell; organized chaos is how I would best describe it.  Children of all ages live there with 24/7 counselors on hand to talk to and keep the order at all times.  There is a crisis every few hours.  We have to sit silent in our rooms when one of the other clients is in crisis.  Since I do not talk I hear things because they forget that I am there during the quieter times.  They think I am twelve.  Maybe thirteen from my body shape.  One counselor tells me I “fill out my clothes” nicely.  Another likes to brush my hair, using worlds like luscious and silky.  And they do not think I had anything to do with the death of my birth mother, they ruled that out almost immediately after I was hospitalized. 

Instead they think that I witnessed her brutal murder.  Gutted.  The counselors talk about it after we have gone to bed and I sit next to the door, curled up in a blanket and I listen.  They marvel at how well I listen and how I cannot seem to talk.  At least not yet.   Oh and my appetite is a constant subject of talk. 

I eat. 

A lot.  But I do not gain an ounce.  They weigh me daily.  I find this amusing.  I do not yet attend school so when the other children are gone to school the counselors do other things with me, play games, engage me in different ways.  I learn.  I watch.  During the third week one counselor simply allows me to eat and eat.  I try everything and eat for three hours, pausing only to go to the bathroom.  And I giggle when they make me step on the scale. 

My preference for nakedness is also a hot topic of discussion at the kitchen table at night after lights out.  I hate to wear clothes.  New clothes are the worst.  So they take me to second hand stores to shop.  I smell all the clothes first, wrinkling my nose at the myriad of smells that can come from a single scrap of cloth but they humor me, many of them confessing that I am a favorite.  I prefer the clothes tight fitting, a second skin. 

            I cannot sleep with clothes on.  I cannot abide it and while I do go to sleep clothed, I remove them without thought.  I am never cold and I feel, well, claustrophobic and I sleep naked.  Since we share a communal bathroom I am instructed to don a bathrobe when leaving my room.  This I can handle and I follow that rule with no deviation. 

            On this particular night I sit, my eyes closed, listening to two counselors telling a new counselor about me.  Ah, how I am often the topic of conversation. 

            “She doesn’t talk at all,” asks Daniella, the newest to the fold of ever rotating counselors?  The turnover rate was high due to the high level of stress.  When not discussing their clients this too was a favorite topic of theirs about how they can never keep counselors. 

            “Nope,” says Andrew.  He is the tall cute one, with soft curly brown hair and a never really there beard. 

            “She is smart, but she can’t or doesn’t want to talk,” says Trace. She has silken black hair and deep brown eyes.  “She’s learning to read.”

            The wonder I had felt two days before when I had taken a book from the shelf of the common room, a ‘starter’ book, and the letters had seemed to twirl and dance and began merging to make sense.  “See spot run”.  And I understood it.  Spot was the dog and he was running.  I had grinned.  For the next few hours, I had sat on the floor, hunched over the books, going through one after another, absorbing all the information.  Yes, now I could read. 

            “Learning?  She’s twelve, right?”

            “We think so, maybe thirteen,” says Trace.  “Her mother was murdered in a cabin in the Allagash.  She was gutted and Remy was covered from head to toe in blood.  The pictures are in her file.”

            File? 

There were pictures?

Of me? 

Of my mother?  I almost get up and charge into the room but think better of it.  No there is no way for me to ask for them.  I smirk and sit back, adjusting the blanket and listening again. 

            “Man, I wish she could talk,” says Andrew.  “No crisis, nothing at all, she’s the best kid we’ve ever had here.”  This dissolves into the typical round of “worst crisis” and I tune them out, crawling up into my bed and falling into a light sleep. 

 

talk

            “I hear that you’ve started reading, Remmiah, that is wonderful,” says Connie.  Her body is stiff and on guard.  I sometimes think that she calls me a murderer in her mind.  She is wary of me.

            I am sitting in her small but cozy office in the back of the building.  The couch is lumpy but it does not really bother me.  I nod.

            “Trace said you also started to copy down the letters and started writing; she said you wrote your name, Remy Petri yesterday.  I think that’s great progress.”

            Which I am sure she will take credit for.  I do not like Connie Vasseur.  She is arrogant and I do not trust her.  No.  I do not like her at all.  My skin crawls whenever she is near me.  She never smells just right to me either.  I think I put her on edge which is why she is always so aggressive towards me.

            “You have a visitor today; Detective Fritz would like to talk to you, is that all right?”

            I smile.  I liked him.  Fritz.  He has caring eyes and a gentle tone and he was the first one to call me Remy.  I nod enthusiastically. 

You are reading the story above: TeenFic.Net