Yurui The Cursed One

The Miracle Inc. woman drags herself out through the bent front frame. She makes it halfway before collapsing. For a moment, her eyes meet mine, then they close shut. Her perfect hair has come loose. Blood runs from her temple down to her jaw. Her left arm hangs at her side, limp and bent at an angle that makes my stomach twist. Right now, reeling from injuries, she looks vulnerable. You could even mistake her for a human, not some blessed freak of nature.

“What?” The word comes out barely audible. My throat was so fucked, I had to take a couple of seconds to recover before continuing, “hit us?”

She does not answer. She opens her eyes and looks over my shoulder. That is when I hear the whistling. A bright little tune. Casual. Cheerful even. Completely out of place amid the scene of disaster.

I turn slowly. A woman steps out of the darkness into the moonlight. She carries a baseball bat. At first, my brain struggles to make out what I am seeing. The bat rests on one shoulder, dented and dark at the end. Her hand is wrapped around it loosely, as if she were holding an umbrella. Then she comes closer.

The woman cannot be much older than me. Twenty, maybe. Then again, she has one of those annoyingly pretty faces that could pass for sixteen or twenty-six depending on the lighting. She is tall and long-legged, her proportions just strange enough to make my eyes do a double-take. Her legs were noticeably longer than the rest of her body. Her white shorts sit high on narrow hips. At first, her legs look elegant, graceful even, then I take a closer look and realize that they are way too thin. Oh fuck, I hope this isn’t what I think this is. My eyes move down towards the ground. Her feet are bare and birdlike, three clawed toes pressing into the sand with each step. Behind her, a feathered tail twitches.

She wears a cropped black top. Her hair is tied into two short side tails that bounce softly against her shoulders. Her mouth is curved in a smile so bright it makes her look genuinely unhinged.

Shit. Fucking shit, shit. I’d rather face the devil himself than run into a blessed in the middle of the desert at night. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that I’m completely fucked. Right now, that mysterious facility they were dragging me off to is starting to sound pretty fucking nice.

The woman drags her clawed toes through the sand, then flicks a spray of it into the air. At first glance, she looks almost chicken-like. Not exactly the most terrifying blessing in the world. Then again, I have seen what “not terrifying” blessings can do. Fruit flies. Mice. Butterfly. Cute little things people laugh at right up until someone gets smashed into bits. A stupid-looking blessing is still a blessing, and anyone who forgets that usually gets reminded in the worst possible way.

“Well,” she says, smirking, “That could have gone cleaner.”

The Miracle Inc. woman tries to push herself upright. The bat lowers slightly.

“Don’t,” the chicken woman says while looking down on her.

The Miracle Inc. woman stops. Just like that. I feel something cold move down my spine.

The chicken woman’s gaze drifts from her to me. Her smile sharpens.

“Oh, goodness. You’re young.”

My stomach turns.

“Stephan!” she calls without looking away from me. “We got a lively one!”

Something huge shifts in the darkness. The ground trembles. A shape moves behind the cloud of dust. Massive shoulders. Two hooked horns. A bulky head, way too wide to belong to a human. You wouldn’t be mistaken if you thought that something was dragging a giant statue of a mythological being towards us. Then it comes into the moonlight in all its glory.

The upper half is built like a man, if that man had been assembled by someone allergic to subtlety. Thick neck. Dark skin. Heavy arms. Broad chest. Massive hands hanging at his sides, scraped raw across the knuckles, looking as if he just spent an hour in a boxing match against a boulder. His face is that of a human, but too blunt. Too broad, square-jawed, almost ox-like, with two curved horns rising from his skull. His expression, though, does not match the imposing build at all. He looks like a child caught with one hand in the cookie jar, except the child in question is built like he could fold a person in half.

From the waist down, there is nothing left that looks even remotely human. His body stretches into a long, segmented mass that drags behind him in thick, rippling folds, like a caterpillar grown to nightmarish size. Pale and soft-looking underneath. Dark and armored across the top. Every movement makes the sand rise around him in slow, wave-like ripples. I don’t know how tall he was, to be exact, but if I had to guess, I’d say he was somewhere in the ballpark of ten to twelve feet, as even without legs, he is tall enough to block out the moon.

The little patch of silver light around us goes dark as he drags himself forward. Moonlight outlines his horns and shoulders from behind, leaving his front in total darkness. It is the kind of entrance a cartoon villain would kill for. I would laugh if I were not one bad moment away from soiling myself. Even in near total darkness, he looks so bizarre that my mind struggles to register him as a human being.

He stops near the wreck, looks at the car, then at the chicken woman.

“Did I do it right this time?” he says, looking at her hopefully. “I was careful not to break it too much?”

His voice was deep, but the tone and manner of speech were that of a small child. Dude was like a living Pandora's box of bizarreness.

The chicken woman whirls around and slams the bat into his caterpillar-like torso. The clang rings out across the desert. He winces, but only slightly.

“You fucking mangled it! I only asked you to stop it! Gently! Do you know what gently means?!”

“But I was trying to be gentle!” He whines like a scolded child.

“Stephan, you doofus! Does that look gentle to you?” She shouts as she points at the remains of the car.

He glances at the wreck. For a second, his gaze lingers. Then it slides away.

“Oh,” he says, looking bewildered, “Sorry.”

The chicken woman stares at him.

“Sorry does not make up for the ruined stock, STEPHAN.”

Stock. Is she referring to ”us”? As in our "group"? Well, at least that confirms that they weren't random passers-by. Oh, God. This is getting worse by the minute. And to think, just yesterday I thought I had reached the lowest point of my life. Cute. Apparently, some higher being saw me in my misery and went like—cool, let's see how much more fucked up her life can get.

The chicken woman taps the bat against her palm.

"One dead crone. One damaged corporate bitch." She smacks her lips. "And a lively one. Pretty little thing, too. That'll fetch a good price."

She looks me up and down. I feel her eyes crawling all over me in a very creepy way.

“Skinny,” she adds. “But skinny sells, especially when they are young.”

I bolt. No plan. No direction. I just run forward as fast as my legs can carry me. Someone shouts behind me. I do not look back. Looking back is how idiots die in movies. I may be many things, but I am not about to become an idiot who gets herself killed in some stupid way.

There is one problem. The sand. The fucking sand. It swallows my shoes with every step. It grabs at my shoes, drags at my ankles, pulls speed out of me in cruel little handfuls. My ribs flare with pain. My shoulder burns. My head pulses so hard the stars begin to smear. I can feel strength sap out of me with each passing second. My heart starts pounding faster. At this rate I might actually have a heart attack before they can catch me.

I'm not religious, but if I were to somehow pull through this, I'm not going to lie, I might actually attend church, at least once.

Memories keep flashing behind my eyes as I run. My mother sleeping peacefully in the car. My mother in that clean new outfit, dressed up for the people taking me away. I shake my head hard enough to hurt. Focus. None of that matters if I die here. The thought of what will happen if they catch me sends me sprinting harder.

A memory slips through anyway. Her fingers tucking hair behind my ear when I had a fever. I almost fall.

“Don’t,” I gasp.

I do not know who I am talking to anymore. I am so exhausted that my thoughts have started to go hazy. Someone laughs behind me, close enough to make the hairs on the back of my neck prick up. I genuinely could not tell whether they were catching up or if I had finally lost it.

My breathing slips out of rhythm, breaking into desperate little gasps. The cold air cuts my throat raw at the same time as my lungs burn as if they were on fire. My legs are weak from hunger, from injury, from the last several days of my body being treated like a public punching bag. All the abuse was starting to get to me. The world lurches sideways. The moon blurs. The sand shifts under me. My knees almost fold, and for one sick second, I feel my body giving up one.

I force another step. Then another.

A black shape passes across the moonlit sand beside me. I can feel sharp pain across the back of my legs. All strength vanishes from my knees. I hit the ground face-first. Sand fills my mouth. My chin hits the sand, and my teeth slam together hard enough to send pain flashing through my jaw. I try to curl up, but my body will not obey. My legs jerk against the sand, pain snapping through them in sharp bursts.

I cough. Spit sand. Try to push up. My arms shake and collapse.

Footsteps approach. Slow. I can hear the sand crunching.

The chicken woman squats down beside me and stabs the bat into the sand right in front of my face. She brushes sand off the handle with her thumb, then leans in closer to face me.

“Look at you,” she says. “Getting worked up over nothing. You know, we are actually saving you.”

She gestures towards the horizon.

“Look around, there is nothing out there. You have no car, what the hell do you think you are gonna accomplish by running off on your own? You wouldn’t live long enough to see another morning.”

I try to crawl away. My fingers scrape shallow lines into the sand. That is all. She watches for a moment, almost fondly. Then she reaches down and grabs a fistful of my hair. Pain tears across my scalp as she lifts my head. Her face fills my vision.

Up close, she smells faintly of dust, sweat, and something sweet. Candy, maybe. Cheap fruit gum.

“You know, for some reason, you do not strike me as the obedient type, mhmmm?"

She lifts the butt end of the bat and hits me square in the face.

“Where I’m from, they say the brave bird gets the worm; I’d like to say that the smart cat gets the bird, and then the careful worm eats whatever is left of the ‘brave’ bird."

She hits my face with the butt end of the bat yet again. It cracks against my face, and blood spills hot from my nose, down over my mouth.

“I like worms,” she says, her pupils going wide. “Worms stay low. Worms keep quiet. Worms eat what they are given. That is all weak things are good for. Bravery, pride, confidence, those belong to the strong. The weak keep their heads down and do what they are told.”

“So that is what you are going to be.” Her voice drops. “You stay where I put you. You eat when you are fed. You shut up when someone bigger is speaking. You do not run. You do not bite. You do not make waves.”

She taps the bat lightly against my cheek.

“Understand?”

I wanted to say something, but all I could muster out was a jumble of noise as my vision started to blur, the moon smeared above her. Her face stretches, doubles, fades.

Then the desert goes dark.

When I opened my eyes, I was moving again. The ground slides beneath me in uneven silver streaks. Sand. Rock. Sand again. Each jolt sends pain through my skull, down my spine, into my teeth. My stomach lurches with every step. For a second, I almost thought that I was floating. Then I feel the shoulder biting into my stomach. The arm locked around my legs. My hands hang limp. I am slung over someone’s shoulder like a sack of potatoes.

The feathers scrape against my cheek, and it doesn’t take very long to realize whose shoulder it is. I try to lift my head. It barely moves. Ahead of us, the bizarre-looking man called Stephan drags his massive body through the desert, carving a broad furrow in the sand behind him. The Miracle Inc. woman lies motionless in the sand, looking even more banged up than before, her body twisted at an angle that makes it hard to tell whether she is unconscious or dead. The wreck is already shrinking into the dark.

Inside it, my mother lies.

I wait for it to sink in. She is dead. She is not coming back. I will never see her again. Nothing. I feel nothing. I would lie if I said that I felt empty; it was more like indifferent. The unusualness of my own feelings started to frustrate me. Goddammit, not even my own fucking body will behave like I want it to. What chance do I have in a fucked up world like this, when even my own body will not take my side?

The chicken woman shifts me higher on her shoulder.

“Mmm. Awake already?” she says, looking down at me with genuine interest. “Good. I was starting to worry I hit you too hard.”

I do not answer. My tongue feels too thick in my mouth. She pats my back once, with a friendliness that makes my skin crawl.

“Good. Try not to die before we get there. Nothing more annoying than payday slipping away right under your nose, am I right?”

Payday, huh? Who the F would even buy me? Heck, I don’t think I’d buy myself. Then I remember what kind of world we live in. The kind of monsters that walk among us. There are sick bastards out there willing to fuck little kids and house pets. I’m sure there are also some perverts who would gladly pay for the opportunity to have their way with me.

A shudder runs through my entire body. The woman looks at me curiously.

“Mmm. Cold, aren’t we?”

A devious smile curls across her face.

“STEPHAN!!! Our payday is getting cold! GET YOU USELESS ASS OVER HERE RIGHT NOW!”

The giant man shifts his weight slowly and starts making his way towards us.

Who was I kidding?

There is no God in this cursed world.

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