Desolation ✔️

Chapter 8: Breathing Scars

My heart constricts in my chest; every nerve in my body buzzes. Despite feeling the dire urge to breathe, I can't. The uncomfortable churning in my stomach makes me feel sick—but then again, that could just be because of what almost happened. I can't control my shaking hands and pressure builds in my head. Why? Why him? Of all people, why him?

Every thought in my brain spins until it feels like everything inside me shuts down. I try conjuring up other thoughts, other feelings, sorting the events of the last ten minutes into chronological order: the man—the dead man—lying on the ground a few feet away, and how he almost...well, how he almost had me. And how everyone in the shop, our group, was divided. One half, dead. The other half...gone. Dead and gone. That's just how things work now, isn't it? If you aren't alive, you're either dead or gone. Dead. Gone. Gone. Dead. Carter is gone. My parents are dead. Keilah and Robert are gone. Terri, Dean, and Marvin...dead.

And me? Well, I'm here. Here as in not here; hardly breathing. If you're here, you might as well consider yourself dead, because every breath taken is only taken because it has to be. Every breath is a fight in itself, which makes it almost preferable to not take one at all.

I picture my parents...my dead, dead parents...blown to pieces, reduced to flesh and blood, on the pavement of my street. I dig the heels of my hands into my eyes to will the images away, to force reality from my brain and forget. But they won't budge. They're like stains on the backs of my eyelids.

"Hey," Ashton says softly. His voice is louder and closer, like now he's crouching in front of me.

I could say, "Thanks for saving me!" or "Ashton...nice name..." or maybe, "I'm Scarlett." But the only words I can muster are, "You killed them."

Despite my whisper, bitterness and anger drip off every syllable. I don't feel like crying; I decide from this moment forward there are no more tears to be shed. Hatred—yes, that's what I feel deep inside—burns in my chest and grows hotter with each passing second.

"No," Ashton says, "only him. He deserved it. Your people were already dead when I arrived. The ones who killed them drove off before I could shoot. And then I heard you screaming—"

I finally pull my hands away and force myself to look at him. His face is close enough, I notice small cuts—from glass?—around his cheekbones. His eyes jump to the flower shop, the dead man a few feet away, my ankle. He points a few times at the flower shop and his lips move quickly, but my brain fails to register anything he's saying.

"Stop," I shout, covering my ears with my hands. "I need...I can't..."

He pauses and studies me, sharp eyes on my own. His jaw clenches and he nods once. "Sure."

Breathe...inhale...I stare at the brown grass around us, at his shiny but scuffed black boots. He rests an elbow on his knee, which is within arm's reach of me, and looks out at the flower shop. I expect him to back away, to give me space, but he doesn't.

Several silent minutes pass—the emptiest silence ever to bleed into my ears—and I look up at him again.

Sweat drips down his temples and he blinks only once, studying nothing but a brick wall, before he looks back at me. We hold each other's' gazes, both unsure, both curious.

Finally, he says, "I only killed one. I tried to get the others, but they got away too fast."

Oh. He thought I was talking about the people who killed our group. The ones who looted our supplies. I shake my head slowly. "You killed others, more than one. You killed all of them. You killed my mom and my dad. Everyone on our street—"