Page 16 of Genesis
My body dipped into a level of relaxation I had no right to feel, the Dilaudids blanketing me in comfort I didn’t deserve. While the drugs worked their wonders, I tried to think rationally about a future I didn’t want. If death was the true goal, staying here would accomplish that, but if we were going to fight through our grief and attempt some form of life that kept us living, we’d need to leave this cottage in the past. It held nothing but old memories and current failures. What would the future hold?
More pain? More loss? I hated Cadoc Dire with so much of my broken heart, but would I live through the loss of him now that he was the only one I had left?
A part of me knew that if he died, I’d die with him. The needle to my arm and my cheek on his dead shoulder were proofenough of that. But we’d both failed and now we had to reassess. A strung-out trip to death or a torturous battle for the future?
“Where would you go if we didn’t go to Genesis?” I slurred, sinking into the couch and inhaling the musty ripeness of it.
Cadoc lit a cigarette and stared at the filter as if it’d contain the answer. Maybe it said death, and that’s why he sucked them down so hard and fast. “I need to… decompress.”
Typical Cadoc thing to say. “How?”
“By killing useless fuckers because I can’t kill myself.” His skin was ashen and disgusting, coated in a layer of grime I’d gotten used to looking at. His dark blond stubble held remnants of drug powders and peanut butter, and his lips were cracked and bleeding. Even his nose had a dried ring of blood around his right nostril, and I knew I’d see the same darkened blood between the cracks of his teeth if he could muster a smile to show them to me. “I need to kill my crazy out or I’ll blow up that fucking city.”
The couch swallowed me, and I let it, hoping it’d suffocate me. Blowing up a city enticed me, but I didn’t know why. I wasn’t the type to harm others because of my own pain. I’d lifted Zan into happiness to take the brunt of his suffering, but the drugs encouraged my mind to dip into Cadoc’s depravity and I didn’t hate the feel of it.
“So let’s do it,” I said. Slurred. Blurted. Maybe just… breathed the words out. I didn’t feel them pass my lips because my whole fucking face was numb. “We’ll hit up your parents' storehouse, get as many weapons as we can, and just start fucking killing anyone who gets in our way. Dog eat dog world now, isn’t it?”
Sober me would hate that statement.
Cadoc used the butt of a gun to crush one of the pills I’d just taken, and then he snorted the yellow power through his bloody nostril. “When’d you turn bloodthirsty?”
This very second.Nothing appealed more to me than death, but if I couldn’t have my own, I wanted to inflict it upon others. “Maybe I need to kill away my crazy, too.”
“Kill me. I’m the cause of your crazy.”
He was. Partially. My whole fucked up life caused my crazy. Maybe Cadoc just made me comfortable enough to snap. I looked around the cottage through tear-blurred eyes and drug-hazed vision, trying to feel an attachment to the place I spent so much time at.
Amelia had been happy here. Zan met Cadoc in the lake right out the back door. I watched them fall in love here, but I also spiralled into my own darkness at the sight of it. My dad had taken it easy on me here, only fucking with me half as often as he would at home. But the punishments here had been… my eyes drifted to the basement door at the end of the hall.
Cadoc noticed. He knew what went on down there. He’d always known, but he’d never done anything about it. No one had. “Want to burn this place to the fucking ground?” he asked. “Maybe it’d kill all your demons.” He shrugged like he didn’t give a shit what my decision was.
I pushed off the couch, falling to my knees on the rug of the living room. My legs didn’t want to obey, so I crawled my ass down the hall, my eyes on that fucking door. Cadoc’s hand latched under my armpit, and he pulled me to my feet.
“Don’t submit to them, idiot. Face them standing tall.” He put my hand on the knob, but he didn’t turn it for me.
Why did he care?
The knob rattled in my grip, betraying my fear. Yes, I was terrified of a basement. I never knew what world I lived in down there, and it all depended on the mood of my dad. Or the mood of Zan. If my twin was particularly happy, my dad liked to make me particularly unhappy, and he did it through physical pain and mental torture until I was delusional and internallyscreaming through my agony. I never gave him my external screams. Never. Those only came when he left.
I opened the door, much the same way I’d opened the bedroom, unsure if I’d find Cadoc dead or alive. It swung towards us, hitting me in the shoulder hard enough to have me stumbling. My shoulder bumped into Cadoc’s chest, and heoomph’das he hit the wall of the hall, staring down the dark stairs with me.
Darkness, dust, and mustiness came at me. Nothing else. No agonized screams. No repressed memories. No panic attacks. Just a basement.
“Smells familiar,” Cadoc said to himself.
It was my past. Nothing more. Nothing less. Over. Nothing left for me down there anyway, demons be damned. I snatched the cigarette from Cadoc’s lips and tossed it through the door. It sparked, tripping down the steps to glow at the bottom.
“What’re you doing?”
“Burning it.”
“One tossed cig isn’t gonna burn a whole place down.”
I wished it would. I just wanted to toss one cigarette like a badass and watch chaos ensue.
“The floor is cement.” Cadoc spun me, my unstable legs wobbling. “You really wanna burn it? This whole place?”
I wanted to burn the basement, the memories, the reminder of a past I could no longer live with my brother. “Yes.”
