Page 47 of The Godhead Complex
The woman slowly nodded, obviously still stunned. “Come in. All of you. We’ll take the cellar entrance.”
She led them down a gravel path that wrapped behind the building, finally to a door in the rear that was painted black, like the pupil of an eye.
“Getting close?” she asked Carlos. Abandoned houses lined both sides of the crumbled street.
“Yeah. Maybe twenty minutes.”
“You keep saying that and then we walk another hour.” Sweat drenched her shirt.
“If I keep saying that, then one of these times I’ll be right.” He smiled, always so genuine from him. “Give me a break, it’s been two years since I walked this path.”
A heaviness hung inside Ximena’s chest. One she knew well and had learned not to cling to. Anxiety in and of itself was sometimes a premonition. She tried to focus on each of the passing houses and imagine what bright colors graced their walls when they were first built.
“Lookie, Ximena.” Carlos picked something from the ground. A small bush of weeds. “Mariana loves these. Well, no, she actually hates them, but she’ll laugh if I bring her some.” He gave Ximena a single weed to investigate. “She grew these right afteryouwere born.”
“Me? Why?” She looked at the little pink flower on the end of the red clover, but she didn’t understand Carlos’ excitement and her face must have shown it.
“Because your mom said she’d been drinking red clover tea before she got pregnant with you. So, Mariana ripped out and collected every last clover in the village, no matter what color it was.” Carlos chuckled. “Eventually she planted a whole garden’s worth ofjustclovers.” He continued gathering a bouquet of weeds for his wife.
Ximena nodded. The whole village did a lot of weird things after she was born. “What’s clover tea taste like, anyway?”
“Terrible. Exactly like a weed should taste. But if she wasn’t tending that garden or drying the clover, she was busy drinking the tea, day and night. Hot tea, iced tea, making tea cakes from it. She wants a child so badly. Doing something you hate for someone you love is, well, that’s unconditional love.”
“She would’ve been a great mom,” Ximena agreed, before realizing she’d said it in the past tense. She hoped Carlos didn’t notice.
“There’s still time.” He laughed. “I know to a teenager like you I must seem ancient, but we’re not that old yet.”
Ximena looked at the house behind the patch of red clover and wondered if the woman who’d lived there before the Flare ever needed to drink fertility tea. Her eyes focused on an unusual deterioration pattern on the house. Burnt siding.
“Do you see that?” she asked Carlos, but he was too busy trying to make weeds look like flowers. “The side of the house got burned. You think that’s from a fire or an explosion?” She walked closer to the melted siding of the dusty haunt.
Carlos stopped picking. “I know you think people used to walk around throwing hand grenades every day. Probably not.”
“I think they’re a revolutionary weapon of defense and more people had them than you think.” She was so focused on possible evidence of her favorite weapon from history that she didn’t pay attention to the ground below the burnt siding.
Once she did look down—she couldn’t look away.
“Carlos . . .” She had a hard time catching her next breath. The anxiety from before found its reason to spread. Her heart pounded all the way to her eardrums. “Carlos, quick!”
She didn’t actually want him to look. He had a weak stomach, but sheneededhim to verify that she wasn’t just imagining the clothed skeleton at her feet.
“Oh jeez, get away from it.” He waved her closer to him, but she couldn’t take her eyes off the bones. The knife sticking out of the pants pocket looked oddly familiar.
“Wait, Carlos?” She bent closer to the dead body and reached into its pocket to free the knife.
“Ximena you’ll get a disease. Come on.” Carlos said it as if he’d forgotten for a moment that she couldn’t catch the Flare; no one in their village could. And no disease was as great as the Flare.
“This is from our village!” She held up the knife so that Carlos could see the embroidered outline of an eagle, with a circle around it, on the weapon’s sheath. The same design that Ximena’s mother sewed into everything. To symbolize truth. She traced the white and brown thread of the eagle’s head, sewn directly into the leather. “My mom’s design . . .”
Carlos stepped forward and Ximena gave him the knife to see for himself. He looked at it with dismay, as if its blade had just popped his entire balloon of hope. “Oh, shit.” He suddenly looked like he was going to throw up.
“What?”
He took a deep breath and looked away from the body. “Does the left hand have a snake ring on the second finger?” He asked as if he already knew the answer wasyes.
It took Ximena a few moments to distinguish what was and wasn’t a part of the skeleton, but a shiny sterling silver ring reflected the sunlight. “A snake eating its own tail? What’s that mean?”
Carlos avoided Ximena’s eyes. “. . . A symbol for the eternal cycle of destruction and re-creation. Or some such mumbo jumbo.”
