Chapter Text
The blood was still warm. Cadence trembled. Margot stared at nothing and everything.
A lightning flash illuminated the bodies scattered around them. “It…” Margot began, then she blinked. Her breaths were uneven as she urged herself to focus. “We need to get them out of here, Cady.”
Cadence rubbed her hands together, but the shaking wouldn’t stop. A tear slipped down her cheek, cutting a clean line through the blood on her face. “No,” she forced out.
“They’re going to smell.” Margot sighed as she glanced at the bodies. She wiped the tears from her sister’s face. “This is our home now. They don’t belong here.”
“They were here before us,” Cadence whispered, her eyes unable to leave the corpses. There was a boy. He was young, not even older than all the fingers on one hand. His brown hair was matted with blood, just like his freckled face and his clothes. Stab wounds littered his body and the side of his head, just like the woman and girl with him.
Margot shook her sister to force her attention. “If you didn't want this to happen, you should’ve stopped me. Why didn't you?” she argued. Another tear rolled down Cadence’s face, and Margot’s eyes squinted. “Stop it.”
She let out a sob. “Mar… Please. Just...”
Margot approached the bodies and grabbed the little girl by her arms. “It’s too late to beg for their lives,” she sighed. Blood smeared across the hardwood floor when she dragged the girl outside. Her brown hair was in two braids that looked freshly done. Purple glasses were on the floor beside her pool of blood. “Help me with the woman when I’m done with the girl.”
No please or a thank you. It wasn’t even phrased as a question. Cadence almost laughed at the thought. Margot had never been kind. Dad wouldn't let her. Dad didn't like anyone doing anything.
Lightning flashed again. Thunder followed after, rattling the windows. Despite herself, Cadence flinched, a fear that followed her from childhood.
When she was done getting the girl out, Margot pulled Cadence to her feet and dragged her to the woman. Her eyes were still open. Her mouth was stuck in an ‘o’ shape. She had begged her kids to run the second she saw the twins in the doorway.
It was only a light rain, but the sky was so dark it felt like nighttime. The rain pattered against the roof and the blue car that had, for some reason, been driven into the fence. It soaked through clothes and stuck Cadence’s hair to her exposed skin. She wanted nothing more than to go back inside, or better yet, go home. But they couldn't. She knew that.
The twins threw the woman down the porch steps. She hit the ground with a wet, heavy thud and landed beside the girl’s twisted body. The woman’s hand landed atop the girl’s, still reaching for her who waited for her somewhere else.
Cadence wondered if Heaven was real.
Margot's eyes were on her, glaring into the back of her skull with a wrath she didn’t recognize. “Get the boy,” Margot demanded.
Cadence’s fingers twitched, and there was a long pause before she shook her head. “No.”
“I got the girl,” Margot snapped, twisting her sister’s arm with her hand. She grimaced at the touch. “We got the woman. You get that fucking boy so we can get rid of them. We have to finish what we started.”
Neither girl moved. Margot sighed and let go of her younger sister’s arm. “We’re almost done, Cady. Please.”
Cadence knew she was right. They didn’t need to bury the family. No one would look for them, and the police were long gone. The world was as empty as it felt now, taken over by the monsters that hunted the one thing they once were: alive.
She exhaled deeply. “Fine.”
☁︎
Cadence pretended the boy wasn’t a boy at all. He was an animal that made its way into their home and died in the corner somewhere. He was a fox or an opossum or a dog. And maybe that made it worse for others, but she would rather drag a dead animal outside than a dead human.
The rain was long gone when Cadence decided to clean the dried blood off with soap she found in the hallway bathroom and lake water. She wanted to get it off as quickly as she could and didn’t feel like waiting for the water to boil.
Shirtless, she stared at herself in the mirror. Dotted scars littered her left arm, crawling from her elbow to the front of her shoulder. Dad didn't like using his ashtray.
Longer, jagged scars on her other shoulder, forearm, back, stomach. Margot said they made her look like a badass. Cadence tried to believe her, but all she felt when she looked at them was sadness, and they weren’t even all from Dad.
When she was done cleaning herself, she stole some clothes from one of the dressers. A long-sleeve shirt, a dark purple sweater that had a hole in a few places, and a halfway-decent pair of jeans that she had to roll up at the bottom, despite them fitting at her waist.
Cadence sat on the twin bed with pink and purple sheets and a mismatched dark-blue flannel pillow. For a moment, she reveled in the silence she got before her sister walked in. Glancing at the door, she took out an old piece of paper from her pocket. It had so much muck on it, and it had been folded so many times it looked crumpled, but she refused to part with it.
Be strong, Cady-girl.
She sighed. She wasn’t anything. She carried her knife with a faux-confidence that a toddler could sniff out. Margot tried to make Cadence strong. She tried everything. She thought killing made you strong, but Cadence wasn’t so sure. Trapping, hunting, butchering animals—at least they hadn’t turned to humans as the dead had.
I don’t think I was ever meant to be a dad. Let alone be a dad to two girls born six minutes apart from each other. We were young. Stupid. Not even out of college yet. Fourteen years have gone by and…
“Asshole,” Cadence mumbled, folding the letter and stuffing it in her pocket again. She began tying her boot laces when Margot finally approached and watched her from the doorway of the bedroom.
She had done the same, changing into a plain long-sleeved shirt and jeans that were similarly too big for her after washing up. “I found food,” she said, picking at a broken piece of the frame. “I went to one of the houses next door. It wasn’t too picked over.”
Cadence tugged on her belt and placed her knife in its place. “Were there any dead?”
Margot hummed in response. “A woman. She had pink hair and a bite mark on her waist. There was a dead one and a revolver next to her.” She took out the weapon from her waistband to show Cadence with a small smile. It was a small thing. It probably had one hell of a kick to it. “There’s one bullet left.”
“I hope we won’t need it,” Cadence said.
There was a heavy silence between them that would have been filled quickly if Dad were there. He hated silence. He hated it when they were awkward and didn’t know how to fill it. Margot pulled off the broken piece from the doorframe and let it drop to the ground. “I found a couple of board games,” she announced. “And a Walkman.”
Cadence nodded. “That’s good. Did you find Candy Land?” She almost smiled at the thought. “We used to play it all—“
“Uh, no,” Margot interrupted with a shrug. “Monopoly and Battleship. A couple of others.”
“Oh.” Cadence glanced at the floor, then sat back down on the bed. “We always fought over who got to go first.”
Margot rolled her eyes, grabbing Cadence’s wrist and tugging her downstairs to the living room. They stepped over streaks of dried blood before sitting on the couch, where a small pile of board games sat. Margot moved a stray pink backpack with black marker drawn all over it out of the way. “Whatever, Cady. It’s just something to do.”
“Okay. Fine,” Cadence relented as Margot turned on the Walkman. Blink-182 started playing as quietly as it could without being heard from outside. The twins quickly decided to start a game of Battleship, then a game of Monopoly when Cadence won twice in a row.
“Ha! You owe me $200!” Margot said, grinning from ear to ear.
Cadence shoved her shoulder. “You’re cheating, you asshole!”
“Fuck off! No, I’m not!” Margot shoved her back, harder than Cadence had, though that only caused them to start a shoving match.
Suddenly, Cadence grabbed Margot’s wrists to get her to stop and glanced around the room. “Did you hear that?” she whispered harshly.
Margot’s gaze hardened as she listened closely.
Two gunshots. Then a third.
The twins hurriedly looked out the boarded-up window at the house across the street. A pair of hands tried to open one of the windows in the upstairs bedroom, but it wouldn’t budge, and they quickly disappeared again. “What the hell?” Margot wondered.
They continued to watch for any movement, but Margot had stopped after a few minutes out of belief that the dead had gotten the person. “Holy shit, Mar. Come look,” Cadence urged with a short chuckle.
Margot was quick to do what was asked of her, finding a boy a few years younger than them, wearing a sheriff’s hat, one shoe, and eating a giant container of… ice cream? Pudding?
“He had weapons,” Margot noted, causing Cadence’s almost-smile to vanish.
“It sounded like he used all the bullets he had,” she said, glancing at the decaying arms reaching hungrily for the boy from the barely-opened window. “He’s just as armed as we are. Maybe even less so.”
“We haven’t checked that house. What if he found another weapon? Just listen to me, Cady. He could be exactly like us.” Margot picked at a stray thread on the couch and stared at the board game between them. “We shouldn’t be drawing any attention to ourselves anyway.”
Cadence sighed through her nose and watched the boy throw the container in the street and crawl back into the house. Moments later, he appeared through the front door carrying a bag full of whatever he managed to stuff in there.
Then he started walking toward the house Margot and Cadence were in. “Fuck,” Margot whispered, grabbing her sister’s arm harshly and tugging her to the kitchen, where they could hide behind the wall. Cadence almost tripped over a pair of shoes, but quickly steadied herself before she could. Margot took out her gun and slowed her breathing so she could focus as Cadence grabbed her knife.
The doorknob jiggled too loudly to be an accident, as if to lure out any of the dead that could be stumbling around. Something was jammed between the frame and the door, and in less than half a minute, the front door slammed open.
The floorboards creaked under the boy’s weight. Cadence briefly wondered whether they had always been that loud, or whether she and her sister just hadn’t noticed.
Margot peeked out from behind the wall, just barely, watching as the boy rummaged through the living room. His gun sat safely in its holster, and he held a large knife in his hand. The second his back was turned, she stepped out from behind the wall and pointed her gun at him. “Get out!” she shouted.
The boy gasped out and faced her with his knife up. Cadence moved to stand beside her sister. Her weapon felt almost heavy in her hands. There was dried blood that had stained the handle, which had been there for years. She could never seem to figure out how to get it off.
The boy’s blue eyes widened. Margot pulled down the hammer, keeping her finger off the trigger, and stared back at him with unblinking eyes. “This is our house,” she said, her voice unwavering. He dropped his knife with an echoing clank and raised his hands in surrender, cursing under his breath as he did so. “Get out. If you don’t, we’ll kill you.”
“Okay. Okay! I’m leaving right now,” the boy said. He carefully walked backwards to the front door, all while keeping his hands raised and his eyes glaring bullets at them.
“Hey!” Cadence said when he reached the door. He flinched, looking at her like he expected her to take the gun from her sister and pull the trigger. But then she reached down and grabbed one of the shoes, throwing it in his direction. “I have no clue if it’ll fit you. But it’s better than just one shoe.”
Margot and the boy stared at her for a moment. “You do look like an idiot with only one shoe,” Margot added with a slight smirk, watching as he slowly picked up the shoe.
“Thanks,” the boy said wearily. He still glanced between the two, but it seemed more like confusion than worry that the twins were cold-blooded murderers just waiting to shoot him in the head the moment he turned his back. And maybe they were. Maybe Margot decided to waste their one bullet on the boy they could easily take down with one knife. “Can I… have my knife back? I need something to protect myself.”
“No,” Margot decided immediately. She nodded toward the door, the grip on her revolver tightening ever so slightly. “Find a new knife to struggle to kill the dead with.”
“You heard her,” Cadence warned. Her eyes widened slightly. Why wouldn’t he listen to what they were telling him? That was all he had to do. But he wasn’t. He was as stupid as he looked in that too-big hat. “Go away. Cowboy.”
He nodded once and quickly made his way out the door, down the steps, and down the street in a matter of seconds. Before long, neither Margot nor Cadence could see him at all, and Margot finally lowered her weapon. “We should’ve killed him,” she sighed.
“You had the gun,” Cadence said. “Why didn’t you? You’ve already killed a four-year-old boy and his sister. What’s another kid?”
Margot didn’t look at her for a long time. “That family… was already dead.”
Cadence sat on the couch and glanced at the bloodstains on the floor. “Were they bitten?”
“No,” Margot whispered. She inhaled sharply and stuffed her gun in her waistband before pushing a side table in front of the front door so no person or dead could open it without alerting them. “Door’s busted, but it’s getting late. We’ll leave as soon as we wake up.”