Ransom

"This moment is only one. It is no other and cannot be regained. It can never be relived, readdressed, or otherwise redone."

"It has passed, and the one before."The rabbit looked at the woman who spoke to him and his liquid eyes were pools of unaffected calm. The woman stood and the rabbit looked up at her, she turned and walked off. The rabbit followed.

It had been a decade for her in this solitary life, a decade since she had seen people, shopped at store, lived in a house, or slept in a bed. When the Marksman targeted her, she ran.

She had a family, a house, and a job but as a target of the Marksman they would all be endangered. She didn't leave a note. She ran. Society would never find her when she made it off the grid.

It began to grow dark. She sparked the fire she had prepared in the firepit and soon the flames cast red and orange and yellow dancing apparitions onto the surrounding woods.

Thoughts like stark bombed out buildings glowered at her from across the precipices formed in her mind. Thoughts that bled and scabbed and healed in betrayals that then inked themselves across her skin and dissappeared into the history as the forlorn march of survival dominated her memories, interspersed by sketches of golden, and smiles and laughter and what felt like love. The latter making progression of the former worthwhile and even possible. Life.

The rabbit sat quietly, watching.

The Marksman hunted people. People that threatened the totalitarian dominance of the One, the presumed new way, the authority of a system that imposed eclipsed values and sameness; the value of mediocrity was greater than that of individual worth. This saddened her.

She hated him, sometimes she said she hated him more than life. And she loved life but hated it in an inexplicable anomaly of thought that makes perfect sense to the thinker and the receiver. He had to be the stupidest thing ever to live. Literally.

The rabbit shifted in shape becoming a man who looked over the fire at her. Waiting.

The fire flickers and the wood makes settling noises casting sparks, shadows cast and the expanse of the night sky its black inky volume held at bay by the dancing flames and interplay of interlocking shadows, that go up and out and seem to find infinite patterns of casting the shadows into greater depths and shapes.

Sometimes in the deprivation of companionship, she imagined that the night sky would swallow her existence entirely. The man spoke then, "The day comes that men will erase their own heritage for a chance to live in the history that they eradicated, dwell in the present, looking forward always as the future is promised to replicate always in deeper levels the glory of its past. "

He blinked and then opened his eyes to look at her, eyes that held their own luminescence. "Men have come from the forests and been paid for what they claimed to be your skin." She stared back at him, she did not blink. "I think you are free." She stared still at the man, questions spilled from her still expression. "In front of you is a choice, a path, a way to go, the way back is haunted, littered, strewn but the way forward is a course, a set, a destiny.

The questions remained in the air. As contemplative assessment failed to deliver the assurance that the man's proclamation stirred the woman followed her eyes down, caste. She waited. He would disappear as had the others who followed the rabbits trace to her solitary existence. They never stayed long, her ghosted company.

The fire died and as it did so did the man's appearance. She turned in, to sleep.

Dreams opening doors in her mind and the past hurdled through her memories like so much flack. As the years progressed memories that once held so much vivid clarity lost their color, their meaning, and eventually their form. Alone dreams became her only companion and the lonely visitors that occupied her sometimes day became more real than the people she once knew.

A door opened and before it a road, unpaved. He skinned her, alive. Bleeding in pain, startled awake.

She lay there and the rabbit looked into her eyes with gleaming and what she presumed was consternation. From across the room, he turned his back and hopped out into the sun that lay in beams full of dusty motes across the dirt floor. Displaying his complete lack of concern.

She rose, prepared breakfast, and as she turned to empty the slop a man's hulking frame filled the doorway. This brought heartbeats, hammering, stacatto, blood rushed, sounds of a thousand trains in her head, all thoughts became panic and weak and shaking.

This being the end, she thought to sit down before she fell. Yellowed skin and blighted eyes met her own as she thought she heard him on and on demanding a price, a price that could never, would never be met. Was he on the phone? She couldn't think, could barely see, and the only thing was the rushing sound inside of her head.

He wasn't the marksman but seemed somehow less desirable. He pocketed the device in his hand and crossed the dirt floor. His fist slammed into her face narrowly missing her temple and the black was alleviated by white specks of light, cold. Maintaining consciousness she managed to look at the sky, focusing she looked into his eyes and above them, seeing something else there above them, she felt gratitude to be alive. He hit her again and again, taking every hit, she felt that she was pushing into the blows as if that were the only escape. Everything around her has gone a cold gray color. The light a not quite fluorescent and the dirt around her felt like gravel, as the struggle blurred and the ground and her standing became less defined. He stopped.

She ran, her teeth were driven through her lips and she felt that her lips may have been shredded. She only knew to survive. So she did. She ran until she collapsed, feeling that she actually still had lips she collapsed into the leaves and slept.

She woke slowly stiff and cold, looking into the dark a white snuffling ball of fur made slow movements towards her. Standing slowly for the pain throbbed in her head and thrummed through her present teeth, she felt her tender face and found it intact.

She knew that a catalyst had been reached. The protection of hiding breached and her lonely existence was no longer safe. This determined she took slow deep breaths of air, and with a buried resolve began shouldered the trudging walk through the night and into humanity's arms.

She would find a village, or a town or whatever they were called now and ride the remaining storm of the reoccurring subhuman saga out with others.