Molotov Cocktail

Darkness didn’t bother me. I’d been conditioned to hide in it most of my life. Sleeping was the problem.

When I laid down to rest, hunger and exhaustion caught up with me. I’d begin to hallucinate about that night. The sticky evening grass under my head, the cool cotton of her sundress against my legs, one of her blonde curls wrapped around my pointer finger as she dipped her head, meeting my lips with hers. Laying down was all I looked forward to. Then one night, the vision changed.

Her lips went blue. The skin around her eyes bruised as they bulged out of her head. A deep purplish red mark ran the length of her neck. I tried to wrap her in my arms, but I couldn’t. She crumpled into dust.

After that, I taught myself how to sleep standing up.

The smell of kerosene and shit poisoned the air. The compound was a patch of desert at best, almost too similar to every dystopian movie I’d ever seen — grease painted faces, breastplates made of scrap, do-it-yourself armored vehicles. There used to be correctional officers to keep the peace, but they stopped coming. There used to be cots to sleep in, but they’ve been shredded to the bone for tinder. They used provide us with measly supplies, but now we were left to fend for ourselves.

There’s a Molotov Cocktail in all of us. A funny concoction of chemicals that make up our humanity. If you keep it nice, leave it be, it’ll stay perfectly dormant. Light the fuse and try to break it, you’ll start a firestorm.

The dirty Ford pick-up ground to a screeching halt when it reached City. I’d snuck into one of the few vehicles that still crossed the high voltage electric fence separating City from the compound. The driver was an electrician, paid a suitable wage to keep the electric fence active, so City was safe from us.

I could’ve been mistaken for a small critter as I scurried to the back of his truck, my body small enough to hide under the tarp he had in the bed. Some bandits tried to hijack his car once, but he was quick with his rifle for an old man. I stared at the rusted stains smeared in the tarp above my head. I didn’t underestimate the seemingly weak. That’s how I was one of the few able to sneak myself into City.

I clutched the leather strap around my neck, fingering the heavy heart-shaped pendant at its center. I hope the Senator said grace tonight. Death was coming for him.

**

The first thing I noticed about Susanna was her hair. Thick spirals of gold that almost touched her hips. She looked mythical. A character from one of my Mama’s stories.

When she introduced herself in homeroom freshman year, I remember it feeling odd. It felt like I already knew her.

“I’m Su,” she said shyly.

“Vera,” I answered.

She smiled at me, and it set me on fire.

It didn’t take long for us to become inseparable. We’d stay up late on the phone. We’d gossip about Sally C. in homeroom or Mrs. Buchanan reprimanding us for passing notes in English. Sometimes she’d gush about the football team. I’d hem and haw along, pretending to understand her infatuations, but I didn’t. I didn’t understand the rage building in my gut about it either.

I didn’t want to, but Su insisted we go to the Homecoming dance. She had more friends than me, so most of the night I waited for her attention like a fan of a pop star.

They played a slow song as I sat on the bleachers nursing a cup of punch, watching Su dance with Ricky from science class. She gazed at him innocently, laughing at something he whispered in her ear. Was I jealous of the attention she was getting? Shouldn’t that be me? Chasing boys, blushing when their hands touched my back?

The only time blood rushed to my face was when Su touched me.

Ricky leaned his forehead into hers. Su closed her eyes. Their lips touched, and my heart cracked like clay in a kiln.

I couldn’t physically stay in the gym. I ran until I was outside, collapsing onto a bench in the rain, crying into my hands.

“Vera!” Su called. Her sundress flowing as she raced after me. “What’s wrong?”

I looked back at her hopelessly. Rain soaking my jeans, seeping into my converses, hiding my tears of absolute and utter confusion.

“I don’t know.”

I answered her truthfully. I didn’t know these emotions for her, alive and breathing in me like I was possessed, could exist, let alone be put into words.

She did something I didn’t expect then. She grabbed my face with both of her hands, looking not through me, but at me.

It didn’t matter if she didn’t feel the same. It only mattered that she knew what she was to me. Everything.

I kissed her, and after a moment that seemed to stretch to eternity, she kissed me back.

I wasn’t dumb enough to think there wouldn’t be consequences for getting caught. I wasn’t smart enough to be paying attention either. I didn’t read newspapers. I didn’t protest with the proud. I didn’t even know I was among them. I certainly didn’t have a clue that legislation had just passed that made our relationship a capital crime.

We could have been more careful, but we were kids and in love. A reckless combination if there ever was one.

It was the nicest night of the year. Among the fireflies and summer breeze, I curled my finger into her hair as she straddled me. She kissed me, and then we heard shouting.

He caught us. Su’s father.

The Senator.

My trial was shortly after that night. The Senator took the stand as a witness. He claimed that I was a vindictive witch straight from the trailer park who’d corrupted his little girl. Ricky was there too, claiming to be Su’s “boyfriend.”

The judge sentenced me to lifetime at the compound. My lawyer apologized half-heartedly. He thought I had a shot since the judge belonged to the opposing party of the Senator. I had no idea what that meant, but it had no impact on my case.

It did on Su’s though. She was sentenced to death.

“Weakness,” the judge preached. “…is more of a sin than manipulation.”

But that wasn’t all. He acknowledged the devil in me and felt it wouldn’t be exercised with captivity alone.

He had me placed front and center at Su’s execution. When she fell, the rope dug deep into her throat. Her lips went blue, her eyes bulged. She mewled and convulsed, pleading wordlessly for death. I screamed the entire time.

**

The lady of the night sipped brown liquid through crystal in the Senator’s library as the fireplace crackled. She smiled a toothy grin.

I was close to the open window, crouched between a prickly pine bush and a moss tree. The estate barely changed, reminding me how the world for people in City, if you were wealthy, naïve, and straight, wasn’t dystopia.

“Can’t get enough, Senator?” the lady asked mischievously, adjusting her low-cut red dress.

“Don’t call me that,” he spat at her as he threw money down on the table.

She smirked, counting the money as he undid his zipper, just like they did last night. I’d been in City for a few days now. Each night I’d return when the staff retired, thinking he’d be alone.

The gun I had tucked away at my side felt heavy against my hip bone. There had been a different lady here each time I’d come to finish things. My business was with the Senator alone, but I couldn’t risk coming here a fourth time. I’d have to kill them both.

I pulled the gun from its holster, pointing it carefully through the open window, my entire body shaking. I blew out a slow, steady breath, watching her get on her knees.

Before I could pull the trigger, the lady shouted something.

“This is for my brother!”

She pulled the knife quickly, but the Senator was quicker. She missed when he deflected, hitting his upper thigh. She aimed for more valuable parts.

Before the Senator could retaliate, she ran, throwing the front door open. She stopped when she spotted me. Her eyes peered into mine, dark and lifeless. A look I’d seen in the compound many times. Her humanity was ignited and broken long ago, leaving behind a blood-thirsty beast. She smirked at me and continued running.

“Help!” the Senator cried.

Thick blood seeped from the deep gash in his leg. His fingers shook as he reached for the knife, pulling it from his wound. That was a mistake. Blood poured freely from it now like a river through a broken dam. He collapsed, not bothering to crawl to his phone on the mantle. I guess he knew whoever he’d get a hold of wouldn’t reach him in time. This estate was free from staff and miles from help. Unless he slowed the bleeding himself, he’d die in a pool of his own black blood.

This is all I’d dreamt about for the better part of a decade. I pawed the locket, bringing it to my lips.

“Su!” he yelled. He hugged his own chest, weeping now. “I’m…I’m so sorry.”

A tremor went through me like I stood on a fault line.

I entered through the wide-open door, throwing the French doors open to the library, meeting cloudy eyes as they stared at me in agony. He crawled away from me instinctively, howling from the pain.

He knew who I was. Under the layer of dirt caked on my face, my shaved head, a lifetime worth of wisdom that I felt aged me past recognition; he still knew me.

“I knew you’d come,” he muttered.

I slowly pointed my gun at his chest. This was it. I’d get to finish him myself after all. He’d single handedly ended the worlds of everyone he’d sent to that compound. People who just wanted to be who they were. He sent them away, took their humanity. He was our apocalypse incarnate.

I would get to end the End of the World.

“Do it,” he coughed. I cocked my gun.

A vision of myself flashed before my eyes. My hair grown back. A flag pin in my lapel. Cameras flashing everywhere as I shook important hands. This was my end game, right? Kill the Senator, avenge Su, be the rebels’ champion? Open my own compound? Let the light behind my eyes go dark?

My jaw trembled.

No. Then it would start all over.

My gun fell to the floor.

I untied the long thick leather strap from my neck. The heart-shaped pendant glittered from the glow of the fireplace.

“It was my Ma’s,” Su said one night. “Keep it safe for me.”

She smiled brightly. I didn’t wear jewelry, but I would for her.

“What are you doing?” the Senator asked as I knelt to him. “Get away from me.”

I ignored his weak protest as I wrapped the leather strap a few inches above his wound. The blood flowed slower and slower as I wrenched the strap as tightly as I could.

“I don’t think weakness is a sin,” I whispered as I dropped his house phone on the ground, just within his reach. “Ignorance? Well, that’s a different story.”

As he began yelling into his phone about how the witch who’d came back for him, I swiftly left in the cover of my familiar darkness.

He tried to ignite me. He tried to break me, but he failed. The Senator would live with the souls he destroyed, but he wouldn’t claim mine.

This witch was still human.