Pitch Kick

Kyra sat quietly in her mother's office, watching as her sister fiddled with the daisies she had picked from the feilds on her way there. The building was small, an old ranch home from the days before the collapse. Somehow it remained in tact regardless of it's cracked foundation and bowing walls. Being one of the few buildings left standing, as the forces formed to create ga ruling governing body over the villages, they had taken it over and declared it their headquarters. Her gaze shifted up to the people dressed in their best hand-made clothing glided seamlessly over the makeshift rugs. The buzz aroudn the place was much different then the easy flow outside it's doors, people seeming as if they were always in a rush, Mother included. It wasn't often she brought the girls here, and the air seemed heavy in Kyra's lungs. Her tiny legs swung anxiously from her seat on the hey stuffed apolstery. Where was Daddy? Why weren't they with him?

Kyra never handled anxiety well, and refused to settle for unanswered questions. Mother was too busy to answer anything anyway and everything just felt wrong. Kyra stood up suddenly, her tiny wood-bottom shoes hitting the floor with a thud. Krysalline looked up at her sister.

"Where you going?" Krysalline knew her sister all to well, they were twins and she could since her uneasiness. She felt it too, but simply chose to ignore it.

"I'm going to find Daddy. You comming or not?" Kyra didn't allow questions with her firm tone. She had her mind made up. Somethign was wrong and all she wanted was her father.

"You're going to get in trouble."

"I don't care." Kyra responded with a shrug. Of course, Krysalline already knew this but still felt the need to warn her sister. Kyra reached over to grab her oversized blue hooded jacket from the crude nail-hook on the wall by the door. She knew her sister wasn't going to come with her. "When Momma comes back, tell her I went to the potty." Krysalline simply nodded, looking back down to her slowly withering flower with a quick wave of her hand as Kyra jetted out the door, barely bothering with sneaky tactics as her little feet carried her outside and down the broken pavement back towards their home.

A fire of determination burned in her deep blue eyes, a drive that ate past the muscle pains that set in a little over halfway through her journey. Her tiny body wasn't used to such a vigorous pace of walking and anytime the girls had traveled from village to village with their father, they would either ride bikes or he would alternate riding them on his back whenever they complained of exhaustion. Her ankles weakened with each step over the loose dirt along the paths but she paid no mind, her thoughts set on Daddy and why they were rushed out of the house so fast by Mama that morning before the sun had even rose over the hills. The more she thought about the occurances of that morning, the faster her feet carried her with questions that needed to be answered.

The night before Kyra had been startled awake by the sounds of their argument in the room next to hers in the family's underground home. Often their father would tell his girls the story of him building it with the help of friends and family members over the years. He talked abotu the way things were before the Great Collapse, how the world was a mess of curruption, greed, and pestulance making the girls almost happy the disaster had happened years before their birth. They knew things were hard, and people struggled to survive but they knew the stories of before, the stories of how people struggled even before but as a result of ignorance and power struggles rather than a result of mere survival.

Hearing them argue wasn't anything new to Kyra. She rarely slept, often laying in her cot staring at her smooth painted walls in fanciful thoughts and when she did sleep, it was light, the simplest sounds waking her back up again as she focused her ears towards wherever the sound was eminating from. The arguments were the cause of most of her awakenings, Momma shouting out at Father with the same shrill words over and over again, "We can not survive like this! We deserve more! Our people deserve more! They are going to take power whether you like it or not and it won't be stopped! You really have no clue how much is being done beyond what your simple eyes can see!" She barely heard a word from her father as Momma raged on, only low toned mumbles muffled by the thick metal walls. These arguments always led to the same outcome, the thump and ting of Father's shoes ascending the stairs to the surface above followed by the gasp of the airlock opening then closing with an ending thud. Last night had been no different. But why did Mother's voice sound like she was hiding something this morning when she woke the girls, rushing them to dress as if the world was ending once again? Maybe the world was ending once again.

Kyra saw the fimilar hill covered in fresh moist grass glistening in the sun causing her legs to carry her in almost a sprint to the door hidden like a cave behind moss covered boulders. Suddenly, she stopped and stared.

Around the corner of the largest boulder she could see the door was left open. If Momma and Father ever agreed on anything it was that the door was to remain tightly sealed between commings and goings. In her short six years of life, Kyra remembered the lectures from both of them whenever one of the girls had ran out or in without bothering to close the entrance properly. Why was it open? Who left it open? She stood outside of the boulders, the fear in her chest growing as her stomache turned itself in knots. With a hard swallow she pushed her feet to move forward, cautiously stepping under behind the rocks to the metal grate steps below.

She tensed her body, making each step as deliberate and easy as possible so her hard wood shoes would silence against the metal. Heavy breathing, almost pants of gasped breath echoed up from the back room. Then she heard it, voices, voices that weren't her father's. Voices that she had never heard before and a static she had never heard before in her life.

"Four seven one seven. Over." The man's voice cut through the static as he spoke, followed by a click, then the buzz of static again.

"Delta two." A female's voice responded behind the radio. Kyra's steps lead her to the final archway as she positioned herself behind the oak bookcase her father had built himself. Her eyes scanned the room, spotting 6 shadows standing in the room where the girl's had often played with their rag dolls on the old woven carpet at their father's feet as he scribbled with chunks of charcoal in his notebooks. She held her breath desperatly trying to control her tiny shaking body.

Suddenly a whirlwind of movement as the bodies stepped heavily through the room and out the door in a line, headed back up the stairs out the front door. She coward down lower in her hiding spot, the darkness of the room wrapping her in a sheilding blanket of invisibility as she stared at the men.

They didn't look like anyone she had ever seen before. They're black clothes were well crafted, not made of loose stitching like she had been accustomed to. They're chests poofed as if their shirts were stuffed with some kind of padding and at their sides was a sight little Kyra had only once ever seen in her life, the handle of a glistening silver gun. As the light of the doorway hit against them she noticed something that caused her to choke on her own breath. Blood splatters. The front of their black clothes were covered with it, the sun reflecting from the dripping crimson. It was fresh.

She stayed silent still coward in her spot for what seemed like hours after the last of the men headed out the door, this time shutting and sealign the entry-way back behind them. A stench rose around her, making it hard to breathe as she finally stood, covering her nose and mouth with the neck of her shirt to try to filter out the terrible smell. Slowly, still with cautious steps she came out from behidn the book case and turned into the dimly lit room.

He lay mangled on the rug. The blood drenched through the fabric, soaking it's entire length to the point that if she didn't know what the rug had looked like i nthe first place, she wouldn't even realize there was even a rug there, just a thick blanket of blood that seeped out and ran in rivers out towards the walls. She barely reconized him. His clothes shredded cloths drenched in the same thick red that poured around him, parts of his body held on by strands of muscle between smooth straight cuts. She closed her eyes hard in disbelief, hoping that when she reopened them she would wake up and it would all be a horrible nightmare, but the stench stayed and as her eyes slowly opened, nothing had changed except the growing pool of blood was even bigger, threatening her shoes as she took a step back.

"It's not father. It can't be. It's... It's someone else. Yeah... It's someone else" She tried convincing herself, allowing her eyes to wonder up to the head of the body, or rather, where the head should have been. In it's place was the riggid loose flesh at the end of a neck, like limp two-dimensional mountains dripping with blood. Kyra closed her eyes tight, pushing the flood of tears out. She had seen dead bodies before, bodies of elderly neihbors as she helped her father prepare make-shift funerals for the family, consoling them in their loss with a childish ideal of "only old people die." The body sprawled out before her wasn't that old, the visible flesh still taut on the muscles. Her mind knew who it was, knew far too well who it was, but her heart kept desperatly tryign to convince her not to believe. Then she saw it, in the severed hand still gripping tight around it, the gold chain hanging up over the back of the hand away from the flood of fluids. She knew exactly what the chain was. Her mind flashed through how many times she had seen that chain around her father's neck, a logn chain he hid under the collars of his shirts that she had often unknowingly fubbled with between her tiny fingers since before she could even remember for comfort whenever he held her or hugged her. Ignoring the splash of blood under her shoes, she stepped hard through it towards the body, grabbing her fingers onto her father's prying back his digits from the peice of jewlery. She felt the bones in his hand bend and pop as she released the chain from his cold dead grasp, the symbol of the thick charm inprinted deep into his palm.

It was his. In all of her years she had never seen any peice of jewelry even made of gold, let alone this very same peice. After The Collapse, everyone has melted down their jewelry, the gold mostly to use as currancy amongst the villages. Father had told her how before the end had even came, people were sellign their peices off in a frantic, trading it all for what had been considered money, thin rectangles of a paper cotton blend marked with black and deep green ink. Father had tried to explain how it worked, even showing the sisters the few of them he had left, all marked with different numbers - 1, 5, 10, 20, 50, and 100. He explained that when the survivors emerged from the rubble, the money they had traded in their gold for was now worthless, and suddenly used to build fires and stuff pillows and blankets for warmth. When they had asked him why he didn't meld down the thick necklace he wore daily, he would smirk and with his low calm tone tell them "Some things are more valuable than any form of currancy."

Kyra held up the necklace in the dimming candlelight. The yellow gold symbol hung limp glinting with flecks of light around small dark drips. Slowly it rotated in her shaking fingers before her hand closed around it tightly, clutching it to her budding chest. She whispered a final tearfilled prayer under a strange calm and as she opened her eyes the stentch of decay once again filled her nostrils, invocing her feet to move. She ran.

Tiny footprints sprinted out over the feilds and the gravel and the woods, they sprinted without thought carrying her soaring through the distance she had padded quickly over earlier when she felt the ache of something terrible. One quick fall to her knee, she scraped her uncovered knee but ignored the surge of pain, ignored the blood pooling down her leg into her shoe jumping up to run even faster. She had to get to Momma, she had to tell her, Father was dead!

Finally she reached the building, flinging the wooden doors open hard enough to make the henges crack. She sprinted inside catchig nthe notice of everyone there, including her sister who stood up from her cross legged seat on the floor pressing her tiny face against the glass knowing at that very moment that her sister's instincts were right. Kyra didn't stop, she ran down the hall to the room Momma had been in earlier with the others like her. And finally, outside of that door she stopped. A dead stop, almost seemign as if she would run head first int othe doors if it wasn't for the sudden stop. Gasping for breaths her body almost collapsed, catching itself with her hands above her knees. Reaching her right hand out slowly she remembered her Mother's words and hesitated "Don't come to this door unless the building is burning down or someone is dead." her mother had said firmly. Someone was dead... Not just someone... Father was dead. The rush of how much trouble she would be in for leaving the office flooded her head as her tiny hand clutched the nob but as quickly as those thoughts came they vanished behind...

They vanished behind the sound of a voice. Not just any voice... a woman's voice. The same voice she had heard earlier except not blurred by the static of the radio. She heard the fimilar brrrrrrrrrr of the static she had heard earlier, and the same man's voice only this time it was his voice that was muffled. Her breaths slowed to near silence as the realization crept into her mind. It was.. It was Mother's voice.

Kyra stood up straight, her eyes fixed on the door in front of her as she let it sink in. The further she let it sink, the more questions arose in her mind. She stared at the door, taking a slow step back, then another, eventually turning herself around slowly to go back to the place she should have been. Krystalline's face was still pressed against the plexiglass as Kyra approached. There was no denying somethign was wrong, not just the skinned dirty knee or a broken doll, no something was terribly wrong and both the sisters breathed heavy breaths towards each other with an unspoken sadness. Kyra collapsed hard into her sister's arms, droppign them both hard onto the floor. As she sobbed, her sister sobbed. In a language created and clouded by the hard tears Kyra told her sister what she had seen, but not all she had witnessed. She told her sister that their Father was murdered and that Momma... Momma had something to do with it.

The squeaks of childish cracked sobbing words were cut abruptly as the door opened. Turning their tiny frames to look up at the looming female figure in the doorway they realized their Mother was no longer their Mother, but a monster they no longer knew. Hovering above them she eyed their cheeks, soaked and plump like swollen paddled flesh. Her face grew cold and stern, even more cold and stern than what they had seen almost daily bringing a cold wind through the room, stinging their skin and hearts like a punch of a million needles stabbing. She knew. And they knew she knew. and she knew that they knew that she knew. The twins swollowed hard, still holding on to one another.

"Get up off that dirty floor." She spoke suddenly, forcing a quick fake smile.