“God of Cain,” she said, out of habit, not devotion. Vern flung open her eyes. She would face her extinction and bear this hot, vicious undoing full-on. She’d watch their blurry shadows descend.
Vern’s eyelids fluttered. She looked left. She looked right. She squinted into the forest dark.
There were no wolves to be found. Vern blinked and rubbed her eyes, but no sign came that she’d been chased down and bit at. With a crimped brow, Vern hushed her crying babe with pats on the back, aware she’d forgotten all about him during her death throes.
Vern snapped her head to the left at the sound of a dry leaf crackling.
“Who’s there?” she asked.
A beam of light flared from the darkness, blinding her. The ground around her shifted, sections of soft mud flattening under a stranger’s boots. Someone with a flashlight stalked toward her. With one hand to her babe and the other made into a visor on her forehead, Vern scooted backward in the dirt.
She could neither see the stranger’s face nor make out more than a few details of his person, but slung over his right shoulder was a dead opossum dressed in pale pink overalls. The fiend had come.
“The wolves always flush out the runaways,” he said, voice suspended in that liminal ether between growl and whisper.
Vern lay frozen before him, regaining her ability to move only at the sound of an animal stalking in the outskirts of her periphery. It beat the ground with heavy footfalls and crunched twigs and pine cones with its massive paws. Hungry, it snarled. The noise was enough to distract the fiend, and Vern tugged the knife from her nightgown’s pocket and plunged it into his thigh. He cried out but didn’t retaliate, staggering toward the animal instead.
Vern righted herself, hoisting up onto all fours and then to standing. She crouched as low as she could as she ran, trying to make herself invisible in the wild plant growth of the woods. She didn’t hear footsteps behind her, but she kept running. She stumbled to a stop only when pain of breath-stealing magnitude twisted inside her belly. It squeezed like something alive inside her, wishing her dead, making it so. If the fiend was coming, there was nothing to do now but wait. Her life, Howling’s life, that was all in his hands.
Overcome, Vern worked herself down to her knees, legs spread. The urge to bear down as hard as she could supplanted every other humanly want in her body. Not one to deny her baser self, she did as the urge commanded and pushed. And so, with one babe tied to her chest, placenta and all, she bornt another. The fiend surely heard her screams.
* * *
IT WAS A SORRY LOT she’d birthed her babes into. They had naught but Vern. Vern, fifteen years old, who was not yet so lost in teenagedom that she believed herself knowledgeable or anything approaching such. The world and all its troubles were as much unknowns to her as they were to her children. What more could she offer them but her milk, her skin?
With Howling and his twin strapped to her, Vern gathered wood and built a fire. It made her an easy find in the woods, but Vern had expended too much energy on being frightened this evening. Let the fiend threaten and taunt. She’d not be chased from her bit of earth with promises of harm. Only actual violence could unmoor her.
Vern made a lean-to once she’d finished the fire. She’d wait until morning light to journey back to her camp.
“Now, what to call you?” she asked her newest child, smaller even than the first, his breaths gasping and unsteady. Like her, he was albino. The babe’s alabaster glow made him easy to see in the dark, a lantern in her palms.
“How about Feral?” she said, for no more reason than it sounded as rabid a name as his elder sibling’s. It made her happy to give them such improper names, because there was nothing good about what was proper.
Vern wished to make every moment of her life a rebellion, not just against the Blessed Acres of Cain but against the world in all its entirety. Nothing would be spared her resistance.
Outsiders looked down on Cainland, convinced of their superiority. Whenever Cainites moved together in a group off the compound, distinctive in their uniforms, parents stared and pulled their children away. People called them a cult.
Vern wanted to know what made these folks so sure they weren’t in a cult, too. A college kid had once walked up to Vern on a dare and asked, Do you really believe in the God of Cain?
Seconds ago, this kid and her friends had opened up a bag of food on top of a panhandler’s head and broken out in laughter. Was that what she believed in? Was that her god? Laughing at the downtrodden and weary? Nobody at Cainland would do that.