Barbra looked around in the house. Dim light trickled from a bulb in the kitchen, and reflected unevenly off crinkly black plastic trash bags taped to the windows.
She tried to think of a word, some description of the room she was in. After a while one came, and that word was 'carnage'.
Blood splattered and smeared across the walls, soaked into the peeling wallpaper, ran down the particle-board paneling and dripped down to the threadbare carpet. Huge puddles ovaled on the bare areas, and dotted the yellowed, smoke-stained ceiling.
There were four bodies, sort of; the one guy had come for her from behind and she'd over-reacted. She'd ripped him apart. Arms and legs laid in the corners and the head was tumbled on the filthy couch cushions. Disemboweled internals strung around in the squalor.
Barbra sighed. "Whoops," she muttered. She hadn't intended to make this much mess.
The woman laid face down, bled out; a gray breast spilled from her top. The two men sprawled around, skin mottled gray. One of them, the one wearing expensive, urban style clothing, was still alive and twitching. She regarded him curiously, feeling his body quake in shock; he wouldn't last long.
The dog, the junkyard, pit-type guard dog, whimpered from a far room.
Barbra felt her body: she was soaked, again. This time down to the skin. Her clothes were completely saturated, all the way down to her feet. She was coated, painted, covered in blood. She stripped naked and padded to the shattered bathroom, passing the room with the dog. It looked at her with terrorized eyes. She smiled at it, showing her teeth. It cowered, then pissed underneath itself, laying in the urine, shaking so hard its head bobbed up and down.
In the bathroom she turned the sink tap and nothing came out. She got confused and turned to the bathtub: the tub had four big, plastic buckets of water in it.
"What the fuck?" Barbra exclaimed. The water was turned off. The group had been squatting in the house. "God damn it!"
She tried to think how she'd missed that; then remembered the dim lighting, candles, and a low thrumming from the trash-filled basement: a generator! Barbra huffed in exasperation.
"Fuck!"
She pulled the buckets out of the tub and stepped in. She located a thin, grubby towel, wet it in a bucket, and rubbed herself off as best she could, concentrating on her face.
"FUCK!"
She was angry. This was aggravating. She wiped herself; when she was more or less done she padded around the house, locating clothes. She found her favored outfit: drawstring pants, hoodie, cheap shoes. She shook the clothes, checking for cockroaches. She took a vinyl kids' backpack with a Warner Brothers character on it and put another shirt in it. It all smelled like menthol cigarettes and dollar-store detergent. Searching for clothes in a gym bag she found a big black pistol, a roll of cash in a rubber band, and a large baggie of pot.
She laughed; she hefted the gun. It was heavy. She gripped it, working with images she'd seen in movies. Curious, she fiddled with levers and pulled on the top of it, she thought it might be loaded. She experimentally pulled the trigger and the damn thing went off with an extremely loud blast, and a puff appeared on the grimy carpet. Barbra almost dropped it from surprise and shock.
"Shit!"
The gun had a shiny gold cylinder sticking out a squarish aperture in the top of it. She pulled the trigger again; nothing happened.
She laughed, tossed the gun in a corner, and picked up the baggie. In the old life she would have taken that shit and smoked it. Now, though, it was useless to her. She thought about it, then stuffed it in the backpack anyway, along with the money.
Barbra said to herself, amused, "Does this make me a gangsta?" Little White girl gangsta. She laughed: a staccato, loud, hilarious, and deeply threatening message. Then her body started to shake, again.
Barbra could feel herself start to throb.
She checked through the house one more time; one of the rooms held a large, shallow cardboard box set on the floor, flanked by bulging black garbage bags. Barbra looked in. There was a baby in it, wrapped in a dirty blanket, sleeping.
Barbra froze. She examined her feelings, and found a small spark. She really, honestly, had no feelings for adult human beings at all, although they were often fascinating. Children, though. She seemed to have some vestige of, maybe, a reproductive need, and children made her feel protective. She knew if she ever killed a child it would be by mistake, or out of overwhelming need, and it would torment her. The baby triggered that.
She thought. She knew the police were unlikely to show up anytime soon. Or at all, realistically. This area of the city was a wilderness, all but dead. There were barely any streetlights, and the majority of the houses were empty. It was a dying urban wasteland. There was no way to depend on anyone finding the child.
