I figure this section really must come with a fair warning and some babble prefacing it. It is crap. Absolute, one hundred percent word vomit. Things are overly clichéd and awful and I actually really hate it. However, I have forgot exactly where by back space button resides (or at least I am currently trying to) and this section is 940 words. That makes me 940 words closer to 50, 000. That’s a good thing. And seeing as the crap I have written here is kinda related to exactly how Elva killed things I figured it was important. And therefore must be seen. Enjoy. Or y’know…don’t. I know I didn’t enjoy writing this bit.

*****

“Make sure you stay close,” said Seth as they wandered around the market square. “Don’t wander off, don’t touch anything, don’t talk to anyone.”

“Yes Dad,” sighed Elva, the second word heavy with sarcasm. Seth wasn’t her Dad, not even close, but sometimes he behaved just like one. Full of warnings and cautions and remember-this and watch-out-for-that. She was sixteen. She could take care of herself. Better than he knew.

Slowly Seth wandered along the lines of market stalls, occasionally pausing to chat to the odd stall vendor. He was doing his best to look casual – the swagger to his step made that much obvious – and Elva simply rolled her eyes. He always seemed to get like this – she had only been travelling with him for the last two months or so now, but every time they went off-ship he never relaxed enough to enjoy it; he spent most of his time snapping at her or trying to get the best deal he could. Neither of these things seemed to do much of anything, she was convinced they were ripped off at every opportunity.

Seth always seemed pleased with his bargains however.

She wandered over to one of the near by stall tables, fingering a bolt of silvery fabric, baby soft and slippery between her fingers. She didn’t know who in this godforsaken backwater settlement would buy cloth like that but she did know that she wanted it. She had spent so many years in anonymous scrubs and now that she was free she was pretty damn broke. She tended to wear whatever was available at the time – pants that had to be held up by belts stolen off Seth, oversized dresses that hung like sacks on her slim frame, baggy shirts and boots with fabric scraps stuffed into the toes in some desperate attempt to make them actually fit.

She was like a magpie – shiny stuff never failed to catch her attention.

“Elva!” She heared Seth’s voice and sighed, giving the owner of the stall and a small smile and an apologetic shrug. She darted off into the crowd to locae again. He was always easy to see, standing head and shoulders above the crowd. That ridiculous height of his was useful for something at least – he did always see to be crashing into doorways however which was not so cool. In two months she had (very badly) stitiched up his head more times than she cared to count.

Suddenly a man brushed up against her and a sneaky hand came out and grabbed her ass. She spun around, the man motionless, caught in her gaze. It went far beyond slight disgruntlement over the unappreciated manhandling.

“You do not touch me,” snapped Elva, her tone vicious. For a sixteen year old girl she could be somewhat assertive.

The man leered at her, rocking forwards as if to look down the open collar of the shirt she was wearing. He was missing teeth, his hair grew in ugly clumps, and he reeked of cheeply brewed moonshine. All in all he was your typical backwater scum and the last thing in the universe you wanted touching you. “Why not darling?” he drawled*, eyes running up and down her body. “Reckon I could show you a good time I could, show you how a real man does it,” he said, bumping up against her, hands snaking out once more.

“You do not touch me,” repeated Elva, doing her best to writhe out of the mans grip. Seth had heard the commotion and broke through the crowd so he was standing behind her, watching the scene unfold. He was about to step forwards and beat the man to a pul for being a spineless prick who couldn’t keep his hands to himself, when suddenly the scum took one staggering step backwards.

“What the…” he said, getting to further, words failing him. Elva turned so she was facing James and he had a similar reaction.

Her eyes, normally grey, had gone completely white. Her crimson hair looked like flames surrounding her face. Her face had changed in the most subtle of ways, somehow making her look older, more alien. And then she spoke.

“They do not touch me. The must not touch me.” Her voice was otherworldly. Deeper, more resonant. It wasn’t Elva’s voice and it made Seth take a step backwards, eyes widening slightly. She had warned him of this happening, she had told him this was possible and he hadn’s listened. And now it was happening and he had never been more freaked out in his life.

She took another step forwards, wrapping her arms around Seth before he had chance to protest. “Close your eyes,” said the Not-Elva. He did as he was told. It wasn’t exactly the sort of voice, or creature (because that’s what she was now – she wasn’t Elva anymore) you liked to disobey.

The screams would haunt him, he was sure of that. He had never heard noises quite like it – it was more like an animal in pain. But he kept his eyes shut, as she had requested, even when he felt hot blood rain down on them, when he heard the sound of flesh being torn apart and the screaming stop. There was a chorus of thuds that sounded vaguely like hail hitting the ground, and when he opened them he was surrounded by complete and utter devestation. He took a step back, Elva finally releasing him, and looked around. Her eyes had returned to normal, her hair hanging in ratty elflocks around her face.

“Well fuck…”

*****

Word Count: 2627

Words this session: 940

“Well fuck,” said Seth, surveying the devestation surrounding him, “That didn’t go quite as planned.”

“Y”think,” snapped Elva, one eyebrow shooting up towards her hairline. “Because killing everybody in the entire freakin’ settlement was totally on my list of things to do today.” The sarcasm was hard to ignore. She carefully stepped over some poor mans dismembered arm so she was standing right in front of Seth, face scrunched up in a scowl.

“I told you this was a bad idea,” she said, punctuating her point with a finger poking him in the chest, “I told you that absolutely no good would come of this,” Another stab of the finger, another point made, “But oh no, Captain Seth knows best, Big Bad Rough and Tough Sethy-boy always knows what’s best for his crew. And now look.” She finally ceased poking him with her finger and instead pointed at a still twitching foot.

Seth was too busy to notice. His mind was filled with wonderings such as how could so small a woman have such extraordinarily strong fingers.

“Look Elfie, you needed a doctor. This was the closest settlement. It made sense.”

“Sense? Sense? Seth. Nothing about this makes sense in the slightest. We are standing in the middle of nowhere, on some god forskaen planet that once had a settlement of backwater folks and hillbillies. They are now all dead. We have a ship that doesn’t work, I have a chip in my head, and the [pigs] will be here any second now. Tell me Seth, please for the love of all that’s good, tell me, which part of this makes sense to you?”

“The um…” This was no good. Captains were not meant to stutter. Or falter. Or be even slightly unsure. But beneath Elva’s furious gaze all of Seth’s confidense seemed to just shrivel up and die. He supposed he couldn’t really blame her. He had cocked things up, big time. He had been the one who wanted to come here. He had been the one who talked her into it.

He cleared his throat, opening his mouth once more. “You needed a doctor,” he said, clinging on to the only good reason he had for them being here. “And the ship needed parts, and a pilot who isn’t a sixteen year old waif,” he said, glancing at Elva.

“So where exactly do you think we are going to find a doctor now? Or a pilot for that matter?” She said, giving him a withering look. She refused to rise to the bait and comment on the pilot remark. She was doing a damn sight better than he could when it came to piloting [shipsname] and he knew it.

Once again Seth quailed under Elva’s gaze, taking a step backwards and trying not to stumble over the torso of a small child. The idea of being stabbed by her oddly strong finger again did not appeal to him.

“Elfie, calm down. Please just calm down,” said Seth. He had seen what happened when the diminutive girl became even mildly irate. He did not want a repeat.

“Calm down!” Elva all but screeched, “Seth, we’re trapped here. I’m leading them straight to us. The entire settlement is dead. I can not calm down.”

Something inside the young girl seemed to snap and her voice broke on the final word. She curled over as if in pain, arms wrapped around her waist, and she slowly sank into a crouch. He couldn’t tell whether she was crying or not, her face was hidden behind a curtain of red hair, but her shoulders shuddered just slightly.

“Elva. I know…I know this is bad. And I’m sorry. But…you can’t give up like this. We got things we need to do.”

Elva didn’t respond; instead she started rocking gently backwards nad forwards and humming softly. He recognized the tune as a lullaby, one his mother had sung to him when he was just a boy. This was not the time, or the place for it and it gave him chills. He fell silent, letting Elva do her thing and instead surveying the surrounding area.

The ground was strewn with bodies, hundreds of them. Each one was ripped into six pieces, limbs and head seperated from torsos, body parts scattered around so you couldn’t tell whose was whose or which was which. The tatters of flesh hanging from the bodies looked disturbingly like rent fabric, fluttering in the breeze. Men, women, children; no one had been spared.

No one but him and Elva that is.

The settlement looked like something out of one of those holovids. The ones that had been popular twenty years or so ago, the ones that had been called such wonderful names and “Doctor Gore-monger” and “Palace of Blood.”

But this wasn’t a holovid. This wasn’t a dream, as much as Seth was currently wishing he could wake up. This was very much real life and the inhabitants of this back water settlement were very much dead.

“I’m sorry okay,” snapped Seth, holding his hands up in surrender. “I’m sorry I dragged us here, sorry I talked you into it. I was just trying to help.”

He didn’t know how to talk to young people, especially not the one currently opposite it, crouched over like a -smilie here-. She was what? Sixteen at the most and already she was having to deal with more horror than most had to face in a lifetime. She had warned him, she had tried to talk him out of it but he hadn’t listened, he hadn’t believed her.

And now this had happened and he lacked anything remotely comforting to say to her. The very idea of hugging her or something equally nice was enough to make him pause and falter. “We need to keep moving,” he said instead, his voice gruff. “Stay here yeah?” he said, taking another step backwards. Elva didn’t respond. “Just…don’t move. Don’t touch anything. Don’t talk to any–” He shut up quickly. He had been giving her the normal run down of fatherly-rules he insisted on when they were off-ship but he realized now just how inappropriate the last one was in this circumstance.

There was no one left to talk to.

“I’ll be right back,” he said to cover the mistak. Elva didn’t move, she didn’t look at him, she didn’t make a sound. The only sign that there was still life in her body was the small shudder to her shoulders that spoke of tears.

There was something intrinsically wrong about looting from dead and dismembered bodies, but needs must. After all, he had one very broken ship, one very scared and traumatized girl, and no real pilot. Not until she was up and functioning again.

Food might also be a good idea.

Unfortunately there really was no readily available source of pilots on this planet anymore. New Darwin, the name of the settlement, was the only place of life on the whole godforsaken world. It wasn’t the most hospitable of envrionments. Mostly desert and tumbleweed. It was a miracle New Darwin had sustained itself for as many years as it had.

And then they had come along and sustainability had ceased to matter. They were all dead.

He gathered things together quickly. Well, as quickly as he could while picking his way across the occasional body parts. The heads were the wrost bit, sightless eyes staring throguh him, a look of absolute terror frozen on their faces. Tears had marked their tracks down dusty cheeks, and small chubby fingers clutched at toys. In the corner of one house a rocking horse was still gently moving on its rockers – he could see it throguh the window.

He tried not to focus on these things however, instead dumping tins of food and whatever spare parts he could find  into a duffle bag he had emptied. It had contained large quanitites of wool – obviously this was a famring colony – and he tried not to wonder what had happened to the sheep. The parts and the food was all mixed together but keeping things neat, ordered and spereated hardly came at the top of Seth’s list of concerns. They could worry about that later.

He zipped the bag up quickly before rushing out to where Elva was, still crouched over and gently hunmming once more. He couldn’t decide if it was a good thing or not that she was still there – Elva was prone to wandering and he had spent many a long and tedious hour searching for the missing girl. And yet here she was, where he had left her, as she should be, doing what he had told her to.

That was not how things were meant to work.

“Come on Elva,” he said, grabbing her hand and pulling her to her feet. Her eyes were like those of the bodies, wide and unseeing and full of pain. She may only be sixteen but those eyes held more wisodm than those of an eighty year old. More pain too. “You can’t just stop. We can’t stay here. We have to go,” he said, tugging the girl in the direction of the desert plains, and his ship.

She stumbled slightly but resisted his dragging, sticking her toes in and not moving.

“We have to go Elva. They will be here any minute. They will come and they will take you and you will have to go back. I am not going to let you go back.”

“They should take me,” said Elva, finally bringing her eyes to focus on him. “They should take me back. They were right. I’m not safe. I shouldn’t be here,” she said. Her voice was dead, devoid of all emotion.

“Don’t say that,” snapped Seth, “And don’t blame yourself for this Elva. It wasn’t your fault.”

“But then whose was it Seth? Who am I meant to blame? Because right now I see no other options but me. You brought me here, we asked for help, and then I killed them. End of story.”

*****

Word Count: 1684

Words this session: 1684