Chapter 6: The Culling

Chapter 6: The Culling

"We choose."

The two words fell into the silence of Amelia’s room and shattered it. They were a confession more obscene than any profanity, a truth more violent than the ceremonial knife in Evelyn’s hand. His mother. His own mother had stood in their kitchen, her hands smelling of flour and bleach, and measured out the poison that had led his sister to the slaughter. The food she’d cooked, the milk she’d poured—it had all been a lie, a slow, methodical execution disguised as maternal love.

Ethan stared at her, at the woman who was suddenly a stranger, a high priestess of a bloody, ancient faith. The journal pages trembled in his hand. He wanted to scream, to lunge at her, to make her feel a fraction of the agony that was tearing him apart. But he was frozen, pinned by the sheer monstrosity of her sacrifice.

"Why?" he whispered, the sound raw. "She was your daughter."

"And you are my son," Evelyn replied, her voice steady, her eyes gleaming with the chilling clarity of the truly devout. "This town, this life, it is all a gift from our Mother. A gift that requires payment. Amelia’s payment ensures your safety. The bloodline continues. The pact holds."

"Bloodline?" Ethan spat, a bitter laugh escaping his lips. "You're all just puppets made of bugs! There is no bloodline!"

"You don't understand—" she began, taking a step forward.

But her words were cut short.

It started as a vibration. A low, resonant hum that wasn't coming from the house or the ground, but from him. Ethan looked down. The few dozen ticks still clinging to the cuffs of his jeans and the collar of his shirt were quivering in unison, their hard, black bodies vibrating like tiny tuning forks. A sound began to build, a pure, crystalline tone that seemed to emanate directly from them. It was not a sound he heard with his ears, but one that chimed deep inside his skull, a note of absolute authority. It was a command. A recall.

Evelyn froze, her head cocked, a flicker of confusion crossing her fanatical features. "What is that sound?"

Before Ethan could answer, the first scream ripped through the morning's silence. It came from the street, a high, agonized shriek that was abruptly cut off. Another followed, then another, a chorus of torment erupting from all over Veridian Bluffs. The goal of surviving his mother was instantly replaced by the overwhelming, primal need to survive whatever was happening now.

The obstacle was an apocalypse.

"Stay here," Evelyn commanded, her fanatic's certainty replaced by a sliver of alarm. She moved towards the window, but it was too late.

Heavy footsteps pounded up the stairs. The door to Amelia’s room burst open and his grandfather stood there, his face—usually a placid mask identical to his son’s—was twisted in a grimace of confusion and pain. "Evelyn, the Sheriff… he just… he…"

The old man’s words choked off. A tremor wracked his body, so violent his teeth chattered. He clutched at his chest, his eyes wide with a terror that was finally, horribly real. The chiming in Ethan's head intensified, a piercing, resonant bell demanding its due.

"Grandfather?" Evelyn whispered, taking a step toward him.

He raised a trembling hand, not to her, but to stare at it in horror. The skin on his fingers began to bubble and smoke, as if splashed with acid. A thin, black fluid, like crude oil, wept from his pores. "It's… wrong," he gurgled, a look of utter betrayal on his face. "She's… taking it back…"

Then, he began to dissolve.

It wasn't a clean death. It was a violent, biological rejection. His form lost its integrity, his skin sloughing off in wet grey sheets to reveal a seething, churning mass of black ticks beneath. They boiled out of him, a frantic, dying swarm, as the essence that bound them together was revoked. His body collapsed inwards, flesh and bone melting into a steaming, bubbling pool of gore and black chitin on the hardwood floor. The stench of ozone and cooked meat filled the air.

Ethan retched, stumbling back against the wall, his eyes fixed on the horrific, spreading puddle that had been his grandfather a moment before. Through the window, he could see it happening everywhere. The calm, placid townsfolk were screaming as their bodies turned on them, their borrowed forms failing catastrophically. They melted in the streets, on their lawns, their component parts dissolving into nothing. Mother Piper, angered by his defiance, his rejection of her 'gift', was rescinding it. She was culling her herd.

The result was a town of corpses. The symphony of screams faded into a wet, sizzling silence, punctuated by the gruesome sound of liquefying flesh. In less than a minute, it was over. The house, the town, the world—all had fallen silent.

A horrifying realization slowly dawned on Ethan, the turning point in the midst of the carnage. He looked down at his own hands. They were steady, solid. He was splattered with his grandfather's remains, but he was whole. He looked at his mother. She stood frozen, her face pale, the ceremonial knife clattering from her numb fingers onto the floor. She was staring at the puddle, then at him, her ironclad faith shattering into a million pieces.

They were immune.

The chime had faded. The house was a tomb, the air thick with the smell of death. Why them? Why were they the only ones left standing? They were at the heart of the town, the heart of the lie. They should have been the first to go.

His gaze fell to the journal pages still clutched in his hand. They were spattered with black gore. His thumb smeared across the last page in the stack, the final, hidden secret Amelia had uncovered.

In the dead, silent aftermath of the apocalypse, he looked down and saw it clearly.

The surprise was not an ancient text or a complex diagram. It was a simple, heartbreaking sketch, rendered in Amelia’s deft, honest style. It wasn't a monster or a symbol. It was a portrait. It showed his mother, Evelyn, years younger, her severe bun undone, her hair falling over her shoulders. She was smiling, a genuine, unguarded smile he had never seen in his life. And her arm was linked with a man who was not their father. A stranger with kind eyes and a dark, unruly shock of hair so much like his own.

Beneath the drawing, in Amelia’s elegant script, was a single, devastating sentence, a realization she must have come to in her final days.

We were never part of the pact. We are not his children.