Page 1 of The Outsider
Part I: Odessa's Eye
But who hath seen her wave her hand?
Or at the casement seen her stand?
Or is she known in all the land,
The Lady of Shalott?
-“The Lady of Shalott”, Alfred Lord Tennyson
Chapter 1
Claire
The world was on fire, and no one could save me but him.
My Wastelander was near, but he wouldn’t make it to me in time to stop the man sitting on top of me from killing me.
As I lay on the hard ground of the trailer camp that had become a battleground, I looked up into the face of my killer: a black mask emblazoned with a golden eye that obscured his entire face. Only a fine black mesh, fitted into the sclera of the golden eye, revealed the dim light of his eyes behind it. The emblem glittered in the flickering light of the flames that engulfed the wooden barricade around our camp. That eye represented everything I’d lost: my sister, my husband, my home, as well as the cultists who now hunted me for reasons I didn’t understand.
The masked man’s white-blond mohawk was his only defining feature, the only thing I remembered as I plunged my tiny blade into his neck.
I felt his life drain away as blood spurted out like a firehose. He clutched at his spraying throat, then collapsed on top of me, fumblinguselessly for purchase. Pinned to the ground, I was forced to stare at that hideous mask.
“Blood on your hands,” he croaked, his voice a death rattle. “You live on borrowed time, girl. Time borrowed for you by a man you’ll never belong to, in a world you’ll never belong to. The next blood on your hands will be his.”
A terrible dread gripped me then, as I somehowfelthis grim prophecy coming true, burgeoning from his words like an angel of death spreading its wings. Only it was me—Iwas the angel of death.
The world shifted somehow, and my assailant removed his mask, only to reveal my friend Asha’s face beneath. Her dead eyes bore a hole through me, and her voice came as a death rattle, a groan from the void: “Have you forgotten me, Claire?”
A strangled scream tore from my throat, a scream of nature that seemed to penetrate and shatter a deathly stillness deep inside of me. A stillness that had been there perhaps my whole life, a paralysis that had been gifted to me the moment I’d been born inside the compound, one that saiddon’t fight, don't resist, it’s useless.But I didn’t want to be that person anymore—the one who sat in her learned helplessness and let life float gently by, trapped by chains that she’d never felt until they were gone.
“Hey, it’s okay,” a familiar voice soothed me, and I felt a hand on my clammy forehead. “You’re alright, baby. Wake up.”
My eyes fluttered open, and I became aware that I was lying on my back in my sleeping bag, inside the tent that we’d pitched in a copse of trees. John was lying beside me, propped up on his elbow and stroking my forehead, his expression concerned.
“John?” I murmured, reaching out for him.
“I'm here,” he replied, then bent to kiss me.
I clung to the kiss, wrapping my arms around his neck and pulling him deeper, urgent with the need to feel him close to me. He was the only thing that made me feel safe now after the destruction of the only home I’d known in the Wasteland.
“Another dream, huh?” John said when we finally broke apart. “Come here.”
He’d laid his sleeping bag next to mine. He rolled back on top of it, pulling me with him. He snuggled me in close, still wrapped up in mysleeping bag. It was the second time he’d rescued me from a screaming night terror since we left camp.
“You on watch?” I mumbled, still sleepy as I buried my face in his shirt.
“Just got off,” he said. “Kimmy just went out when you started screaming your head off. Scared the shit out of us.”
“Sorry,” I said, embarrassed. “I can’t stop them.”
He pressed a kiss against my hair. “Tell me about it.”
I did, recounting the bit about ‘borrowed time’, but omitting the appearance of Asha. Seeing her in the dream filled me with crushing guilt that I didn’t knowhow to talk about.
“I’m scared,” I said before I could stop myself, and I heard the edge in my voice. “I’m scared the cult will find me. I’m scared that they’ll hurt you and Kimmy. I’m scared it’ll be all my fault. And I still don’t understand why they want me. Why they cared enough to send people after me.”
