Chapter Text
The very same day, before the sun had ever a chance to set on the world outside, it fought its way into the bunker. A loud banging hurled itself throughout the entry hall of the bunker. Cascading violently, clunking like a rock down a mountainside, the sound fell through the ladder-entrance and boomed throughout the halls. Joseph bolted upright out of the bed, pushing Eve’s naked body away from him.
Fear rose in her eyes, she sat up in bed and shivered as she looked at her empty doorway, thrown open and breached.
Nothing had happened in a year. No sound had ever been heard from outside—No sound came from the bunker except if it was made by her, or Joseph—and yet here it came.
Hell surely following with it.
She got to her feet as she heard Joseph’s frantic footsteps descend down the halls. She pulled her clothes meekly back on. They felt foreign and strange.— No. They didn’t. She did.
“Faith!” He shouted for her, his voice booming from the hall with a rising timbre. She had never heard him yell so loudly before. Never so desperate, “Help me!”
She ran to him, following his grunting and his panting. She made it to the very end of the bunker—the entrance, and looked up the ladder to the surface. Joseph looked down at her, holding out his hand, “Come up here and open this with me!”
She trembled. “Y-you’re opening it?”
“Faith, come here—Now!”
She couldn’t move. Her thoughts bombarded her. The sound didn’t stop. He’d let it in? The banging outside the door despaired; fists pummeled, the harrowing sound bled. He said he would never leave me.
“Faith! I need you!” He shouted angrily. There was no love in his voice. Not an ounce. His seed was still wet. Slathered to both sides of her thighs.
She planted her hand on the cold bars of the ladder and looked up. This was it. She had never climbed any further than this. This was the threshold of safety. The ascent into her death.
She climbed.
Her trembling arms brought her up to Joseph’s side with a soldier’s obedience—but her cowardice was like something else altogether. She dreaded what they would let in. The wheel of the bunker-door was jammed. Hadn’t been touched in what may well have been over a year.
Joseph’s biceps flexed with the full breadth of his muscle, but they were uncurtained; unsheathed of their muscle by malnourishment. Eve provided what help she could, but she too was weak.
The both of them pushed and pushed and closed their eyes. But inside, Eve prayed. She prayed for what she did not desire because it was Joseph’s prerogative. She prayed the door would open, and the apocalypse would come into their Eden. That it would ravage his garden of creation; and take her with it.
The wheel budged loudly and a metal screech deafened them with its turn. Frantic hands grabbed at it and turned until locks could be heard disengaging. The door then felt fragile, lighter, and—finally, could be opened.
“Stand back,” he said to her. His hand guarded her stomach.
She stepped backwards away from his hand and watched as Joseph opened the door. And then, light broke through the corners of their vaulted paradise, making the inside seem so much darker in comparison. A darkness she had never seen. A growing line from the crack of the door as the outside air wafted in. She smelled something foreign, and wet. Something alive and forbidden. And then she smelled blood.
She expected the rain to be red, the skies to be orange, the grass to have turned to ash and died. But the sun—the true, real sun—, it blinded her. A voice broke through the white as she turned her eyes in unbearable fear. The vision of light was something unholy. Terrifying.
The voice called, broken and dying, “J-Joseph…? I found you?”
She uncovered her eyes in wonder, but could hardly turn back.
The man was on his knees. She could tell from how low his voice was, “Brother…”
“You’re alive?” The voice from the other side repeated.
Finally, Eve could not stop herself. She looked over her shoulder, and though her eyes still could not adjust to the light, she saw a man on the ground before the bunker-door. The source of the smell. He was bleeding out, panting in a puddle of his own crimson blood.
“You’re hurt,” Joseph said, and there was an aching in his voice Eve had never heard before. It was absent when he called for her help, it was absent when he emptied himself inside of her. Absent when he moaned. And it was absent when he guided her through her first confession.
Eve had never heard it before. Joseph’s voice was wreathed in the sincerity of love.
She turned around as Joseph moved frantically. He took his brother’s heavy arm and tucked it over the back of his neck. Then they both looked at Eve. His brother’s arm hung limply, the blood dripped from his ring finger and splashed dirt into the purity of the bunker.
She froze. She had never seen so much blood in her life. Lacerations, lathered in blood, scarred him diagonally across his ribs. But still the pillowy meat beneath his skin tamped inside like cotton, opaque with sinew. Her head spun, her skin pale, mouth dry. Horror lifted her soul out of her body and she merely stared at the wounds.
A mortal terror haunted her. Haunted her so deeply that it twisted into something more than simple fear. Her lip twitched lightly, mouth slightly agape. Beneath her lips she could feel a morbid smile threaten to take her face. It only disturbed her more, as her lips twitched trying to fight it.
Eve did not even realize that Joseph was speaking to her. Her gazeless staring filled her head with a blank, abject fascination. Her eyes snapped to Joseph’s. His neck had strained, all tense chords, with the effort of getting his voice to penetrate the maw of her dissociation.
A palette of emotion she had never seen colored his face and took form right before her eyes; grief, love, horror, fear. Total emotion, as naturally as if he always felt it, “Close the door.”
She turned to her side. The apocalypse still filtered in. Close the door. And shut it out? She looked back at Joseph as he began shuffling his brother over his shoulder. Eve couldn’t imagine how Joseph could hold up such weight. His brother was enormous. All muscle. Mottled and burned skin. She wondered if it had anything to do with the lacerations that cut across his arms and chest. Her stomach lurched at the thought.
She did as he asked. The door pulled with the weight of impervious metal and her fingers clasped it deadly, a cold yearning locked around her heart like the very vault she was pulling shut. Freedom. Emptiness. Air.
Even if she died; just to be rid of this cloying insolitude would be enough to feel alive once more. A final glimpse into the expanse of all that was denied her; a fit haunt of Gods, and shut it out forever again.
“Go down and bring everything from the medicine room.”
Trembling, paling, Eve did exactly as she was told. The strange man’s agonized gasps, Joseph’s trembling hands, the slick sound of blood pattering on the floor—it all haunted her. She climbed as fast as she could. Even to missing a step and nearly plummeting to the floor. She clutched the rails tightly and looked up. Knuckles white as snow.
Joseph had his brother over his shoulder. He was trundling down the ladder with one arm. She could see his entire body shaking with the immense effort of atrophied muscles. The fast-twitch way his hands rushed down and latched tightly onto the rails during those split seconds only his legs kept him from falling backwards down the shaft with his brother. She climbed down even faster and ran down the halls to the medicine room.
There, she grabbed everything she could get her hands on. Shoveling it all into her arms, then turned.
She ran, tears flung from her face as she flew through the halls. Little tin tubes of gauze clopped on the ground as they fell from the heap of bags in her arms; scissors; plastic wrap; boxes; pliers; cotton-balls; swabs; splints; knives.
A tin fell from her hands and popped open. Unfurling a trail of white fabric across the floor before butting silently into the wall.
Her feet hurt from the dull thudding, digging her heels down as she ran with the whole of her weight across the cold bunker floor.
By the time she got back, Joseph was on the final step. His arm trembled as it released the grip-warm rung of the ladder. He tried to hold his brother upright as his brother’s head weakly swung around the fulcrum of his neck, delirious in stupor. And as Joseph lowered his foot to the ground, his leg buckled inward like a failing hydraulic press. He adjusted to, or rather failed to adjust to his brother’s weight—this massive hulking man was now wholly rested upon his brother’s mercy.
His eyes were half-lidded and unblinking as his hand smeared crimson down the side-bar of the ladder; iron stinking over iron. He tried to wince under closed eyes like he’d felt pained in a dream.
His viscera clattered against his body. It was all the strength he had left in his entire body as it fled from his wrists. It made Eve feel dizzy with disbelief. He was a hulking man—and that fact worked against him completely. All that muscle was now worthless, his body was limp and heavy and he could hardly stay afloat under his own weight. It amazed Eve how weak it made him look. She wondered how it could be possible that a man that big could be turned into a shambling mess such as this. How such power could be eroded like water over sandstone.
And Joseph looked no better. How easily he could bring himself to strike down upon her, and bruise her, and cuff her, and scream at her; and brush up against her body, and invade her inside, as if she had no say in the matter. Yet that brutality was now juxtaposed vastly against his brother as he struggled beneath his half-dead weight. A weak, dying man who could hardly keep himself upright eclipsed Joseph on every metric which measured the breadth of manhood.
It was a strange pantomime. Eve felt a shifting in her mind, like running unevenly through sand; Joseph was weak. Weak…
And there, finally, what little strength Joseph had left gave out as his brother sank backward. His brother’s chin grazed his shoulder as it slid backward. And with a slip, he fell. Though Joseph tried to catch him, it was for nothing. Like the weight of a lurching giant, his brother’s head fell to the floor and rang loudly against the last rung of the ladder.
Joseph fell forward under his own weight. His knee compressed his lungs against his chest. He panted weakly, breathing so heavily that little beads of spit painted the floor beneath his mouth.
His brother tried to rise but couldn’t. His weight gradually sank into the floor. One eye was shut lightly, and the other hung open, distended with a swelling bruise of blood. His tongue rolled loosely behind his teeth as if muttering. But he made no sound.
The ladder sang loudly with a low vibrato. The resonance rose up the passage, like someone had struck it with a metal pipe. A hollow tone played like a sine through the bunker. Like a full-note over a measure. Like a bell tolling in finality.
And then, as if remembering that she was standing there—watching this happen in reality as opposed to a film—the meditative trance that Faith had been in ended suddenly and again as she blinked down at the floor. She doubled over on her knees, medicine pouring from her arms and clanking to the floor before she rose again. She shoved them gently to Jacob’s side as time seemed to run faster. Her lips quivered as she asked, “What do we do?!”
“ You don’t do anything,” Joseph’s voice was cold and narrowly refrained, “What you do is back away. And do what I tell you to.”
Eve got back to her feet, taking two steps back, covering her mouth. She wasn’t sure which disturbed her more; the sight of his gore—leaking down the bent rung of the ladder—or the fact that somehow, he still moved. Barely.
He moved barely, but he moved.
His hand shifted the dust back and forth across the floor in little eased bursts, like a drunkard searching for his glasses. He couldn’t even lift the hand, only move it, as it rolled over his knuckles and his palm faced the ceiling. Then back flat on the floor. The grim knowledge wriggled in the back of her mind, that he should be dead, yet he simply wasn’t and instead suffered blindly through his wounds.
Joseph’s hand left bloody fingerprints on the floor as he doubled over on both knees over his brother. He panted, cupping his brother’s face with his hands. She judged his performance from a distance, wondering why he wasn’t praying. She’d never seen him this confused and erratic.
The crook of his inner elbow had peeled off in one layer. Down to the cloudy white of cartilage, mottled in crimson. A network of interleaving periosteum covering his bones like rust. His arm was torn open in a synaptic, trypophobic pattern, as if little hooks had slid through his skin, and pulled outward to split it. His forearm seemed almost sundered from his shoulder as so much flesh had been stripped away. Little ribbony strips of his bloody meat were peeling down to the floor; sagging in thin, blossoming, anthesismic fingers, which touched their tips to the cold floor.
He hardly seemed to bleed anymore. Had hardly any blood left. Not enough in his body to feel his numb wounds panging under the cold wind-draft of the bunker. Eve’s eyes shot to his calf. As Joseph scrambled, desperation in his voice as he screamed down at his brother. His voice commanded him as if his authority meant anything before a living corpse.
Joseph grabbed his chin, and raised it with a finger too rushed to be gentle, “Look at me, brother. Look at me.”
Dark gobs of blood pooled under what clothes were left. Little trenches carved into his legs were filled with webs of stringy blood. His coming fate was visible under clothing that seemed shredded by an auger. Thin strips of dark-green camo stuck to his wounds, pasted over his hairy legs like bandaids. Eve thought the likelihood of Joseph’s brother opening his eyes, let alone looking at him, was unlikely. It broke her heart.
The brother’s face was pale as all movement tapered away. Dark bags beneath sat atop his cheeks as his lip twitched. Joseph pleaded to the Heavens as both hands cupped his brother’s cheeks again. He shook his brother’s head in both hands as his fingers cupped his cheeks. He had not intended to do so, but did simply out of how shaky his hands were. His voice quivered and echoed down the halls. He dropped his brother’s head unintentionally as Jacob’s eye raised to the ceiling.
Joseph’s hands raised and leveled at the back of his own head, fingers gouging at his hands and his hair. Joseph’s hands raised and shook, bewildered before his head. His head turned down to the floor before his brother’s legs, pitifully clawing at the ground. Fumbling tinctures and plastic containers in his hand. With a tear he ripped a roll of gauze from its plastic sleeve with such force that it shot from his arms and soaked in the blood before Jacob’s calf. He took the gauze in his hands and peeled it loose as it dropped to the floor. Then wrapped his hands beneath his brother’s arm, struggling at both ends like tying his shoe. He pulled the gauze vainly until every inch was undone over his brother’s skin.
His hands shook in every direction as they took to the pile again, knocking everything aside, unsure what could possibly be done to help his brother. He grabbed yet more gauze and splayed its coated packet open over the floor. With the wet loftiness of an organ, it split open, the plastic covered in blood as the gauze slid out like afterbirth. His brother’s neck opened in a wound that wrapped from the front of his throat to the back of his head. Joseph had overwrapped it so much that it looked as if it was a thin cast. His brother made no more movements, no silent gurgling in his lips anymore. Joseph held his nose closed. He suddenly accosted from above his brother’s mouth with his own.
Eve flinched. She knew nothing short of violence in a kiss from Joseph Seed.
Joseph"s cheeks bulged outward,—trying and pleading,—transferring to his brother what little life he could. Trickling his breath down his brother’s throat and into his lungs with an open-mouthed kiss. Then back up as he coughed for oxygen. Blood smeared in a thin varnish over his teeth as he raised his mouth to the heavens wordlessly, then back to his brother’s.
In a sudden break of stalled tension, Joseph’s hands dropped to his sides, as if to give his brother a second. As if the body on the floor would begin coughing and shoot upright in righteousness. Like the stuff in movies. But there was nothing. And the tension returned for both of them as Eve realized there was nothing further from the truth of life—or death—than a Goddamned movie.
Silence. No flash of lightning, his preaching was pathetic, and came to an unceremonious end.
Then it seemed as though Joseph would give up. His crying overtook anything he could possibly say as his head sunk and his forehead rested atop of his brother’s chest. His crying gradually becoming less violent, seeping into a quiet hopelessness. Eve’s throat clenched as she began to tremble. Though she was terrified for the length of the death, there was nothing more heartbreaking than seeing a man like Joseph Seed give up. To give up on his own flesh and blood brother. To give up on Life and God.
“Forgive me brother. I’m—I’m so sorry,” he muttered it so quietly, Eve almost missed it. And a part of her wondered if that was his intention. She wondered if he was humiliated to have failed in front of her. She who had so much Faith in him.
Eve, trembling with tears, broken at the seams with guilt and sympathy and horror, could not watch Joseph gently stroke his brother’s face. She could not watch their arms tangled in a hug of immeasurable grief. A hug of one-side, as his brother’s arms hung limply by his legs. She could not feel that grief in her heart. Something inside her disallowed it. And thence, something took her forward. An impetus she could not trace the source of. She knelt at Joseph’s side and merely touched his brother’s cheek. As though wiping away his last tear of Life.
A pharaonic miracle burst like a bright sunrise before her. In her mind, a sudden stark electrocution of life came from her. Beneath her fingers, the canyons of his wounds melded together; a geodetic pattern of velveteen scars coalesced across his reviving flesh. All at once, at the touch of Eve’s hand, she knew his soul, she knew his name, she knew his beating heart to be alive again. And she gasped in total horror at herself—the sudden void left in her soul, now bereft of the gift she had given—and backed away, mouthing his name,
Jacob, Jacob, Jacob.
Jacob sputtered and gasped. Awaking suddenly, overtaken by pain and bliss. From his lungs he disinterred a tarry black fluid—like a newborn baby—vestigial pieces of his old, dead lungs. And Joseph looked at Eve in awe as she scrambled back and scratched at herself in panic. As if her chest had gone hollow. She could not feel her heart, taste her spit, or sense her breathing. Whatever she had transferred to Jacob, now, was gone from her as a shepard’s tone fell in her belly.
Joseph’s elation bled across the scene, crying in happiness, hugging his brother as he searched himself for his wounds. Not aware how they’d been stolen away from him.
She was the Resurrection and the Life exalted in their pocket of underground Eden.
Her heart was racing. She backed away from the body as if she had killed him; let alone brought him back from the dead. His wounds were scarred over perfectly healthy wherever she had touched him, and his heart revived of earthen Life. Even the blood which dirtied him lifted up into the air in sparks as it faded. A spring of energy still ran through her being, more bright and pure than anything she had ever felt before.
And still it hurt.
A mass of tar, calcifying and hot, burned in her eyes and the palms of her hands. Her wrists felt brazen with rashes, and all around her head a halo of agony surrounded her with its Holy radiance.
And then, a feverish shock over her body and her fingers; and her eyes; and every follicle of hair on her body. Every limb screamed and burned as if facing judgment for a Godly power she had not been permitted to use.
She began to sob uncontrollably. She could not hear how Joseph and Jacob first began to speak. She could not hear Jacob’s chthonic objection; his sacrilegious disbelief. She could not hear how Joseph defended her, praised her with true reverence. A true reverence he had never before shown her. And she could not hear how they argued. How life was alive. The sound of a dead man’s voice ringing true without any sign of the uncanny was horrific to her. Insanity surely must’ve bloomed inside of her sickened heart.
She could do little but run away. Never in her life had she wanted Dutch more. To feel the blood of her blood against her skin, and hold that man she despised so greatly tight to her chest. There where she’d know she was safe and real, solid and herself. But her room was empty of her past, it smelled of Joseph. Her bed still stained with their sex. Her chest empty of soul, full of something foreign and wrong in place of herself. She tore at her bedsheets and screamed. Her heart raced but she could not feel it.
Numb was not the correct word. Numb implied a sensation stunted and distant; phantom.— Gone is what she was. She was completely gone in body and soul, but not mind. All of her had been decimated, the Gnostics would have said, except her nous; her abandoned, abused, and terrified little mind. She couldn’t grab hold of anything that was real.
It was, apparently, the mortal’s price for resurrection.
Collapsing to the floor, all she could do was cry. A grief filled her heart that she had never, ever felt before. The grief of hundreds of men filled her heart, and she wept.
Joseph had embraced his brother so warmly. In a way he had never ever touched Eve. As if his heart was open. As if Jacob knew what was contained within it. And there was not even the slightest shade of abject fear between either of them. Jacob did not fear how Joseph’s grasp might grimace and twist against him; and Joseph did not fear that Jacob would distrust him. It was a familial embrace, but Eve had never seen such a thing before. Not in real life. Not ever in her own life.
And there was a history so rich and evident between them; a familial bond that could almost be touched.
Eve had never had a family. Of course it sounds redundant to say. It was clear to Joseph from the first moment he saw her. But she herself had never realized it until now. To see a man weep for his brother. No one had ever wept for her. And now she wept for everyone.
But she was wrong, of course.
She did have a family. It had just grown, too, to include someone new. Joseph,—he was coming through the door now—was her family. Jacob was now her family by extension, and she had ensured it was so with her own hands. And now Joseph gently held her. He pulled her into his arms and kissed her temple and wiped her tears.
He told her how special she was and how perfect and Holy. But she heard none of it for the piercing pain that hollowed her out. Soul and all.
He held her as though what she had done was something precious and all for him. Just for him. As though it did not kill her. As though she was not gone, and he did not hold in his arms what was merely a husk of a girl. He treated it as though she merely had a scraped knee. Holding her sweetly, kissing her temple and tutting. Her throat bled with agonized cries. She was blind with woe.
But he made her stand up, like it was something she could simply walk off. He made her get to her feet and continued to hug her and speak to her as though she could hear him. He brushed her clothes down and pulled a blanket over her shoulders and wiped her face. Doting on her like he was preparing her for a performance. Then he took her out of the room and she had no choice but to acclimate numbly.
He brought her to the kitchen, and she didn’t understand why until she saw him. Him.
The sight of Jacob standing, full and real in their small little kitchen,—twice the size of, taking up twice as much space as Dutch would have—rattled her. She looked at him in complete wonder, as though there stood before her Frankenstein’s monster himself. The fact that it was a reality, she knew,—had felt it in her fingertips—that he had died right before her eyes, and now drew the same breath as her. Jacob Seed, taking up a pencil and scribbling on a piece of paper that he had spread across their kitchen table, behaving as though nothing had happened at all.
“There’s more survivors than me,” Jacob had said when Eve was still coming, freshly disoriented, through the doorway. He was catching Joseph up on all that had happened since… Well, Eve wasn’t exactly sure when Joseph and his brother had last seen each other, but all of what he spoke of sounded foreign to her. “New Eden is in the Elk Jaw Lodge, but there’s another group of people in the Whitetail Mountains who’ve found a way into some of our bunkers.”
Joseph left Eve’s side, rounding the table with his brother. She stood back, just watching Jacob. She could only watch Jacob. Like a mother staring at her newborn, her heart worried at her that there was nothing more for Jacob to do than to yearn to re-attach himself to her at any moment. But was that Jacob that her body longed for, or the part of her soul that she had donated to him in her Holy mercy?
She could not know, and she hoped that by watching him closer, it would eventually come to light for her.
“Faith’s bunker,” Joseph said idly, pointing at the map.
Eve instinctually took a step forward, her head perking up at the sound of her name. Jacob and Joseph both looked at her as though they were confused as to what she had to do with anything they were talking about. Then, after a beat, Joseph nearly smiled, looking down at the map, he gestured at Jacob, “Jacob, this is… Faith,” he said pointedly, and eyed his brother.
Jacob gave his brother a look of—what could only be described as—brief confusion, and then turned to look at Eve. It was the first time he had looked her in the eye. A chill ran down her spine. His presence, like darkness, was a pitting weight that nearly made her double back. Eve held her hand out, a courtesy she had seen in movies, and tried to shake his hand.
Jacob eyed her hand and after a pause, during which he looked back at his brother for a second,—disbelief?—and then took her hand almost reluctantly. It was a firm shake, though it felt as though he didn’t quite take it seriously. “Jacob,” he said.
Eve wondered for a second, as he let go of her hand, whether she had done something wrong, and if people really did shake each other’s hands or not. But then, she realized, he had done it, and knew her intention by sticking her hand out, so it couldn’t possibly have been that strange, right? What was it about her exactly, she wondered, that he was so amused by?
He turned back to his brother. Eve was quickly forgotten. They began to talk, but Eve could not take her eyes away from Jacob. The feeling of his hand in her hand was… vivid. It was magnetic, almost. Like their hands longed to feel one another again.
‘Again’ was the key word here. The word which distressed her body so. They had never met before.
As they continued speaking, now, occasionally Jacob would look at her again. Their eyes would meet and she would shudder again, briefly, and her mouth would go dry, her blood would run cold. She would briefly be engulfed in a darkness that, starkly, was only broken by the light that shone down on his face from overhead. A brief moment in which the verisimilitude of his presence stalled her completely. The scars that painted his face fascinated her. She wondered how painful it was. Her skin burned just to look at it.
He would look away, the spell would break for a moment, and she’d look back at Joseph, trying to listen to what they were talking about.
“‘As soon as they hear of me, they shall obey me and submit themselves unto me,’” Joseph said, smiling. Eve looked at him narrowly, as he made his brother laugh, and she frowned deeply.
“You said that it was God’s plan that we stay here for three and a half years until the consummation is over?” Eve suddenly said, curiously looking at the Father in shock. Shocked that he would even consider going outside before their time. It felt sacrilegious.
Joseph turned to her grimly. He planted his hand on the table, “Do you know how long it’s been?”
Eve blinked. Of course she didn’t know. She didn’t keep track of the days, he did. Her cheeks turned red as she looked between Joseph and Jacob. Both of them looked at her the same. Almost every time, exactly the same. A question on their lips, inside the smoke of their irises, ‘Who asked you?’
Jacob chuckled again, and they both continued speaking without waiting for her response. Eve, blisteringly offended, stepped back from the table, her eyes still glued to Jacob’s face. He noticed her silent retreat and looked up as Joseph continued to speak. Something about him looked disappointed, but the hostility he had shown to her could not be extracted any further from her mood.
He looked back at the table as she left the room.
†
———————
“Don’t ever correct me in front of my brother again.” It was the first thing Joseph said to her when he saw her again. Hours later, coming through the bedroom door, and shutting it swiftly behind him. He looked out of the window as if to check if he was there staring at them, before he turned back to her. He didn’t care that she was sitting on the edge of the bed with her knees to her chest, her eyes glazed over, staring at the wall,—deep in thought. It had apparently not left his mind for a second.
Eve ignored him. She got to her feet with her own revelation propelling her. She wouldn’t have even known what he was talking about even if she had paid attention to his arrival and heard him. She had forgotten all about it. Her elation was something manic. Unnatural and almost forced. She smiled at him, “I want to be called Eve.”
Joseph’s brow turned. His eyes searched across her face. “Why?”
Her heart filled with love and passion. She couldn’t hardly manage to find words to put to the feeling of love she had in her heart when she thought of Eve, mother of all mothers, and what piety her stories had summoned into her. Stories of suffering and ascension. But she first thought of the night spent with Joseph, “You made me a wife.”
Joseph’s jaw clenched, “A wife?”
Nodding, Eve smiled and took his hand, “Your wife.”
He looked down at her hand again, but this time, unlike before, there was no hostility in his eye. His face remained unchanged, unsurprised. He looked back into her eyes and frowned at her sadly. “Oh, Faith,” he said, and her heart sank, “You can never be my wife.”
“But we—”
“You tempted me,” Joseph cut her off. He let go of her hand and suddenly seized her by the throat, “You’re a temptress. That’s all you are, that’s all you’ve ever been.”
Eve, shocked, hardly had a second to react before Joseph threw her back down against the bed and flipped her over onto her stomach. He thinks of her dream, “The only thing you are…” His voice trailed off as he fumbled with his belt, undoing it with a flap, “Is a vessel for my Faith.”
He tore her jeans down her legs and pictured those three flowers. A symbol of his children. Her hand slapped in vain against his hip, balled into a fist. His hand crushed her wrist as he held it against his leg. His eyes closed, neck falling back.
One unblooming, the stilted life of his daughter—his sacrifice for his faith. And two new children; a daughter and a son, for he and Faith to raise.
And as he released himself from the confines of his boxers, and pressed his cock against her cunt, he pictured what gifts his vessel of Faith could give him.
“Get off of me!” She yelled, trying to get her hand free. But he wasn’t quite as weak as she presumed.
Joseph held her hands behind her back and firmly thrust into her, “You’ve always liked it,” he panted, squeezing her ass with his free hand, “You’re good at faking it. You know exactly how to act so innocent. It’s all an act. To draw me in. But I know you, my Faith. I know you’re a temptress. You’re filled with lust—you always have been. That’s why you make me do this.”
Eve squeezed her eyes shut. She cried out in objection. It was so much more painful than before. It was horrifying, it was objectifying. She felt unreal. With each thrust, coming apart.
“Stop saying no!” Joseph shouted in her ear and hit her somewhere, “Why don’t you like it, huh? Are you still thinking of girls? Your soul is so stained with lust that you think you’re a dyke.”
She dug her head into the sheets. He released her wrist, which shot up to the side of her head. The other hand followed as in unison she tried to plug her ears.
“Do you think Eve was a dyke? No!” He grabbed her by the scalp and pulled her head up, her unmuffled sobbing filling the room, “You have the most disgusting kind of lust of all. You need to be fixed. And this is what will fix you, Eve. The love of a real man will fix you if you let it! I see in you a righteous soul, restrained. You have to accept it.”
He groaned against her, voice quivering, “Free your soul, accept my Faith.”
He suddenly threw her down on the ground and pushed her head into the floor. After which, she felt almost nothing. Not really present for the rest of it. Perhaps it was the force of the slam. Her cheek became wet with blood, she knew that. And her eyesight was blurry, her head spun. But did she black out, or did she escape?
For a while afterward she laid there. Unreal. Unfeeling. Just sobbing. Unable to do anything else, limbs too frozen to struggle—only shake. But the hollowness in her heart was eclipsed by a holy light. Was it there before or after Joseph forced her down onto the floor and tore into her?
She remembered feeling empty after she had touched Jacob, what presumably was some blessing of life leaving her and filling him instead. But now? What entered her now? She felt like she hadn’t taken a breath in hours, but it didn’t matter, she wished for the mercy of unconsciousness.
It didn’t come. Her brain was alight and boiling between her eyes.
She got up from the bed and put on her clothes; whatever was laying on the floor—with the added addition of a second shirt, to make up for the fact that Joseph had ensured she had no more bras, and knowing that Jacob was out there. She didn’t care if it was clean. She went to the door. It creaked open. Lightheaded, lips and fingers tingling, Eve stumbled out. She pulled the door closed behind her, her arm twisted at an awkward angle and she looked nervously around. The hallway was empty of sound and light, but from the other room. Her eyes guided her to that light, she could see the yellow of a lamp beside the couch. When she walked across the hall to the bathroom, she saw Jacob. He sat on the couch and smoked a cigarette.
Smoke dimmed the lamplight in a yellow-gray cloud and as it dissipated, the two of them locked eyes silently from across the room. Shadows of the smoke trailed across the wall.
Jacob said nothing, though he must have known, either by looking at her, or from having heard it all through the wall. But his face did not even change. In fact, he looked bored. His eyes squinted slightly as his lungs soaked up the chemicals. He took another drag from his cigarette, staring at her like it was a competition. She shivered and turned away, as one who’d given life to another would never turn away from them. She went into the bathroom wordlessly.
Her ankles wobbled as if she was, once again, taking her first steps in new skin.
Before the mirror she held a little secret cut-out from a book. One little vestige of her remaining selfhood that managed to survive Joseph’s cleansing. It was a picture of Joan of Arc. More specifically, the illustration of her by Allen Lynch, which had appeared in some book she was reading. Joan with her cropped black hair and short bangs.
Eve wiped the tears from her eyes and smiled at herself as she leveled the scissors across the long tresses of her hair. Then well above her shoulders, by the top of her long neck where it would frame her jaw, she shipped her hair away proudly. Section by choppy section, she cut, cut, cut. And it was more freeing a ritual than she expected. Shedding this hair, she molted out of whatever stain Joseph had put on her soul—or so she felt.
When it was done, she was amazed at her beauty. She wiped all of her hair off the sink basin and gripped the edges, standing on her tip-toes, leaned up against the mirror like a kid with her nose glued to the TV screen. Her high, arched eyebrows, electric, lively blue eyes, and the haircut of a sacred virgin framing the feminine strength of her face—she knew her beauty was immaculate.
She filled the sink with water.
“Eve,” she confirmed quietly to herself as she plugged the drain. The water was icy cold and stale but it would suffice. She closed her eyes as she shut off the faucet and prayed, “Heavenly Father bless this water and make it Holy for me.”
And there was little else she knew to say. She was grinning when she dunked her head into the water.
Ice cold, her face froze as she submerged it in the sink. It bit at her skin, nipping at her cheeks as if it were full of keratinocyte-eating fish. And she held her head under for as long as she could hold her breath, thinking the longer she drowned, the Holier she would become. So even as bubbles emerged violently from her nose in a steady stream of desperate exhalations—and a blast of air from her mouth just short of an attempt at gasping—she still held herself down. Gripping the sides of the skin until her knuckles went white, blinding herself with the thought of her baptism, and what a success it was becoming.
When she could hold on no longer, she flipped her head back—her hair flinging a thick stream of water across the ceiling and the wall behind her—and convulsed for air, mouth wide, eyes wide. She pinched her nose free of water, heaving.
It took her a minute or two to catch her breath. Wiping the running rivulets of water from her skin, tears from her eyes, and waiting for the biting numbness of the cold to slowly subside from her cheeks. Her eyes burned, her scalp tingled, and the water tickled the back of her neck. Her hair was an unruly crop of pell-mell curls, bundled, dogged, and pathetically hanging around her throat and across her forehead.
But she was glorious. Her eyes were redlined and scorchingly blue against the icy-paling of her skin, but she was righteous. Her hands were sore from scratching and clawing and gripping, but she was powerful.
When she left the bathroom, she returned to Jacob, who was now laying on the couch as though to go to sleep. She stopped in the center of the room and looked at him from over his head. Jacob craned his neck, uncomfortably cramped between his chest and the couch armrest, and looked back.
“Can I ask you something?” She said almost meekly. But in her heart she did not feel meek. She merely spoke quietly for another sake altogether.
Jacob seemed to think it over. He looked down at his hands, clasped comfortably over his stomach. The mottled valleys of skin that cascaded down his arms looked almost to shiver. He reluctantly sat up and moved his legs off of the couch. She happily sat down on the couch beside him, pulling her legs up behind her and facing him as he seemed to give her his attention, “What did it feel like?” her eyes widened, “To die?”
Jacob blinked at her, “I didn’t die.”
Eve hadn’t expected him to argue that simple fact, which seemed so evident to her. If his life was not gone from him, what had she given him? What was gone from her now, in return? “Your heart stopped.”
“Your heart stopping for a few minutes doesn’t kill you,” Jacob countered, and gently guarded his scarred arm. Something that looked less self-conscious and more like it had formed out of some strange habit.
But Eve was confident in what she knew, factually and faithfully, “Your heart stopped for thirty minutes. Almost an hour.”
Jacob eyed her silently. He brushed a strand of hair away from her neck, but he did not touch her skin. He blatantly ignored her, “Did he choke you?”
Eve pushed his hand away. “What did you see?”
He continued looking at the marks on Eve’s neck. Almost ignoring her. He didn’t look affected by it, necessarily. Rather like it piqued his interest. Like he was admiring the color that bloomed in her skin where Joseph’s fingerprints stamped her throat. After a minute, he looked away. His boot hit the floor, “I was dreaming,” he admitted.
Eve leaned in closer, her voice high with wonder, “Of what?”
Jacob squinted at her. He looked her up and down again, and wiped his lips. His thumb idly ran across the scars that marbled his cheek, riding up to his piercing blue eyes, “How often does Joseph do this to you?”
Eve’s brown furrowed. A light inside her flickered. Her amusement dulled for a second before she attempted to smile. Half-hearted smile, “Why won’t you answer my question?”
“I don’t like your questions,” he said, almost mockingly, “They’re boring me. I want to know about that screaming and crying I heard. What Joseph’s doing to you.”
Eve covered her throat with her hand protectively. Guarding it from being seen, “Did you dream of home?”
With a flick upward, Jacob’s eye stilled, staring into hers. For a second they squinted, like he didn’t trust what she had said. He leaned back against the couch, bending his arm and propping his head gently on his fingers, lightly brushing his lips. “Yes.”
Eve leaned against the back of the couch too, and pulled her legs up though her knees were red and sore. They caught Jacob’s eye, the scrapes and cuts, but she ignored that. “When Joseph and John were really young.”
Again, Jacob looked her in the eye and paused before he offered a response. This time, though, he didn’t look suspicious of her, he looked hostile. “Don’t talk about John.”
Eve smiled.
Jacob’s hostility intensified. He removed his hand from his face and gripped the back of the couch, “You think it’s funny?”
“You don’t want me to talk about John because he’s dead and you don’t know me or like me. That’s sweet,” she said, still smiling softly. Then her smile slowly subsided as she thought of death. She felt a sinking feeling where her pulse should have been; her heart, “I’m sorry that you died.”
Jacob chuckled, looking away. He found her ridiculous, it seemed. He scratched his beard and looked at her out of the corner of his eye, “What’s your name?” He paused, “Your real name.”
Eve’s eyes sparkled. She smiled with her teeth and lightly raised her chin as if basking in the pride that came from her mouth as she said brightly, “Eve.”
He looked at her as if he didn’t quite believe it. Perhaps it was because it didn’t suit her, or perhaps it was simply because of the ridiculous ceremony she applied while saying it. Regardless, Jacob didn’t repeat it. He just gestured back at Joseph’s door, “Go back to Joseph, now. You’re not mine.”
She was puzzled by that sentence, and she felt, somehow, that it was hostile. Hostile in the way, she was learning, that Joseph could be too. In a subtle, concealed way that is meant to alarm her. Because it so often did. So she stood up and prepared herself for going back to who she really belonged to.
Joseph slept peacefully. More peacefully than Eve could ever imagine herself sleeping. He looked almost happy in his sleep. She wondered if it was simply the satisfaction of what he had done to her, or if it was more to do with Jacob’s return. Was his body satisfied, his sexual thirst quenched, or did he miss his brother, and was now relieved to see him safe and home?
Eve was tired. Her muscles hurt, her bones ached, her eyes stung, her head pounded. She shivered and wished for sleep. But she knew she would not sleep peacefully beside Joseph again. Not if she feared waking up to him forcing himself inside of her, for the promise of his misinterpretation of her dream.— Eve didn’t believe for a second that the flowers in her dream were of their children. Not if she would sometimes dream of the Sun. Fuller and realer and brighter than she’d ever seen in movies. Warmer on the skin than the heat of an old staticky TV set. Not if she would dream of greater things to come for her than passing on Joseph Seed’s genes.
Joseph looked peaceful. Eve wasn’t sure if she had ever felt peace.
Her eyes darted to the dresser beside the door. It was where Joseph had put the handcuffs he’d used on Eve when he first came to the bunker. She wandered over to it.
In her head she dreamt idly of the glimpse of Earth she had seen. Was This Eden? Concrete and metal and handcuffs and sex and men? Was Eden not the home of Eve, who was not pawed over or grieved or covered in the white wine of her Father’s lust? Was the first Eve not the Concrete walls? Was she not the Metal bed frame, and the Handcuffs, and the Bed in which she was also Sex? And what was she other than a Man, because she had come from Adam?
Eve took the handcuffs into her hands and, wandering again, made it back to the bed.
She dreamt idly of Death. Suffocatingly bright light. How fast that glimpse of sunlight turned on her. She dreamt of a seizure, and then of a sea of blackness. No stars. (She had never seen them herself). No holes in the sheets.— She dreamt of home. But it was not her home, it was someone else’s. It was an enormous cabin. A two-story log structure with antlers and couches and pictures of children and toys scattered around. Baseball gloves and stray tennis-shoes and lost toy trucks. It was Jacob’s home she pictured, because it was a vision his Death had offered to let her peek at. Like cheating on a test.
She knew if she died she would return here, to the bunker. The only home she had ever had. So life and death were no different at all.
She gently ghosted a touch along Joseph’s sleeping wrist.
But Earth… Outside… That was entirely new. An Eden virgin and untouched. Either unconquered or unconquerable.
All of a sudden, Eve’s hand squeezed a cinch of tight metal over Joseph’s arm and yanked it back against the bed frame. His head nodded up, then his eyes shot open, alarmed, and immediately swung out to grab Eve’s arm. He struck the side of the bed with the hardness of his wrist. Still half asleep, he couldn’t drag it back up as she cinched another handcuff over his pulse.
Joseph roared, “Faith!? What ar—” He yanked his free hand up, as she caught it and clapped the next bracelet over his wrist. She turned from the bed and locked the door, returning as quickly as she had fled. But that small bracket of time gave him the freedom to take his other wrist in his hand and tug at the metal.
She calmly fought his thrashing as he swung his free arm violently. And with a satisfying cascade of clicks, it tightened, too, against the bed frame. His arms were strung broadly to the frame in a crucificial array of submission.
And though he kicked and thrashed and hollered, and cried, she had done it. Her knees buckled willingly as she lowered and straddled him with her full weight. Raising her elbows, she ripped her overshirt off and stuffed it violently into his mouth, “Shhhh, Father…”
Her voice undulated with the force of his kicking beneath her. Voice peaking and breaking beneath the rags.
She clapped her ankles around his legs, locking them to the bed. She sat on his thighs, bearing down over him. Her back arched as her head lowered. She breathed over his neck shakily. He lifted his head to the side, looking down at her from the frightened corner of his eyes. His head shook involuntarily as if to tell her, ‘no,’—as if he had a say. Her mouth hung open, her canines brushed up against his lip.
He yanked at the cuffs in vain, letting them nip at his wrists and tear his skin. And when she rose above the bed and towered over him, his eyes widened at the figure standing above him in the darkness, no longer the Faith he’d known. Blindly she stared. Seeing him.
Morbidity; newborn fascination mounted as she considered all of the possibilities presented before a body with no leverage. She did not fight the smile this time as she watched him fight. His wrists straining for agency he had disgraced. He would not get it back again. Not after what he did to her. She’d ensure it.
He looked up above his head, searching for some kind of escape, and simultaneously presenting his vulnerable, soft neck to her mercy. He looked like he wanted to crawl up, up; Heavenward, where his God would spirit him away. But he was locked here with her; the Apocalypse herself .
The bed squeaked in distress as he bounced her up and down. He was covered in sweat,—the lovely panic that ensues when a woman takes control—and where it allowed the metal to slip against his wrists, he found a faint trace of idiotic hope. But that hope soon faded, and he knew it was useless. Something new altogether was forming inside his blackened little heart.
It was fear.
His hips flinched as Eve started to untie the drawstring of his pants, “You don’t call me ‘Faith’, anymore.” She shook her head to make a show of her haircut, raising her chin over him, a darkness over her eyes.
Joseph’s neck strained with muffled screaming. He was furious. Furious and afraid. He could not be one without the other.
The air kissed his wet legs as Eve raised and pulled his pants down his thighs. Immediately they tensed in the cold air. His knees locked. He felt his ankle bobbing with anxiety and a cold rush of blood flooded his waist.
She prodded at the curve beneath his tip, as his cock hardened—Adrenaline thumped through every inch as it twitched in the freezing air. It rose out of the nervous anticipation of not knowing what Eve intended to do with him. Although it was incredibly evident, he couldn’t believe it.
“You look useless. You look weak,” she pouted, “Where is He now, to help you? After what you did to me… His prophetess. His resuscitator.”
She found it amusing. The way his ears almost perked up as she talked down to him. The fury that arose in his red face to hear her disqualify him in the eyes of God.
Her eyes raised to his; one squeezed shut from a stinging bead of sweat which he couldn’t wipe away. His breath began to shift unevenly through his nostrils. She stuffed the shirt in his mouth a little deeper to ensure it wouldn’t go loose. He felt the temperature in his head raise.
The thin skin over his forehead burned, but the inside of his brain felt freezing, like a flurry of slushy water was running between his ears. His eyebrows hurt as he raised them higher than she ever thought possible. It amused her deeply, deep in her stomach. She sucked it down and begged for another helping, teased him with implications for more.— More of his sweet, sweet fear.
Her eyes lowered. She took his cock out of his boxers.
“Looks so harmless like this,” She played with it, picking it up between her fingers, and looked Joseph in the eye as she grabbed it.
Joseph’s brow furrowed as he watched Eve press it up against her clit, grinding her hips against it as her lips cushioned it and kissed both sides. It hardened even further. It was clear he didn’t want it to, but it swelled between his legs. She could feel it pulsing. Sending tingles up her belly as he twitched uncontrollably. His stomach fell hollow and sagging like a swayback horse.
Her smile grew as his hands struck up at her, disciplinary. But he was punished by the cuffs. He yelled at her and shook his head, screaming as if his mouth wasn’t covered. He squeezed both of his eyes shut, shaking his head so violently that he shook loose little beads of sweat that rained down onto the bed.
“I’ll take it out of your mouth, but you need to be good and listen,” she offered, licking her lips, “You’ll call me Eve from now on. I’ll let you scream without my shirt soaking up your spit if you do as I say.”
Joseph shook his head, pulling his hands tightly against the bed frame. He seemed to be threatening her under the muffle of the gag, but she hardly cared. She slid her shorts aside and raised onto her knees.
“Look at me.” She said, and spit in her hand. Contrary to her words, her eyes lowered, as she rotated her wet fingers against the peak of her cunt, knowing she’d need it. She was not aroused in the slightest, only piqued by his terror. She still wondered if she could even make it feel good. For her, anything he’d receive would only be consequential to her empowerment.
Joseph’s eyes had left hers. His toes curled as he watched her hands fondle his cock and guide it toward her spit-soaked cunt. It was all he could look at. “This is your fault, Father. You did this to yourself.”
The fat head of his cock split both sides of her slit. She grinded against it slickly for a second before she put it down and let it press against his belly. She continued to throw her hips, moaning as she focused the tip over her clit. His legs kicked and cast wrinkles over the blankets.
“You can’t say I’m not Eve,” she smiled and raised up. A hand lowered, and as suddenly as she sank down on him, she snatched his throat and said, “You gave me the apple.”
His throat produced a little peaking noise as she snatched the air from him. Her second hand, slathered in her wetness, raised and joined it as she began to ride his lap in tidal waves. Little veins in his throat bulged as she squeezed his throat so tightly that her hands shook. He tugged at the cuffs in vain, his chest sagged, his tongue sucked at the gag over his mouth for air. But as his head grew lighter, lighter; more disconnected from reality, his tugging grew weaker and weaker.
Joseph’s muffled moan was profusely exaggerated. She’d never heard him make such a guttural sound of pleasure. It almost made her recoil. She felt him inside of her, pushing deeper and deeper as she sat down on him with her full weight, grimacing in pain. She watched his arms go slack as he gave in, and it disgusted her.
He enjoyed it.
It wasn’t working.
Her chest burned with anger. The air rushed into his nostrils automatically as she dropped his throat to the bed. Lashing out in fury, she slapped him so hard that it threw his head down and to the side, it shook back and forth with an ethereal tingling at his lips. Eve suddenly got up again. She dislodged him from her and crawled off of the bed. Joseph made a sound of sudden confusion as he watched her leave the room. She went down the opposite side of the hallway from where Jacob slept on the couch and instead went into the kitchen.
From a wooden block interleaved with wounds, she withdrew her desire and heard it draw from its sheath with a shink. Its shiny edge glinting orange red, its power hypnotized her as she held it in her hands. With a teasing thumb, she pushed along the length, to feel its edge. A little bulb of vibrant red and she knew that she needed-not to press it any deeper to feel its efficacy.
When she returned, Joseph’s eyes lit up. Her shadow stood in the darkness of the doorway as the door recoiled against the wall. First he saw her eyes—or the darkness inside them—and then his eyes trailed down and saw the knife in her hands. He shook his head violently, back and forth, and back, and forth. He started to shout beneath the gag, he shook his head, and kicked his ankles and pleaded. Twisted his chest and cried. He sobbed beneath the band of her shirt, “Eve! Eve! Eve!”
Though it was muffled, she knew he was saying her name. It changed nothing. If he needed the sight of a knife to change his mind, then she had better ensure it stayed that way by using it. His hands shot down and his wrists twisted. He begged her, shook his head, and fought. Eve calmly stepped inside and turned her back. She locked the door again.
“I am a temptress and a Holy woman,” She turned, carried herself to the bed, and crawled over him again. He arched his back and shouted, twisting his chest away from her as she lowered. Suddenly, his chest stilled. Eve teased the curve of his sternum down to the middle of his belly with her ticklishly fine knife-point.
And with the flat of her hand she pushed him down, hand squishing against his ribcage,—nailing his sweaty back to the cold mattress. An invisible, stinging line traced down his body as he forced himself to still. He could no longer see where she directed the knife, could only feel it. Her nails bared down into his sternum, she didn’t bother to look him in the eye, “And if you scream when I take this gag off,” she looked only at the knife which poked the inside of his belly-button, “I will stick this knife inside of your belly so deep, it’ll poke a hole in my mattress.”
And as his cock plunged into her a second time, she moaned. She slid the tip of the blade alongside his neck, pressing the back ridge of the knife up against his throat. His skin stung, and bled, and with it she christened the knife. She closed her eyes tight as she rode him. She could still feel how he squirmed and she knew, now, that he was deriving no pleasure from it—there was too much uncertainty. He wouldn’t possibly know whether Eve was now ready to take a life, having returned one hours before.
The sensation of him inside her, wet and rigid, was still unpleasant. It was something she, fundamentally, could not enjoy. It frustrated her, as she threw her hips against it weakly. Though she touched herself, her fingers roughly circling her clit, the way she would if she were alone—and it did ease the burning pain of penetration—she mounted nothing but the hardened flesh of a man she did not desire.
And she hated how he loved it. How, despite her restraining him and taking him violently, he still found pleasure in her body—in a way she never could find in his. She hated that this was not a rape like hers. She hated that he did not claw, nor even attempt to claw at her or even to cry. She hated that the longer it went on, the more he enjoyed it. The less he seemed afraid.
She didn’t realize how her hand had tilted dangerously against his chest until he suddenly twitched all over, nearly kicking her off of him, and she saw a bright bloom of red in the corner of her vision. The knife had dug a few centimeters into his chest. She looked at his face and there, finally, for the first time,—she saw pain. He lost a measure of hardness immediately as his eyes shot open. She saw discomfort. She saw uncertainty slowly acquaint itself with the sharpness of fear. Growing more and more frustrated that it was impossible for her to enjoy raping him.
Joseph looked at her incredulously. Like he wanted to tell her it must have been an accident. Like he wanted to say it was amusing before but she should really put the knife down before she hurt somebody.
And she cocked her head to the side curiously. Seeing how badly he had reacted to that pain. It was strange. How? She wondered. How could he be so sensitive, with such scars marring him all over? One of her hands, she felt it beneath her fingertips, was now planted on that scar of lust, struck through across his pelvis. And as she looked down at it, another curiosity struck her. How lustful he felt lodged deeply inside of her.
It was incorrect.
She looked at Joseph again and frowned, “You never struck your lust through its pulse.”
Joseph’s eyes dulled.
Eve angled the knife again, staring at his blank chest, “Your sin is still alive.”
She cut him. Letter by letter, as he jolted and shouted and screamed beneath his gag. The knife rolled to face downward from her palm as she dug it in like a sickle. Eve carved out the letters of a fresher lust, across his chest. She grinned at his agonized squirming, and rocked her hips to its tortured rhythm. “That’s it.”
Were those tears in his eyes?
She felt her core pulse with a sudden magmatic heat, a coil of purse arousal snaking through her. Joseph’s agony amused and aroused her. The more she rocked her hips, the better it felt. Her eyes grew determined and thirsty as she began to soak his cock with it, the immensity of her pleasure. She opened her mouth wide, her eyebrows cinched and mismatched with the angle at which his cock thrust inside of her.
Joseph’s cry almost broke through the gag. His voice annoyed her. It annoyed her that she grew closer over his disgusting body. And how he grew hard under the pain. She’d take his throat again if she weren’t so focused, just to shut him up. She closed her eyes, carving without looking, never picking the knife up completely.
She knelt forward and pressed her nails right into the inch-deep scars she’d planted on him, angling her hips so that she could ride him harder as she gouged for leverage. “I thought you would’ve gone soft,” she said breathlessly, almost laughing at him.
S was a tricky one, and came out more blocky than the others. The thing is, she was beginning to realize, cutting into flesh is a lot like cutting into paper. It’s hard to get any kind of precise curvature. She laughed at it. Laughter deep, sadistic, and low. How rudimentary the bloodied lines of cuts looked as the blood rolled between his feeble pectorals. Like an elementary school child’s handwriting, carved into his chest forever.
By now, blood was everywhere. It pooled mostly at the base of his throat, in that hollow section between the collarbones, and down the sides of his neck, soaking into the bedding. The bedframe squeaked, now, loudly, as Eve rode him violently, she stopped herself from moaning—hating that he might enjoy it anymore than she did, which wasn’t much. The adrenaline that rose up in her veins at the sight of her sadistic knife-painting only aided her mobility.
T, the final letter in her tattooing of his flesh. Two cuts; one vertical, one horizontal; and that was that. She was done with the knife, she supposed, but she didn’t wish to be. Neither of their bodies were finished. She did not feel his seed explode inside her—in fact, she didn’t think it would, considering how badly she was hurting him. But she did think she would climax, because her amusement was so wholehearted, it almost felt like lust, too.
She took the gag from his mouth suddenly,—but before he could make a sound, she held the knife to his throat. “Say my name,” she demanded.
And the urge to slit his throat nearly overwhelmed her. A chill rushed up her arm. Little goosebumps rose from her skin like flowers blooming as her wrist begged her to push it in and pull it back. To kill a man with his cock inside of her, she felt, was the only way to do to him what he had done to her. It was the only way to reclaim her power, and become what he was. But she also knew that she could be greater than whatever he was. She could be crueler, and Holier, and she could make him into her own Faith. Her own Judge.
He only needed to do one very simple thing.
“Eve,” he panted, his voice a groaning ache. He sounded exhausted, “You’re Eve…”
Eve smiled. She threw the knife to the other side of the room. It clattered to the floor, tinkling against the ground. The satisfaction of getting Joseph to acquiesce to her desire, she knew, was greater than anything that could be achieved by killing him. She bucked her hips against him, making him hiss and clench his fists, “And I shall be your wife.”
Joseph’s eyes were wide. His mouth agape. Still, he grimaced and clenched his teeth, but he nodded shakily, “You shall be my wife.”
His hand violently braced forward and from the mere weight of both of them, the handcuff snapped. Immediately, he grabbed her chest, the way one would gasp for air—the sudden overwhelming relief as soon as it was within his grasp. He pushed her shirt up and squeezed her breast. His hips bucked weakly up into her. Eve covered his hand with her own, trying to peel it off, but without the focus. It painted her chest in his blood. Joseph was breathless, “I’m sorry, Eve,” he said with wonder,
“I’ll— gah!” He winced, “I’ll repent.”
She smiled, her hips curling deliciously. A skill which was quickly acquired,—the instinctual desire to amplify the pleasure that arose with a slow rolling of the hips, deeply pressing her inner thighs against his pelvis. She loved to hear him say it. ‘I’ll repent,’ she knew, meant that there was something, some wrongdoing, that he must atone for. She knew what it was, but Joseph actually admitting it himself was what pleased her. The power to bend his will…
And then, unceremoniously, sudden spurts of thick cum shot from his cock and filled her. Eve sat contentedly down, waiting for it. She waited out Joseph’s egregious moaning and pawing, and held him inside of her as snugly as could possibly fit. Apparently having earned what she came for, she rose from him as he came down from it. She didn’t look down at him as she rose and turned to the door.
“Fai—Eve?” His fumbling voice called out, half-crying in pain. He held his chest weakly, and grabbed the bedsheets to congest the bleeding against. She didn’t respond as she opened the door and rounded the corner.
She had only made it to the coffee table beside Jacob’s couch when Joseph suddenly called out, hoarse and roaring, “Jacob!”
And his brother leapt up from the couch in an instant. He looked at Eve for only a second. Long enough to see the blood that covered her nudity, and the carving knife that still dripped from her hand. But he went for his brother.
Eve ran toward the bunker door.
She could hear the two of them shouting behind her. Jacob was telling Joseph to stay put. That he’d ‘get her,’ but she was already halfway up the ladder. By the time Jacob touched the first rung, she was already opening the bunker door.
This time, the sun was setting. The light was a pale orange, the atmosphere was wet with petrichor, which filled her senses entirely. This time, she did not falter as she stepped out into the grass, because she knew herself to be exactly what she had said;
“I am a whore and a Holy woman. I am she, the Lord.”
TO BE CONTINUED…