I pressed my eyes closed, trying to summon words to comfort him, but there were no words that could take away his pain; not the pain he felt today, and not the pain that echoed from the past. His life would always be filled with the deaths of those he loved. For some unfathomable reason, he and his siblings survived the flood that killed the rest of their kind, and nothing has been able to kill them since. The reality was that they may never die. They may be immortal. And he was right, every season of his life would be full of death, both the natural passing of mortals and the lives taken in hate.
Finally, I spoke. "I'm so sorry, Enoch." The words felt hollow. Not because they weren’t heartfelt, but because there was nothing anyone could say right now that would make things better or take away his pain. I had seen the mourning of some who lived in the Compound, and I'd told them the same thing, that I was sorry. It wasn't a lie. I was sorry they'd lost someone. I knew intimately how that felt, but didn't want to say it and diminish their feelings in any way. Heartache like this cut hot and fast, and though time would take away the sting, the heart would never be the same as it was before. There would be a scar, a reminder of the moment in time when life profoundly changed for them.
"There are shovels in the garden sheds," he said.
"I'll get them." I went to walk past him and he caught my elbow, spinning me around to face him. Wordlessly, he buried his face in my neck and cried, sobs wracking his body. Tears fell from my eyes, soaking his coat. "This isn't your fault," I told him. Because it wasn't. None of this was. It was mine. We should never have agreed to travel.
When we jumped the first time and saw the three siblings were different, we should have jumped home. If that didn't work, we should've kept jumping until we made it there. We shouldn't have upset whatever peace they had. Instead, we messed everything up and Enoch was paying the price. His people – innocent people – were being killed because we chose the wrong path. How were we any different from the bloodthirsty vampires in our time who preyed on the populace?
The sound of footsteps made me raise my head. Titus lingered near the house with three children hovering around him. I looked up at Enoch. "He found them. They are alive."
"Tell him to keep them away until we finish."
My tears didn’t stop as I walked to Titus and whispered to him. He guided the kids to the well house, amazingly still intact in the back yard. The two girls, twins, looked no older than five. Their dresses were covered in soot and dirt. Their little feet were filthy and their auburn hair was knotted and snarled, the hair having slipped out of their braids long ago. They asked for their parents.
When Titus told them they needed to get cleaned up, the little boy spoke up. "They’re dead. I saw the monsters bite them and then they fell down." He began to cry. "My Paw's dead, too. Now nobody's gonna look after me." Titus pulled them all into his arms, telling them everything was going to be alright.
I plucked two shovels from the nearest shed and ran back to Enoch. He was still crying silently, but not for himself.
"What will happen to them?" I asked in a trembling voice.
"For now, we'll take them to Asa's. The girls have an aunt in a nearby town, but the boy is right. He has no one left. His grandparents are dead, his uncle died in the war, his mother died in childbirth, and his father lies here dead. But we will take care of him. I'll make sure he has all he needs."
What he needed was his father back, alive and unhurt. I pushed the shovel head into the ground and began to dig. The soil was dark and rich and easy to cut through. I wanted it to be rocky and as brittle as I felt, to make the process of burying those whose deaths I'd helped cause more punishing. But the earth gave way easily, adding to the guilt pressing down on my shoulders. I needed to get Titus and get out of here. We had to jump. Enoch would be better off without me anywhere near him.
We moved the first body into the grave I had dug, and then Enoch began digging another while I covered the boy’s father with the rich soil, one shovel full at a time.
“Years ago, after the clone army appeared and after the last of your doubles died by Asa’s hands, we looked for survivors and found none. The fact that these three children managed to hide and survive is truly a blessing,” he finally said, his voice breaking.
How could he see good in any of this?
“And then, it took the three of us days to bury all of my people. We left your variations to rot until the innocent were laid to rest, but every time I had to step over one of them, I couldn’t help but wonder if it was you. If you were among them.”
“You must have hated me.”
“Afterward, yes, but not in that moment. In the days that followed the slaughter, I kept hoping you weren’t dead and hoping I hadn’t inadvertently killed you. I kept hoping you’d made it home safely.”
I shook my head. “I don’t see how you could have thought that. I couldn’t have.”
“You don’t know that,” he replied. “Love doesn’t have to make sense. It just is. I couldn’t switch it off, even after…” He stopped digging for a moment, folding his hands over the shovel’s handle. The sky lightened behind him, birds chirping in the canopy above like they had no idea the whole world wasn’t completely messed up.
“And then, we had to do something with your clones. There were thousands of you. I stopped counting after nine hundred. Asa refused to help bury a single one of you, and Terah followed his lead. He suggested making large pyres out of the heaps of your bodies. Numbly, I helped them make mounds of your dead, lifeless corpses. Once we had ten enormous piles around the yard, Asa lit them on fire. I couldn’t bring myself to stay and watch you burn. After that, I took off on foot to Asa’s home and found that someone had slain his people, too.”
My mouth gaped open. “I had no idea.”
“I know,” he said softly. “I didn’t tell you because I knew that the truth of what had happened broke your heart, and I wanted to spare you the pain of knowing such a thing.”
“Did Terah have a home of her own? Did they attack it?”
He shook his head. “In that time, she was unmarried. It wasn’t lawful for her to own property, so she lived in my manor instead.”
No wonder Asa harbored such hatred for us. He’d told me once that he should’ve killed me when he had the chance. Maybe if he had, this wouldn’t have happened. If they had removed the three of us, lives would have been saved, even as ours were lost.
Enoch resumed digging and I continued covering the body of the man whose son was now orphaned.
Tears never stopped falling from my eyes, but Enoch’s dried up. I could almost hear and see the hatred for Abram filling him up. But Abram wasn’t the only one he should hate.
Chapter Eleven
Titus
After the dead were buried and the sun was up, we escorted the kids to Asa’s. He was surprised to learn that there were survivors. The boy had seen the adults killed, though I wasn’t sure where he was when it happened. He wouldn’t talk about it anymore, but I felt sorry for the little guy. He was six. He shouldn’t have had to witness that.