Chapter 13: Mari's Childhood part 2: The Murderer
"Humans tend towards no particular alignment. The best and worst are found among them" - Dungeons and Dragons instructions concerning playing a human character.
Marie woke the next morning with a face full of saltwater and desecrated tear glands which made her bloodshot eyes feel like they were cracking apart.
Her poor sight felt as if she was seeing the world through a cracked and broken windscreen.
Every muscle in her body ached with each little movement she took.
Even sleep had offered the newly orphaned brunette no respite as every tiny noise sabotaged her attempts at drifting off.
Struggling to her feet as she fought these awful sensations chaining her down as best she could, the girl begun to walk along the narrow path between the tall trees occasionally taking a peek backwards to check she was not being followed.
NERV was really living up to it's name by constantly getting on her nerves.
She had escaped her town but not the dreadful fear that any moment now she could still find herself staring down the barrel of a gun.
It would not even be the cruel but at least humane one shot to the skull that a hunter had the courtesy to offer to their game before hanging their heads onto the wall of a trophy room.
Marie had seen enough of NERV to know that the first bullet would probably go into one of her legs, preventing her from running while giving her the false hope she might get away alive after all.
The next shots would go into her other leg and then her arms, badly wounding her but not yet killing her.
Her gut might be next along with some bad pun from her heartless shooter such as "No guts, no glory".
Wherever the NERV agent decided to aim at, they would make sure to refrain from putting her out of her misery for as long as humanly possible.
It didn't matter if their firearm was a six-bullet revolver or an extra-large chambered machine gun. Not one bit of ammunition would remain in their weapon by the time they finally ended her life in the slowest and most insufferable way possible.
They might even opt to stop shooting the instant there was no way she could crawl far enough to seek any kind of medical attention and had no hope of staying alive even if a doctor did check up on her, leaving her to instead slowly bleed out instead of finishing her off.
The nerve of the psychopaths of NERV.
It made the nine-year-old girl gag and nearly throw up as she continued her slow and cautious trek through the woods, keeping her hearing primed for the slightest noise.
Twigs snapped under her feet and the wind howled as it played with her shoulder length hair making it fly into her eyes.
If she ever reached civilization, she would be sure to get a haircut. With the most powerful military organization in the world hunting her, there would be no time for fashion.
She stopped when she reached a nearby river, stopping briefly to stoop and drink from the water when she saw it looked clear enough.
Common sense told her that she'd not get a chance to rehydrate for an indefinite number of days until she happened by pure luck upon the next body of water which could be anywhere.
There were no settlements near the backcountry town of Nirgendwo that she had left behind and even if there were, she could hardly count on the oppressed citizens of her ruined country to give her even a crumb.
Food and water had become the gold bars of her era, and even the most selfless evangelist knew better than to go giving gold bars to a starved beggar child with no possible future.
And so the long walk to freedom of Marie Simon Bishop continued in this monotonous manner for the next five days.
Every step made an already emaciated and poorly fed nine year old runaway even weaker. She walked in painful silence knowing that even talking wasted valuable energy and opted to cut the amount of sleep she took each night to about half, waking up to continue her journey when the sky was still pitch black.
Time spent asleep was time she was not spending escaping from NERV and it was pointless to try and rest for extended periods on an empty stomach that would not let her deeply sleep.
Marie had heard that prior to the first impact, the forests of England were ripe with fruits, berries to say nothing of the lovely little critters which called the arboreal paradise their home.
There were no such luxuries left for Marie to savour as every yard cost her dearly in life energy which once expanded, would leave her easy prey for a slow and drawn out game of Russian Roulette. If her organs didn't shut down from starvation and thirst first.
The only trees remaining now were the variety which bore no edible fruit and the only animal she had seen was a lone raven on the second day of travel which briefly swooped over her uttering its hideous crow before flying away. It was said that a Raven's cry signalled approaching death. A good thing that the Bishop family had never been superstitious.
"It's Superstitions which in part led to the founding of NERV" daddy once explained a few days prior to his untimely demise. "And uneducated fools pretending to be geniuses by taking certain books way too seriously to make any kind of rational sense. Like how the churches of old built grand buildings for themselves while locking the starving beggars outside. NERV is doing the same, pretending to spread love and tolerance while grandiosely doing the complete opposite"
Every time one of her dad's phrases of wisdom came to her, Marie wanted nothing more than to kneel down and cry until her eyes stopped working. But that would be expanding energy that she knew she didn't have if she wanted to reach the end of whatever this was alive.
Her parents may have been dead, but as long as she drew breath, their legacy would remain strong in the hearts of the lovely daughter they gave everything to raise.
This was the true way to achieve true immortality. By making positive contributions to the world which got you fondly remembered so that you were never really gone even when you were. Not this mumbo-jumbo about EVA's and human instrumentality which NERV claimed would soon grant everyone ascension to godhood.
Funny how Shakespeare, Abraham Lincoln and Gandhi had figured out the true meaning of eternal life centuries before NERV even existed. And NERV called themselves the modernists. Hah.
Day six of the journey. Or what day was it?
Marie's quickly fading mind couldn't quite keep track anymore.
She had not had a bite to eat or a sip to drink since the first morning she begun this directionless trip.
Everything seemed blurry. She swore her throat had been lit on fire and her head felt like someone was repeatedly thwacking away at it with a hammer.
She was not a superhero from a comic book. She was a cowardly and out of shape nine-year-old child who was drawing what were her last breaths before death came to put her out of her torture.
Soon she would see mum and dad again. Though she wasn't religious, she did believe that Theresa and Martin managed to end up in the highest cloud in heaven and would be more than happy to welcome their Marie to live with them there forever.
She didn't know what it was that prevented her from simply lying down with her eyes closed to let starvation and thirst do their work which at this juncture, wouldn't be much at all.
Even if she did reach the harbour city of Irgendwo as she had initially planned to, no one was just going to let her get on a ship without a ticket which cost way more money than she had.
Perhaps it was simple survival instinct which had been ingrained into mankind since they were nothing more than savage animals no better than the Angels.
Or maybe she was just this much of a coward, not being willing to accept death yet violently refusing to face justice at the hands of the magistrates who now ruled the world, unfair and sadistic as they were.
Maybe it would have been better if she just let NERV shoot her. At least then she could die with the satisfying acknowledgement that she didn't break the law.
She was snapped out of her pointless line of rhetorical questioning by the sight of a road up next to her.
In her delirium she had somehow wandered out of the forest to find the lifeline she had until now been renouncing out of fear of being spotted. The six days she'd spent evading capture had made her very antisocial.
She knew this was her last chance. Successfully flag down a passing vehicle and pray to a god she didn't believe in, that the driver was friendly enough to give her a ride to any place better than where she was now. With any luck, there would be food and water that the stranger would have the common decency to share with her. She swore she could see the gates of heaven opening wider and wider by the second.
The dual carriageway was at first very empty. Typical for any road leading to the town Nirgendwo which in English literally translated to Nowhere.
Then out of the blue, a faint revving of an Engine begun to sound louder and louder as Marie's fading sight managed to make out a blur of black in the distance.
"Stop. Please. Stop" Marie begun to shout, waving her sagging arms frantically in her weakened state.
She didn't care that the car was probably still too far away to hear her. She was just ecstatic that a god she didn't believe in was actually answering her prayers and she wondered in that moment, whether she would convert to a religion when this entire ordeal was done with.
That thought lasted three seconds as the car came closer for Marie's failing eyesight to finally make out that the driver and passenger was wearing a black military uniform and written on the side door in big grey letters, was "NERV. LTD".
She would have gotten better prayer results from being a devout Satanist who went around kicking kittens for a living.
She didn't know what she expected was going to happen.
It was this event that an older Marie would always bring up when she was explaining her own stance on why she did not believe in miracles.
The one thing even sheer exhaustion and malnourishment could not impede was the flow of adrenaline. And Marie found herself back to the same energetic state she had been in when she fled the town as she raced back into the woods with lightning speed as the NERV car begun to pull to a stop and the familiar kerchunk of bullets being loaded into guns sounded once more.
There was no reasoning with evil men who killed without good reason.
She ran without looking back hoping to lose her chasers in the thick undergrowth and maze of dead trees but even with the head start she had gotten in the time it took the gunmen to stop their car and load their guns, she could still hear them very closely behind her.
Several times she nearly tripped. She even banged her head into a tree branch causing a neat trail of blood to trickle from her forehead. She managed to jump over a pit which she saw in the nick of time only to land in a bed of nettles which had survived the Impact, the prickles narrowly missing her face.
She wanted to scream in pain, but she was too tired for even that.
Then it was dead end drive all over again. She had come to the part of the forest where the trees in every direction except the way she came, were clustered too closely for even a wren to fly through.
She stood dead still as the faster of the two men finally gained on her, unable to move a leg or arm as a mask of terror formed on her bloodied face.
He took one step closer to get a better angle only to cry out in fear himself as he tripped and fell on a big branch on the leafy ground which in his arrogance he had not seen.
The stocky and tall grown-up's revolver flew forward as the deadly weapon's former wielder cracked his head on a big sharp rock. It was truly a horrific sight for anyone to behold as vomit came out of the still shocked girl's mouth.
Baser instinct wrested complete control from Marie's better judgement as she reached a hand to catch the glittering firearm still in flight.
She managed against all odds in her terrified state to grab it almost perfectly. The gunslinging cowboy's in the old westerns on the TV's she sometimes had the luxury of walking past, would have been proud.
A dark silhouette emerged from a layer of trees beneath the slope Marie had just run up.
A dark shadow with a gleaming weapon that it was beginning to raise even as it came closer and closer despite a now crying and bleeding Marie's repeated silent pleas.
Leaves squelched beneath the figure's feet and Marie was still trapped in the dead end of the maze of trees that was the forests of England.
"S, stay back" the girl weakly tried to utter, putting her captured revolver up in front of her with trembling hands. She had read of this tactic sometimes used by policemen to catch criminals without a serious confrontation and she hoped it would work for her. Surely even the psychopaths of NERV didn't have the nerve not to value their own life?
She would have done better waving a packet of bubble gum. The big and burly figure seemed to take her attempted threatening gesture as little more than a joke as it giggled while raising its own firearm higher and higher.
The events of the next few seconds came as a set of blurry images that her forever damaged psyche would never fully comprehend.
As the giggling of her attacker became a cheerful and loud laugh, the nine-year-old Marie's trembling trigger finger tightened more and more as not simply ordinary fear but primal terror overwhelmed her senses.
She heard a loud crack and then a cry of pain as her vision begun to dim.
The figure with the gun had dropped to the ground clutching its chest.
Had Marie been closer and had her eyes not been so damaged by crippling fatigue, she would have seen that her pursuer was a middle-aged man with greying hair whose emotion in his final moments were not of the fear that he'd soon be dead, but of the surprise and disbelief that his killer had been a nine-year-old schoolgirl with a gun.
Everything was a blur as her feet took her in random directions, no longer under her control.
Everything was a lie. She was a lie.
A few minutes ago, she would have delighted at the prospect of taking the fight to the men in uniforms that had killed her parents and tried to kill her.
Now she felt nothing but disgust that she had ever tried to escape what was her rightful fate of being put to death along with her father.
Disgust that she still believed she deserved to even exist let alone live and not die.
Disgust that she had actually had the gall to pull the trigger in those final seconds where she should have accepted her rightful punishment and let justice be done.
Even if that justice was being carried out by what amounted to a kangaroo court and a lynch mob of a totalitarian governor who was just trying to silence all opposition, however benign.
"I'm sorry" she managed to sincerely sob, despite the fainting fit coming over her.
"I'm sorry. Please forgive me. I didn't mean to hurt you."
Through dazed eyes she saw the road ahead once more. But she no longer cared about any of that.
With the last of her strength as darkness became her world, she weakly put the barrel of her gun to her already reddened forehead.
"I miss you mum and dad" she whispered as unconsciousness consumed her and she fell to the concrete ground of the road, her trigger finger merely millimetres away from clicking the trigger.
Another car pulled up from around the corner as the brown-haired girl in the blue sweater and skirt lay with a serene expression of peaceful parting on the roadway.
A Japanese woman in the driver's seat and her son riding shotgun.
The woman's hair was long and brown, and she was wearing a white lab coat and an ID tag which denoted her as the chief scientist of NERV.
The name printed on the tag, denoted her status as the third most powerful human being on Earth whose very words could save or destroy the entire planet on a whim.
"Yui Ikari." The neatly printed writing clearly stated next to the tiny fine print that she was to be granted additional privileges from NERV as the wife of its chief.
…
"I'm a murderer Shinji. A murderer" Mari uncontrollably shouted as she finished retelling this part of her story in the present.
To which Shinji could only sit in uncomfortable silence and nod in strained acceptance. He knew words could only worsen this memory which would forever embed itself as a never healing wound in his girlfriend's heart till the day she died.
He understood fully why Mari did what she did and held not one bit of bitterness for the completely justified act. But he also knew that simply saying the words "It's nothing, I forgive you." Would only worsen the guilt.
It would also have been a dishonest thing to say since he was never angry with Mari in the first place. He would have done the same in her shoes.
The one thing he could say to himself as he allowed Mari to continue her story, was that even pure and perfect Mari had her dark secrets. And that even good people had their bad days. Even happy smilers had their sad moments.
And we have the next chapter. Thanks once again to all my reviewers for reviewing, especially fictionelement777 and StraightedgeEpyon. You guys rock and I wish you luck wherever you are.
So you see, it's not just Asuka who had it hard in her childhood after all.
The story was inspired by escape horror games such as "Inside" and "Little nightmares" where you play as a unarmed and mostly helpless young child trying to escape from the hostile world trying to kill you. You head in an unknown direction alone, not even knowing where you will end up or if you will ever find anything. That would be horrible for anyone.
