32/10 Chapter 1

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Ryan Jones stood an inch below six feet tall, but currently resided on his knees. The room around him burned as red as his passion was deep. In front of his eyes and just out of reach lied the body of his newly-wed darling, scorched nearly to the point of anonymity. Ryan knew it to be her all the same, for she was the only one at the orphanage carrying an unborn child.

The blackened and charred wood mixed into the deep brown of Ryan’s eyes, while the flames were reflected by the slight flickers of green in them. If only the beams were not hot enough to subject him to the same fate as his wife, he would be strong enough to lift them and touch her one last time.

Memories of his wife flooded Ryan’s head. He first met her stationed on Mars. He, the rough and tough military hothead, she, the cool and collected tech specialist. Their eyes locked and the rest of their lives played out in theory. That was the first time Ryan saw her, and now on Earth, enveloped in a hell the color of the sands of the planet they met, would be the last.

“Agh! Fuck! Fuck!!”

Screams from a man burning to the ground brought Ryan back to reality. He knew he would suffer the same fate should he lurk in his grievance and slowly stood up. With a blank mind and blurry vision, he traced the steps back to the entrance of the orphanage. Left, right, right, left… no. Right?

The blaze was growing stronger and Ryan was completely lost. Panic kicked in when a falling beam nearly grazed his nose. In a flurry, Ryan went through every doorway and cleared path he could. His search for the exit, any exit, was leading him closer and closer to his doom.

Everything went silent. Ryan’s adrenaline kicked into overdrive and not even the crackling of his inevitable death could be heard. He closed his eyes and accepted his fate. The flames drew nearer and he could feel the heat on his face. This was it. This was the end of Ryan Jones.

That is the only thing that ran through his head. However, that is not where Ryan’s story ends. In fact, although he had lived a third of his life, his story was just beginning.

As Ryan drew what he believed to be his final breath, he could faintly make out the sound of a small child sobbing. An animalistic instinct roared within him, and he sprinted in the direction of the cries.

Near the entrance of the building, trapped behind a single beam of fire and a pillar of smoke, was the frame of a small girl. Ryan rushed over to the spot in an instant.

“It’s all gonna’ be okay, you’ll be alright,” Ryan managed to cough out. Despite his words, the child still cried. Calming words wouldn’t keep her alive, and a child can’t be reassured out of fearing for their life.

Ryan looked at the beam that came between him and the little girl. He could easily lift it, but his hand would get burned. Without a second thought, he positioned his left hand under the beam and pushed, using his right hand to pull the girl to safety. The pain was unbearable, but to save this girl he would have risked his life. Ryan was no stranger to pain and he knew how to use it as an advantage. Clenching his left fist he pulled the girl into his chest and rose into a run out of the burning orphanage.

When Ryan was finally free from the fiery death trap he set down the child, who had wet his shirt with her tears, and stared at the building. Howlett Orphanage. After he and his wife retired from the military, she started working there in preparation for taking care of their own children. They tried for years to have children and when his wife finally got pregnant, Ryan was ecstatic. Now, all of that was gone; destroyed in a matter of minutes. Ryan slowly sat down next to the young girl and cried. Cried for his wife, cried for his unborn child. The pain in his hand. The innocent children and staff whose lives were wasted. The fact that the only one he could save was a stranger to him, a little girl. A little girl who was crying, just like him. A little girl who was holding Ryan in her arms now.

Her soft voice was a sharp pain in Ryan’s ears when she first spoke, a harsh reminder of what he had lost.

“It’s all gonna’ be okay, you’ll be alright.”

Ryan lifted his hands to her back and gently hugged her. The pain again surged through his left hand and he hung it at his side.

Each minute felt like an hour as they embraced. Two broken souls who had lost everything that could do little else than stay right where they were.

“Guys, the fucker made it out! He’s got a girl with him!”

Men in masks with knives, bricks, and all other sorts of homemade weaponry made a beeline for Ryan. His eyes grew wide when they locked with those of the violent people running toward him. With one swift motion, he picked up the girl again and ran, her face buried in his jacket, legs and arms both wrapped around him.

Gunshots began to sound off and the little girl once again began crying. Ryan ran faster. His car was just a few dozen yards away and he could take the girl to the authorities. Another shot hit directly next to Ryan’s foot. The car was close. A window in the back seat was shot out, causing glass fragments to scatter across the seat and the cracked concrete. The car was closer.

The young girl whimpered and wined, to which Ryan looked down in response. From the corner of his eye, he viewed a stream of red from her leg. Her bawls became hoarse and labored.

Finally, they arrived at the car. A shot ricocheted off one of the rear-view cameras. Ryan opened the passenger side door and tore the girl away from his body, setting her on the seat and slamming the door.

“Get your head down below the window!” He yelled, running around to the driver’s side. Ryan flung open the door and the girl’s cries filled his ears again, alongside the sounds of various bullets flying toward their direction. He put his finger to the ignition print, but the car didn’t start. Instead, it beeped angrily. The passenger side window exploded, its remains landing on the little girl whose sobs only grew more pained.

“Don’t move, stay right there,” Ryan commanded. He pulled his door closed and once again attempted to start the car. The electronic engine whirred to life and Ryan slammed on the acceleration.

The closest hospital to the orphanage was the once in the city, about an hour away. The process and traffic to the inside at this time of day would likely double that time. Ryan had only one option, and it was to take the girl to his home ten minutes away. He had plenty of medical supplies there, and in the worst case scenario, biomechanic gear.

After Ryan retired from the army, he returned to Earth with his wife and bought a little modest home. Two bedrooms, two bathrooms, and just enough space for the little family they wanted to raise. It was much cheaper than getting one in the city, if you could even find one. Most people in the city lived in apartments with steep prices in buildings stacked thirty stories high.

Ryan and his wife ran a business from this house that dealt with repairing and healing people using robotics. Ryan was very good with his hands and his wife knew her way around technology better than she knew the way around the city, which they visited often for their parts. Eventually, Ryan’s wife taught him nearly everything she knew, and he could fix up people just as well as she could.

Everything was calm on the way back home. It seemed like the masked men had stopped trying to attack them and although the girl was still bleeding badly, her little body had sent enough adrenaline through itself to keep her quiet for a little longer.

Ryan’s head still spun with intensity despite the situation dying down. His driving was on autopilot and all he could think about was the girl in the passenger seat. He had to help her get to somewhere safe as soon as possible, somewhere those masked men could not find her. He knew who they were and didn’t want them taking her away with them.

Antip. A group of people, mostly men, that were radicalized when the government decriminalized pedophilia in 2093, six years ago. Antip had a history of hunting down alleged pedophiles and killing them, sparing nobody in their way. They would take the kids away, if they hadn’t killed them in the process, and disperse them across their many hideouts in the country or send them off to other countries where pedophilia was still illegal. As many Antip members and leaders have said, “A child dead is better than a child abused.”

Ryan, along with a decent part of society, disagreed with the decriminalization, but absolutely hated Antip. Their actions were immature and reckless and they were cowardly enough to hide behind their masks. As the gears turned in his head, Ryan began putting two and two together. Had Antip been responsible for the fire at the orphanage? Did… they think he was a pedophile? Is that why they tried killing him? If that was true, he had to separate himself from the little girl. There was no stopping Antip once they were after you, and Ryan didn’t want to risk the girl dying as well. They had almost killed her already.

As the car pulled into the driveway, Ryan nearly kicked the door open as he rushed to the passenger side to pick up the young girl. He had forgotten about the pain in his left hand from the burns and went to open the door with it. The fiery pain revived and Ryan recoiled, cursing under his breath. Again he reached for the handle, with his right hand this time, swung open the door, and grabbed the girl.

That’s when Ryan noticed her deep, saturated green eyes fluttering, her unburnt skin turning from peach to pale. Was she losing too much blood? Unlikely. The pain was probably getting to be too much for her to handle, the poor little thing.

With haste, Ryan walked to his door and let it scan his eyes. It slid open and he stepped inside, the door not hesitating to close behind him.

Finally. Home.

If today was a normal day, Ryan would have plopped down on the couch alongside his wife after a long day on both of their parts, waiting for the biweekly pizza man to arrive. Today was obviously not a normal day. Still clutching the girl in his arms, Ryan stepped in the elevator down to the basement. Stepping out granted the site of robotic machinery and plenty of military-grade weaponry littering the walls and floors. Bionic limbs, motherboards, and upgrade chips blended in with multiple styles of grenades, automatic assault rifles, and high-powered, flashy handguns.

Ryan moved over to the medical bed and laid the girl down on it. She had passed out and was entirely unresponsive, but she was still breathing. Up until now, Ryan hadn’t gotten a very good look at her in the quite literal heat of the moment. He now saw her shoulder-length, purely blonde hair. It was singed, but it wasn’t anything a quick snip couldn’t fix. Her eyelashes were long and she still had baby fat on her face and cheeks. She couldn’t be older than twelve. The dress she was wearing was a simple one. It was white and had two inch-wide shoulder straps. Well… it used to be white. It was now stained with multiple shades of black, brown, and red. There is no way Ryan could get it off of her to treat her wounds and burns, in the worst case she would have some of it melted into her skin.

First thing first, Ryan had to fix the girl’s leg. He had easy enough access to where the wound was and only had to lift her dress a little to see the entirety of the damage. He poured alcohol on her leg and rubbed a cloth over it gently, making sure to clean up anywhere that was injured. He fully expected the girl to be awoken by this, but she lied dormant. Once he knew everything was clean, he put an anti-bleeding compound on the wound and wiped away what little blood was left.

Even though a bullet had hit her leg, it had only grazed it, leaving a wound small enough to be patched up rather quickly with the current medical technology. Ryan turned away from the girl to rummage through a small cabinet in the corner of the room. In a moment, he procured a thin bandage a few inches in length then took it out of the packaging, applying it to the girl’s leg. It shrunk perfectly in size around the wound, tightening the skin and flesh up and bringing it together.

With that out of the way, Ryan needed to treat the girl’s burns. There was only way to find out exactly what damage was done, and that was to remove her clothing. He contemplated his options for a moment. He could wait for her to wake up and then explain what he needed to do, but she could be in extreme pain when she did wake up if he didn’t act fast. He could just take off her clothes and get to fixing her right away, but if she woke up she would be confused and scared. He could also administer a sedative to her to prevent either of those things from happening, and although it made him feel a little bit weird, as if he was taking advantage of her, he knew that’s what had to happen.

Acting swiftly, Ryan slid open another cabinet door on the opposite side of the room and found a syringe by a quite powerful sedative. Unfortunately, he didn’t have anything child-sized, and decided to give her half of an adult’s dose instead. He wrapped a band around the girl’s arm to expose her veins and slid the needle inside, pushing the liquid sedative inside. After pulling it out, Ryan rubbed her arm, released the band, and put a small bandage over the entry point. He believed that had done the trick.

Grabbing some scissors from the counter, Ryan began to cut around pieces of the girl’s simple dress that had melted into her skin. There was a small piece on her chest just below her collar bone, pieces of both shoulder straps on the back of her shoulders, quite a large chunk curving from her mid-back to the right side of her abdomen, and another small piece on her thigh. He pulled the loose parts of the dress off of her and was left to gaze at her mostly nude body. The size of her breasts revealed that she was certainly not twelve, in fact it was unlikely that she had even hit puberty yet. Ryan deduced that she must be closer to 10, her chest being completely flat, her small, pink nipples left untouched by the flames. He tugged around on the girl’s plain white panties to make sure none of the cloth had stuck and, to his delight, it hadn’t. He did this with clinical efficiency, but couldn’t shake that call of the void that told him to rip off those panties anyway. He could just explain that he needed to fix something down there… no. Ryan was a good person. Everybody has bad thoughts, but Ryan’s actions were what made him so attractive to his wife.

Ryan moved over to the sink and ran a washcloth underneath some cool water with an intention to get off as much of the melted-on clothing as possible. Carefully placing it on top of the girl’s chest, Ryan pushed lightly down with it over the piece of burnt dress and slid it over. A few bits came up without any issue, but the rest needed a bit more scrubbing and pulled up a decent amount of burnt skin with it. This was the case for the rest of the burns, which Ryan covered with more bandages similar to the one he put on the girl’s leg.

The one exception of how well the clothing removal was going was the massive bit of scorched dress stuck to the girl’s side. Ryan only managed to scrub away a few spots. This must have been where she got burnt the worst. There wasn’t any other way than to cut it out. After grabbing a sterile knife from a heated box, Ryan held his breath as he cut through the flesh of the girl, separating the clothing as well as skin from her body. He had only needed to do things like this a couple of times, and never on a girl as young as this. He winced not from the sight of the blood being drawn and beginning to pool around her, but from some emotional turmoil, sympathy for what the girl was going through even if she was asleep.

With one final, exact cut, the remainder of the clothes had been removed from her body and Ryan began the cleanup process. This wound was far worse than her leg and he didn’t have a single bandage that could cover the whole thing. Instead, he opted for a tried-but-true method. As he cleaned the whole thing with alcohol, The girl stirred when he applied it and for a moment, Ryan thought she would wake up, but thankfully it wasn’t so. He rubbed in the same anti-bleeding compound from before and wrapped her up with gauze, being careful to not make it too tight to cut off any circulation but tight enough to hold together. With that, all that was left for Ryan to do was wait. He knew that the sedative would likely wear off in about thirty minutes and he still had to get something for the girl to cover herself with. He didn’t want to lose any sight of her, so he opted for a white towel that was neatly folded on a shelf alongside a few others. Ryan wrapped it around the girl carefully, making sure his hands didn’t touch any inappropriate places. While wrapping her he noticed that she had no tan, which was quite peculiar for a girl her age at the tail end of summer. He sat down on a nearby chair once he finished covering her and immediately noticed the pain in his left hand. Ryan had been so focused on helping this girl that he had forgotten to help himself. The burn on there was just as bad as the girl’s side was, but he didn’t have time to worry about it. He needed to give this girl as much help as he could.

Ryan grabbed a bit more gauze and wrapped it around his hand quite heavily, making it completely immobile, and after sifting through a few bottles found one of morphine. He settled down on the chair again and waited, watching the girl breathing. He thought about his wife and his unborn child, whom he didn’t even know the gender of yet. His years in the military had done quite the opposite of make him a rough and tough man. Sure, he was that on the outside, but his time on the front lines always gave him brothers in arms that were swept away. The Mars Attacks were a brutal time, a large-scale war between India and the USA fought between their respective bases. Ryan had lost so many people he loved, and it never got easier for him. It only got harder.

He broke down in tears. This loss he had suffered was greater than any other.

Before too long, the girl on the medical bed began to mumble herself awake. Ryan regained his composure, knowing he would need his full attention for her, especially when the treatment he had given her settled in and he could begin using the robotics side of the equation to completely fix her up, as well as himself.

“M… m… Maria…?” The girl stirred as her eyes slowly began to open.

That was Ryan’s wife’s name. He choked a bit before pushing down his emotions. He had to show this girl that he would be strong for her, so that she could be strong too.

“I’m Maria’s husband, Ryan. I got you out of the orphanage.”

The girl tried to move but pain struck her to the core, causing a wild cry to be let out.

“Don’t move, the medicine is still trying to make you better, alright? It’ll be okay, just stay still,” Ryan said, standing up and moving toward her so she could see him.

“Do you remember me?” he asked, looking into her eyes.

“Y… yes… you did save me. From the fire and… and those scary guys.” From the way she talked and how she tried to avoid eye contact, it seemed like she was shy. Ryan could deduce that she was not popular at the orphanage and probably stayed by herself inside most of the time. He thought about how she repeated his line back to him after they had escaped the orphanage. She must have some bravery or courage hidden deep inside there as well. Whether she used it willingly or it came out reluctantly was yet to be seen.

“It’s true. It’s going to be alright. Can you tell me what your name is?” Ryan squatted down, getting eye-level with the girl.

“Camilla,” she replied simply.

“You got a last name?” Ryan questioned.

“They never gave me one…” Camilla looked sad. She must have been there since birth. From Ryan’s knowledge, that’s usually the case when children don’t have last names. They simply aren’t given any because nobody has claimed them. They’ll only get last names if they are adopted or once they turn 18 and choose their own, being required to leave the orphanage. This is how it was nationwide, at least. In the government systems, their last names were simply the names of the orphanages they stayed at. That would technically make the girl’s name “Camilla Orphanage-Howlett.” Didn’t really have a ring to it.

“Alright then Camilla,” Ryan stood up, his figure completely overshadowing the lithe girl’s.

“You’ll be safe here for now. It’s getting to be dinner time, have you eaten yet?”

Camilla shook her head slightly, to the best of her ability without inflicting more pain.

“Well, just stay right here and I’ll get some soup to feed you, alright?” Ryan began to walk away, heading toward the elevator, pausing when he heard Camilla’s little voice.

“Is Maria okay?”

Ryan’s heart couldn’t stop getting broken. Just when he thought he had it glued back together, it would shatter all over again.

“She’s… no.” Ryan hung his head as his posture drooped.

“Oh… I’m sorry Ryan.” Camilla sounded calm, a good sign that the medicine was doing its job.

“It’s okay.” Ryan continued walking into the elevator, his physical and emotional exhaustion making itself well known, then pushed the button to ascend, leaving Camilla in the basement to ogle technology she’d never even dreamt of.