Chapter Twenty-Nine – A Crying Shame

Chapter Twenty-Nine – A Crying Shame

“Nightmares? Stress? Are you suffering from PTSD or anxiety over the constantly looming threat of human extinction brought on by the aliens above?

*All information and recordings of therapy sessions belong to Theracore. On entering a Theracore clinique you waive the rights to any information you disclose to our expert psychologists, staff, and interns.

–Theracore ad, 2055

***

I’d felt shame before. Embarrassment.

I can vividly remember some of the brats catching Lucy and I in a closet then running off to go tell everyone. I’d spent an entire week feeling as if my face was aflame.

As for shame, I’d done some pretty stupid shit sometimes.

But right then, standing next to a row of four bodies laid out next to the entrance to the stairwell… I didn’t know how to describe the churning in the pit of my stomach. I kept going over all the shit I could have done to keep them from dying, and the stupid crap I’d thought about them.

They were slow and fat. They were dumb. They were annoying.

And now they were dead and it was my fault.

A hand touched my shoulder.

Turning, I looked into Elisa’s deep eyes. She was teary, but there was determination over that. “It’s okay,” she said.

I worked my jaw. A glance to the side showed one of the women crying into another’s shoulder. Some of the guys didn’t look much better. One or two were glaring at the alien corpses we’d kicked to the side. Others were glaring at me.

“Is it really?” I asked. “I should have–”

She shook her head. “It’s not on you. It’s on the aliens. You’re… what, sixteen?”

“Seventeen,” I said. A few months from getting booted out of the orphanage. Maybe a bit less. My documents got mishandled at some point, and my date of birth was lost somewhere along with everything else. It didn’t matter.

“Right. These folks, they’d have died when the aliens continued to swarm us below. Hell, I would be dead by now if it wasn’t for you,” she said.

“And I could have kept them alive for longer,” I said.

She shook her head. “It’s not on you. Did you know there was an ambush?”

I swallowed. “No. I know what you’re trying to do.”

“If you know it, then you know it’s not your fault either.”

I snorted. “You’re a real optimist,” I said.