Inheritance

CHAPTER TWO:

The only thing that I could hear was the sound of my own breath and the grass underneath our feet.

Marta's small, short legs were causing us to fall behind.

I had clutched her hand tight in my own and had almost started to drag her behind me.

"Lizzie, I'm going to fall." she whispered behind me in the smallest, most scared voice I had ever heard from her.

I slowed down a little bit, but I couldn't do much.

The khaki's couldn't see us as far as I could tell, but I also couldn't see them which terrified me even more.

"We're almost there, Marta. Please, just a little more." I pleaded with her when her hand had gone limp in mine. I knew she had started to falter.

When we got out of the clearing, the adrenaline that had driven me so far had started to wear off already. I could feel the pain in my legs and the slight stabbing of pain near my lungs.

"Lizzie, are we safe now?" Marta asked after realising that I had begun to slow down.

"I don't know." I answered, my voice sounding far stronger than I was feeling. "I don't know where they are. We need to be quiet. I need to listen."

The only sound around us were the sounds of birds and the wind through the trees.

And far off in the distance, I could hear the shouts of the khaki soldiers.

They were getting closer.

***

The sound of the dough slapping against the wooden table pulled me away from my thoughts just then.

I was thinking about Marta, as I so often do now.

My mother was baking bread today. I had come down to help her.

It was almost comforting, hearing the slap and the squish of the dough under my hands.

It couldn't drown out the memories of my sister's pale face looking up at me from inside that cursed tent.

I couldn't protect her.

It's my fault she's dead.

I knew it and I couldn't silence the thoughts screaming my guilt and remorse.

I saw it on my mother's face sometimes too. The guilt.

It wouldn't leave you, no matter what you do.

***

We had run for what felt like hours but what was really only several minutes.

The breath in my lungs was coming in quick gasps. Marta's hand was slipping out of mine from the pure exhaustion we had both felt.

But still, we couldn't outrun the inevitable.

I knew it was over the moment I heard Marta's screams over the sound of my own heartbeat.

A minute after, my feet still fighting for freedom, I felt a pair of steel arms encircling my waist and pulling me back.

"You let me go!" I screamed, but all I could hear was a sick laugh, a cackle of sorts.

"We don't take orders from a backwater wench!"

And with every inch of me I fought, but I didn't feel freedom. I only felt the rough material of a red uniform pulling me to and fro.