Reflections Of The Damned
No one knew her name, so we just called her Sally.  She didn’t talk, not one word, not even when– well, she didn’t talk, never.
She was a pretty little girl, surely no older than six, but she was always dirty.  ‘Course, all of us are.  There ain’t no clean water, not to bathe in anyway, and besides, what’s the use?  We’ll all die soon enough anyway.
But I was tellin’ you about Sally.
When I woke up and realized that I had lived through the night, I was kinda glad about it, but kinda wished it was over at the same time.  I pulled on my boots, pulled my tattered cap down over my eyes, and walked out the front door – and tripped over her.
She was lying there on the front porch with a little headless doll in her arms, asleep.  Her dress was probably yellow once upon a time, but now it was little more than a rag, smeared with blood and dirt.  Her bare feet had blisters on them, and her hair hadn’t seen a brush for even longer than mine.
My surprised yell brought everyone out of the house, and startled Sally awake and into tears.  She sat on the porch crying silently while the rest of us just looked at her, stunned.
We hadn’t seen a kid in years, not since the war.  All the kids and most of the adults had died in the first wave, and the rest of us were left sterile.
Gotta give the human race credit: when we decide to destroy the world, we do it right.
After a while, Thumb, our leader, walks over to Sally, and tries to comfort her, tells her its okay, nobody’s gonna hurt her, things like that.  She takes up with him instantly, latching onto his neck, and buries her face in his bare shoulders.
Thumb is a hard man, all of us are hard, and it’s not a matter of choice now.  He’s hardest of all I’ve seen though, that’s why he’s the leader, so all of us are surprised to see how he cradles Sally in his arms, how he instantly assumes the role of father to her.
For the next few weeks everything is fine, and we all dote on Sally, bringing her new dolls and new clothes we find in the deserted, rotting stores in what used to be our town.  She loves them all, but hangs on to the headless little doll all the more.  I wonder where she got that doll, and why it means so much to her?  Probably from Before.  Before the war, I mean.
Anyway, everything is fine until Sally walks out of the house carrying Thumb’s mirror.  We’re all careful not to look in mirrors anymore; we don’t like what we see there.  Thumb scrambles to grab the mirror away from Sally, but Robin gets to her first.  God, if only Thumb had reached her before Robin!
Robin starts to pull the mirror away from Sally, then her face explodes into a scream of wonder, awe and surprise.
“Her reflection, oh god her REFLECTION!”  Robin is almost hysterical, and Thumb grabs Sally and hugs her to himself tightly.
Amazingly, Thumb starts to cry, the tears leaving streaks of cleanness on his filthy face.  He rubbed Sally’s hair, and hugged her all the more tightly.
The rest of us ran over to Sally, and I managed to grab the mirror away from Robin before she broke it; it’s the last mirror in existence as far as we know.  We, and others like us, have long since broken all the rest of them.  Thumb insisted on keeping just one, god knows why.
I took the mirror, and put it in front of Sally’s dirty face, and for the first time since the war I saw the reflection of a human, of a little girl.  A little girl being hugged by a demon.
It was like a breath of stale, rotted wind that ran across us, the jealously stealing into our hearts and souls before we even realized it.  God, I would never have hurt that little angel, not for the world, but she had a reflection, a real reflection!
Robin grabbed the mirror from me, stared hard into it, and the pain and anguish was instantly back into her face; we all passed the mirror around, hoping beyond hope that we would see something human, something other than the grotesque demons we had somehow become.
Thumb grabbed Sally and started to run into the woods behind our old shack, screaming that we would not hurt her, we would never hurt his little angel.  I think he lost his mind then, or part of it anyway, that small part doesn’t let you see people for what they really are.  He thought we were gonna hurt Sally just ‘cause she had a reflection, a normal reflection.
And he was right.
We all ran after them, all of us did, it was madness, murder, lust, hatred, vengeance that drove us, screamed at us to make her pay for having a reflection, make her pay!
It wasn’t long before we had Thumb tied with a thick rope to a tree, just a few yards from Sally.  Sally was tied too, but unlike Thumb, she wasn’t gagged.  There was no need to gag her, after all.
I don’t know what caused us to do it, I guess it was just our minds slipping a little more, but we did it.  I did it, actually, it was my idea.  I doused the wood and Sally with what little lantern oil we had left, and struck the match.  I hated her in that instant, hated the way she just kept starting at Thumb like he was the Messiah or something, like he was better than us.  I wanted her to hurt, I wanted to hear her scream, to beg and scream and die screaming.  Just once I wanted to hear that voice of hers, and I wanted it to be full of fear and pain.
I gotta give it to her though, she didn’t even whimper, not once.  
The flames engulfed the oil-soaked wood and Sally instantly, and the whole time she just stared at Thumb.  Long before her eyes burned out and started to run down her cheeks, she was dead, but still her eyes were locked on Thumb.
He tried to scream, tried to beg and plead for her, but the gag was tight, and all he could really do was stare at his little fiery angel and cry.
The fire went out after a while, and soon the embers didn’t even glow.  I sifted through the flames, and found a few bone fragments, but nothing more remained of Sally, the last human child on the known earth.
Two days later we let Thumb go, but the fight was gone from him by then.  Too weak from screaming and crying, I guess.  ‘Course we didn’t give him anything to eat or drink while he was tied up, neither.  Guess he was weak from that too.
It has been four months since we killed Sally, and most of our “family” is dead now.  I am still ticking, Alice and Trigger are still alive, and so is Roger and Francis.  Thumb is, well, he’s still alive, but he may as well be dead.  All he does is rock back and forth on the porch holding that little headless doll Sally used to love so much.  He don’t talk at all no more.  Just stares straight ahead and rocks that cursed doll.
I found Thumb’s mirror today, and I finally got the courage to look in it.  I didn’t see the demon anymore, for whatever reason its gone, gone from all of us.  We all took turns looking into the mirror, and all of us are free of the demon reflection.
Now it’s something worse, something far, far worse.
Every time we look into the mirror we see Sally looking back at us.

The End

David Bowlin
June 18, 1999
8:43 p.m.