Carolina the Carrion
Once upon a time, in a land of Santa Cruz, Portugal in 1400′s century lives a girl named Carolina in a village, a seventeen year old girl. In that village, people are suffering from severe disease that happened to strike unexpectedly from the Europe. This disease include gout, blackened toe and fingers, cysts growth in stomach and exposed flesh in skins. For that reason, the disease was named “Life Vermin”. While medicine in that age are not efficient, many churches and infirmary tries their best to heal the infected.
Carolina and her family was struck by this disease as well over months and hasn’t shown any recovery. However, Carolina who hasn’t in contact with the disease didn’t lose her hope in helping for her family that dying in their bed. Carolina has to wake up to feed her parents, while also bathing them everyday to keep them from the cysts. As she was the only healthy member in the family, she has to keep herself safe from anyone in the house with mask and self hygiene.
Home wasn’t her only problem, she hasn’t gotten to school since it was closed due to the pandemic. What’s even worse is that people haven’t received proper food, hygiene and many supports since the king refuse to go outside. People had begun to riot over the village whenever any nobles comes and refuses any form of visitor other than churches. Which means that the village has been casted away from any source of contact with kingdom, and lives with only reliance on themselves.
One day, the water of the village is no longer clean and had to be taken outside. Some villager refused to go outside, and demand others to go instead. This cause debate among the village that almost started a fight, until Carolina volunteer to go since she didn’t want her parents to die. So the village gives her a cart full of empty buckets and container of water for her to fill at the river that was supposed to be few kilometers away from the village.
With this, she takes her chance to go outside the village and goes to the river. Upon her travel, she encounter a teenager boy sleeping at the tree. At first she was ignoring them until when she gets closer, she sees that the boy has an rotting and awful skin disease. Suspecting that he was in need of help, she goes over him to help out. Rushing into the tree, she rips out a cloth from her dress and wet it to clean the wound.
But as soon as she ask for his help, the boy looks at her with a of rotting and darkened face, a bald head and scary eyes. Carolina steps back in shock as the boy stands up and reach for her legs, but before he could touch her she kicks him and run with the carts away from him. In shock, she runs faster while boy chasing slowly. Carolina took one bucket from her cart and throw it at the boy’s head to stop him for a while before running as fast as she could. In the end, the boy lost his sight of her and she finally reaches over the bridge.
Under the bridge, lies a clean water from a river for Carolina to take. Relieved from the boy, she takes off her clothes and took a bath under the water to clean herself in case of any infections occurs from the contact with the boy. While having bath, she sees two different soldier walks at the top of the bridge discussing about something. She hides under the bridge to not getting caught naked until the guard leaves.
When she finishes taking out all water, she returns to the same route back to village for giving announcements for the new water. She was hesitant at first after the encounter of the boy, but as she walks there she found no trace of the boy at the tree. As she thinks it was safe, she rushes out through the walk path only to be ambushed by four boys who has similar appearances as the boy before.
She hides herself at the cart, only for the four boys to found and drag her out from it. She tries to defend herself from the boys using bare fist, but the boys seems to crave for another purpose. The boy behind her touches her from the back and slip away from her. She looks behind only for the boy in front of her pushed her down to the ground. She was lay behind her back, as the boy lifts her and hold her hand from the back.
At first, they brought a pocket full of bloods, fats and sweats and smeared them around her face which disgust and scares her with the smells and the blood. Then, they ripped off her clothes from her body and torn it to pieces and smeared another bloods and fats around the body, forming a weird symbols at her. The boys then unleash her and drops her to the ground, a desperations that makes her thinking that she was finally released.
But it turns out that they were not finish at all, as they began to cover her under the mud and sands. Forcing her to bathe in mud, and covering herself in both blood and mud. Finally, they leave her alone with her carts as she now can go back to the village.
As she returns to the village with bare naked, she sees that everyone suddenly becomes healthier and better around. Despite all the terrors she has to felt, now she can feel relieved to see her parents conditions. Upon going back to her house, she founds no one in the house at all. No father and no mother was around, so the confused Caroline looks into the outside for her parents only for the villagers to be scared and afraid of her.
Upon looking at the reflections of the water, she sees a familiar eyeballs belong to her father. The moment she realized that the boys smeared her with her parents corpse left her in shock and screams. The villager comes and attacked her, burnt her and left her dying on the land. But before she can draw her last breath, the elder man comes to her to give one story for her.
The Elder man tells her that the four boys she encounters was the chosen four child by the village that was going to take water from the kingdom's bridge when the drought strikes before the plague. However, because it is illegal to take the water from the bridge, they were executed and this village pretends they never asked them about it. So the four boys cursed the villages with disease for everyone, unless one dared to go out and take the water and sacrifice themselves to the four. Then he leaves her to her own demise, as the hands of the four boys emerge from the ground and dragged her.
But little do they know, that the four boys never want the village to be free. Instead, they poisoned the water in the bucket to kill every villagers who drink or touches it. In the end, after Carolina was dragged underground all the villagers ends in riots as they slowly succumb to inevitable death of theirs. But for Carolina, it's one humiliation paid with blood.
When the king sent his men to the village after inspecting burning and chaos from the village, they found nothing but dead and burnt people from the diseases. What they could do is clean up the mess and abandon the village at once. But as soon as they leave the village, a sound of a walking can be heard around the village. Followed with a sound of a girl chuckling, and putrid smell of a rotting corpse shows a girl walking around with dress covered in mud and flesh exposed from the skins with dark and dead eyes wandering around town.
Some people who visited the places often sees her walking, and claim that she was incarnated from the dead people from the village. In fact, Carolina herself was named "The Carrion" for her body contains the living souls, to attain immortality.
