Death was once something I feared, an illusion that brought darkness with it, but now I plead for its mercy in this time that survivors have come to call, The New Order.
•••
It was only a cough to began with, something so simple, it had happened a t...
The icy air hits us as the entrance to the apartment complex creeks open, the fresh air wafting into our tired lungs. With wobbling legs we stumble our way down the dusty steps and begin our tread to the out city, guiding us to the sanctuary that is held within the trunks of their lumping branches.
My eyes are vast as I search the street, the windows to the homes of others and the pavement across from us. Elianas gaze stays forward, like I,d instructed her to do, her hand clasped within the warmth of mine.
I dont want her too see what I've seen.
It's quiet for what this street typically contains, with the stampede that wanders forward, and the cars the honk endlessly, for the apartments that echo out the words and sounds of ones home. Now, there is nothing but us, and small orange leaves gently blowing down the empty road. Nothing blasts my eardrums with the inane pounding, my body isn't being crashed in a sea of limbs and I can't smell a million different scents floating around me.
It's weird.
But what makes my spine tingle are the widows above us with a dark crimson dripping down them, not all, just a few spotted here and there. A sign of what lies within the buildings. And what's been taken from them.
A screech echos from a distance away. The main central city.
They must be inside because of the lockdown that's on the city. Some might have even forsaken the warning to stay within the city and gone out anyway. I wonder if they got far, or if there are people patrolling the main exits to the city, stopping anyone from getting out. What if they barcade the city in? To contain whatever this is? To stop it from spreading any further, if it hasn't already.
I speed up my steps as they echo throughout the streets. Like a sharp ding of the dinner bell being rung for all willing to hear, ready to feast.
Sometime passes, the sun grows bolder as it rises in the skie, thankfully we have come across nothing but ourselves along the path leading us to the store that I've worked at for the past three years or so, now only just a mere block away from us.
There's a sudden tug on the sleeve of jumper.
"Nas..." Eliana breaths in deeply, her eyes darting across the windows above us.
"I think somethings watching us," she utters softly.
My gaze turns to the glass above where we stand still in the empty street. I eye each one, in a dysfunctional order, no patten as i seach through each of the portals.
Something slithers beneath my skin as my gaze catches the shifting of shadows within the many squares above. But whether they are just that, shadows that my mind plays with, or someone inside, I dont know.
I dont know what they are capable of.
A few streets up I see what looks to be a gapping whole in the side of the buildings. The alley is bleak, shadows casting darkness through the curve at the end, leaving your mind to wonder what lies beyond it.
Eliana pulls my hand, as though to drag me away from the tunnel of uncertainty. "That doesn't... we aren't really going down there, are we?"
I simply turn to her, and give her a small, reassuring smile. "It'll only be for a few minutes."
In all certainty, I didn't know, not when they were wandering around, feasting upon the living. It was like setting yourself up to be bait for them, it was the pinnacle of stupidity, but I didn't have anywhere else for us to go that would hide us from plain site, from them. All I know for certainty is that it gets us from here to my bosses store, without all the open space.
And right now, that's what we need.
The shadows engulf us as we step forward, elianas resists the further we go. Her gaze no longer stays focused on what lies ahead but instead, what surrounds us. Something scurres through the piles of black bags filled to the brim with others trash and forgotten objects, that have been lazyily tossed to the corner of the large bin, a decaying smell that wafts from the area, the faint sight of rodents bigger than my hand barely visible through the bags. Her eyes are wide as we tread forward through the alley.
She's never liked the dark, always scared of what it contained within it. When we were younger, how mother had forgot to pay the power bill. Leaving us in the clutches of the dark. It was nearly midnight at the time, so there was nothing the pitch black to comfort us as we tried to navigate of small feet through the lonely home. Eliana at some ponit had fell, cutting her small hand on something sharp as she had fallen to the floor. And in the darkness, she'd sat on the tiled ground, her blooded hand clutched to her chest as her wailed, not for our mother, but for me.
Something reaches its talons into my mind, ripping me from the delicate memory held there, now making me deathly aware of what lies around us.
A screech. But not just any high pitched beckoner of death, one from the lungs of a human pleading for help. And a deep set smell of rot consumes me once again, a reminder of all the other times such a smell had eaten at my senses. I grab Eliana by the shoulders, the bags of rotting trash rustiling as I shove her in between them and the oversized bin.
She pulls at my hand, her nails digging into my skin as I pull away from her. "No, Nas, please, I dont want to be left in here." She pleads.
Her eyes were wide, as though she was trying to let me see into her soul somehow.
I don't want to, I'd rather crawl in between that trash and hide as well. To close my eyes and never open them again, let the world as I know it fade away. But I need to go, because I need to get to the other side and I can't do that by cowering away from what lies behind that corner.
I need to face it head on, for Eliana, and for Nana.
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