Chapter 15 TESNI #2
Might have been raided before. Might have been eaten down to the bare minimum by the last of the patients and nurses that stuck around for quarantine.
But we find some jars of baby food, gross, packets of barley, which I guess was for soups—and a lot of teabags, coffee and powdered milk.
We take it all.
By the time we’re back at the nurse’s station, all the corpses have been moved to one room, and the door shut tight.
The dead in the world don’t stink much anymore. But not all of them are total skeletons yet. The winter came, the cold froze them, and I guess it takes a while in these conditions.
Either way, we hide the bodies for one reason.
Comfort.
Plain and simple, it’s the comfort of not tripping over them, of looking at ghoulish corpses.
The little things, you know?
Mike and Michelle, siblings, set up a gas cookstove, the kind that reminds me of the Winnebago—and that then reminds me of Ramona, and Ruby, and Louise…
I flinch at the thought of them. A twist of nausea tightens in my chest.
I scoot by Carlos at the edge of the nurse’s station as he gathers his backpack, some tarp, and blankets, loads of blankets.
Guess he’ll be taking first shift on watch, up on the roof.
It’s a brutal job, but someone has to do it. Actually, a lot of us do. I’m one of them, since I avoid cooking and corpse clearing.
It gets baltic up there, so I don’t blame Carlos for taking a bunch of blankets to the roof with him. And it still might not be enough to ease the freezing cold.
I step over the row of backpacks, grab my own, then slide onto the mattress that Emily is sat on. Her knees are hiked, arms draped over them, and her head leaned back on the hard bite of the shelf.
First, I set the heavy, hand-held torch down on the floor. It’s free use. Anyone who needs it, takes it. And once I’m free of that weight, I reach down to the hip of my belt and flick on the CB.
The faint crackle of static is low, the volume down, and it lulls me into a light sleep.
Maybe I sleep for hours, maybe just minutes.
I only wake when the radio static breaks—and I’m like a new mother who wakes the moment her newborn starts crying, an instinct burrowed in me, but for the CB radio… and Bee.
I listen to the silence that breaks up the static.
Bee uses the code to communicate with me.
One moment of quiet, two seconds, then static. Then another moment of quiet, again for two seconds, then static.
She holds the push-to-talk button on her radio but doesn’t say anything.
‘Are you there?’
That’s what it means.
‘Is it safe to talk?’
It’s not like we can just start talking to each other through radio on a whim. For all we know, the other might not be somewhere safe, and the sound of a voice on radio could put us in some serious shit.
I clammer out of the makeshift bed as I scramble for the radio. I answer with the ‘wait’ code before I take the call in another room.
“We’re going to stay here for a few hours,” she tells me, her voice sheathed in crackle. The wind might be interfering with the transmission, but I manage to make out the location she gives me.
I spread the map out over a patient bed and circle the apartment block she’s taking refuge in.
“We’ll get some rest,” she goes on, “see what we can loot—and we’ll head back the moment we see any signs of them.”
Signs of the dark fae.
This is what we do, part of Bee’s masterplan. To get back to the other realm. Her lands. Her home.
We stalk them, the dark fae, their units made up of about a hundred or so warriors, moving and shifting around the continent.
We watch them, track them.
And learn them.
Each unit is led by a general, and the units don’t intercept, not since they came back for their Great Return two months ago, now.
It was strange. Their disappearance.
They marched by us, headed west to the coast, then a whole month passed before they came back.
And they came back to destroy.
Each of the units we’ve since tracked and stalked have their routes, their paths to follow. It weaves them through towns and cities and villages and farms, and they burn their way through them all.
Nothing is left alive or still-standing in their wake. Even stone burns with their flames.
Their way of doing things is… organised.
It’s meant to destroy—but flush out the survivors, too.
Two months we’ve been stalking them, and we’ve learned that each unit sticks to a section of a city or a town—like the charred northside of this city—and they burn it to rubble and ash, then hunt the blaze for any humans pushed out of the flaming buildings.
They slaughter the survivors.
Once the city is gone, and the smoke has cleared, and their magical otherworldly flames have eaten away at that whole section, the unit moves on. They never stray far from their sections, and they never meet with other units.
Except for the strays.
So that’s my goodbye to Bee, the end of our call.
“Watch out for strays.”
Strays are a constant threat. A wildcard out here.
Strays are the dark warriors separated from their units.
Sometimes a fae is separated from their unit, and as they find their way back, they sometimes stray off course.
Those fae are often drawn in by the scent of fresh blood, or humans lurking nearby, and they will indulge in some quick slaughters.
All that time ago, the dark armies marched by us on the road, and one only targeted us after Ramona shot that rifle. If she hadn’t shot, none of those warriors would have broken formation.
Then nothing.
For a while there, I really doubted they were coming back for their Great Return.
Foolery.
Delusion.
Wishful thinking.
Because they did return.
This time, not to snub us or pass us by.
This time, they came with eternal flames burning on torches they carry through the darkness, flames that stick to precise sections as they burn down human settlements.
Bee is insistent, we track them, monitor them—because it’s our only shot at an escape.
Sounds twisted. Backwards.
But Bee has her strategy, her plan: We follow, track, but avoid the dark fae all the way to the edge of this continent. The dark ones will eventually return to where they first arrived from.
And we need to be there for that.
We need to find out how they are getting back to Northern Europe from Canada. How are they crossing oceans?
That is why we follow them.
What I don’t understand is the motivation of the others in our group, why they follow the dark fae with us.
Our plan has only been shared in pieces with the others. Even Emily doesn’t know more than some fragments, that the purpose of us shadowing the dark ones is to find a way to the fae realm.
It’s crazy.
If I was one of the others, like the twins or Carlos or Gary, I wouldn’t be in this group. I wouldn’t follow two crazy ass bitches with a plan to track the fae.
I would be foolish and hide out on some farm, thinking I’m safe out there, maybe take shelter in the basement, then one day a unit would be upon me, and that would be my end.
So, as the door creaks open, and Carlos pokes his head inside, I look at him with consideration, a thought of how fucking crazy are you to follow the dark fae through the blackout with no good enough reason beyond ‘it’s safer behind them than in front’?
Freak.
The freak speaks: “I can’t stay awake another minute,” he says, and the puffiness of his eyes and the swallowed yawn that tenses his voice tells me he isn’t lying. “The others are out cold. Take watch?”
I nod, then fasten the CB back to my belt.
His gaze latches onto the radio. Then, he shifts his attention to the map sprawled out over the bed.
“She’s safe?”
Again, I nod and fold the map. “They’re crashing at some apartments before they head back.”
Carlos thins his mouth, a betrayal of his disappointment. He doesn’t like it.
I don’t, either.
But try telling Bee what to do.
This girl gets something in her mind, and nothing is going to stop her. She’s fucking formidable.
Me? I give up at a strong gust of wind.
The only thing keeping me going out here is Bee. Maybe I don’t think she can handle it if I gave into the occasional temptation of opting out.
I’m not suicidal by nature.
I’m just… tired.
Very, fucking tired.
Maybe I’m not as hopeful as she is that this will work, or that we will survive long enough to find our way back to Britain, then the light lands.
It all just sounds so fucking crazy to me.
Even all this time later, seeing the fae with my own eyes, living in their darkness, my mind rejects it.
Could be my brain’s way of self-preserving. If I disconnect from the truth, the facts, because they are too ugly to face, then I’m safe from myself for another day.
I wonder if I’m permanently detached now, broken in a way, or just officially soulless.
Those thoughts carry with me to the roof.
I’m relieved to find the little camp that Carlos set up for his shift: Tarp pitched like a tent by the door, layered with hospital blankets and a waterproof sleeping bag.
Not too shabby.
Better than being out in the open, that’s for sure.
I settle under the tarp, the sleeping bag wrapped around me, and I’m suddenly a toasty burrito.
Goddd, what I wouldn’t do for a burrito—and I don’t even like them. Tacos, nachos, curry, even pasta… I dislike them all, but I would scoff down any one of those in a heartbeat.
People think that’s weird—or they did before the blackout, before the apocalypse. But the biggest reaction I got was when they would find out how much I hate pizza.
It’s just mush. Layers of mush.
Gross.
Still, I would demolish any and all of that, stuff myself full with anything that isn’t canned.
Canned is all I know, now.
Once, I was vegan. A good one, too. Not healthy, never healthy, but I didn’t cheat—not ever.
Now, it’s either eat what I can get, or starve.
I’m sick of it all.
Fruit slices, peeled tomatoes, baby carrots, greyed asparagus, corned beef—yack—and once, dog food. That wasn’t canned. It was kibble, the hard stuff. Still didn’t go down easy.
The remnants of that memory shudder my shoulders, or maybe that’s the chill in the wind.
The tarp flaps around me.
I don’t even think about it, I just start digging through my backpack until I find my cigs, instinct and boredom motivating me.
I smoke. One, two, three.
The nicotine is starting to stir nausea through me, so I chuck the third cigarette at the snow and watch the red ember die, sizzle out.
I’m not a smoker, exactly. I mean, obviously I am, but not quite. It used to be an alcohol-exclusive thing.
Now, it’s the boredom that gets me.
That’s something I never would have considered about the end of days.
The fucking boredom.
The absolute silence of nothing to do.
Such little light to read for more than a few moments before headaches start to settle in; hiding in whispers and subdued conversation; goodbye vinyl collection, I will forever yearn for you; no more insect pinning, no more collecting butterflies and grasshoppers and crickets, taxidermizing them, then framing their preserved beauty; and no more television.
Oh god, how I miss Real Housewives. Beverly Hills, not the other ones.
But that’s all gone.
The overstimulation was suddenly cut down to nothingness.
Even before civilisation, society as we knew it, tribes of people lived wild, harsh lives. And even they fought boredom in creating the written word, or drawing and painting on stone walls, carving weapons, signing songs, making flutes and drums, telling stories and dancing.
We don’t have that.
We must be quiet.
All the time, quiet.
If we aren’t…
Well, it could another group that comes.
Wants what we have. Wants to use us for their own boredom cure.
Or it’s a stray. Or maybe at the wrong moment, a unit is marching upon us to burn us down, and we are in their section; all of a sudden they know exactly where we are, where to flush us out from.
They like that.
The fight, the chase, the thrill.
I’ve seen it.
At the edge of a section, through binoculars, some miles out of San Francisco, a couple of blocks away from where their flames travelled.
The faint ebb of that memory is knocking at my mind’s door, and maybe I don’t want to let it in.
Some people think they will fight in their last moments.
Don’t go gentle into that good night.
But that moment comes—that dark fae warrior snaps a neck like it’s little more than a fucking twig, then turns its gaze of death on someone…
Most people might be surprised how many freeze up when facing down a fae.
I’ve seen grown men wet themselves, silent tears streak dirty cheeks, mouths part for words that can’t be uttered.
I’ve seen more people freeze and fawn in the face of a dark fae than fight.
But all of them scream.
Every single one.
Even if it’s curt, in that final second of breath, they scream.
My cheeks swell around a harsh exhale.
I force the violence from my mind and rub my gloved hands over my face.
I’ve been out here a while now. Hours upon hours. The whistling winds are easing. Not stopping, never stopping, but at least calming down.
The cold lingers.
The upside of the cold air is what it does for my lungs. My breaths are smoother out here. Something in the concentrated chill, especially in the breeze, eases tension in my lungs.
I enjoy that while I have it.
I burn through time with the binoculars.
I see nothing out there, just darkness. But it doesn’t stop me from scanning the blackout for a flicker of a flame. One of those little fires always burning on the torches of the dark fae.
This city is only half burned, so more units will come for the rest.
That’s why Bee is out there, scouting.
We need enough time to move out of a section, but to stay close enough to track the unit to the next.
It gets hairy out here in the dark.
We sometimes lose the unit we’re tracking, and we have to find another one to follow, like now. The unit we were following has been and gone, destroyed half the city on their way, and we have lost them.
Bee will find them—or another to stalk.
So I wait, wait for the silence of the radio crackling at my hip. I can’t reach out to her. If she’s in a bind, hiding, and I start speaking through the CB, she’s done for.
All I can do is wait.
And in the isolation, I’m reminded of one glaring truth thrumming through me.
I’m so fucking scared.