I was under that car for what felt like hours. It might have just been the longest minutes of my life, and I lived through the apocalypse, the wars, the pestilence, all the changes in our world. It was the first time I ever feared, truly feared deep in my bones, that the dark fae had come and were about to slaughter us in the black street.
But time slipped away, and the sound of pounding faded. It carried off into the distance, until we couldn’t hear anything anymore, other than the harsh breaths coming from all over the street. Coming from us.
I rolled out from under the car. Scuffling sounded out from the darkness. We were moving, feeling our way through the darkness to find the one who screamed.
It was Mike. He was sprawled out in the middle of the road, a bloody, torn mess. Even with the faint light of the lantern, it was hard to stomach what he looked like. Mangled.
Tiffany couldn’t stomach it. She threw up whatever sparse food was in her stomach, and it splattered all over the road. Some drops hit my boots. I felt them like raindrops falling from the sky.
Mike was as good as dead. He wheezed, struggling to breath. Bones were broken all over his body. His wrists were shattered, his legs bent at odd angles.
“Horses,” he wheezed. “Horses.”
For a moment, I wondered if he was dreaming, or his mind had drifted away to a place without pain and only beauty. But then I realised, the pounding sound, the rattling windows, the scream and Mike’s mangled body. A stampede of horses.
“He’s been trampled,” said Lee. He was our bossiest survivor. Thought he ruled the tribe, fancied himself our alpha or what have you. But no one argued with him then. Because he was right.
Lee stepped up. He ‘put Mike out of his misery’. That was what he said to make us all feel better about the murder. The way he so easily sank his blade into Mike’s neck, like it was a knife simply cutting through butter. It was a dark thing. Darker than the air around us, darker than the shadowiest parts of me that I keep hidden.
Still, it wasn’t as though we could somehow take him with us. He was broken all over, his bones a shattered mess, and his wounds would kill him within the week if infection didn’t come faster. We knew what we had to do. Mike knew it too.
But it didn’t stop him begging to live.
I never understood why he was in the middle of the road. Why didn’t he run like the rest of us did? Now, I wonder if he was looking for Tiffany, trying to save her from what was coming.
Guess I’ll never know.
I side-step the memory and snub all talk of Mike. “How do you know it’s night?” I ask Tiffany instead. “You said nights like these.”
She gives me a half smile. Forced. But isn’t everything these days?
“Feels like night,” she says. I can hear the tears slicking her voice, and worry her voice might crack any moment. “Coming in here, getting our blankets and supplies out, bunkering down. Eating,” she adds and lifts the tin as if to punch her point. “How tired my bones feel. How I ache.” Her eyes gleam blue at me, like little gas-flames. “It’s night.”
I just shrug after a moment. She falls silent and eats her tomatoes until not even the juice is left in the tin. Then she gets out her sleeping bag, and falls away to the dark.
I bring my gaze back to my book.
As I flip through the bare pages, pencil in hand and ready to go, I’m faced with the usual barrier. Darkness. I can’t see the pages well enough, and even if I could, my mind goes blank. Inspiration died long ago, when the light was stolen from us. All I see when I close my eyes, when I open my eyes, is black. So I sketch dark grey lines down the page, lazily, and I think of my tins, mull over which one I’ll have tonight and wonder how long they will last if we don’t find more to loot before we leave the village.
We’ll spend a few days here.
We’ve been travelling for a week now. We’re all exhausted. Our bones and muscles ache for rest. So we must rest, loot and scavenge what we can before we move on.
It’ll be another small village or even a farmhouse that we move onto next. Before we go, we always check the maps, mark our location, and find the closest isolated place. It has to be isolated. Cities and towns are too large—too much of a target of the dark fae. It’s a sure way to end up dead, burning down to ruins.
I can’t focus. Rarely can these days.
I slam my book shut and drop it into my open bag. It lands with a thud. With a swipe, I lift the closest tin onto my lap and peel open the metal lid. Beans. I eat it with my fingers, bent to scoop up as much as I can hold. I even lick as much of it clean as I can without cutting my tongue.
By the time I’m done, most of the others are asleep. The silence is broken by deep, long breaths and the occasional rustle of a sleeping bag.
Phil, at the far end of our little circle, reads a magazine by the lantern perched beside him. He’s our oldest. His cane is
