Once, she feared the dead like no other.

They were rabid. They were monsters.

But time passed her by.

And then, she wondered how peaceful it would be to join them.

Because the living were the rabid ones, not the dead.

And as for herself? Well…

She was one of the monsters, wasn’t she?

----------------------------------------

“L-Lee…? Did you have to kill those men?”

Snow was Hell’s biting plague.

To her skin, such snowfall sank like glass the more it ravaged the horizon. Her shoes scuffed across that biting plague; she felt it gnaw at her, teethe into her heels. Then there was the gore dressed down her body. The smell of blood was rabid off her. It stained her clothes, leeched onto her flesh. The gore did little to warm her, but it was enough of a cloak.

Amidst her fogged mind, a white static, there was little to truly damn the girl.

Or little to forsake her, at least, beyond what she was.

His eyes were shot by remorse, she remembered—unequivocally strewn by fear. The world seemed to have held its breath for his sake.

Like the dead who roamed the world alongside her, there was nothing that could. Her mind swayed. Her body swung to another rhythm. There were aches. Her feet throbbed for sleep. She was weighed down by the lone pistol secured at her waist—a grave remnant of days past. There was her shoulder too, and her mouth. One scorched to the muse of ice. As for the other…

Her mouth recalled where the barrel had kissed her its intended farewell. A charge haunted her. One not yet ignited.

She remembered, too, how slow his words had been. Thoughtful as always, spoken with care. But, to the world’s held breath, his strummed vowels sunk deeper than he could’ve ever fathomed. They burrowed the weight of the world down her shoulders. Wormed in place to the shell of her ears. And, as the days grew old and weary, and the world fell around them, and its held breath suffocated itself, those words would fade.

Because they were the wise words of a dead man. Because she was still alive, and he was not.

Her shoes abraded across a stride, down a frigid patch of asphalt. Did so to memory’s fleeting tune.

There was only so much she could cling to. Recollection was nothing but a humble tote bag, after all. So, only the better, sweeter memories were kept safe…

The ones at a motel, mainly, where they were stitched together by candlelight, and woven soundly by sheets and embedded cigarette ash.

Those sweeter memories went rotten long ago. All there was left, within that snow, were his wise, dead words. Shards which clipped her strides. Fallen parasites they were just as well, the more snow stole her complexion away.

“Did you have to kill those men?”

Those shards—the parasites—festered to the muse of ice. Her shoulder was an agony, and she didn’t know what was worse, the fact that it was a rifleman’s puncture, or the fact that…the bullet was hardly the Devil of it. The shards ate through the gore, ignored the jacket. They desolated. They dulled her mind’s eye to slow, rattled drawls of conscious thought. All the girl knew, barely, was the road she was on, and the ways she lagged behind herself.

A phantom amongst the dead, roaming wherever her intuition would wrench her.

…of course, there was the life she kept safe in her arms, deep against her chest. He was safe. Secure.

And as warm as she could manage.

There was that, at least. It wasn’t as though the life was enough to soothe her mind, however. So she roamed. The most she could grasp were the whispers of her fractured mentality.

“Did you have to kill those men?”

Over and over and over again.

A ghost of herself. Perhaps. This sounded like a girl not far younger than what she had grown to, anyway. She couldn’t quite recognize her.

“Did you have to kill those men?”

Her recollection… It was waning. Those sour memories revolted her mind’s eye.

“Did you have to kill those men?”

Over and over. And every time, Lee backed away. One step, then two, then three. Four. Further into the shadows. Away from her.

The world was suffocating.

“Did you have to kill…?”

Because he was a dead man. She was alive, he was not.

A sick mantra that hewn his wise words with ease, as it were.

He was a dead man. She was alive. There was dead. Then alive. Dead. Alive. Human. And then not…

“Did you…?”

She was alive. It had been days since that smoking gun was pocketed. Her hands were flecked by his blood. Her face as well.

Did you, Clementine?

The girl tripped. She lurched over the break in asphalt, staggered for balance, before the life in her arms fidgeted.

Her eyes snapped to him where he was, in his blanket. His own peered at her. She saw a vivacity. Those dark eyes of his, they were truly bright. The white static ebbed away. There was no ignoring her maternal instinct.

The world sharpened. There was clarity, and with that clarity came an agonizing harmony:

Her feet ached. Her mouth burned.

Her shoulder writhed of frostbite.

Clementine managed a pained, cracked smile. It didn’t reach her eyes. It barely crossed her cheeks. She choked on a feeble kind of sob, before her cold lips melted onto his warm crown.

“We’ll be okay…” she whispered, ingrained within another mantra, a somber one, that she’d yet to crawl out of. “A.J…, w-we’ll be okay…”

His dark, truly bright, brilliant eyes held her still for a moment. Consoled her. Had Clementine forget.

For that moment, though. A mere lapse in time.

Because snowfall was Hell’s plague. It slashed down her cheeks to remind her of everything again. So she walked.

Did you have to?

The hellscape around her was a vast, dead acreage. Trees were looming. The cars were decaying. And across the horizon, a great shadow. It spurned a dreadful hope.

So Clementine meandered through. Stepped over the bodies, around the abandoned cars.

The snow upon this land was scarcely white. There were more reds, and darks, and everything between. Some rotted above the surface. Most were a decomposing reality just beneath, and wore snow as twining, raw layers. As raw flesh, marred by the truth of survival:

You don’t.

There’s fumbling for that last knock into the dead’s jaw. There’s the scrounge whenever a last bullet is lost. The bleating wail in the one hope that somebody, anybody, would just fall from the clouds and be their savior.

It only ever ends one way. Called it survival’s fallacy.

Across that acreage, there were black pillars erected. In the blur, their arms were wide; they did not shed their light for her. They reached far into the winter, above her head. At the base of one, a truck had lunged itself into its pole. The driver’s body was sagged in the chair. The airbag was wilted across.

She snagged her reflection in its broken windshield.

“My baby, my doll. You have the sun in your eyes. Who wouldn’t want to play with you?”

Clementine found not the dead walking, but a ghost roaming. Her ballcap was a fog in color. There was barely the blue she cherished. Her black hair beneath was strewn with ice. Her face, gaunt in hunger and insomnia’s union, and twinged by hypothermia.

Then…, her eyes.

There wasn’t a trace of life. Dull instead. Winter had stolen its yellow. Left her with a… A bleak hazel.

“You’re the life of everyone’s day!”

A lie. It had been a lie gifted to her from… Who had said that? An uncle, was it? Her father?

…Lee?

She didn’t know. Couldn’t, the longer she rummaged for his face.

Clementine tore herself away. She kept A.J close to her heart, away from her shoulder. The snow, the ice, still festered. Threatened to spread. Down her arm, for her spine, it threatened to claim her whole.

And she thought of the little girl—the one that asked Lee why? Asked how could you?

It was the little girl who asked the same of Clementine in that hour.

Did you have to kill him? Did you?

Her weary bones ached, and her wounds begged to be licked clean. So, she slowed in her stride. Meandered to a nearby lamppost. The baby struggled in her arms; a last drone of wind clipped them both. Clementine sagged against the pole, only to flinch away from its scalding frost.

She urged her weary bones for a few more strides, before another dozen. They complied. It was agony…

Winter’s haze cleared as she encroached. The bill to her ballcap followed her eyes. Death and its frigid rot swept for the girl’s nose.

HOWES

HARDWARE

Clementine never could decide what that sign meant for her. It may have been a blessing, or the Devil in sheep’s clothing.

It was a place where the world held its breath, anyway. Just as it would wherever she wandered.

To the point of suffocation, for Clementine never wanted to answer the little girl.

∇ ∇ ∇

Moved to a ceaseless rhythm, that train of hers. It strolled across the landscape, blurred it all to its desire. The breeze blew past as wind. In harmony to the ceaseless rhythm were the murmurs of the car’s flooring, then drum of the engine as the train worked its wheels. The tracks themselves weren’t quite what she thought. They were almost this husky timbre.

Clementine sat in the train-car’s mouth. Her legs dangled over the edge, and she played with the hem to her dress. Mused over its yellow. Because the dress was white once, though pure cloth never did last anymore. The best the world had was snow, and even then, decay painted the white demonstrably so.

Behind her, the flooring groaned. It had been a soft gesture, before he asked, “You loved this train, didn’t you?”

Clementine turned to face Lee. He smiled down at her as he shuffled himself beside. “Yeah. It was the first train I ever rode on…” Her eyes trailed. She thumbed over a loose stitch. “I just found another one today.”

“I remember you mentioned that…” Lee swayed his legs. His voice was a warmly tune. “Does this one you just found move?”

She shook her head. “No. Half of it’s off the tracks, and I think someone drove off with the engine and some other cars.”

“I see.”

The train wound itself down a curve. The trees waved as the two went by. Clementine felt his eyes before Lee’s hand graced her shoulder. She winced, and she bit away the urge to recoil as it struck. He soothed the ache in her shoulder. Clementine, however, didn’t have the heart to tell him the frostbite. How it grew. Then how it festered.

“It’s been a while since we’ve talked like this. You have been…distant.” She caught him by his lingered eye. There was always a knowingness to Lee. “This isn’t the RV either.”

It likely was the professor in him. “No.” Lee knew a lot of things, and naturally, he professed them.

Lee nodded. He watched the distant cityscape. “You…moved on from that. But this train…” He watched her. “Do you get tired of it, meeting me here every time now?”

“Never.”

It was an honest answer.

Clementine heard his smile. Allowed him to pull her close, and wrap his arm around her shoulders.

Her father was a compassionate man, in his own way. He never embraced for long. The man favored gifts and words instead… Something to his love language, as her mother praised once. So instead of hugs, or the soft pinch on her cheek, Clementine had her gifts, and she had her words. Which worked well—she was her father’s daughter. And she liked to…collect things, and keep herself well-read.

It was just…

She did long for those hugs, or the odd soft pinch, from her father.

Lee gave her the former tenfold. He was a compassionate man as well.

“I want…to be back here. With you.” Clementine frowned. The wonderment of it all reminded her that…this was a fantasy. “For— For real.” And she had meant to leave her fantasies behind, in her treehouse.

“I understand, sweet pea. I understand.” His sigh was grim. “A lot has happened since I left, hasn’t there?”

Had Clementine forlorn. Because she knew of better days, where there were people, and people did right by her. Lee…was the last of them. And there was no one else, aside for fantasy.

Her stare hardened. It bloomed a stark maturity that didn’t belong on her face, at that age.

“I’ve changed, Lee…”

“And I would expect you to.” Lee hummed, nodded again. “It’s okay, Clementine. That…is a part of life. You can’t change it.”

At another hour, or in another day, she may have had tears to shed. There were none. “You don’t understand.” It may have been her way in conserving the water. Or, the numbing had become too vast for her eyes. “I-I’ve changed.” Still, she urged for him to know. Silently begged for Lee to know everything: “I— I tried to be like you. Tried to…tell them to stop fighting, but they just…never did. None of them listened. Acted like…they didn’t hear.” She frowned again. The stark maturity flourished. “They acted like they were the children.”

Lee’s smile, and the laugh along with it, were knowing. And bitter as well. “That is…more common of a thing than it should, isn’t it?”

His hand squeezed her shoulder, then soothed down her arm. She leaned into him and eyed his other hand. “Living at the motel was like that,” Clementine murmured.

“It was.”

“I tried to be like you, Lee. Honest. I just couldn’t.”

Again, he nodded. The kind a wise man would. “And that’s okay too. We were never the same people, Clem.” He was a wise man. Lee knew his way around words. He never spoke to her as though she couldn’t understand, nor read his lips. “Not even back then, when we were here on this train. Not even at that motor inn.” Lee watched the landscape cross into woodlands. “You kept a lot of yourself…close to heart. You were quiet, minded your words, but you knew…exactly how to speak of yourself, as you wanted.”

Deep in her chest, her heart panged. “I’m sorry.”

“No, Clem. That is nothing to be sorry for.” He paused, as though to wait. Then, “Come here, sweet pea.”

Wrapped around her. Embraced Clementine whole.

His laugh was warm against her.

“Look at you… You’ve grown!”

She peeled herself back. Looked down at her jeans, then the jacket. There was aged gore across her, stained from the herds she slipped through. Clementine dipped her ballcap’s bill away from him. “I changed, Lee…”

“Of course you did.”

The winds began to chip down the train. There was no snow. The sun was still high above.

Yet…, Clementine knew it lurked where she ought not to look. And she felt where she couldn’t pry away her flesh; in her shoulder, it seethed to winter’s graze.

“You never told me what it was like to murder.”

Lee hesitated. Paused in his soothing hand. “I…” He resumed, as gently as he could. “I told you…how it’s something you can’t take back. It is…an act never worth the price.”

“You never told me the price.” Clementine ran her hand down the other arm. Her fingertips scorned across the fresh ravine. The stitching—the fishing wire—had been a bane to pull out. “You never…prepared me for it.”

“Clementine…, sweet p—”

“I killed Kenny.”

The train’s melody sank to a hollow drone. “In the snow. He was distraught. H-He—” Her throat clotted. A cold wrath singed. “I…hated him, Lee… I-I hated our friend. S-So I killed him… And it wasn’t— It wasn’t like you said.” Clementine whimpered, “N-Not at all.” Bit down on her recoil. “It wasn’t…an a-anger.It wasn’t blinding.” Found it to be a daunting thing, within the man’s embrace.

He didn’t answer. Didn’t rightly know how to.

“There was…fr-frost. And I— I-I see it all. I s-see it all, Lee…!”

Lee then found his words, the longer the trees wilted, and their leaves decayed upon the ground. “The world’s not right, Clem… I’m sorry.” He sighed, and the air fogged to him. “It mangles us until we’re done with.”

She turned to Lee.

There was a sheen to his eyes. Of honesty. Death followed.

“Do y-you… Do you…s-still love me?” Clementine searched them anyway. Felt her eyes burn the tears she thought she didn’t have. “E-Even though I— I-I…?”

“Of course.” The sheen grew drab. And though he smiled, Lee fell to a gaunt shade. “Of course I do, sweet pea…” A bleak hue of color—so unlike the strength he once wore. “I understand. I know what it is you feel.” Clementine waited. She knew that he was conjuring a story of his. One she vaguely remembered, at that: “My pops, when I was around your age, he said that being human isn’t in the things you do, but in the things you feel.”

Clementine swallowed. “…f-feel?”

“You’re not a monster, Clementine… You still feel even after doing a terrible, terrible thing.”

His arm sloughed away. Flung from the train, into the abyss.

“Lee? Lee, no, don’t—!”

“It’s okay. It’s okay…” The rest of him began to fall behind. His voice, she heard Lee wane. “You got that boy, now.”

The sight of him boiled her tears. She snatched after the remnants of the wise man. “L-Lee? Don’t— You can’t leave!” Resentment, had it been?

“Go and live, sweet pea. For that boy, and yourself. Go and live…”

“Don’t you f-fucking leave me again! You— Y-You can’t…!”

Had to have been. Her voice never tore like that for anyone else. It didn’t break just past her teeth, nor did it surge from her throat.

“LEE!”

Clementine snapped awake as thunder bellowed through the woodland. Her eyes navigated the shadows and grasped after the day prior. There were booths and tables—set in two rows—, and then the windows on either side of the train-car. It had been a stroke of sheer luck. Howe’s Hardware had the last pamphlet stocked in a shelf, and that led her to a station many, many miles south. Then this train, a mere day farther.

She gnawed her cheek, then steadied her hand. Clementine set aside the knife she’d slept with. Its grip was a comfort, only second to the baby sat beside her. Still, however, she sought to quell what rattled her.

There wouldn’t be waking to paranoia any longer. At least, not over who the last haven invited.

Slipping away from the family as they broke into Howe’s was the best she could manage. Because the haven…was less of one, more of a spiral to plummet through.

This train-car reminded her of a time before Hell. Clementine couldn’t quite place it—if it had been reminiscent of her grandparents, or something she watched on television. Either way, it was another comfort. The dark wood furnishings… The green, floral carpets—in the shade of pine…

There was even a twinge to the air. Cigarettes.

Oddly enough, though, before the world fell, she would’ve loathed it. Squirmed wherever she sat in the cabin.

Time changed her, however. Life after the motel…

Out of anything, it soothed her. Not enough to sleep. Clementine couldn’t fathom how she could achieve such a thing again.

The train-car’s musk—of rot and earth, lathered over cigarettes—mused a sympathy. Though she couldn’t sleep, the rolling thunder was like the train’s rocking lullaby. In the day before, where she stepped inside, inhaled the dust, and the train lit for her, that had been another lullaby. To have someone finally in its sanctum breathed life into the space—gave the cabin a reason to nurture.

Clementine planned to leave in a day, maybe two, after she studied the pamphlet’s map a little bit more. The last passengers had also left books behind. Some of those, she may grace her way through…

Her jacket’s collar tugged. Clementine met him by his wide stare. A.J smiled. “Keeping an eye on the storm, goofball?” She looked out the windows again. Watched the hail as it pelted the gravel on either side of the train. “It sounds bad, doesn’t it?”

A.J’s mumble soared to a scream once lightning struck, and was trailed by a devastating clap of thunder. It was close. Just in the woods. Too close for either of their liking.

Clementine rocked A.J and whispered, “It’s okay, A.J… We’re okay. We’re okay,” and pecked his forehead. She looked out into the woods again. Saw the silhouettes that the light had illuminated. She realized that this was the first storm A.J would ever watch, and that it would be far from a lullaby. The times before—the few times—were spent huddled in the dark corners of any building they found. “It was just lightning. It happens sometimes,” she assured. “As long as we’re under something and dry, we’ll be safe.”

A.J whined. Perhaps he heard Clementine’s anxiety: she knew that metal wasn’t safe for anything electrical, and trains… Well, they were made of metal. And they were on rods made of nothing else. She just hoped whoever designed them knew that and worked around the lightning, because she wasn’t about to abandon the only shelter around for trees and walkers.

Her collar tugged again. She looked down and hissed, “Hey, don’t chew on that!” Clementine pulled the collar from his mouth. She dug through her backpack beside her. “Where’s…?” But found nothing. “Oh.” She scowled. And remembered the stupid walker that tore open her bag, stealing half of everything with it. “…right.” Including all of A.J’s toys.

Clementine sighed. He tugged the collar, and teethed. It was the most she could do, allow A.J to chew on her clothes, in her arms, away from the lightning.

It was the most because she wasn’t a wise man. She didn’t know better than that.

Her spirits deflated. She nestled A.J close to her heart. And as the storm ripped across the hellscape outside, Clementine could only murmur a ghost of her dream:

“Lee…”

[Away From Ice]

(she thought eight months)

This one had been conscious…

Getting to the ranch house had been the equivalent to an odyssey through the first ring of Hell, but it was manageable. The walkers that littered the abandoned pastures were easy pickings for her knife. The ones inside, even more so; they were fragile creatures—not emaciated, but sickly. They were her size, as well. Enough of their faces had yet to rot away. Kids. Those ones had been kids.

But this one. The conscious.

This gargantuan of a walker had been reading. And by the time she had realized, it was already lurking within the doorway. Its stature engulfed the room behind it, shrouded the space in black, and left its dead eyes to glow as somber moons.

Clementine recoiled the moment it stepped through the door. The walker ducked beneath the doorframe with precision. It still had the living’s grace.

…but then, the dust began to settle. Her heart washed behind her ears.

There was nothing but mulch, the house’s grime, then the gargantuan’s blood down her arms. Clementine knocked her head back to the wall, before she felt the rug beside her, for the ballcap. Her shoulder throbbed from where the walker swung its bodyweight. The opposite leg panged, and she debated whether or not she regretted the decision to launch the desk at it.

The reflex saved her life, of course. But it still hurt like a bitch.

Clementine slipped the ballcap back on. She numbly stared at the knife in her hand. The blade was snapped. This walker had bones so thick, it snapped her knife.

She tossed the blade aside.

Her bitter eyes landed on the dead man.

Enough of the room had settled. The aftershock of this walker’s fall still hummed beneath her palms, though she could breathe, and she saw the dead for what it once was.

He hadn’t been dead for long. By smell alone, it’d been a week or two. The kids downstairs were the same story, yet those…looked to have been decaying for far longer.

Another week. Maybe a mere few days. Or, this ranch had watched them wither away before the dead claimed them all.

It didn’t take long for Clementine to realize what happened there, and knew that the living couldn’t stay in the house for long. Something plagued it. The devastation around the ranch told the story, and those kids downstairs were, indeed, sickly. Feverish, almost, beneath the ghastly layer of death. The dark rings around their eyes were something else. Their faces recalled their last moments—told her that they had been waiting.

There was no staying. Yet, she hoped the house was kind enough to leave goods behind for the road.

Clementine climbed to her feet, staggered a step, before she meandered to the dead man’s feet.

Bodies never fell the way she’d anticipate. The dead always wore the living’s last face. There was a guilt scribed across the man in mourning. The tears he shed still stained him. His eyes—before she managed to batter a chair leg across them—had been downcast. She couldn’t find a way to see the walker in him any longer. He wore a bright gage in his ears—a yellow, or a green—, and his raven hair was a thick, healthy bounty woven to one braid.

Her mouth throbbed a likeminded agony. She laid her eyes on where his last bullet punctured him. There was an exit wound—along the crux of his jaw and neck. Its entry…

Clementine soothed her neck.

The gun was a good one, though its ammunition would be a rarity.

She lingered for longer than intended. Roamed to the book left open on the floor. Clementine picked it up, then read the front cover. Her hum was light. Sleeping Beauty. And at the bottom, the Disney insignia. “I think…this is yours,” she murmured, slipping the book in the man’s large hand. She had it tucked soundly against his chest.

Before she could leave, her eyes followed the lines down the arms. Wondered if there were more. Wondered if he’d gotten caught in something, or if these were intentional. Self-inflected. Clementine shivered and shied herself from the body. Her eyes found the bullet wound in his head, again, and they stayed for a minute. She held her shoulder, absentminded, then turned away.

The walker was a monster, so she put it down.

But the man before, he was not. She knew that much. So, Clementine closed the bedroom door behind her. Left the man to rest in peace.

She found the bathroom. Discovered how the man took care of the kids. Washed them with wet rags and pails. Probably in the bath, to rinse away grime the best he could. In the pails, the water frothed of dust, and the rags were hardly damp, but it would be enough. Clementine washed her hands, dried them, and stepped into the hall. She picked up her pistol—the one that the walker had smacked from her grasp.

Clementine meandered further down the hallway, to another closed door. She nudged it open—the handle didn’t work—and found A.J where she left him: on the bed with wide, bright eyes and a growing smile. He hopped in his seat and raised his arms.

She arched a brow, set her hands on either hip. The smile she brandished was quiet—the best she knew those days. “Is this a good room, A.J?” Clementine asked. A.J giggled and kicked his feet. He then sunk to his stomach and pointed. Curiously, she crouched beside the bed. “What’s there, goofball?”

“Aah.”

“Did you see something when we came in here?”

He paused, then subtly nodded. Clementine lifted the hem of the bedcurtain and—

She smiled. “A trunk…! You did find something, A.J!” Clementine palmed his cheek. He leaned into the affection. “You’ll make a good scavenger.”

His smile was as bright as his eyes.

“Alright…” Clementine unbuckled the latch and pulled it open. And the world paused. The sun, through the clouds, beamed. “Holy shit, A.J. Look at all this!”

Food. There was food. And a thick blanket. Small clothes. Pictures. Books. Bottles. A flask. Water. Boots…

In the back of her mind, she saw the man collect these for the sickly.

(Thanked him as well. Hoped his soul knew his charity survived.)

Clementine grinned. She sat herself comfortably, set down the pistol, unshouldered her backpack, and eyed A.J. “What do you think, kiddo…? Should we go through this stuff?”

His giggle pitched in her ears. He said enough.

She started with the blanket. Tucked it away to her backpack. Same with some of the books—novels, all of them. Once the water was at hand, A.J hopped again. Quite violently. “Careful, we don’t need you falling,” she chided. “But do you want some?”

“Aah! A-Aah!” His hands flexed for it. “Aah.”

Clementine sifted around the blanket, and she grabbed one of the few things they had: his sippy-cup. It had been a Godsend the instant she recognized the thing. And as she filled the Godsend with its water, A.J practically vibrated on the bed. “Okay, A.J. Here you go. Here’s your water—now quit with the hopping.” His answer was a squeak, and with his drink at hand, there was nothing but a quiet, starved gratitude.

She shook her head. Her grin was a humored one. “Goofball…”

Her attention was promptly bought by the trunk. As she rifled through its contents, Clementine kept herself away from the pictures, kept them in place, and recognized the one, healthy braid. The man before the walker had a nice smile. Brotherly… He reminded her of good people. The boots and denim were pulled out. “…these clothes might fit you.” Clementine heard his silent question, and she said, “Finish your water, A.J. We’ll check after you’re done. W—” Her eyes caught the food again—a bag of chips in particular. “Actually, maybe pace that water out a little bit more. We can eat a little bit.”

Clementine scanned the label. “Salt and…vinegar chips… These might be stale— Yeah… The date’s passed a while ago.” She opened it with bright eyes peered over her shoulder. “Well, they don’t look horrible… Maybe a little brown.” A chip was sampled. Which felt like cud, tasted like…vinegar pudge.

With a shrug, however, she said, “It’s better than nothing, A.J. It’ll have to do.” Another chip, now offered to the baby. “Try it.”

He gnawed the chip, and his fingers, as the sippy-cup sagged in his other hand. A.J chewed, then paused, then screwed his face tight.

“Is it too sour for you?”

“Aah! Aah!”

“Okay, okay! You like it! Got it!” Clementine kept a small handful for herself and laid the bag on the bed. “There you go. Eat while I pack the rest of this.”

A.J chirped.

Jerky. Crackers. Every packaged food not yet opened was packed away. She’d throw out what went bad later. The remaining water bottles were next. Her eyes landed on the boots. Black with thick soles, meant to snag a grip—half of Clementine wanted no part of them. They were too big. Surely.

But, it didn’t hurt to try. The Converse she wore were falling apart at the seams, and as she compared the boots by eye alone, she wondered how too big they really were.

Clementine pulled off the left Converse for the boot. Her foot slipped inside, and when she stood, there was room to stretch her toes. Room to grow.

“Huh.” Her smile was just short of beaming. “Bet if I tightened the laces on these and found thicker socks, it’ll work.” A.J glanced from his food and watched the boots. Already, the mess across his face would’ve fed another orphan. Clementine, the other orphan, sighed.

She got to work with the boots. The Converse were tossed aside, and with her own mouthful swallowed down, the boots were tied securely. Content with her prize, Clementine glanced into the trunk. There wasn’t much left: only the pictures, and some other fabrics, then a flask.

She mulled over the fabrics as makeshift bandages, whenever the time came… Though her eyes were fixed onto the sheen across the flask. …for the water, might as well. Clementine reached for it, forgot the fabrics.

The flask was full. A third of the way.

Clementine hesitated. Her curiosity unveiled itself, and reminded her of a distant time. That of a pylon, and a cellar.

A lifetime ago…

Water. She needed the water. An irk within chastised the girl. But Clementine eyed the flask. Her curiosity spilled over, and with it, she recalled the way liquor burned warm, and how it had a way in nulling the grown to sleep. She uncapped its lid. Then tentatively, Clementine inhaled its lip.

Recoiled. Its air singed her.

To the baby’s anxious eye, from atop the bed, she eased for A.J to settle. Smiled and murmured, “It’s definitely not water, A.J. So we won’t—”

Again, there was that same hesitation. Clementine doubted herself, and so too the inkling to put it back. It rivaled an instinct of hers, however. A newborn one.

She capped the flask. Slipped it into the maw of her backpack.

And pushed it then, to the back of her mind. It was easier that way.

“Come on, A.J. Let’s see about these clothes on you.”

A.J watched her with chips across his face, and more up his arms. Down them as well. Clementine shook her head again, then reached for a bandana she’d left in the trunk. “How about—” she wiped his cheeks, then his arms— “we don’t leave that there.” After a thought, the bandana was tied around his neck. A.J played with its hem, then giggled. Clementine grabbed the rest of it. A denim—

“Oh. Even better.” Overalls. Not pants like she assumed, but overalls.

It took a moment with A.J’s bright eyes never leaving her, and Clementine pulling the legs he kept kicking through the pants. A few struck her knuckles. Two warning glares were enough to calm the baby. Once the last button was done, Clementine managed that beaming smile. “You look like a little farmer!” she chuckled quietly.

A.J threw his arms up.

Clementine couldn’t help but to mirror the boy.

Her smile beamed to the sun’s muse. The clouds pried the light away.

Because.

Oh God.

Another light plundered. A white one. Blinding, a ghoul’s complexion, and with it, she heard a triad’s timbre—the growl of their engines, and they snaked across the ranch. The tires they wore seethed in the dirt, gashed through the grassland.

“Fuck…” she breathed. Clementine darted to the window. Plastered herself against the wall. With a covert eye, she spared a glance down. Three men, trudging through the mulch. Their eyes were trained on the porch, for the front door. “A—”

She heard him topple. Clementine ripped herself from the window and found A.J, on the floor, stumbling for balance before landing on his hands and knees. He watched her with his bright eyes. “Alvin! I said stay on the bed!” Clementine snapped. A.J whined. He tried again, and he managed his first few strides.

There was no time to console him. Nor for her to remark the feat.

Anxiety bled off her. Collecting everything for the backpack was swift work, and without a second to lose, Clementine swiped her pistol and hoisted A.J—both in one fluid rhythm. She scampered down the hall and rattled down the stairs. As Clementine snatched the backdoor’s handle, she heard the men at the front, bewildered by the couch she’d overturned as a barricade.

Clementine fled.

She escaped to the woods. Her strides, winding around nature, were panicked as much as they were calculated. Every lunge forward was to the beat of A.J’s heart—or what she felt with him slung in her arms. Each hurtle over roots tangled together, as an echo of his sharp breaths.

It wasn’t until the house was far behind, but a mere spark of color between the trees, did Clementine look back.

She stood in silence. Heard no motor. Saw no headlights.

“We lost them again, A.J…” she murmured quietly. “In record time, too. I don’t think they saw us this time.”

“Aah…” A.J mumbled.

Clementine nodded. She dipped the bill of her cap down. “We have to hide, A.J. It’ll be dark soon… And tomorrow, we’ll make a break back for the railroads. Get out of this place…”

His response was a fleeting hum. She turned away from the house. She didn’t think about what other gifts it had. The gifts she left behind.

It was easier to think that Clementine’s luck wasn’t all cashed in.

That there was some luck to spare. For the future.

With all her hope, there had to be.

…her pessimism reminded her that lucky girls weren’t followed by grown men day after day.

∇ ∇ ∇

Those boots had been a lifesaver.

After hours of walking, ditching paths for other paths, they gave Clementine the stability which her old shoes couldn’t provide. She didn’t trip, not through her urgency to lose the men. And every so often, she would hear them—motorcycles, snarling across a distant landscape.

The boots gave her stability, but moreover, they gave her warmth.

Winter wouldn’t come for months. Clementine knew that. Yet, it was as though this hellscape wanted nothing more than to remind her what cold felt like. The brisk air, it hung to ignore the sun, and the morning dew stuck until the evening as frost. Deep in her shoulder, where A.J nestled his weary head, Clementine felt her flesh scathe to memory. Frostbite whittled its fangs like needles. It demanded of her a scar to never quite heal…

There was no…hating the cold, and its season.

Acrimony meant far, far more than hatred.

One thought itself like fire. The other was the fire’s smoke, and the violent scars it left behind. Hatred was a lashing. The welting skins, however, and the strange array of colors before a scalding fever, an infection’s damnation—that was acrimony. A silent beast that knew how to bide its time, and knew how to drag it behind its heel.

Clementine didn’t know, exactly, she could welt winter’s hide, and if there would be any blooming colors at all. What fever would there be…? How could anyone damn a force of nature…?

There was…something stirring, deep within her shoulder. She ran her tongue across her mouth—felt where the pistol branded her sins.

Nothing.

There was nothing a girl could do to a forsaken world.

Clementine dug her heels into the earth, and kept her arms wrapped around the cradled baby. She paused, then crouched. Her eyes scanned down the guard-rail to a long, frigid road just beside it. The trees were green; they were nice. Pleasant, dare she thought. The sky was a brooding slate of grey. The road, black and gleamed with morning frost. And the liens dashed down its backbone, the yellow, it laid as a sharp contrast. Reminded her that, in a world scorned to frigidity and its liking, there would be warmth.

The boots weren’t enough, however. A.J, her boy, was indeed the brightest sun, but he, too, needed it. He too needed the warmth which could envelope them both whole. Nowhere close by her, but it was somewhere. Out there…

Somewhere. Anywhere— it had to be.

A.J crooned in her arms. Her kiss above his ear soothed him, for the hour.

He was…the only soul alive Clementine adored. He had been the brightest sun born in winter. His eyes held the world. The laughs that mellowed from him reminded her of the jokes she forgot to crave, and the banters between another as well. She knew that such a thing—banter—was a dead tradition. The living were far worse than the dead. One needed to be put down or avoided. As for the other…, avoided as well, but swiftly laid to rest in the end—like any animal.

And that’s what walkers were, weren’t they? A new breed.

Clementine stroked A.J’s back the more he shifted, and she eased a fumbled vowel to a slow, gradual silence. “It’s okay, A.J… We’ll find somewhere for you to sleep soon.” The insomnia of her eyes learned to never promise for her own.

“Aah…” he mumbled.

“Yeah. We will,” Clementine cooed.

Once she was sure she couldn’t hear any motorcycle engine, she crossed the road. As she did, Clementine saw that the woodland on the other side was thin.

Come to find, a gas station.

She meandered through the trees and met the station’s parking lot. It wasn’t what she hoped. It wasn’t the railroad Clementine kept herself on, nor a busy maze of buildings to hide in, but it would do. For the night, at least.

There was only one car. A small van with its roof caved-in.

The hazel in her eyes scanned the gas station’s overhang and read the sign with furrowed brows:

hell

A.J whined into her shoulder, and as Clementine stroked his back, absentminded, her curiosity strafed around the car. A large S laid as a broken spine, dug into the windshield. She looked up at the overhang again. A.J mumbled and pointed at the car, and she said, “Yeah, it fell, A.J. This gas station looks like it was one of the newer ones too…”

She took another few steps, and then—

“Oh.”

A.J squealed into her ear, and Clementine stroked his back another time. “It’s okay, A.J. He’s dead.”

Just before the hood, there was a man. His body, laid in that spot before winter fell, she knew. Shot in the head, and judging from the axe tight in his hand, he wasn’t the kind that rose. The man was never given the chance to.

Clementine moved away from him. “It’s okay, A.J. That’s just what happens to people when they die.”

“A-Aah…?”

“Your body doesn’t stop changing until it’s just bone. He’s not going to hurt us,” she assured. Clementine lingered, then thought to pry the axe from his hand. Rigor mortis had its word. She hissed air, yanked on the handle with a boot square on the body’s chest. It broke free. Bone sprayed over her shoulder.

Clementine weighed it before a couple of lazy swings. “It’s a little loose, A.J…, but it’ll be okay for now.” The baby stared at the axe. “It’s to replace the knife, A.J. I broke it at the house.”

“…aah.”

Her eyes found the front doors, and the rotting barricade gave reason to worry. At one point, it had been a strong wall. Made of nails and wood, taped over and glued together—a mangled construction with everything you’d find in a gas station.

It was a construction eviscerated.

As though a battering ram had bulldozed its way through.

Clementine found the splinters which flecked the ground, and then the holes that punctured chunks of its surface. So, not a battering ram but, instead, spitfire incarnate. “People with guns,” she mumbled, pointing at it by the axe. The bullet-holes were smaller, different, than what took the man behind them. “And these look like they came from automatic ones.”

“…ehmba.”

Her smile was weary. It was the first syllable change of the day; knowing A.J, however, it would be the only one. “Yeah. We don’t like those guns. They’re not good.”

Clementine nudged the door open.

From glance alone—without a candle lit nor the odd lamp illumed—, she knew the place was vacant. From smell alone, she knew the place was dead. But howvacant and what kind of dead, Clementine knew not to assume. She kept the grip on her pistol firm, and the hold around A.J tight.

Her eyes adjusted, and Clementine swiftly realized that the shelves had been cleared away. Not entirely—there were rows aligned like barriers, littered with holes identical to the barricade outside, and others that were pushed against the refrigerators. The rest, she assumed, were used for fires or were dumped somewhere else. There were mattresses, sleeping bags. Trash. Ruin.

Oh, and the bodies.

Every one of them, culled like the lone body outside.

Except, these were by the hand of spitfire.

It wasn’t until Clementine saw them did she realize that the bodies didn’t smell. They were older than the one with the axe. Nothing but cloth and bone.

The longer she roamed this hellscape, the more Clementine learned how many stories were out there. Each and every building had a past. Any and all roads led to tales. Ones of horror, mainly. There were never any good memories left.

She wondered about this one. Most of the bodies wore the clothes that belonged to a gas station: workers, and the average civilian who passed by. The man outside wore leather upon layers upon grime.

Clementine tensed her jaw. She roamed the gas station, and within minutes, it became evident that all the station had to offer were bodies and shelter.

“Well shit,” she breathed, knowing there wasn’t any better option. The sun was coming down with a bloody sky beneath the grey. Her legs were sore. Her head ached for sleep. This was the end of the road, for the night. Clementine sat A.J down on an empty booth pushed to the side, furthest from the bodies. As she stepped away, he reached for her. “Not right now, A.J. You stay there. I’m just going to move them.”

“Aah! A-Aah!”

“You can see me. I’m not going anywhere, A.J,” Clementine sighed, then with a repeated, “I’m just moving them.”

Once A.J was sure his eyes remained steady on Clementine, she went to snatching the bodies by the collars of their shirts and lugging them to a corner, out of the way. By the side-door to an empty kitchen. Out of A.J’s reach, hopefully. The bodies fell apart one way or another. Legs were left behind to be kicked aside. Arms rattled, left to be thrown, or for the axe-head to knock across.

And.

For fuck’s sake.

She wasn’t ready for the Goddamn head that fell off a dead woman’s shoulders and rolled towards A.J. After a yelp echoed by a shrill squeal of his, Clementine kicked the head far away and hoped that the sight of it deterred any curiosity of the baby’s. By the look of A.J’s face, wet and teary-eyed, it did.

Once it was done, Clementine set aside the axe, found a rag and managed to scrounge up enough water to vigorously scrub off a layer of her skin.

“See, A.J? I didn’t leave,” she murmured at the booth. Clementine scooped A.J back into her arms and adjusted the backpack slung over her shoulders. “Now, we’re going to get away from the windows. And no looking at the bodies. We stay away from them.”

“…aah?”

“Yes, we stay away.”

There wasn’t a clean mattress in sight. The best Clementine found was a thick sleeping bag, stained by only God knew what, that she folded over and laid her blanket across. “Okay. Here you go, kiddo. There’s a bed.”

Once A.J was settled with the blanket wrapped around his small body, Clementine unshouldered the backpack. As he did, A.J laid into her lap. She learned months prior that bundling her jacket was never something he as drawn to. Clementine was a better pillow. And it meant that she, without the blanket, had some semblance of comfort. She always had the scraps.

Clementine toyed with his hair, and raked down its hairline. She watched him. He nestled deeper, batted his eyes closed…

And just like that, as though the world wasn’t Hell’s paradise, and the dead didn’t roam, A.J fell asleep. There weren’t mean trailing the girl and her baby wherever he escaped to. He looked utterly peaceful. A sort of serenity clung to his body.

…Clementine wanted some for herself.

There was no recalling the last time she slept well. Not a dream to escape to, nor a serenity to cling after.

She…did remember a man and his words. His way of assuring her, of waving the concerns away.

“Haven’t slept in two years.”

That’s what he said. It’s what the dead man said.

Clementine swallowed down the guilt; her scarred mouth refused her. She rubbed A.J’s back and fixed his blanket right. Shoved the dead man away, as best she could. There never was a good way, though. It pained her. Yet, if they both couldn’t have their peace—herself, and the baby—, the least she could gift A.J was the time with his.

After a light twitch of his brow, before he buried himself deeper in the blanket and her thigh, Clementine leaned against the wall. She closed her eyes. Sleep wouldn’t come, she knew, but shut-eye was better than mindless stares across the room—looking into shadows, seeing things that weren’t there. People, ultimately, and their rotting bodies… Things which paranoia teased into the world. Like the glimmer of their dead eyes. The husks of their bodies. Anything, really… Everything that came to mind.

Instead of peace, Clementine had always been gifted with that—a busy mind. It was a compliment throughout the few years of school she had. Busy mind, busy mind—something every teacher noted whenever they met with her parents. Such a strange thing that Clementine kept to memory. “She has a busy mind in there, but she’s so well-behaved!” Or, the teacher’s note rang, “Your daughter is quite smart. Upstaged the grade above her at the spelling bee with that busy mind of hers!”

“Never gets into trouble!”

“Always the model student of her class!”

Warm smiles—all of them. From behind their desk, every one of their blurred faces turned to her. Smart. Talented. Quiet. Good-mannered. Mature.

And humble, and kind.

With a promising life set out for her…

Clementine wondered about them.

Wondered if they knew what she’d grow into.

If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

Wondered if they could’ve guessed that she found a second father within a convicted murderer.

“You have the sun in your eyes…”

Maybe it had been her dad who said it.

Hazel cracked open, and she frowned. Clementine’s hand skimmed the brim of her ballcap. It made sense. Her dad always liked the sun. But… His face…

Clementine scoured for it, yet all she managed were the glimmer of his dead eyes. The husk of his body. Her mom’s too. And though their bodies lurked as dead monstrosities where she didn’t want them to, it was nice, knowing that they stayed together in death. An odd relief, at that.

Busy mind, busy mind.

What a shit compliment. Clementine scowled to herself. She’d rather be as dumb as a fucking rock and be able to sleep than to hear her every thought rattle.

She needed it. A dream, or two.

And warmth. Of course.

Her mind drawled, and her eyes lazed across her lap. They landed on the backpack to her other side. It was no use, though. A.J had the blanket. She had—

The flask.

…she remembered. Not the last time she slept, no. Rather, it had been the last time she held a full bottle and debated, to herself. Doubted the urge—the blooming curiosity. And doubt won, that night. She returned to the dead man’s side, and listened idly to his meandering tales.

A.J had been in his arms that night. He could have…been a father’s second chance.

Clementine rummaged through the shadows around her. She listened. Heard a distant past, clotting the minutes together. Above all, she searched for his eye. The one the dead man had left, before she stole it herself.

“I’d like a sip…”

There was one night, she remembered, where all she wanted was peace, and the space to breathe. And they gave her that. The dead man, and then…others too. They sat around a fire. It was…beneath a pylon, she thought. And the wood for the fire was stripped from an old crate left behind.

“No.” The dead man’s words were crawling. “You are not drinkin’. That is that.”

Her hand was in the bag. Clementine drew her nails down the flask—found its neck, heard a nervous woman’s voice:

“Oh, what’s a sip gonna hurt?”

“No.”

The rum that night smelled better than what the flask bore. It likely tasted better as well. There was a spice to it. A good one. Scratched her throat, yet— “I asked you not to drink—” the cinnamon was palpable; there may have been vanilla with it. “You gotta… You gotta be careful, Clem. Sometimes, it only takes one.”

It felt wide in her hand, the flask. Cold as well. “That was my second.” Not in the way frost threatened her, however. Cold as in…a nice breeze, a first breath in the morning.

That rum had been a nice swig. So why was it she yearned for the moonshine’s bite…?

There was a long moment. It stung beyond liquor, likened itself to a shiv. Clementine gnawed the inside of her cheek, because there were laws against this. Her parents— God, her parents would’ve loathed this. Maybe. She didn’t really get to know them in the end.

They were dead, though. And the laws were too.

Clementine didn’t know what the point was mulling over the past world. There wasn’t any.

So, she thought about the first—the moonshine, or whiskey as he claimed. An hour embedded within a lifetime ago. Her eyes followed the flask’s reflection, and Clementine saw brick and mortar. Grey—all a lousy grey—, with cracked windows and mulch on its doorstep. She remembered a wrecked still, and shelves, and then, thrown glass. Hearing it shatter. Feeling it grate her every last nerve.

If her memory was sound, Clementine was trying to sleep then too. And though broken glass still felt like nails dug into a chalkboard, she understood it now, sat across her memory.

Because as her eyes traced the faint, grey brick that lined the walls, a part of her wanted to break something.

To just reach out into the shadows and strangle.

…but Clementine was tired, and she had A.J just beside her. It didn’t do any good back then, and it wouldn’t now.

She stared into the flask and followed its sheen. It led to scratches which bruised its neck, then a dent on its side. A small one. Nothing that worried her…

“I had to kill my mom.”

A ghost. A memory.

His voice was defeated. Even now, Clementine could hear it, how limp he was, sagged against the wall. With a jar in his hand, one not thrown, he breathed a laugh and mumbled, “Sounds weird when I say it out loud, huh…?”

She shook her head. “No, it doesn’t, Nick,” Clementine said quietly. The words she almost did say, back when they would’ve mattered. “I’ve had to do that too.” She thought. Then, near-silent, she admitted, “I had to kill Rebecca, believe it or not. After she turned…” Her brows pulled themselves together. Her face found new angles, hardened to maturity. “That was after you died though. I think…” She found A.J again. “I think giving birth drained her last strength away. She bled too…”

Clementine thought about her, for a moment. A.J’s mother. How Rebecca smiled with bright eyes, looking down at her boy. Nursed him the few times she could. Cradled and rocked him every chance she got…

A.J had her eyes.

And Clementine wanted nothing but to keep those eyes pure. She wanted him to have those bright eyes for the moment when he too would be a father—with or without a child of his own blood. With or without Clementine there to witness it.

She stared into the flask’s neck. Already, it was warm in her hands. As though its blood within promised her something—sleep, or warmth. The vow was a mere sip away.

Maybe.

She desperately hoped so…

“Luke always used to push me. I never wanted to go into business with him.” Clementine looked up again. Right then and there, she saw herself in his eyes. Nick wore but a bleak shade of blue. There was an endearing quality about those eyes of his. The kind that…a brother, perhaps, would wear, and that she would scour for in a crowd, and ask to climb atop his shoulders.

She never did that, though. Couldn’t really remember if she thought to ask, at the time.

“I remember when he sold me on it. His big plan. Some fuckin’ plan.”

Her smile was subtly charmed. Luke’s effect, really. “I can see that. Sounds like something he’d do.”

Nick held the jar to his chest in thought. He massaged its belly, and as he did, she tried to remember how it was. Better or worse than the rum. The latter was more pleasant to her. Yet… Whiskey sounded right. “A case of beer in, and he said, ‘Nick, we’re burning daylight.’ And that was that.” Nick laughed, shrugged limply, and muttered, “After six months, we were flat broke. But I didn’t care. We were havin’ fun.” He frowned. His voice turned hollow: “I wish I was like him. I wish I could just keep moving all the time.”

She nodded, her eyes latched to the flask. “All we can do now is keep moving. Staying in one place doesn’t work. It never fucking works…”

“I’m just not…built like that.”

Once, Clementine liked to think she was more like Luke. Or better yet, like Lee.

But now…

She wasn’t sure. It didn’t sound right. It didn’t sound like whiskey.

“No, you weren’t,” Clementine mumbled. Because maybe she was more like Nick after all. “I don’t know if I am. I just…have to move.” Like Nick.

Within other shadows, she could feel his stare. The dead man’s one eye. Her mouth refused her swallow. She croaked, “I’m only alive for him, you know. He— He saved me.” Like the shadow that lurked just over her shoulder. His one eye pierced to her soul. And she ignored him. Clementine watched A.J, and she rubbed his back.

In a mere whisper, she confessed, “He stopped me from staying in place.”

“Everyone I grew up with, it all…happened to them.” She nodded again. Nick was right. He was right. “Now, it’s gonna happen to us.” He spoke no lie. “We’re all so fucked. This world is fucked…”

The drunk man was a wise man, although dead.

But, then again, the wise drunk’s words rang all the more true now that he was dead. Clementine didn’t really know if it was ironic or not, how the only wise people she knew were rotting away as any other corpse.

It didn’t matter. Ironic or not, her drawn laugh was sour, and she nodded to the drunk man as he faded into the wall. “You were right, Nick… And we did march to some new place, and everyone is gone now. You’re gone now.” Clementine looked into the flask. “But you’re with him, right? With Luke? With all the money in the world to spend on that big fuckin’ plan?”

The drunk man didn’t answer, of course.

She leaned back against the wall. “They’re all gone… You’re gone… Luke’s gone… I’m the only one left…”

“Hey kid.”

Clementine didn’t need to look back. She knew that Nick was gone. She was the one that had to put him down, in the end. So yeah, she knew. But, his voice sounded crisp. Like he was still there—right beside her. As if they never left that brick shithole.

“Have a drink with me.”

Hazel drew to her left—the Devil’s shoulder, as someone murmured once—, and Clementine looked into his dead eyes. They were nothing like the bleak blue moon Nick wore alive. They were white. Like snow. Like ice. And his skin, tacky as the skies which threatened whiteout. Blizzards that sought to pierce open wounds, then claim frigid bone.

His laugh… He had a laugh that was frail in timbre, but there was a mellow to it. Different from A.J’s. Older, and bitter, and all the more wiser.

“It’ll be your first…, and your last…”

She rolled her wounded shoulder and nodded. “Of course,” Clementine whispered. “Why wouldn’t I?”

There wasn’t the same hesitancy as that first drink beside Nick. She knew what to expect. And if it wouldn’t taste like the sour, brittle grain in that shithole, then maybe it would taste like the rum. Sweet as a cat’s tongue down her throat, and though the thought of it had her squirm, the warmth of that fire, beneath the pylon, it was a nice one.

She twisted the cap open, and then—

“I asked you not to drink.” Clementine froze. The dead man, alive, was a distant memory. He was the one who clawed through the shadows nightly, until his hands chafed to bone across the floor, and his teeth gnashed free of flesh. Through the veil, he was as crisp as Nick beside her. “A girl your age… It ain’t right.”

She worked her jaw, inhaled the spice that brewed from the flask’s lip, and murmured, “I have to Kenny…” Her throat knotted. “I-I need to take care of A.J. And I can’t do it like this… Everything hurts, please Kenny.”

“Yeah, I’m sorry… You’re right.” Clementine watched the shadows across from her. He was there. Lurking. Head hung back, waiting for the moment he fell into the snowbank. “It’s probably not my place to be tellin’ you what to do…”

Kenny fell into oblivion.

It was quiet for a long minute.

Then, Clementine tentatively braced for it—noted to take a only a humble swig. Which she did. She swallowed. Her mouth allowed it. And as the swig went down, she heard Nick’s droned laughter. But now, there wasn’t a knowing hand stretched for a jar back. Other than A.J, Clementine was completely and utterly alone.

The flask was tipped away. She thinned her lips together. Third time was indeed the charm. The girl handled the drink well. Though it burned, Clementine found the taste she sorely missed before—how whiskey wasn’t just brittle grain, but there was, indeed, some flavor to appreciate. She understood better, how rum had a mere blade, though this…was serrated. Something to shrug past. Clementine looked into the neck and swirled it around. Then, another swallow—this time, less of a sip and more of a mouthful. Again, it burned. Again, she found how adults willingly ignored the fire for the rest.

It got better, the serrated blade. There was a way to dance around the alcohol.

Her busy mind persisted. Clementine thought of Nick, whose words were wise in hindsight: “What are you going to do?” she had asked him.

After his long, drunken ramble, Clementine didn’t get it. Not back then.

“Stay here. I’m tired.”

She did manage to get him back on his feet. And she felt strong for it. Felt like it meant something. But as Clementine bitterly reminded herself, through a mantra, he’d been dead. So no. It didn’t matter. It didn’t mean anything.

Clementine understood now, though. She got it.

Because she was tired too.

She wanted to stay in place. Wanted to only sleep…

As Clementine drank another mouthful, as it clawed its way down her throat, she felt it, the flask’s promise.

It was warm after all.

∇ ∇ ∇

She remembered…floating, somewhere. Remembered the moment where the ice broke, and she fell through. Clementine had been looking for something. It had been a frantic thing.

…there was a moment, the one thereafter.

One where her body felt not cold, or frigid, or anything alike. It wasn’t warm either.

Bliss…

That had been it. All around her, Clementine was cradled by bliss only.

The world was dark. She was submerged. The girl, quite alone for that blip in time. Yet she could breathe. Not by her mouth, no, nor her nose. It was hard to understand. Breathe, though, that was the right word for it. The girl could breathe, because the blood, and the gore, caked down her hands were washed away.

Except, there was more than that shedding gore. A phantom in her shoulder grew quiet. The aches from insomnia bloomed for sedation. And her mouth—

Oh…, her mouth…

Her tongue grazed its roof. Searched for the outline of the gun’s barrel. A scar, a rigid mark, where it paid reverence to a scorched earth. A pistol’s kiss.

Come to find, she couldn’t. A fire, instead, had blossomed—across her mouth, down her throat. It shrouded such a pain whole.

Clementine could forget what she almost did.

And within the shadows of lakewater, beneath ice, she was stuck there. The metal that haunted her teeth, then the frost in her shoulder… It was all swarmed by the whiskey which sounded right.

It was…

Truly.

It was a wonderful thing.

Clementine kept her eyes closed. She didn’t have to dream. If her flask was indeed her poison, and the shadows of this lake laid her to rest, she felt that it was okay. The poison rocked her to sleep. Murmured a story, from a book. Its voice was… Dead or alive, she couldn’t tell, but the voice sounded familiar. And the name of that story, Sleeping Beauty. How utterly poetic.

This poison allowed the princess at heart to rest in her treehouse. Watched over her in black, shining armor, with eyes glowing to the shade of moons.

Even the good part of her which remained, the one that condemned such thoughts, was soothed by lakewater. You have to go back to A.J, that part reminded Clementine. You can’t just leave him.

But…, you can come back here when he sleeps too.

We can forget everything here…

∇ ∇ ∇

There was something wrong.

It snagged her from dreamscape. Nestled beneath her skin like there was a violent storm to come. And through the cold spot on her lap where only his blanket remained, then a haunting melody of engines, her urgency roused a panic. A.J wasn’t there. It was still dark. Yet. The windows. They were… They—

They were illuminated.

“A-A.J!” she barked. The boy had climbed onto the booths. She told him to stay away from the bodies, thought she said the same about the windows, but dammit. Dammit, the fucking windows.

His eyes were wide and over his shoulder. His silhouette, shrouded by headlights. Her body sparked horror. The lakewaters and the bliss within, all mutilated from her grasp. Clementine snatched the backpack mid-stride for A.J, and she strafed around the booths. A.J yelped in her arms. The shock of it, her dexterity as it whipped her momentum out of the headlights’ reach, it startled him silence. In her arms, Clementine felt him hang as a ragdoll. Before his nails dug into her side.

“A-Ah!”

A.J was stronger than she thought. Never before had he clung onto her with a grip of stone—remarked upon who may have fathered him after all.

Clementine ignored his cries. She barged through the station’s side-door—the one without a handle, to a modest kitchen. Just beside the pile of bodies she left behind. “Fuck… Fuck, A-A.J they’re here! We—!” Her hand latched onto the backdoor’s handle. And she yanked on it. Dug her heels. Hurled her weight back. Fruitlessly—it didn’t budge. “W-Why—?!”

Her heart sank. A.J screamed into her ear, and Clementine found the door’s narrow window.

And in it.

A face.

His dark eye gleamed. His gnarly teeth stretched with his smile. And just behind him, the growl of a motor, then another headlight—her torment—that screamed to her eyes. “THEY’RE IN HERE! GET THE FRONT!” he howled, creasing his cheeks into his covered eye’s bloody bandage.

Clementine bolted. She knocked over a tray table as the backdoor flew open. The kitchen door, she barreled through. She reached for the pile left behind. Her fist snatched a body—a torso—and blindly flung its weight. The body managed to trip the man just as he crossed the doorway. “HOLY SHIT!” The door slammed. The kitchen bellowed, and the tray table screamed.

Clementine didn’t look back. Her heels scraped the tile. The other two—a blond, then an older one—, right at the front door. Her weight lashed her imbalance. The man from the back. Then the other two. Closing in. She was—

Surrounded.

A.J cried in her arms. Bawled the panic which threatened Clementine to… To…shoot…

Fuck.

Her pistol.

It wasn’t— She didn’t have it.

Her back smacked the wall. Her eyes darted. The men closed in.

“Get the little bastard,” the one-eyed man snapped.

The blond clawed after A.J. The baby wailed. Clementine struggled. “Leave him—! L-LEAVE HIM ALONE!”

It was no use. Her boots were burrowed into the floor, her arms strained, her lungs, pierced by air—all for nothing. The blond punctured her ribs by the edge of his knuckles, and to tug A.J’s leg would be to break the boy. “YOU FU—”

“QUIET!”

The one-eyed man swung, and Clementine buckled. The backpack snaked across the wall, off her shoulder. Her jaw was spiked by a newfound agony. And her vision swam a disorientating blur. The older man crouched by where she landed, not before he hiked his pantlegs by his knees, and all she could gather was how his ghastly complexion smeared itself with his pale eyes and white hair. A ghost.

“You’ve got quite the spitfire there…” he murmured. “Gave us hell the past few days, haven’t you?” Clementine wavered on her hands and knees, though her glare was as sharp as ever. The ghost-man chuckled quietly. “But we’ve caught ya now! Thought you’d be able to get away, didn’t you…?” He stood and fixed his pants. His shoes were once a fine leather, but had been torn by blood and debris. “Daron, get the girl. We’ll take the boy on ours.” The debris…smelled of rot. The living’s rot—not the dead’s.

“N-No!”

Clementine’s voice was weak. Weaker than what she wanted. Pathetic. Drained. Tired.

The one-eyed man snatched her shoulder. His voice, an animal: “You’re getting up! Now!”

He wrenched her to her feet. She tossed against it. Reached for the screams of a boy by the front door.

“NO! LET ME GO!”

No use. Never any use.

She was too small. And the man, far too alike an animal. The one-eyed man booted the door open. Marched her through the kitchen—in disarray—with her scraping for any sense of balance. The moment her heels caught asphalt, Clementine managed to hook an ounce of her footing. She wrenched herself away from his grasp, only enough to jolt it to her wrist. Her nails dug. Her jaw, tempted to bite.

“Would you quIT THAT?!”

The one-eyed man swung.

And that was all it took.

He forced her body into a dumpster’s hull.

The impact alone sent her world to disorder. She tripped over her weight. Steel and ironwork drilled her skull into a dismal throb. Clementine swore she would vomit what meal she had—the whiskey, and then the measly few chips. The man—the Devil, he had to have been—was engulfed by his own bark of laughter.

It echoed.

So unlike Nick’s amusement, it echoed to ravage…

Everything a haze, she fell to the asphalt.

∇ ∇ ∇

Lakewater again. Clementine remembered when it was, and how she broke through the ice—sobbing—with her pistol at hand. Then she fell through. Her body, for a moment, forgot what cold was.

So she plunged, and she…hung there, in place. Orange came to mind. She wanted to find a warm color.

Those hazel eyes of hers kept themselves closed. Cradled in bliss, rocked by poison, the world was dark. Clementine kept herself quite alone, deeply submerged, while she breathed again. The blood beneath her fingernails flaked away. The phantom of her shoulder was mute, insomnia fidgeted, and her mouth—

By God, her mouth again.

It felt wonderful. It was painless.

…she found not orange, but instead, wildfire.

Clementine was stuck within the lake’s shadows, though she didn’t mind. Be it her royal heart, she was safe. She was secure. She wasn’t a princess to be saved, for the lake was her elixir…

She opened her eyes.

“You hesitate.” Above her, there was ice. A frigid wall which kept her locked in place, and in time. “That’s your sheep’s streak right there… And you better figure out how to get rid of it.” All around Clementine, she saw wildfire’s hue. Deep within those lakewater depths. Warm and bright—a comfort, really. It swarmed her body. It pushed away all of whom—ghosts—that haunted her.

The pistol’s kiss; the shoulder’s frost—both, singed away by the gracious pyre.

“It’s going to be what slaughters you, and the child.”

There was…one ghost, however, which remained. She knew whose voice it was. Recognized it. Revered him so.

Clementine heard the lake call for her again. As he soothed the arson on her tongue, as he pocketed the fragments to her mind as those drifted, the lakewaters thrummed, “You licked your wounds. You filed your nails, and fed those fangs.” There were…too many things about that man. He was nightmarish. “But it ain’t enough. It will never be enough.” His words were…a gospel to follow. Because he was right. “Get used to using them.” He was another dead man who was right.

And his words, they graveled the loudest now that he was dead.

I will.

Within the lake, there were shadows, then eyes. An identical pair—ones that she always thought the Devil throve within. Clementine thought of him, sat at the corner of his desk—a throne—as the king of his own land, dressed in a jacket rich in fur.

“Good.” Those eyes narrowed. Hell itself glimmered. “I like that fire in your breath. Lean into it as you get the child back into your arms.”

Frost began to set in.

The lakewater… It was cold, the more she floated from where she plunged.

I… I will.

“You hesitate again.” Biting. He always spoke like a shard of ice. “Let the fire burn.

“The prick down your throat is to lace that bite of yours, and I always knew you got one.”

I will.

She would. Clementine listened to him, so she would.

∇ ∇ ∇

Her ears rang a persistent murmur. After that, she realized a pungency, how it wormed from her nose and down her throat. Musk. Of wood, and leather. Dirt, grime, then blood. This place lathered her senses stale, urged her to crack her eyes. She did. The world blurred to clarity, and she found herself on a grey couch; it was a ratty one, so awfully threadbare that she couldn’t fathom if there was ever a pattern. And around her, there was lanternlight. A looming kind of yellow, hung from the walls, which married well with the candles. Those too were disconcerting, though they more sneered than they did loom.

Clementine soothed a new ache across her head. It panged to a rhythm. Footsteps, she gathered, the more they pulsed from the floorboards. “A.J…?” The room was a confusing mash between rustic and unkempt. Rural—in ways that had her skin run hives. “A-A.J…? Wh-Where—?”

Glass shattered.

A man’s voice bellowed.

And, rattled, Clementine whirled in her seat. “A.J?! Where—?!”

“SHUT IT!”

The one-eyed man. Except, now, the bandage had been removed. His skin was a leathery stretch, and his eye… Nothing but fog, that eye. Had she not known what a depleted socket looked on a live man, inflamed by gashed streaks, Clementine would have been deterred. Because there was something about this man, that eye… She couldn’t quite place it.

“Not until you tell me—!”

He swung. “WHAT DID I JUST SAY?!” Clubbed her by his knuckle-ridge. “QUIET!”

This wasn’t the same as persistent murmur. Instead, it chimed like lashing.

Clementine watched him as he lunged from the couch, back to where he paced before. Her eyes followed. The house seemed quaint, as though it was built from the trees around, much too long ago. There was a kitchen, with a bar as its curled arm. On either side, doors—facing one another. To the outside, if she had a guess.

Her thoughts were drawling. And her cheek…was warm to the touch. The man hit her. He— He did.

Yet, Clementine ate the stroke of his swing as though he didn’t at all.

“Holy shit! Would you calm down?!” She held away her hand. Studied it. “She just woke up, my god!” Realized it felt numb. Not quite the white noise after she laid for too long. There was a disorientation to her hand, as though her eyes and head didn’t quite align with the strings to her arm. The prick down her skin was, however, a soothing gesture. As though she could…move herself, not have to mind the world, with ease.

From the bar, laughter.

Clementine snapped her eyes. Found the one-eyed man, then the blond. The latter was stone in the face. He ignored the other man’s split grin and narrowed glare. “So you were drinkin’, huh…? Slippin’ away from your counselors?”

…is that…what drinking did?

Prick down her skin as a soothing gesture? Promise to have her move without mind—with such ease…?

She pressed into the couch, away from him. The blond smacked his shoulder and snapped, “Enough, would you? God, I’m sick of babysitting you and your bullshit all day.”

“It’s what you get for runnin’ off with that choir boy…” The one-eyed man wrenched away. “Beat it, then.”

The blond rolled his eyes. “What is she going to do, anyhow? Step on your toes?” He thrusted a hand towards her. “Look at that girl and tell me she can honestly take your ass down.”

Both men pierced her—with the one eye, the dead eye, and then the blond’s silver pair. Belittled every bone in her body. Deemed them frail.

Clementine let them fall for that lie. She wasn’t almighty, no. She knew her limits, and had only a mere handle on few strengths.

The thing was though…, she knew when giants fell, it was to succumb. She, however, fell to sink her teeth deep in their Achilles’ heel.

Clementine wasn’t almighty, no, but she knew how to take down a dead giant. And the one at the ranch, he had been one of the biggest people she’d ever come across. He towered over these two, after a week or few of rot.

She sunk deeper into the couch—discovered the billowed mess, its cotton, beneath the fabric—, and slowly nodded. Clementine left her eyes wide, and her face, as soft as she could manage. As though she still was crowned by halo’s innocence—that of a mere child.

Satisfied, the blond smacked his hand against a pantleg. “There’s no need to beat the fucking kid. She’s drunk enough, so get her talking,” he continued.

Between them, a short standoff. The glare was mutual. Singed like a fight waiting to happen. Another one, her inkling foretold. The blond then stripped away—or tried to, before he was shoved aside—, and watched Clementine. His stone face was lined by disgust, though she found it infinitely better than what then glared at her from the couch’s matching ottoman. Her eyes darted between the two. The blond appeared to be the more reasonable of them, if not plainly indifferent.

“Anyway,” the blond said, “if you’re asking about where the baby is, he’s fine. He’s just in the barn.” After a jutted chin to one of the doors—past the kitchen, on the left—, he strode for the other. “Now if you’re going to break this one anyway, do it after you get answers, yeah? There’s only so many children from that camp lurkin’ around here.”

Clementine frowned. She gathered the last few minutes. What…camp…?

The one-eyed man didn’t answer. He merely grunted and shook his head, and his greasy hair with it, leaving the blond to march through the door and slam it behind. “Fuckin’ twink—” she flinched— “doesn’t know what he’s talking about…”

He waited long enough until the blond strode off the porch, and walked far enough away down the gravel lot. Clementine kept her eyes at the ottoman, knew that something was stirring, before the one-eyed man prowled to the window, behind the pulled curtain. Stalked the blond for a long while by his eye alone. Muttered to himself. His words hissed more than they were mouthed.

There were…stories like this, weren’t there? Old ones, and in school, they were told in a manner of crayons, up until another student—wide-eyed, but egregiously amused—claimed that they came from blood on the walls, scars in the floor.

Fables. The word had escaped her. But what it meant was clear to her, in that room.

It wasn’t like she didn’t ever witness the most harrowing people by the skin of her eyes, but this man… That place… Clementine realized what it was about him. She read stories about one-eyed giants before, and how…

Oh. Oh God.

In that minute, with the man leering over the window, a horror dawned upon her. Be it the candle or lanternlights, the couch she sat on, the rustic furniture—cobbled together, bent at the legs or arms… Fable-like, all of it, told not from crayons but from the blood and scars…

(Those stories. The fables…)

She was not the first child to sit in that room.

Clementine couldn’t explain how she knew such a thing, yet it was precisely that which her gut twisted so, and what her heart ached until it was a dismal heap.

(They were real once. They were real again.)

Her eyes searched. There was nothing, really—not until her fingers ran down the frays in the cushion. She barely moved. Pathed her stare. The lines were a perfect match. Her nails could’ve been the ones that drew down the grey, digging until they broke, or her body tore.

The one-eyed man lurched from the window. He paced back to the ottoman. Sat down. Met her eyes.

She decided then that he was a giant, and he would fall that day, with a tooth dug into his heel.

“Now…, girlie… Where’s the rest of your camp, huh? You know where your counselor is?” The giant hilted his chin. “Bet they’re all pretty worried over you…”

“I don’t have—” Truly, bewilderment was a damning thing. “I’m on my own!” Clementine insisted. “I don’t know anything about this camp!”

He laughed. “A child on her own? Right. Likely story.”

“Honest! I’m telling you the tr—!”

His face twisted. His eye, it detonated. So that was the kind of man he was… A bomb.

“Quit your FUCKING LYIN’!” The one-eyed man leaned close, and his eyes—both the living and the dead—searched her own, set on a prowl. “You and I both know what happened. You and I were there. And you—” his spit sprayed— “had two of our goats on your lead…!” He skewed his eye. Almost grinned at her. “The hat gives you away… Not a lot of girls are into baseball.”

Confused. These men were confused because she happened by with her ballcap.

Clementine worked her jaw. Alcohol’s prick down her hand urged her. “You got the wrong girl!” His body flared. She knew the glimmer in this giant’s eye: he wanted nothing more than to snap her neck. Clementine paused, then said, “Look… I’ll just leave with my baby, I don’t care! If I manage to see this ‘camp’, I won’t say anything!” Another pause, and when she realized he was waiting, she added, “All I know is you’ve been following me for days!”

The man shook his head. “You. Little. Lying piece of shit,” he graveled.

“I’m not—!”

It took the one-eyed giant a second flat to hoist himself on his feet. “Shut up and fucking listen!” he snapped by a pointed finger. He then threw his hands in the air, mangled the cabin’s musk—there was a rot to it, without a doubt—as he began to pace. “We told you to stay off. Our land. There is no trading. And I am fucking done…” His knuckles cracked. His palms rubbed together. “I’ve been done since the first few you sent our way. And the next few who asked about the first few. But let me tell you, girlie…” The man’s smile warped across his face. His teeth gleamed his livid froth. “They ain’t comin’ back… None of them are.” Clementine remained quiet. She watched him. This monster. The giant. He was nothing more than a rabid animal himself. “You fucked everything, didn’t you? Burned my eye…?! And thought I’d just be sorry…?! No.” A rabid animal, forever at heart. Yet for the meantime, he kept his words softspoken.

The same kind of way smoke roamed: in suffocation’s name.

“I am done with your fucking games, girl. And I am done with you motherfucking kids.”

Clementine numbingly pranced through every option she had. There were few. None of them secured her life, nor promised A.J’s. So, “You—” she tried again, “You have the wrong girl!”

A death’s certificate irked across his face. However, the giant pondered, then meandered his strides in slow claps of thunder. He pulled from a drawer. Clementine dug her nails into the cushion. And, without another moment to breathe, the man slammed his palm onto the low table—set at a crooked angle to the couch.

“Then what’s this?”

A paper. By the look of it, torn from the end of a paperback novel. Once he drew his hand away, and his eye demanded her literacy, Clementine obliged. She grasped the note.

Her dismal heart churned. And her gut simply thrashed.

We kicked her out.

She’s in town at the train station.

At first, there wasn’t much of anything—aside for her heart, and gut. The house was silent. The one-eyed man stood as her foreboding messenger.

Because these men weren’t confused after all. They were led astray. Lured to believe that she had anything to do with them. Whereas she, with the baby at her side, would be this summer camp’s sacrificial lamb.

This was intended to be her execution.

A.J’s death sentence.

The note wilted in her hand. The alcohol…, the arson on her tongue, it did something. Behind her eyes, that something boiled. A writhing thing, this urge. It forgot the kind of moral she tried, desperately, to cling to, because Clementine wanted blood to spill at her feet. For her knuckles to throb, and for that red to gleam across. Wanted to bash anything, really. Glass to break. Wood to shred.

What a writhing, violent thing, this urge.

It seized through her shoulders. Claimed a hot spire down her spine.

She tipped the bill to her ballcap before her eyes followed. She met his eye—likened it to a dead moon. Her head shook, slowly, and Clementine murmured, “You have. The wrong. Girl.”

That irk again. It wrangled his features together. “Really now?! You’re going to keep giving me that shit even though you’ve been caught, bitch?!”

“You’re half-fucking-blind! I’m surprised you can even read this!”

“You little—!”

A mistake.

Clementine forgot how cattish a man’s wounded ego could be.

His knuckles found her again. They belted her jawline and sent her to the ground. She hissed on impact, then gasped for the air knocked out of her. The flask’s blood did little for Clementine. The impact itself nearly knocked her sober. Nearly, because it would have, if not for the way her head spun, and the alcohol’s smog turbulence. She did finish that flask. It did well to spear her mouth.

As the man’s bellowing drilled her ears, and her palms scuffed the floorboards, she tasted iron—blood’s runoff, rather, as it leaked down the back of her throat. So she clawed for balance. Followed the tracks scarred into the wood…

Clementine set her glare level with the floorboards. She may have snagged a glimmer of lost teeth, amid the dust. More than that, the tracks left behind were her size again, if not done by smaller hands. And come to find, those tracks were clustered around one board. And in that board was a nail. It was loose. A thick one, corroded by rust in every ridge. And with the rust, a blackened shade of grime.

Lockjaw came to mind. Clementine swore she risked the fate by holding the nail alone. Still, she teased it from the board. Found that it was long as well. Within a closed fist, the nail was brandished between her fingers.

What luck.

So it had been saved for this. Leaving that house when she did, the ranch, it had been a divine call to make.

Her fist inured. Sealed the giant’s fate. Felt blood drip from her nose. Heard the man—

“I TOLD YOU TO FUCKING GET UP!”

His hand captured her Devil’s shoulder with a thumb dug deep into the bullet wound. She yelped as the one-eyed man yanked her onto the couch. Clementine wriggled away, and sank deep into the cushions. The man had his hand raised, though the moment Clementine realized her licked lips tasted like more of the iron, and the cushion had a fresh smear, the hand relaxed. And his smile, it was satisfied.

The door whined. Again, the blond stared at them both. He shook his head. “Jesus Christ, Daron. What has she told you so far?!”

The one-eyed man sat back down on the ottoman. “Nothing,” he growled.

“What’s with the blood on her shoulder?”

“That’s been there, dipshit.”

Clementine heard the blond’s laugh, and as she glared over, she decided it was the kind a jester would make behind a king’s back. “They shoot you on the way out, kid?” His teeth were long.

She gathered the leakage down her throat, felt it bile along her tongue, before she spat the lob over the table.

Her aim was near-impeccable. It dove into the floor, and specks of it found his boot’s toe. A boot, which, was otherwise kept clean.

“Real salty today, aren’t you…? You were doing just fine tryin’ to hide it before.” There was a sick irony to his words. Clementine heard that he knew just as well. Before that stone face of his cracked, and his toothy smile gnashed wide. “Or did we wake you up too soon, princess?”

Instead of a sick irony, the way the blond’s voice preened to her ears, yet wormed beneath her skin, had her swallow. His eyes were cold. She felt them bite across her.

They were both giants.

The men needed to fall.

Within a final laugh, the blond’s face dropped, and he carved it back to stone. Those silver eyes burned the other man. “So has she been talking at all, or what?!”

“She has!”

“‘She has?!’ So what the fuck’s with this?!”

Another standoff. Clementine realized then that they had the same noses—down from the bridge to the point—, and the same jaw. Brothers. They had to have been. It left the older one—the ghost-man—as the patriarch, the Devil who raised these two.

And the Devil likely had A.J.

The one-eyed giant shrugged, then snapped, “She’s what’s called a liar, Dan.”

“Don’t care. Just do your job, and I’ll do mine and fix the fucking gate.” The blond glared at her, as though she was wholly responsible, and did so to…steal from them. Goats, was it? Were these giants ranchers? Not that it mattered what they called themselves. She watched the blond glance around the room, only to find the toolbox he’d been looking for. “If I come back and she’s dead, you better have some idea about those other kids.” There was a final glare sent Clementine’s way. “Give her a fucking bottle if you have to.”

“Fuck off.”

Once again, the front door slammed shut.

The man watched Clementine. His seeing eye sharpened, and the fog in the other curdled his hostility. “Tell me where they are.”

“I—” Clementine hesitated. As she shifted into the couch, she realized how her eyes threatened to burn. Because, her shoulder… It stung. Her nose was an oozing cascade. The pains were not the worst to bite through, just enough to have her reconsider a few things.

She spun a web—her own fable. There would be no lesson to learn from this, however.

It’d play like a warning instead, should the girl play her cards right, and lean into theatrics.

“B-By the lake…” she woefully began. “There’s these fishing huts, a-and, um… There’s a-a whole bunch of them.”

The one-eyed giant paused. He didn’t expect that. Clementine managed to startle him, almost, by the ease of her lie. He debated for a moment, searched for a crack. All he found were glassy eyes, singed by a throbbing shoulder, and the warbled mess in her words. If the nail she pried from the floor was luck, this was a stroke of fortune: he bought this first lie. Leaned from the ottoman with a curious brow. “Where? By the sign?”

Clementine swallowed. “T-To the—” Down the railroads she followed, there was plenty of water. She leaned into guesswork, and mumbled, “To the lake?”

The man was still easy to detonate. His eyes flashed. Both dead and alive. “That Jr. Tanuki’s sign of yours!”

There. Jr. Tanuki’s… That name tolled a bell. A weak one, buried deep within memory. Clementine couldn’t scrounge for a sign, or what font a Jr. Tanuki’s would be painted in, but she heard that bell, and she realized that…she had been past this town before. Along the outskirts. Down the woodland paths…

A lifetime ago. Or beyond that, even.

It was hard to know.

She shook her head rapidly, and whilst her mind sprinted for recollection, Clementine said, “I-I mean, yeah, but it’s on the o-other side of the place.” Nothing returned to her. She only had a faded inkling. “When they— When they kicked me out, I-I had to go into t-town by the, um, the… The sideroad where all the trucks used to drive. For our food, and…things.”

The one-eyed giant was satisfied with her answer. Clementine pleaded that her memory would be enough, and that every abandoned husk of what once was—the camps she came across before—would have her get away with this.

He shifted in his seat. “And those huts, then… How big are they? And how many?”

“A-A bunch.” She glanced at his eye. “But there’s been fires—”

“I’m well aware!”

Clementine recoiled. “I mean in those h-huts… Some of them w-we don’t use. But they’re like this size…” She gestured vaguely.

“Cabins.”

“I-I mean the room.”

The one-eyed giant grunted. His hands came together. They crackled.

“A-A lot of the younger kids like, um, like elementary kids hide there.”

The dark moon of his eye shewed at her. The fog in the other boiled. “Like you?”

“N-No…”

He arched a brow. “You ain’t one of the older ones.”

Clementine nodded swiftly, and said, “I-I know that! But I’m just…” She shrugged. Meagerly so. “Small.” Her Devil’s shoulder stung.

“No…” he murmured. “No, there’s no way you got past elementary.” The man stared at her, the girl, as he did before. The dead eye, and the other, pierced her. Belittled her. Clementine gnawed her jaw, though she didn’t argue. Because the fact of the matter was, no. She didn’t get past elementary. There were more upperclassmen than lower.

It merely…stung a kind of way—worse than her nose—, whenever an adult saw her as that same kid. Like age required a grade to pass.

…still, the more he leered, and the longer she sagged as pitifully as she could into the couch, Clementine figured that once—this one time—, having a grown man believe she never cracked open a book after the world fell would do her good. So she gnawed on her humility. Played herself docile.

“Anywhere else…?”

“Wh—?”

“Anywhere else?!” He glowered from the ottoman. “You just said the younger ones usually hide there. Where would the others be?!” There wasn’t a great change to him, but the giant snapped at her like he legitimately grew above the clouds. There was a way his words began to slip down at her. His voice was heavy. It sank like anvil.

The cabin still sneered at her from the candlelight, and the lanterns. Its musk remained rancid to her nose.

Yet, the nail in her hand grew warm. The blood in her palm hummed for rust.

“I-In a few places…,” she explained, “we patrol in the woods. I-I started to.” Recollection wormed as she grazed her shoulder. Winter’s breath marred down her skin. “There’s—” The giant’s dead eye gleamed at her. Had her, for a devastating breath, long for another eye. One bludgeoned instead—on a far better man. “There’s like this lodge up high. For winter camps. Like sledding.” The better man was a broken one…, but at least he knew when to keep his words gentle…

“Or for skiing.”

“I’ve gone skiing.” No she hasn’t.

He rolled his eyes. “Of course you have.” The man’s patience was wearing thin, yet it wasn’t quite the way she would’ve feared. If anything, the withdrawn nagging in his eye said enough. He wasn’t a liar. This giant truly was tired of kids, and every bane they brought with them. “Where else? You got a barn, don’t you?” he asked, gravely unaware that Clementine shed those banes long ago.

Her nod was rushed. “F-For the horses we had.”

“You got horses.”

Shit. Any more of this, and the girl would risk the man discovering her. Clementine warbled, “I-I know we still have some,” and hoped he’d take her words as anxiety. “My favorite ran away. H-He was—” She thought of a woman. Her eyes were always kind. Her memory, however… “He was a— A palomino.” It was a pain she never would have fathomed.

Down the world’s grime on her face, a tear streaked.

(The bludgeoned, better man’s wife was too, too kind to her.)

The man didn’t care. He massaged his browline instead. “You kids and your stupid ass life stories… I didn’t ask about your pony.”

Clementine bowed her head. Left the man back to his stewings. She clawed after her chest. Strangled the jacket and shirts together. Because winter marred her still. The better man’s wife was a whisper in her ears. There was no scar in her mouth, however, no. The flask ensured that.

She needed…more of that flask, if its promise was true, and it’d bury the dead family away.

Sweat lined from her ear to her jawline. She eyed the one-eyed man. He’d been staring. Contemplative—it was the most human Clementine would ever read of him, and it was of a man scheming. She drew himself away, snagged himself on a thought, before the man snapped back at her.

“That baby… Where d’you get it?” Clementine froze. The hand clawing after her chest hung limp around her collar. He narrowed the one eye. Darkened the life within as the fog in the other bulged. “Or is it yours…?”

A.J… He wanted A.J.

Deep in his eyes, there dwelled a disturbing reality within this man. There dwelled the giant. A fable’s monster. A beast of— Of brutality, and of bloodshed. Slaughter, should her fleeting inclinations know better.

A smirk twitched down along his lips. He had to have read something in her face.

Clementine may have given A.J away. Sealed his fate as the camp’s sacrificial lamb.

“He fuckin’ is, ain’t he…?” His words gruelled. This monster gave her fate a final judgement of its own. “You got yourself pregnant in all this? Do you even know how that happened?”

Her skin ran gooseflesh. To speak would be to damn A.J’s life. To sew her lips would be to tell everything the giant wanted to hear.

And he did hear everything he wanted. He listened to the silence. Saw for himself a girl who did gave her body away, did the very thing few warned Clementine against.

“Them kids didn’t want you around with that baby, huh…? Can hardly blame ‘em.”

The giant stood from the ottoman. Decided that he was done asking questions—her answer satisfied him plenty. “Let’s go check on him. See how my pa’s treating him.” He flexed his hands.

Clementine slunk off the couch.

There was no deciding whether the ground was in her favor, or if it had…always been this way. In the hour, to be grounded meant a dead body anchored. She wasn’t floating. It wasn’t that she was lighter. This was the disorientation down her hand again. Her eyes did not align to the strings in her arm, yet the nail had its own heartbeat—she swore.

This was the flask…

It meant to work her body by the strings alone, without a cross-brace, and it meant a dangerous ease.

Adrenaline found its home behind her ears. It blurred between the alcohol, and coherence. She allowed herself to stagger. Her stride swung too far anyway. Clementine yelped. Her busy mind surged as the giant glared over his shoulder. Tried to stare at her with the dead eye. Had to twist around for the other.

He stood tall. He wasn’t thin.

“Piece of advice, Clementine… They are weak, and we are strong.

“But you are no man.”

He demanded a reason for this. For this child’s fragility. Clementine choked, then fumbled, “I-It’s just my ankle. It’ll get better by t-tomorrow.” She batted her eyes. Told him that she was a mere lamb, longing for her mother.

…goaded from him, by a sly tongue, how much time she had left.

The one-eyed man smarmed his lips into a genuine smile. He wore it like venom on a rattler’s fang. In both eyes, there was glee. Down either hand, a twitch. It followed a chokehold’s shape. And thereafter, he turned around. Continued to lead the way, his body leaned for the other door. Not to the blond. To the Devil.

And…, a ditch, she presumed.

Clementine’s time was running thin. A.J had a mere breath thereafter.

“The same way…that we are no bear. Man or woman. Understand?”

The nail was humming. Lockjaw was brewing. And she reared back. Clementine wound the tension in her body.

To strike.

Clementine gashed the air silently. One leering candle’s fume was its laceration.

Her weight slammed his balance over itself. The nail found a wrinkle in his denims—at the bend of his knee, from the back. She strafed as the giant fell. Her weight alone wouldn’t have been enough, but this nail—the tooth to pierce his Achilles’ heel—compensated. The one-eyed giant howled. He plunged into the floorboards in one bark of thunder.

And because she was no lamb, and she had no mother, Clementine force the nail deep into his flesh. Her boot damned him that lockjaw.

(This heel of hers would commit the same to the dead.

(Their skulls would find sovereignty within the boots’ pattern.)

“We are all weak creatures. Our eyes, our ears, our muscle… They ain’t what make us strong. Never have.”

(The moment the nail’s pike met bone was the same: it found the girl, the flask, and the sovereignty between.)

She lunged over him. The giant’s life—the monster’s—was nothing more than a vile sin. He writhed his arms to snatch her. Couldn’t decide if prying the nail would be worth the time lost. Clementine narrowly avoided his leg—the one he thrashed to knock her stride—, and she staggered for the kitchen bar.

Her eyes skimmed the disarray. There was filth. And clutter. And rot.

Then a knife. And the a Glock.

“YOU’RE GONNA WATCH HIS HEAD ROLL FOR THAT, YOU LITTLE BITCH!”

The one-eyed giant lurched to his feet. She, mid-reach, caught the break of his snarl in peripheral. Both eyes were animated. His teeth were strung by his spit’s froth, and his slicked hair was a frayed homage to the couch.

Clementine closed her hand around a handle. She secured her intentions. Bore the hazel of her eyes into the man. Felt them ignite. Heard the bar’s disarray smatter to both wood and tile as she swung, and the alcohol did well to hide away the agony in her Devil’s shoulder.

This was it. Life or death.

“It’s about being able to stare down the world with those weak eyes of ours, and…listen closely for a breath, this window of opportunity.”

The Glock fell in the kitchen—broke a tile upon impact. The knife fell between her and the giant.

Her eyes were set ablaze. The man dove for the knife, yet the glint across her swing nicked his one good eye. There was no time to brace for it. Because Clementine moved without a cross-brace, and to the devastating ease alcohol brought her.

There was a chime to the pan as it met his face. It was lurid.

His frothed spit followed the arc, before the pan spun to the same momentum, and Clementine struck again. He staggered violently into the barstools. Slipped across the counter’s debris with his bad leg. His face fumed the wrong colors. He rasped at her, “I ain’t gonna die to a fucking slut!”

Her skin crawled. Her stomach wormed.

Clementine didn’t know. She didn’t know. But she heard enough. Knew kind of eyes he laid on her. They only scribed to her animosity. And whatever he implied with that…

It wouldn’t matter.

The pan’s onslaught sank a third strike upon his head. She felt his jaw crack, teeth break, down the handle before she snapped his nose. His mouth split between a scream and a roar. He scrambled to climb a barstool. Clementine gave the pan its one final assault: aimed it right at the lockjawed knee.

“Y-YOU FUMGING LI’LE CUN’!”

To hear the man fight the blood in his nose, and his mouth, then his loose jaw…

It was something to behold from this fallen giant.

“That breath may take an hour, or you’ll only have one blink of their eye.”

He thrashed. Either his leg was longer, or the ground thought itself skewed.

Clementine fell the moment she took a step back. The man kicked again, and as he lunged forward, she heard the knife skid past her ear. Felt herself cry.

The giant didn’t go for it, no. His hands found her neck.

Her nails dug into his wrists. She kicked the man at his stomach, but the man— This was his sport. The smile warped across his face, despite what she marred, spread his glee wide. Knowing that he could pop a child’s head off with his bare hands alone…

He knew how to deal with children beneath him. Ones that laid declawed. With teary, honest eyes.

Clementine needed that knife.

“We ain’t strong like that, Clementine.

“And you’re no man… But you stared me down like you weren’t just a human little girl, and I wasn’t wearing a pelt.”

Dots plagued her vision. Everything from his face—the blood, froth, then a tooth and strip of flesh—pooled down upon her. It burned her cheeks. She raked his skin by one hand. Locked both heels against his weak knee. She kicked. He vomited more of what drained from him.

Her heart thrashed. It screamed in her ears, for A.J’s life.

“You’ve alrea’y gone reb…!” His words, a crackled distortion. “Wha’ ‘o you have ‘o ‘ay for yourse’f…?”

Through the grit of her teeth, a veil of gore, she snarled, “You. Got. The wrong. Girl.”

Realization struck him, and it swindled the violence from his grasp. “You…” She reached for the knife at her fingertips. His strength returned. Clementine choked. “You lie’ righ’ ou’ your ass, dibn’ you…?!”

She didn’t answer him.

“Have ‘o admi’, you would’ve been the fu’ing smar’est kid there…” There was scorn in his voice. Or was it enthrallment? “None ob dem’s fough’ li’e dis…” A leering kind of eyes set on her?

…busy mind, again. Memory grasped. It reached further than she thought possible.

Clementine kicked again. He snarled into her face.

Her teachers…would’ve loathed this sight. They may have loathed what she was about to do tenfold.

And her parents indefinitely, for the matter.

“Stare him down like you don’t have a body weaker than him… Let him question his own strength.”

Clementine snagged the handle.

“‘oo bad tha’ head on your shou’ers will roll in’o my ditch.”

She aimed. Her eyes didn’t align. It went too far.

Through the static of her vision, she felt the blade puncture his face. The man spasmed and choked on his blood. His hands sprang free from her neck—his vain attempt to tear the knife away from his eye. The wrong eye. She meant to have the giant blind.

But it was no matter. He was too slow, for he was a giant still disorientated by the pan’s onslaught.

Clementine drove the pan further. Felt the man suck in his last breath before she saw it. Blood and air rattled down his throat. And in his eye, so twisted. So confused. His seeing eye widened as the other met the back of his thoughts—into the barrel of his skull. Wondered what happened. That seeing eye wondered where he went wrong.

She stared as his weight began to sag against her body. Her lungs grew sharp, and air tore its way down her throat.

The slain giant’s blood pooled.

“Bring down a man like a man would bring down a bear.”

With the hilt of the knife dug into her chest, Clementine kicked and kneed the body off of her. It took a minute. Maybe two. Once it was done, and she got to her feet, her breaths were sharp, but there came a pain at her side. A shrill one. Through the adrenaline, Clementine couldn’t decipher if it was deep in her body, or a mere graze. Her hand latched over her hip. She felt the pond of blood seep between her fingers.

Clementine grated her teeth together as she limped into the bar. The kitchen tossed to her eyes. She buckled to the ground, along where she thought the Glock laid. Her hands fumbled. Blood smeared wherever she skimmed.

And the Glock was at hand.

She braced her teeth. It felt heavy. Like it promised enough bullets. Two, at least. There wasn’t any way Clementine would commit the same to the other men. Tears beaded across her eyes. She swallowed the knot in her throat. Felt her stomach churn. Clementine forced air to steady its pillage. Then, she unloaded the magazine.

The Glock was brimming. In its magazine, she had fifteen chances.

Clementine held her mouth. The handle was freshly smeared of blood, but this was luck. This was all luck.

She stalked along the cabinets for leverage, until she rounded the corner. Clementine strode a weary stride into the second door’s hall. She spied a sunroom, then another door—open, this one. Looked like it… Like it—

Hinges whined. Bootheels scuffed a doormat.

At the front doorway, she heard his appalled whisper:

“W-What the fuck…?!”

She did not hesitate.

Clementine raised the Glock. Felt it fire. Watched as his nose sunk between his eyes.

Bodies…never did fall the way she expected.

Memory captured the moment, a snapshot, where he stood there—gaunt in the face—with the mangled pan and dead brother at his feet. The false halo Clementine dawned for him, that of a child’s innocence, forced him to plummet.

And he did, as yet another giant damned to the earth.

Once the door closed, only to stop at the blond’s shoe, Clementine’s weak sob teetered the line down relief and revulsion.

…oh God. Oh God, why did their bodies fall, their blood spill, the way they did?

She sagged against the wall. Whirled over the agony as it blistered across her abdomen. Her neck was a numbing disgrace—contorted every feeble line of thought. Clementine would have to find a first aid kit, or a tacklebox. Staples, if it came to that. Or… Or tape. Anything at all.

The world veered the wrong way.

Her body knocked into the other wall, before her eyes sped, and she snagged the outline of a shower curtain.

The kitchen’s light was more than enough through the bathroom door. She staggered into the sink. Blood smeared, and the mirror waned. Both gun and knife dove to the floor as Clementine seized for balance, clawed at the ceramic. Her nails dug into gashes in its bowl. Liquid gore pattered down her face. There was doubt that the blood, and the spit, would stain the sink beyond what it was already.

She went to swallow. Felt her stomach reject the urge.

Clementine choked into the bowl. The sludge from her nose and mouth sank, but neither would drain.

“Fuck—!”

Her head panged below her feet. She felt the floor lambast the girl for weak knees. Clementine eyed the agony in her side. And there, a gorge in her jacket, then a new ravine down her skin. The man— He managed to stab through the jacket, the few shirts, before slitting her very skin. Had the knife been a touch longer, or the giant without a pan’s onslaught…

The when and how of it all escaped her.

The jacket was peeled away. She was losing blood, had no time. She tied the thing around her waist. Tightly.

Enough to pry another sob from her.

It would have to do. For the meantime.

She desperately hoped this bled worse than it was.

Clementine leaned over the counter with either hand grounded, and she found it hard knowing what exactly—sweat, tears, spit—leaked from her face, in harmony with the red. It may have been all. Or something else entirely. There were too many things that could drain from a body, she learned.

She picked up her head. Searched for the answer in reflection.

His blood was dark across her skin; there was still enough of it to lather. The runoff from her nose was darker. It paired well with the midnight bruise around her neck.

There was…another thing, however.

…within that mirror, she found sin in her eyes. The same that her parents warned her about. The same that would have her burn to ash for stepping a mere foot into their conserved, faithful home. There was no shaking it. She would carry the thought, long into her shallow grave.

Clementine found the gun, then the knife. Her stride from the door was lumbering. She swallowed. Her throat bit back. She strayed her eyes to the slain giants. Decided it was easy, sealing their fate. To look into the depths of their souls until those slain giants—monsters, ultimately—gasped their final breaths, it was a natural thing.

And as she did, she heard it. From the depths of her mind’s eye, something clicked into place.

There was lakewater. Her breath swelled to the hum of alcohol. The shadow’s pyre. Her tongue’s arson. It called for her again, that lake; she heard the nightmarish man:

“Stay with me, and that feelin’ in your gut, it’ll be easier to follow. Because you’re no damn lamb, there.

“Poach them. All of them, Clementine.

“And raise that child right.”

Truth be told, she wasn’t much better. She knew that.

A.J was, though. He was. And regardless of her royal heart, be it the dragon in her breath, Clementine would keep it that way. Through the means of a monster—if honest to God, that’s all it took…?

“Be that wolf who looked me in the eye, back in the cabin. And the one who fed me to the crows.”

I will.

Of course… Of course she would.

Clementine peeled herself away, roamed through the sunroom, before she nudged open its door with the pistol in one hand, and the knife in the other.

The barn was quiet. Too quiet for her liking. A hushed woodland meant despair.

Despite the looming clouds above, the sun’s hue had begun its embark. A deep, smoldering orange bled the night’s sky like ironwork to a blacksmith. It was a living color. Ignited the red across her face, and the sin of her eyes. The traces of insomnia which lay beneath, they boiled.

A glare beaded across the early morning’s dew.

As for her own, it seethed for the third giant. She intended to have his body break the ground he fell upon.

Clementine trudged across the soft gravel path, and with every stride, she gradually heard A.J. His whimpering. Not of pain but fear, she heard him. Halfway across the gravel, she heard the ghost-man as well—hissing at him, to sew his fucking lips together:

“—nderstand? That’s what happens when you don’t listen to Daron, kid. He decides when fun time’s over… Now shut it before he shoots you too.” Clementine’s face twisted with sardonic poise. “We don’t need another child in the ditch.”

Her shadow crept into the barn’s mouth. The ghost-man stood with his back to the door, and A.J had been sat on haybales beside the man. A.J was the one to turn. He called for Clementine. Reached for her.

And those cold eyes followed. The man blinked, and his complexion paled to that of bone. How…disturbing a sight she was, the girl had to wonder. The blood on her face was fresh—still beaded from her jaw, to her collar. There may have been the lasting imprint of a dead man down her body as well. The giant collapsed rather slowly across her.

And her eyes, of course… Her eyes blistered a new kind of color.

“W-What did you do…?!” he strained. “What… What did you do to my boys…?!”

She didn’t answer. Clementine stepped into the barn. She cocked the gun. Readied it for the inevitable. “Let him go,” she muttered, throat raw. The ire in her eyes forced the man to silence. He didn’t move. He held his breath.

She rocked her jaw. More of the giant’s blood twined. Then, with that ire seeped into every word, Clementine hissed, “Let my boy go.”

He stood there, as a gravestone. Clementine narrowed her eyes. The moment dragged between them, and as it did, Clementine realized that all three men really did look all alike. Same nose. Same jawline…

The giant’s face broke to wrath, and twisted the same way both his sons’ had done. He lunged forward. His hand stretched for her head. The Glock jolted in her hand.

It was easy.

The ghost-man was dead before he hit the ground.

She stepped over the body. Cared not for him, nor the his face—the one haunted by the stretch of his wide eyes, a panicked sneer.

Because he saw something then. The ghost-man saw hellfire. Nothing but a violent hellfire in her eyes.

There was no gold, no hazel.

He saw…a damning hue. Not what painted the sky behind her. Instead, the one before night’s dark reign, the dead’s siege:

Sundown.