Momo stands a board’s length away from the little creature. Minutes pass and it doesn’t move. She nudges it a few more times, then shrugs, checks her map, and begins walking in the direction she was heading before. Occasionally she looks back to make sure it isn’t following, but the unmoving lump slowly fades from sight as she walks farther away.
Even though she no longer feels the arthritis in her joints, her aging body still begins to feel tired after walking for so many hours. She has just decided to find a soft-looking rock to lay her head on when several shapes appear ahead. Momo looks toward them, then around her at the lack of soft-looking rocks, and continues walking.
As she gets closer, she can make out more and realizes they are houses, grouped into a small village. Ten, no, twelve she counts. Fenced-off yards sticking out into the wasteland resemble spokes on a wheel branching out from some central point. Each house is small, one room, maybe two, set a reasonable distance back from what she guesses is the village well. She pauses at the remnants of a fence marking off the backyard of one of them and runs her hands over the faded wood.
I wonder if this is where that creature came from, she thinks.
She stands there, her eyes constantly moving, looking for anything that might come at her, but everything is still. Hefting her board and gripping it with both hands, she takes a deep breath and starts moving again.
The sun is low in the sky behind her, and her shadow races ahead toward the stone well beyond the houses she passes between. She stops again when she reaches the central space. Twelve houses arc out away from her, their windows tightly shuttered and doors closed. Except one. Two houses to the right sits one that is slightly larger than the others, set a little farther back and taking up just a bit more room. Its door is the only one that is open. It faces away from the sun, and there is only darkness past the opening.
She steps toward it, skirting the front face of the closest house. Something crunches under her feet. She nudges at the offending matter on the ground with her foot, frowning when she figures out it is the now broken remains of a shrub. Light-colored branches lay scattered along the building front, the remnants of what was once a cheerful and welcoming home.
Something moves at the edge of her vision, and Momo immediately tenses. As soon as she sees another creature move from the open door ahead she begins to move. Her brain registers the ragged stump with no blood dripping from it and decades of training takes over. The board cleaves through the air and hits the already dead but still walking goblin, caving in its head and sending it to the ground in a motionless heap.
She waits just out of sight of anything else that might be inside, her ears straining to pick up any other noises that shouldn’t be in an abandoned home. But, there is nothing. The shadows stretch farther, the sun is setting quickly. Momo takes a deep breath, rolls her shoulders, and inches around the doorframe and into the house. She scoots against the front wall and waits for her eyes to adjust, ears straining to pick up any sounds, but there is nothing. It isn’t until she has cleared the main room and the small room in the back corner that she closes the front door and drags a heavy table over to block it. Then, she crawls under the table and promptly falls asleep.
image [https://i.imgur.com/js4cqrN.png]
In her life, Momo Smith has seen many things. Most are things she would forget if she could. This morning is one of them. As she looks down at her fifth half-eaten corpse since waking up she can’t summon up the energy to scowl at it. She walks back to the doorway of house number eight, makes sure nothing is wandering around, and begins to drag the body of the previous resident out into the gloom. The cheerful glow of the oil lamp just inside beckons her back, but she closes the door on its siren call, shifts her board under her arm, and holds it tightly to her side with her elbow while she pulls the body in between two houses and out into the wasteland.
In the distance, lightning flashes from dark, tumultuous clouds. They are closer than the last time she looked while moving corpses two and three from house number four. Two, Three, Four. She snorts a laugh at the way the numbers happened to line up and walks until the houses are small in the distance before laying the body out next to six impromptu graves. She picks up the shovel she left behind with the last corpse and begins to dig next to the mound of dirt covering the fourth body she had found that morning.
The wind is beginning to pick up by the time she pats the last shovel full of dirt on top of House Eight’s occupant. Momo gathers her new shovel and her faithful plank and walks back toward the houses. ‘At least that is all of them,’ she thinks, feeling the refreshing drops of water hit her skin as she opens the door of House 8. She rushes in, grabs a pail she saw earlier, and uses her new Sparkling Clean ability on it before setting it out to catch the rainwater.
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That done, Momo pulls up her Stat window to check her mana levels.
When she first began playing with her new abilities that morning she hadn’t realized she had mana at all. It wasn’t until cleaning up the traces left behind by corpse number three that she connected the deep exhaustion she was feeling with something magic-related. She relaxed for a while, poking around in her windows and trying to teach herself while recovering enough to move on to the next house, but now she is more cautious with her use. When all the dried blood and stray body bits are cleaned from the ground she collapses onto a sturdy chair next to a table filled with canned goods and lets out a sigh. Wiggling her fingers to help her concentrate, she activates No Germs Here and zaps one of the jars before opening it and a fork left behind nearby. Just to be safe.
“Beets. I hate beets.” Momo scrunches up her nose. Then, realizing she sounds just like her 8-year-old granddaughter, she laughs tiredly and digs in.
The rain continues through the rest of the morning and well into the afternoon before the wind begins to die down and the sound of elephants tap-dancing on the roof settles into the drum of a steady rain. The little house is almost sparkling, not a speck of dust in sight. Momo can feel the weight of her exhaustion as she dials down the lamp and crawls onto the narrow bed in the corner. Her mana bar is drained, a bold ‘0’ staring at her from her screen when she opens it. She curls up on the clean tan sheets and closes her eyes. “Just a little nap,” she whispers to herself, rubbing her face against the pillow. “Maybe an hour or two. Then I’ll get back to work.”
Light is peaking through the cracks around the shutters when she wakes up, full of energy. She almost bounces outside to take care of toilet business and looks around, rubbing her eyes in confusion. “The sun is rising, not setting? Did I sleep until morning?”
There is nobody to respond, but the answer is obvious as the sun is in the sky in the direction of her impromptu graveyard, toward the marker on her currently ignored map. Years of waking up on a set schedule make her want to be annoyed, but in the end, she shrugs and heads back to her collection of canned items. “Well, I’m retired now, I can sleep as much as I want.”
Her second full day in the no longer abandoned village goes easier than her first. She finds more jars of fruit and vegetables, confirming that whatever happened to the villagers happened after their summer harvest. “No more than a few months ago,” she surmises as she looks around House Ten and makes note of what is inside, “If my guess at the time of year is correct. The days seem pretty long, but I’ve only been here a couple of days. I could be wrong.”
Momo talks cheerfully to herself as she sorts through items left behind. The morning passes pleasantly until she enters House Twelve, and finds not just one body but three. She looks once at the smallest form and walks directly out into the sun again.
Nearly an hour passes, crouched in the sunlight, staring at half-buried remnants of some kind of plant. She stands up finally, slapping her legs to wake them up. It isn’t the first child she has seen die before it should have, but she had hoped she would never see another. Momo rolls her shoulders, shakes out her arms, and sighs so loudly that it echoes off of the house faces around her. Then she heads back in.
She picks up the little body instead of dragging it, intent on getting it out and buried before dealing with the other two. It takes a lot of mental tumbling to keep from thinking too much about the people in House Twelve. Who they were, What they could have been. Her thoughts want to become pensive and pull her into a sadness that she isn’t prepared to cope with, and she walks quicker so she can get the job done and move on.
Puddles dot the landscape around her on the way to the little graveyard, and she is so caught up in not thinking about certain things that she nearly trips over a body on the ground that was most assuredly not there the day before. She backs up, taking in the little goblin with one eye and a rather large knife sticking through its head, then dismissing it to scan the area for anything else she might have missed, anything else new that she should have been looking for.
“Well, if these were snakes they would have bit me,” she murmurs, setting the figure in her arms down on the ground and advancing on another body a few meters farther along with her shovel raised. “Or, I guess that should be if these were zombies they would have bit me?”
The second body is on its side, curled away from her, facing the graveyard just beyond them. The clothes covering it are old, but not in tatters like the zombie goblin’s, and it is closer in size to those bodies she had been clearing out of the houses for the last two days. She skirts around it, keeping her attention split between the land around her and the body that might jump at her at any minute.
There is no jumping, no biting, but she does see something different than anything else she has seen so far. The body is breathing, its chest moving slowly with each labored breath. It is a man, no older than her daughter, she thinks as she crosses her arms over her chest and appraises him. The shovel dangles from her hand and smacks against her hip.
For a moment she can’t find anything obvious that is wrong with him, but then she sees a darker spot on his dark brown shirt sleeve. With one hand holding her shovel up and ready to swing down, she leans over and tugs his sleeve up to his elbow, sucking in her breath between clenched teeth. The wound isn’t large, but the arcing wound can’t be anything but a ragged bite. Blood drips lazily from the punctures.
In her state of heightened awareness, she immediately notices when the breathing changes. Crystal blue eyes flutter open and parched lips part. “Please,” he says, his voice a labored wheeze. “Kill me.”