Rust considered her life, as they walked together through desolate streets.

She hadn't also been this isolated.

Her cottage was out of the way on the edge of the village, sure, but at one time in her life, she had only returned there to eat and sleep. There was the gardening club, of which she was the chairperson and the knitting circle, and she had helped clean the church when she wasn't busy. She had given out the leaflets and gone out to visit the parishioners who could no longer make it there themselves. She had cooked for the local school, for a time, and had generally kept busy.

Then there had been that drama with the gardening club and she had lost her position as head, and then her knees had gotten bad, her bike had needed repairing, and it all sort of crumbled around her. Now she was one of the parishioners that the younger people came out to visit. The children she had cooked for had all left for the big city, and more than one of her children had escaped overseas.

Still, they did visit sometimes, and they did think of her. The chickens had been a gift from them, years earlier. She hadn't wanted the creatures, but the whole lot of them had gotten together and decided on it, whether she wanted it or not. "You'll at least always have some food in, mum, you just gotta clean them out now and again. You don't even have to get a fridge, we know how you are. You can just keep the eggs on the counter."

"You can bake cakes using the eggs!" the grandchildren had thrown in, and she had rolled her eyes and let them set up the coop in the garden.

It was, now that she thought about it, the last time she'd seen them all together.

That night she had read the stack of books they'd left behind, sorted out the food-safe pens and egg cartons and boxes and leaflets and god knows what else, and despaired at the lot of them. The next morning she had released the birds and collected her first egg, terrified that she might get bitten, or that they'd resent her for her theft.

She had soon learnt that they had no care for their eggs at all, leaving them in strange places or breaking them in their attempts to muscle each other out of the nests, and gradually her fear had waned, until she was almost fond of them.

Not that she would admit ever admit to her children. They were a burden, riddled with lice, either not laying enough or laying too much, eating her out of house and home!

She had gone through a few different chickens in the decade since, making friends with the breeders and keepers in her area, but now she had only a handful left, and they were likely to be her last.

Still, it had been a hobby, and when her kids tried to take them off her, worried that she was getting too old to care for them now, she had firmly resisted.

And then the world had ended.

-

"You alright over there old woman?" Shim grinned, nudging her out of her reverie, "you zoned out on us there for a minute."

She huffed at him, working out if she was close enough that she could get him in the shin with her boots.

He grinned and danced backwards as she tried it, and she rolled her eyes at him, rubbing a phantom ache in her back. "Let's go to the end of this street and then head home. It doesn't look like our library is forthcoming today."

Shim shrugged, skimming his gaze over the walls as they passed. "You never know, maybe if we shut our eyes a bit and then walk into one of the building, it'll turn into what we want, like with the hotel that one time."

"It'll turn into a void and you'll fall straight into the nothing." Quilt shouted from across the road, where she was checking the doors on her side. "Don't even try it, you daft sod!"

This street was one of the ones near the outer edge, and it was narrower than the ones further. There were even ripples in the road where it had bunched up, like the waves in a rumpled blanket.

"I'm more liable to agree with that," Rust said, and Shim sighed at her, feigning innocence as he closed his eyes, stumbling towards the next set of doors. She could see from here that it was an ordinary hollow, something about the way the light reflected off the windows, but she wasn't going to stop him.

"Don't fall in!" Quilt shouted, and he raised a middle finger in her general direction, staggering as he tried to navigate over the bumpy ground with his eyes shut.

"I wanna find the greatest library," he intoned, his voice like the priest at Sunday mass, "I want to find the library of Alexandria. I want it to have the biggest shelves, and the juciest books. I want the romance section to span a whole floor, so that Quilt may never run out of things to- ouch" Rust had reached out and knocked into him gently, and he stumbled into the wall laughing and blinking his eyes in the light.

She suspected that when the End happened, she had been older, or her body had been… Different, more broken down. Her knees twinged now and again, after a hard day of walking, but that was the thing. She could do a whole day of walking now, when before she remembered having to lie down after just sorting out the chickens, or after digging the garden. Her knees never would have allowed her to come even half this far, and she would have been in pain for days afterwards if she had.

She had been considering turning the parlour into...

Shim reached out and poked her again, and she blinked at him. "Lost you again." He looked a little worried now, "you doing alright?"

She shook herself off, "yeah I just…"

Already the dream was fading, something about chickens and gardening?

"Worried about my birds, is all. We've been seeing more animals in the forest, and all my fencing is gone. What if a fox gets in, or a raccoon? And I should start setting the garden up for Spring, it's already starting to thaw"

He huffed out a laugh, "and ere I thought you were thinking about important things."

Walking backwards now, he raised his arms to the heavens. "Oh great World Rebuilder, bringer of BRICKS and BLOCKS and occasionally BARS, please send upon us some carrot seeds, some dried peas, and some pansies, ready to harden-off now and only four ninety nine for six! Great Rebuilder, I implore-"

This time, she did push him over.

-

"Hey, I got something!" Quilt called out a few minutes later. The other two walked over, and she pointed down a side road. "Over there, some big animal came through I think."

They looked over, and sure enough, there was a ditch across the road, as if something large had been dragged between buildings. The trench was already mostly filled with snow, whatever had passed by there, it had been a couple of days before.

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Rust shuddered and pulled Shim back as he started to head towards it. "Be sensible, lad. Whatever came through it doesn't look like people, but if it's still around, we don't want to alert it."

Quilt bit the inside of her cheek, realising now how loudly she had shouted. "But what if it is a person, if somebody else has woken up? Surely it can't be just us?"

She swallowed, wrapping her arms around herself and staring at the distant track. " What if it's a person, and they're alone out here?

She stared at the trench and then shook herself. "There was that big cat thing we saw a while ago, what if bigger wildlife is waking now, do we need to build up some defences, like?"

Rust opened her mouth to speak, but Shim got there first. "Don't give grandma ideas, we can protect the chickens from a couple of foxes, but I ain't taking on a lion, no matter how good the eggs are."

"It shouldn't come to that." Rust said, "But we should see if we can make their house more secure. I never needed it before, but things are different here."

She stared at the track with worry, and a minute later they all pulled away, back to hunting for wild libraries.

-

"Hear me out." Quilt proffered, "If we moved into the city-"

She raised a hand at Rust's as-yet-unspoken objections, "If we find a good building, somewhere central like, then there'd be no animals. We could go back to my apartment block, there was places in the ground floor we could live."

Shim pointed wordlessly back towards where they had seen the track, and she winced but carried on.

"Ok so, less animals. Not like living in the forest anyway, and we'd be closer to places we haven't explored yet. We could set up a huge indoor place for the chickens, give them their own apartment or something even."

"They'd have no food." Rust's voice was clipped, "they eat bugs, and grasses, and plants. They would starve inside an apartment."

"They keep chickens inside sometimes, right?" Quilt's question was a little more unsure, as this wasn't her field of expertise. "We'd make do? We could liberate oats for them from the Store. We could even keep them on the roof maybe, long as we fenced it off right?"

Shim was staring at the sky as he walked, not a part of this conversation. They had given up looking for the library and were heading home, along the middle of the road.

"I used to look out and there was a building across from me which had a vegetable garden up there, and bees. We could make it work."

Rust gave her a baleful look. "And do you fancy climbing up a hundred flights of stairs, multiple times per day?"

Quilt opened her mouth to object, and then shut it again, thinking. "Huh, yeah. I guess you're right. There used to be ways to get up and down without stairs I'm sure, but I guess they went away with everythin' else."

"I thought so." Rust nodded, and that was the end of that. Shim kept his hands in his pockets and his eye on the sky as he walked. Maybe they could take the axe they used for firewood and liberate some fencing from the forest. He had never built fences before, and it would be hard without nails, but he thought he'd spotted a... A long-twig tree at some point. Maybe they could do something with that.

Still, it wouldn't stop a lion, but what would, maybe a stone wall? But where would they get stone…

He winced as Rust leaned over and nudged him, "I was just thinkin' about the chickens!" he protested, rubbing his arm. "You do it all the time!"

-

Going into the forest to get the material for the fencing had freaked him out so much that Rust had had to accompany him. They were only a few trees deep, but they may as well have been a thousand miles from home now, for all he knew.

Even the sounds were different, the birds sounded wilder, and there were some sort of monkeys or something up there. He had caught a glimpse of one once, he was sure of it.

"Come on now," Rust cajoled him, arms full of sticks, "I used to play in this forest when I was only knee-high. Nothing ever harmed me."

"That's cause it was your forest, normal and civilised, not, not whatever this is!"

He would have gestured around, but his arms were also full, the axe hanging off his belt.

He sighed and adjusted his load. They would have to come back at least once more, and he wasn't looking forward to it.

"I used to build little houses out of sticks like these, when I was a kid," Rust tried to fill the silence, "One of my friends in the village had a big, uh, stick tree behind her house, and we used to hang out there sometimes and play house."

Shim shot her a baleful glance, and then jumped as something screeched overhead, almost dropping the sticks.

"I used to like walkin' home through the woods, I said that. But this isn't those woods, this is like being lost in some horror book."

He peered ahead, even only this far in, he already felt lost.

"This isn't- this isn't that. This is some jungle or some shit. This is what forests were before there were people. This forest, this forest is some crazy shit. I looked out saw a bird the other day like one of your chickens but like four times the size. What the fuck was it? I have no idea, I certainly ain't seen it again."

He was shaking now, glaring at nothing. Overhead the animal, whatever it was, screeched again.

"and you, whatever you are, you shut up too!" he shouted.

Rust stared at him, looking around for somewhere to put her sticks, before eventually dropping them at her feet. "C'mere"

He tried to get away, but she dragged him into a hug. "No, get off!" he grumbled, trying to twist away, but she wasn't having any of it.

"This situation is shit. For all of us. It's shit and none of us should be here."

He tried to fend her off with his bundle of sticks, but almost tripped in the process, dropping half of them and still failing to dislodge the hug.

"I have a whole life of memories," she wrapped her arms around tighter him, and he made a noise like an unhappy cat. "I know I had a family, and children, and grandchildren, and I know they might be out there somewhere. But if they are, they don't need me. I'd like to find them, but I was old, they didn't need me anymore."

She took a deep breath as Shim lost the rest of his sticks. "This isn't really an End for me, it's just a second chance. I was prepared to go."

He grumbled something, but it was muffled by the hug, despite her being a head shorter than him.

"But for you, it's not a second chance, because you never got to live out the first one. Or if you did, you don't remember it. That-"

She gave him one last squeeze, and then let him go, pushing him back. "- That's the worst, and I'm sorry it happened. I know that ideally you wouldn't be hanging out with people of your mothers and your grandmothers generation. You'd have friends your own age, you wouldn't be stuck in… In whatever this is. This purgatory. But-"

She rubbed her cheeks and then knelt down to pick up the dropped twigs.

"But we're here, both of us, if you wanna talk, we're all going through the same thing."

Shim shrugged and stared up into the canopy, holding back tears, blindsided and not knowing how to respond.

-

"I dunno." He said almost five minutes later, as they were dropping off their loads in the garden. "I'm scared. Right now everything feels stable and ok, but what happens when that changes."

He grabbed the axe and started whittling down the ends of the branches into points. "What if in the end it's still just the three of us and you two get old and I have to look after you and there's no like, hospitals or whatever. There's no doctors here, we're using a wood fire to cook and the forest, for all we know, is full of bloody monsters."

He huffed, "I feel responsible for the both of you, like I have to step up and be the man around here or whatever." Rust gave him a long stare, and he withered a little. "I never said it was smart, alright. That's just how I feel. But I also feel like, what if there is people out there and we're just, I dunno, castaways on a deserted island. Except it isn't deserted, what if there's a big beach resort nearby and we've simply walked the wrong way, missing it every time we go out."

He ruined one of the sticks he was attempting to sharpen, and almost lost his finger as the axe slipped. With trembling hands he placed it on the pile, rubbing his hands together. "I miss my ma and I'm scared she's out there somewhere without me. Your kids may be grown up and you were ok on your own, but I wasn't, and she relief on me. I miss my own bedroom, and my friends. I don't even remember my friends, but I was buildin' a life, and I never got to live it."

He swallowed loudly, surprised to find tears tracking down his face.

"We should go back and look at those tracks, just in case there was a person. It looked like it went through the doors, the animals wouldn't have done that. Then I wanna look proper for people. I wanna leave messages in paint, I want to, I don't even know. I want to find a store which sells spray cans and graffiti every single piece of concrete I can find."

He sniffed and rubbed at his face, leaving grubby trails behind, and Rust was struck again by how young he was. She hadn't even thought about it lately, just thinking of him as Shim, but compared to her, he was barely out of the cradle.

"We can do that."

She picked up the axe, having much more experience with it than him, "I think I saw a house-paint section in the Store. We can look tomorrow."

Shim nodded, suddenly exhausted, as if he hadn't slept in days, and together they started putting up the fence.