Things weren’t great.

Well, that much was obvious from the beginning, but everything just slid down a shallow slope from there, inch by inch, into the depths of hell. It wasn’t so much that everything was awful for Gaunt as it was somehow failing to improve.

Everything was heavy. Her muscles strained even when she tried to keep them still. Thankfully, it seemed like nothing came and ate her in her sleep, but that wasn’t particularly obvious to her when she first awoke. She felt more like she’d been hit by a train than back when she was hit by a train.

Absently, Gaunt reached for one of the wooden shelves to prop herself up and it promptly cascaded onto her. Muttering under her breath, she swept off all the stray splinters to the best of her ability. Rolling onto all fours, she got her feet underneath her and relied on the wall for support.

She then trudged over to her bag and set herself down with that same excruciating slowness. Lifting the bandage revealed a sight basically identical to the infection from yesterday. The most she could ask for without any actual antibiotics, really. Experimentally, she traced a hand across the back of her neck and felt very little, just a smattering of dried blood that didn’t seem to come from anywhere in particular.

She pried up the bandage a touch more to reveal the fresh injury. This one was also mostly unchanged, though not bleeding quite as freely. It hurt, but not the same way as yesterday; Gaunt was inclined to call it more of a throbbing rather than a stinging. The antiseptic only stung the gash at her midriff rather than the new slice, which was worrisome, but also what she liked to call a “later problem”.

A can of tuna didn’t do much to stop the tremors. It did make her feel thirsty, which was shitty, given her current resource imbalance. Kiki better be close, and she’d better have some shit on hand, or Gaunt figured she may as well just sit down and die anyway.

No use dwelling on worst-case scenarios. She ducked out the door and that was that.

This time, she pulled out her phone. Kiki should be close by now, and directions would be handy. Gaunt didn’t feel great about the chances of meeting today, but on the other hand, she felt equally optimistic about her own chances given they didn’t.

Turned out Kiki had left just a bit before then, actually, and it was them asking for directions. Which set Gaunt slightly on edge; wasn’t it the number one rule of getting lost that you stay put? But then it was always possible Kiki just knew this place better than Gaunt, especially given her unfortunate circumstances.

Gaunt glanced around lazily at the various ruins littering her view. Nothing even remotely attention-grabbing. Scratch that, then. As for distance, the skyscraper was still slightly hazy but highly visible, and seemed relatively large. Three kilometres, maybe, maybe not, but that was close enough. As for direction, no clue. The train was going southbound while she was on it, but who knew if the tracks curved in the meantime, or which way the tracks were even going. The wreck was so demolished that she couldn’t even tell which end was front from back, let alone which way each end was facing before being thrown hundreds of metres off the rail.

That in mind, she gave Kiki her best guess. How they planned to meet Gaunt was a mystery, at least for the next couple hours. Checking her messages then made it very apparent that it was a mystery to Kiki, too. Supposedly, they’d found Gaunt’s exact location despite being given zero landmarks, not having a direction in mind, and not even knowing what she fucking looked like. Fat chance.

Kiki, how, exactly, do you think you’ve found my exact location?

And of course they’d assumed Gaunt could keep in a perfectly straight line while travelling. Huffing, she stopped walking and brought the phone a little closer to her eyes. She woke up in the middle of nowhere in a scrunched-up train car, hundreds of miles from home, disoriented, injured, exhausted, and all that served with maybe a minor case of actual brain damage, and this bitch expects her to walk in a perfectly straight line. Yeah. No thanks.

But Gaunt had a fair bit of experience simply keeping things to herself, which she did, probably more to Kiki’s benefit than her own. Thankfully, Kiki didn’t linger on that for so long and started asking about directions. Which again, Gaunt didn’t know, but she was pretty open about having a whole medley of backpacking-related gadgets. No compass, though.

She’d only started walking for maybe three minutes when she stopped in her tracks again, fully reconsidering Kiki’s currently integral role in her survival. No compass means no compass, and anyone who can find their exact direction with a fucking sun dial would’ve been living off in the woods several miles away from any hint of civilization. At this point, Gaunt wondered if she was just better off alone than with someone with these kinds of expectations.

Well, end of the world. Not exactly spoiled for choice. She rolled these words around in her head in a weak effort to keep her from attempting to throw the phone into the nearest wall, which for the record, was a few hundred metres back. Kiki’s questions got more inane by the second; why didn’t she know? Why the hell would she? Was Gaunt brain damaged? Maybe, no need to lie there. Finally she shot off a question of her own: I’m not expecting you to know your exact location at all times, why do you want me to do this shit?

Which led to the audacious claim that yes, indeed, Kiki knew exactly where she was all the time, and it was Gaunt’s fault for not asking about it. Sack of shit. Finally after a healthy ten-minute silence Kiki decided to shut the fuck up and just meet her at the skyscraper. Like a normal human being.

Well, that certainly boded well for their approaching meet-up. Gaunt tucked the phone into her pocket, where it should’ve remained in the first place, and vowed not to touch it until she was done walking for the day. No matter what.

That said and done, her mind was left to think about more important issues. Still no water, and her throat was starting to ache. Her knee-jerk reaction was to continue being pissed at Kiki but Gaunt had to concede that she’d kept an eye out despite the distraction, and was faced with nothing whatsoever. But oddly conveniently, as the thought drifted through her mind, she could make out a collection of shrubs in what used to be a park, dotted with little red berries.

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As she got closer, they looked like raspberries. Plenty of water there. Eagerly, she pulled out one of her empty water bottles and started plucking them off their stems.

As much as she wanted to devour them right away, she wasn’t certain. She wasn’t exactly an expert on foraging, and plus, who knew what had been around these bushes anyway. And anyway, it would be better to wait until she was in a relatively safe location rather than on the road. She’d eat them as a last resort.

She still took the time to pick them, which ate up a few minutes of her time. There was this incessant tingling that pushed to the forefront of her mind, but no bugs to be found. The next logical step to consider was it being the plant itself, rather than bugs. The bottle fell to the ground with a hollow thunk and Gaunt tugged her arms free.

The tingling didn’t go away. As she kept walking, it started blotting out her focus on looking ahead; there was just this incessant underlying itching under her skin that slowly turned to raw pain as she scratched. Her arms were becoming textured, between new abrasions and numerous blooming hives. The tickling sensation was reaching her face now, too, and then her vision blurred completely as her eyes grew wet. Finally the tickling was too much and she sneezed all over her face and hands, spreading the wet sensation further.

First thing to do would be get somewhere safe, but that posed quite the challenge for someone who couldn’t see. Gaunt was tempted to wipe her eyes, but stopped herself at the last minute and forced herself to stumble blindly. It took less than a minute for her to collapse on the ground, and opt to stay there instead.

It would’ve been nice to keep going. Make some progress, or at least pretend she was. Or to dress her wounds, or maybe break her rule from earlier and pull out her phone. Hell, even fight off a giant centipede, apparently, if it meant doing something. But as much as the itching and swelling and bleeding spurred her into action, there was absolutely nothing to do past just sitting there and trying to breathe.

Still full of tension, and no outlet. None except for thinking.

Fucking hell, how did I end up here?

It used to be kind of funny, the sheer escalation of it. Sure, Gaunt knew being a yes-man would bite her in the ass sooner than later, but on this kind of scale? And it was ridiculous, too, like someone made it up on the spot. What if the train just crashed and suddenly the apocalypse happened and you didn’t even know where the hell you were? Wouldn’t that be so crazy?

But it was funny to think about because it wasn’t plausible, it wouldn’t happen, and then here she was anyway. Experiencing the actual apocalypse, and she was alone. More alone than she would’ve been at home, anyway.

Would they miss me? Not a hypothetical anymore. Do they miss me. On a superficial level? Yeah, no shit. Her parents called her nearly every hour the first couple days of the trip. Her friends, too, kept her updated, with the promise she’d do the same. Talked about the things they’d do when she got back. Of course they miss her, but they wouldn’t miss her, because they wouldn’t know what happened. It had been four days, for fuck’s sake.

But what if they did? Immediately, Gaunt tried thinking about anything else, even bringing her attention back to the snot running down her face and her skin raising into rashes, but it was like trying to shut an overfilled suitcase after the zipper broke. The answer remained the same. Of course they’d miss her. She’d basically be dead, how could they not? Her parents would hold a memorial, invite the rest of her family, family friends. There would be sad Instagram posts with that black-and-white filter, with pictures of her smiling and captions talking about how she was so honest and supportive and a great person. She would be missed, because that’s what you do when someone you know dies.

But would they miss miss her? What about after? Oh, her parents would cry for weeks, but they’d move on. They had other stuff. Gaunt hadn’t visited in a while, so it wasn’t like they weren’t used to living without her, anyway. And they weren’t exactly enthused with her career choice, either; chances were they were waiting for her to hit a dead end. In a different way than she actually did, sure, but without exactly holding high hopes for her future.

And her friends? Yeah, they’d be fine. Go out and do exactly the same shit they used to, the exact same way they used to. Gaunt never really did much. She was there, that was it. Hell, for that matter, she’d never actually offered her skills to Kiki. Just her stuff. In some ways, this was good, moving on. No one to have their lives shattered.

Are they okay? It didn’t even strike her before that maybe it wouldn’t have anything to do with her. What the hell happened? It wasn’t a train crash. It wasn’t just a crash, and no one could fucking tell her what actually happened. Why everything was empty for miles around. Superbomb? Meteor? Did a bunch of fucking lizard people drag everyone down into Earth’s mantle? It just didn’t make any goddamn sense, which was so much worse, because now anything could have happened.

Gaunt knew. She’d always known. This is big. It’s not just me, it goes far, it goes all the way back home, they’re in this too. They’re dead.

They’re fucking dead, too.

She found her hand touching her face against her will. Her eyes were still wet, even though nothing was itching anymore.

Last thing she fucking needed. She wasn’t sure if she was grateful or not to be alive. She wasn’t sure if she was disappointed or not. That said, she may as well keep herself that way.

Now that she could see where she was going, there was no reason to sit and wallow anymore. Flicking the last of the tears from her eyes, Gaunt shoved herself to her feet with more energy than she should rightfully have, and set off for the tower, looming tantalisingly close on the horizon.

But as luck would have it, hardly thirty minutes in and there were bodies. Not human bodies, thank god, but limp heaps scattered with hardly a square metre between them. Stunk like the ashes of hell in the summer heat, just ripe enough to rot. Gaunt gazed up at the sky, and the sun gazed back.

Well, she’d just spent an unhealthy amount of time thinking about death, so it wasn’t exactly unexpected to stumble across a field of corpses after the end of the world. Or it wouldn’t have been if she hadn’t gone for tens of kilometres without seeing a single sign of life, save some scattered and very questionable insects. Made her wonder exactly what would have dragged ninety-five percent of living things into one place, dead or alive, and ensured they became the former.

Certainly nothing she was planning on dealing with. Her throat was scratchy and was starting to taste like copper, but a bit (or a lot) of dehydration was nothing compared to the actual Grim Reaper. That said, a detour would likely triple her travel time. She’d last a couple more hours, take a much-needed break, and skirt around to the tower from the far end. It took a few moments for her to force herself back the way she came.

Small blessings. There was an intact house on its lonesome less than an hour from there, with a strange foundation that would have been called ugly a week ago and Gaunt called perfect for the present day. Thick and squat and the reason it was still standing. Tiny, as the rent would have been astronomical otherwise, but it hardly mattered anymore. Gaunt threw her things down and barricaded the doorway.

She took a can of tuna from her bag, stared at it before putting it back. Tamped down the rolling wave of nausea. She abandoned all thoughts of eating and opted to check on her wounds instead. Both of them remained very much the same as that morning.

With nothing left to do, Gaunt started typing a message and hoped someone could take her mind off everything. That, or – hoping beyond hope – prove her wrong about any of it.