Kiki trudged into the lobby, dusty and tired.

She’d been woken up in the middle of the night by vibrations coming from below. Not directly below her. A bit further away. It wasn’t an earthquake, she was pretty sure, but not knowing frankly made it more unnerving than if it was one.

Point was, she was dirty, exhausted, injured, and hungry, and all of those were draining her hope and willpower.

Pack up. Go meet with Gaunt. Things are better when someone’s watching your back, she’d known that for as long as she could remember.

There wasn’t really that much to pack. The whisky had to be settled away carefully in her bag, wrapped up in the towel. Various cooking tools were tossed haphazardly into the duffel, alongside the water, and she had a new sheath for her broken knife. It was also made from plastic trash, so not very strong, but good enough to keep her from cutting herself.

The soap went in her bag. She grabbed the old plastic water bottle, the one she’d finished off the day before, and put the pills in there. She had her reusable bottle so she didn’t need it for much else. Pockets could get dirty and develop holes. They were safer here, and then in her bag.

That was it. Everything was packed.

It wasn’t much, but the duffel was still pretty heavy.

She stepped outside, and started walking towards the Starbucks as she texted.

Heading out now. How far away are you?

Gaunt replied, saying she was about 3km away. Okay, great. Should only take an hour or so.

About an hour later, Kiki stopped 3km away from the skyscraper, looked around, and saw no sign of anyone.

She did say ‘about’. Maybe she was a bit further away?

Another half kilometer, and still nothing.

I’m here. I can’t see you. Are you hidden somewhere?

what why do u think u know where i am

i didnt even give a location???

Kiki raised a brow. Gaunt didn’t know how Kiki knew?

So, she explained her reasoning, which was pretty easy to figure out if Gaunt had been moving in a straight line.

If Gaunt had been moving around in a different direction, that would make things difficult…

okay well idk exactly where i am its not like im going in a perfect path?? like u know u dont walk like that???

Damn it.

Fine. Fine, if she could just get the direction from the skyscraper, it would be fine. She’d just ask which direction Gaunt was in.

oh i dont have a compass so idk sorry

…What?????

How did Gaunt not know where she was? How did someone get that mixed up?

Surely she knew general directions at least…

bro i said i dont know

Gaunt.

Didn’t know.

Basic cardinal directions???

Like yeah, people used compasses, but Kiki had always thought that was for when you needed something really precise! Surely most people knew general cardinal directions!

Okay. This was no longer difficult. This would be nearly impossible.

How does someone get this lost?

And now Gaunt was treating her like she was crazy, just for expecting her to know basic cardinal directions. It wasn’t that hard! Did she also struggle with concepts such as up and down???

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Okay.

They were both getting upset over this, and that wasn’t productive. Fighting would only make things worse.

At this point she’d have to scrap her plan of meeting Gaunt where she was. Which was shitty because it was a good plan, but no, walking in a straight line was too much to handle.

And she should probably assume Gaunt would get lost without her destination being clearly visible on the horizon. So, they were meeting at the skyscraper.

And now, it was time to double back to where she’d just been, because this whole foray out was just a waste of time and energy,

Seriously, was it too much to ask for someone to not get completely lost if they were blindfolded and spun around a few times in a forest?

Whatever.

As she stormed back, her foot went into something squishy, and she yanked it out on reflex, looking down.

It was a corpse.

Not human, a dog, although that didn’t change the fact that she’d stepped in it and now rotting fluids were on her leg.

“EW!”

She backed away, searching for something she could use to wipe some of it off and trying not to gag. She was pretty sure the only reason she succeeded was because her stomach was so empty.

She didn’t find it.

What she did find was lots of other corpses.

How did all these get here? She’d passed through this area less than half an hour ago, and they hadn’t been there then.

They’d been moved here.

The smell…

The corpses were wet. Not water, and not their own fluids. Something clear and goopy. And some of them were… caved in. Like their organs had been removed.

She tossed a rock at one, and it collapsed with a wet splat. A bit of red-brown liquid leaked out, but besides that, there was nothing inside as far as she could tell.

There were streaks and smears of that goopy stuff here and there, leading off in a different direction. The stuff on her leg had started to dry, becoming sticky and forcing her to pull her foot up after each step.

She followed the trail up to the subway entrance, yawning black.

“Nope, fuck that.”

She turned around and trudged back, going maybe a little faster than before, because she really didn’t want to meet whatever had been dragging around those corpses, especially not in an enclosed subway system. Which it was presumably living in.

Kiki thought back to the noise that had woken her up.

Yeah, she was staying the hell away from subways for the foreseeable future.

Was the skyscraper close to any subway entrances? Had she seen any on her way there?

Not that she could recall, but maybe there was one in a direction she hadn’t looked in. Hopefully not.

Okay, so Gaunt was meeting her there. Probably moving stupidly slow like they had been for the past few days, and possibly getting lost along the way.

Her plan had been perfect, if only people could navigate, but fine, she was doing this. It would probably still work. Gaunt wasn’t dead yet, and they’d made it this far already without getting more lost than they already were.

There was a pinprick on her forehead, and she brushed at it.

Then another at her ear, and this time, she swatted and looked at her hand.

A little gnat, squished on her ring finger.

Great. Just great. She picked up her pace a tiny bit more, hoping to get to the (relative) shelter of the lobby, and waved her hands around her in hope of dissuading any more. They had better not follow her.

They followed.

It wasn’t one of those enormous swarms in horror movies, capable of stripping you to the bone, but it was a lot. She squished two and three more took their place. They darted across her field of view, and no matter how much she brushed and swatted at her exposed skin, they kept biting.

“God damn-” She spat, hurriedly, as a few got into her mouth. They were bitter. She tried pulling her shirt up more to protect her face, but that just exposed a strip of her midsection and she hurriedly let it fall when they attacked her waist. Then she snorted as one flew into her nostril.

Where the hell had these things come from?

Smoke. Smoke got rid of bugs, but even at the lobby, she had no way to start a fire. Insect repellent… would be really nice right now, but she had none. She growled in frustration, rubbing her hands over her face, little red streaks from the gnat bites staining them. Some had congregated where her wounds were, the cuts and bites she’d acquired, and even though they were covered it was still unnerving.

One flew into her eye.

“Fuck!” She yelled, immediately spitting when more flew in her mouth, again. Tearing up, she blinked, rubbing at that eye until she was reasonably sure she’d gotten it out.

Where had they even come from? There was nothing for them to eat for-

Oh, if they’d come from the corpses, that was ten times as bad as anything else.

She decided to believe that they’d flown in from elsewhere.

Bugs didn’t usually like the sun, but it was cloudy, and she couldn’t control the fucking weather. Once she got to the lobby, she could close up her curtain and hopefully keep more from finding her, but that wouldn’t help for the ones targeting her now.

And it was still over half an hour away.

If she could…

But no, that stupid thing that kidnapped her was fucking her up even now, and there was absolutely nothing she could do to get rid of these hellspawn.

Maybe she’d never recover.

Maybe whatever it did was permanent.

She slapped at a gnat for harder than she meant to, and flinched at the impact. She’d have a hand-shaped imprint there, on the back of her other hand. A stark red representation of her frustration.

No. This wouldn’t last forever, it couldn’t-

But if it did-

If it did, even if she made it home, she’d never be free.

Maybe she’d make it through this hell, survive everything it threw at her, and make it out, only to never-

Never again-

She covered her mouth with one hand, bending over, and screamed. In terror, in rage, in despair, black specks swarming her like every little thing that had hurt her since she’d woken up here. A cry for someone, anyone, to help her, but her family was worlds away, her friends similarly unreachable, and there was nobody close enough to hear her and answer. She was hungry, filthy, and exhausted, alone and in pain, and powerless in a way she hadn’t been since she was an infant.

What was the point, even? She clearly didn’t have the intelligence or resources to find her way out of this- she couldn’t even organise a simple rendezvous. Maybe she should just give up on the meeting, start walking home and keep going until she died. It wasn’t like she’d actually make it there. She didn’t even know how far it was, beyond ‘farther than she could measure’.

But then Gaunt would arrive, and Kiki wouldn’t be there.

Gaunt would arrive, and Gaunt would be stuck here, alone.

And you know what?

She stood back up, wiped blood and gnats off her face and neck, and kept walking.

If she died here, she’d rather die with someone there to hold her hand.

If Gaunt died, she didn’t want Gaunt to have to die alone.

And if there was some way she could help Gaunt escape, or Gaunt could help her escape, she didn’t want to close that door forever.

The gnats kept biting, but there were fewer of them as she kept going. By the time she reached the lobby, she was covered in bites, but there were only a few left.

Wearily, she stumbled inside, closing and securing the curtain behind her, before carefully swatting and killing every gnat left on her skin.

She turned on the phone, took a flash picture, and winced at the photo.

Okay, she needed to clean up before Gaunt got here, or they’d think she was a bloody corpse come to life. She could spare a bit of water for that. No soap, she didn’t have enough water to rinse off as well.

So she wiped herself off with the wet corner of a towel slowly becoming filthy, undid and redid her tangled, matted braid, tidied up and swept away a bit of leftover sand.

And then she settled into what was left of one of the armchairs, and waited.