“It’s late. Let’s take a breather.”

Although Gaunt’s now-bandaged forearm felt fine even with that shallow slice, her lungs felt fine, her legs were fine, so on and so forth, a break after carrying over a hundred pounds couldn’t do any harm.

The spot they were in was already half empty, with the odd corrugated sheet and chunk of concrete littered around the edges of a clearing. Flat enough for the two of them to find a seat and start on lunch. Kiki took the liberty of wandering around the perimeter, tossing bits of rubble this way and that, probably looking for anything suspicious. Gaunt resigned herself to sitting perfectly in the middle of the area.

She crossed one leg halfway over the other, and propped a can of tuna on her knee. She peeled the tab back with one finger and yanked it aside, tossing it back into the surrounding scrap heap, and scooped out a chunk of fish with her bare hands. Salty, and enough to make Gaunt wince a touch. Eating the same thing for days on end had a way of doing that.

“All clear!” Kiki announced, walking back over to Gaunt. She trotted over to Gaunt’s bag and pulled the rest of the raw pasta free, shoving a few pieces in her mouth. Dry, raw pasta.

“You sure you… I have tuna, if you’d like. I don’t think we can afford setting water to boil right now, though.”

Kiki waved her off. “I’ve been eating tuna for the past three days. Even this is better than more of that.”

Hard to argue with that, even if she really wanted to. “...Alright.”

Kiki continued picking through the pasta like how a raccoon plucks out the choicest castoffs from a dumpster. Strangely delicate with how her fingers took each piece one at a time, how she looked at it from all sides before nibbling on it. Gaunt tossed her now empty can aside and rummaged around for a bottle of water.

Kiki swallowed another bite of pasta and cleared her throat. “So, any idea what the fuck that was?”

Ugly. Ugly and scary, that’s for sure. “I mean… I’m not sure it would make me feel better if I did.”

“That’s fair, but if we knew more about it, maybe we would be able to fight it off better if it attacks again. Like if we knew what killed it. Maybe we severed something vital?”

That was true. It was fleshy, for starters. Not any kind of animal on Earth, but close enough, maybe. Maybe closer than she thought. Any self-respecting animal would bleed out and die if someone stabbed it enough times, which they did, and might keep going even if you threw a rock at a tough spot, which they… sort of did. “There was a lot of… looked like blood. Probably something like that. Maybe that did something.”

“You think it bled out? Maybe. Yeah, that makes sense.” Kiki paused for a moment. “It seemed semi-intelligent. It was using tools to trap us and as weaponry.”

Gaunt took a swig of her newly acquired water bottle. “Bled out or heart attack or some shit, I don’t know, it was weird. And I mean… lots of things use tools. Like I think a crow or something could do that too if it was bigger…” Gaunt’s voice grew quieter as it trailed at the end. “It’s probably not… it’s probably not as smart as we think. And if it is, then whatever.”

Kiki looked at her for a long moment. She opened her mouth, hesitated, let her brows furrow instead. A lot like Gaunt said something she probably shouldn’t have said. “Well, we probably won’t see it again, so no need to worry.”

Well, now Gaunt had to remedy that whole situation. “Well, I’m not saying we should brush over the topic or anything. I’m just saying, you know, there’s no reason to make things out to be worse than they are, right? Especially at the end of the world, ha.” She snorted. “If it does that shit again, we just do the same thing. Cut all its stupid limbs off.”

Kiki smiled a little bit. “That’s the spirit.” She reached down into the backpack, pulling out some water, and unscrewed the cap. “Most animals can’t use tools, so hopefully that’s not anything we’ll have to deal with again. Being pelted with rocks is not something I want to repeat. Honestly, I’m usually the one doing the pelting.” She took a sip of water.

“Well…” Gaunt’s gaze traced the path of a stray weed in the packed dirt. “I’m not sure that was really an animal? Like, it didn’t… it was weird?”

“Very weird. It felt unnatural. Maybe it started as an animal once, but I don’t think it really is anymore.”

“Yeah, maybe.”

Unnatural.

Gaunt unclasped her hand from the space just above her bad wrist. Not really knowing what to do with it, she screwed the cap back on the water bottle, tucked it away, and zipped her bag shut. “Well, I’m ready to go when you are.”

Kiki held up a finger, taking a long drink of water, then paused mid-sip when a faint hollow thud sounded somewhere just behind her. “Did you hear that?”

Gaunt whipped her crowbar around in front of her. She was suddenly a lot closer to the edge of the clearing, her backpack left lying in the dust. Apart from the aimless path of stray hairs around her face, all was still. “Get behind me.”

No need, Kiki was already there, guarding from the other direction. Quiet, but Gaunt didn’t take her eyes from the spot just ahead. Nothing, but Kiki’s light breaths behind her, Gaunt’s slightly deeper ones, and the gentle breeze. Nothing, and then…

Something.

It was something, for sure. Big and not enough skin to cover its frame, white bone prodding free from orifices too large. Spurs poking through joints that grew longer than limbs, causing its gait to stumble, its steps to collapse unevenly forth. Blood traced its way around each follicle, and around some scars in the flesh. Each lurch forward spurted gouts of it from each joint.

It was best described as a mess, really.

Its “limbs” were long, but they creaked forward at an ancient pace, and they never reached quite as far as it seemed they could. Stiff. They had a moment to prepare, but–

Hissing like air through a popped tire. Gaunt couldn’t resist a brief glance back, didn’t want to let the thing in front of her out of her sight for long, but it didn’t look great back there either. It was huge, a good ten feet tall at least, and just as wide. Shit. Shit shit shit.

When she looked back, a spur reached out to slash her in the face, missing by over a foot. It was accompanied by a brutal ripping sound that shot frigid panic through Gaunt’s bones, before she connected it to the fresh geyser of blood erupting from the closest of the thing’s joints. It was it, not her.

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

It was pulling the limb back, but in short jerky motions that didn’t retreat so much as tremble in place. Gaunt took the opportunity to drive her crowbar around from above, planting the tip of the claw an inch into the ground. Further back, white grated on red before the whole arm flopped cleanly down; the spike protruding from the shoulder closest to the joint was a solid crimson, now.

It just… It just sliced its own fucking arm off. It bent the wrong way and it just… Gaunt did her very best not to gag and brought her crowbar back up.

Kiki didn’t seem to do much on her end, either. Not much to do with a fire axe if the target was out of reach. Gaunt made out another shrill scream, and maybe a touch of something wet spattering the back of her neck, like spittle. Spittle and not… better not be anything else.

Then she heard a scuffling and a whump and she couldn’t see anything at all. Some kind of putrid, thick… its skin. It’s draped over us. And then it wasn’t, and she could see just fine. Kiki picked up the fire axe from where she swung it down, the giant heaped in a puddle around them. It didn’t get back up.

Skin. It was just frills.

That left the one in front. Before it could strike, Gaunt tumbled to the side, taking Kiki with her. The next stab went wide, over a metre off. Gaunt pulled the two of them to their feet, ready to move, scrambling for some kind of insight to take hold.

She didn’t need one.

It wasn’t moving, save the steady ooze of blood from every part of its body into the junk around it. Gaunt took a step forward, hesitated, and took another. Kept her centre of gravity stable in case she needed a quick escape. Slammed the crowbar into it a couple times for good measure.

Didn’t need to. That did nothing. Nothing except peel some of its not-skin back, revealing what was underneath, and…

The spikes. It was so cut up inside its innards were more of a slurry than any kind of functioning organ system. It got sliced up by its own damn spikes.

Kiki stared in confusion at the innards. “What the- how? Why? How the fuck does something even do this to itself and survive long enough to get to us?”

“Wait. I think…” Gaunt backed up a couple steps before jogging back to where the other one fell. A lot less impressive now that it wasn’t flaring its frills to look ten times bigger than it was. Cleaved nearly in two with one blow. The webbing traced around each of its digits, through its limbs… there was no way it wouldn’t get tangled every time it took a step, even if it was alive and moving.

“This is not…” Gaunt exhaled. Inhaled. “This is not normal.”

“No fucking kidding. This doesn’t feel natural. It’s like someone took a natural thing and twisted it. I just don’t see how evolution could make something like this.” Kiki kneeled down by the spiked thing’s corpse, examining some of the spines.

“Well, they weren’t made well.” To have something, or some things, so dysfunctional, so hell bent on killing them they just dropped dead…

There was a thud as Kiki swung her axe. Reaching into the bloody mess, she withdrew a spike, just the right size to be comfortably held on one hand. There was a piece of cloth impaled on the end, dark with blood and also dye, which she promptly removed. She made a few experimental stabbing motions, then tried throwing it at the skin thing, pinning a flap to the ground.

“Maybe we could grab some of these spikes. More effective than rocks. This creature… I just don’t understand why. Okay, someone made it, but why? What’s the purpose…”

Her rambling kept going and going and Gaunt had to agree with her, beyond anything else, it was just…

Unnatural.

Gaunt snapped to attention, heart thrumming faster than even in the midst of combat. “They shouldn’t… It doesn’t make any sense, right? They should be dead, right?” She was talking fast, so fast her lungs could hardly keep up. “And, and, we’re fine?”

Kiki wiped her hands on her pants, turning to Gaunt and moving a step closer. “We’re fine. They’re dead.”

“Yeah, and they shouldn’t have made it here in the first place if they were gonna die like that, it doesn’t make any god damn sense. And, you know, you know what– you know what else is you’re fine, I’m fine but it’s not supposed… Fuck, let me just–” Choking her words out, Gaunt thrust her wrist towards Kiki, sleeve pulled back and wrappings roughly thrown aside.

“You’re fine, you got hurt, so what, whatever. That’s normal. You’re tired I guess. Whatever. What about me? You know it got me, huh, they fucking split my wrist open and I felt it and if you just fucking look at me there’s NOTHING FUCKING THERE.”

Her wrist was bare. Smooth and bare and completely free of any lacerations.

“Okay. Gaunt, I think-”

“No, look at me. Look–” She dropped her sleeve, yanked her shirt practically to the neckline. Pulled her bra up a bit to reveal the rest of her midsection. “I was fucking cut open. Across my whole stomach, you saw. And there’s nothing. I shouldn’t… I can’t even think about it anymore. I should be dead. Why the hell am I not dead?”

Kiki’s eyes widened, but she didn’t step away. Maybe she should step away, Gaunt didn’t know. Impossible to know when it didn’t make any sense.

It just didn’t make any fucking sense, there wasn’t any reason for this to happen to her…

````

There was someone yelling behind her.

The voice was faint. She couldn’t remember what the words said. She didn’t like it and everyone else was tense.

The yelling was loud. The woman’s eyes were wide. She said something, it was quiet, like she didn’t want anyone else to hear it. The man said something very fast and pulled out his phone. He was trying to call someone. A figure at the end of the train car was dark.

The figure was holding something sharp. There was another figure too and it was shaking. There was a splash of red. Gaunt was running. The man wasn’t moving fast so she yanked his hand hard and then he was next to her.

The yelling was all around them now. There was screaming now, too, some scary and some scared. She didn’t know where she was running and she didn’t then, either. The woman stopped in front of one door and pulled it, and it didn’t open.

Then they were at another door and Gaunt was in front. She shoved it open. The woman and the man came through too and it clicked behind her.

She could barely make out a figure in black robes, gold trim. She pulled on the door. It was locked.

…

Everything tasted like blood.

It tasted like blood and smelled like blood. Gaunt raised her hand but it stopped. There was cold metal around her wrist. She raised her head and looked ahead.

The man was in front of her. She didn’t see the woman but she knew she was there too. There were other people and they all had chains around their wrists and ankles. There were dark figures with colourful trim.

A shape Gaunt didn’t understand approached the man. It raised something very long and very thin, and sharp. The man was breathing fast.

It stabbed him in the chest, and kept it there for a second, and…

````

Black and gold. Black and gold and maybe other trim as well…

Gaunt shoved past Kiki and snatched up the cloth from where she’d discarded it. Black with a shiny blue trim. “I’ve… I remember this. From the train… Were they…”

“Gaunt, I’m having a bit of trouble following your train of thought. I can help you figure this out, but you have to calm down a bit and explain stuff to me, okay?”

Gaunt raised a hand. “It’s fine. I’m fine. It… On the train. I guess that’s when… stuff would have happened. Before the crash, I remember there were people. I don’t remember… dangerous people, I don’t remember anything past that. And they wore this.”

Kiki looked at the cloth for a long second. Committing it to memory. “Do you think they caused the crash? And do you think they have anything to do with your, uh, miraculous recovery?”

Gaunt could only shake her head. “I don’t… I don’t know. I don’t know anything. It’s just… I don’t want to fuck with this. At all.”

“Okay. I um, believe it or not this is not the weirdest shit I’ve seen.”

Gaunt stared. She would have dropped her jaw if she was the type to do that at all. As it was, it took a moment too long to get her thoughts under control. “Are you… you’re not for real.”

“I can’t share details, but no, this is actually kind of tame in comparison. I… I don’t think whatever’s causing this is dangerous, I mean it’s just healing. Weird, yes, but I think things will be fine. And if something happens, I’ll be right here to help you deal with it, okay?”

“I guess.” It made sense, anyway. Plus, there was no use worrying about things Gaunt couldn’t control. It was practically her mantra.

“How are you feeling? Anything else you want to talk about?” Kiki reached out a hand, glanced at the traces of blood on it, and pulled it back. Gaunt nearly took it anyway.

“Nah. No use. We should get moving, though.”

“Okay.” In place of whatever she was going to do before, Kiki stepped over to Gaunt’s side, bumping their shoulders together. Then she broke off, quickly grabbing the spike she’d chopped off and stuffing it in her bag. “Let’s go.”

And that was the end of that, at least until Gaunt got bored of denial.