A boy in ragged clothing stood at the peak of a high sand dune. He listened to the open howling of the wind: ever-changing, without relent.
His mother had named him Olive, after the wild fruit trees beyond the village where he was born. He held a spare tee-shirt close against his nose and mouth. The tattered sleeves were wrapped as tight as they could be around his neck. He knew if he let go, they would not stay tied there for long.
It was impossible to see more than a few paces off through the storm. The whirling sand blurred with the airborne ash to become a gray-brown haze. It made the journey a slow, plodding trudge across the dunes, the span of ground that led further to the humid slogs of mud below.
Squinting beneath the harsh assault, his eyes caught the faintest flecks of color that swirled along with the drifting sand granules.
Olive blinked at them. He watched that odd, most fleeting glimmer of purest blue beneath the haze of murky gray. His legs, despite how his muscles shook, stood fast against the potent winds. The heavy air made his eyes water. The churning whirl of grit felt equally relentless.
He still wasn’t sure if struggling to inhale through his improvised mask was any better than directly breathing in the ashen fog.
The ground shivered beneath his feet. Olive’s thoughts snapped back to the present. He locked his knees by instinct, but the earth itself lurched forward and took him right along with it, tumbling down and collapsing fast over the sudden empty drop.
Olive felt his back hit the sand with a muffled thump. He gasped and flailed to try and grab anything, but no handholds appeared along the slope.
He twisted his body sidelong. Olive tried to turn himself upright, struggling against the crumbling earth, digging the backs of his boots and his elbows down as deep as he could against the sands, but the sleek track of ground only scattered, unraveling beneath the desperate grasp of his fingertips.
Olive found he could just barely start to glimpse the first uncertain outlines while he fell, those old specters waiting beyond the storm. Out there, off in the near distance, a faint number of structures still stood beneath the gloom: an eroding, dilapidated space where the floodwaters rose high against the sands.
Reeling, Olive tried to brace himself for the rapidly ending slope, but his shoulders and back skidded right off the edge and sent him hurtling through the air. Sheer velocity slammed his body hard against the flat wooden surface of a barn.
Olive felt himself wheeze a short, choked sound as he fell. Dazed, he cringed away from the lingering impact, his clothing fouled by the slimy bubbled paint of the rotten building. His body curled down to a low, weary slump, crumpled there in the cold wet murk.
Once the throbbing pain in his shoulder finally faded to a duller ache, Olive forced himself to lift his head, just enough to inspect the nearest corner of the decaying structure. The mold-streaked walls stood half-tilted in the sludge, leaning ajar from where they gradually sank further away.
“Damn...” He knew his mother would’ve tugged his ears for the language. “Damn it.”
Olive clenched his teeth tight. He slowly leaned forward. He tried his best to wiggle his way a bit higher against the thick slog built up beside the half-sunken doorframe of the barn.
The ash, sand and water had all collected into a deep slurry pit beside the wall of the building. Beyond the pool of liquid silt, the rest of the crumbling, sandy trench all too quickly began to look more and more in Olive’s eyes like some vastly oversized antlion nest.
Antlions were the fierce beetlelike creatures he’d often idly watched in the dappled sunlight, observing them and their peculiar lifestyle after he’d finished his chores most afternoons. Olive recalled spending hours studying how they would burrow themselves deep into the loose ground beneath the cliffs of his home village.
The antlion would crawl its way down through the earthen sand to create a funneling spiral, digging as far as it could. Then the spiky little beast would lay there in wait, hidden beneath the seemingly tranquil surface until another insect wandered too close and stumbled inside.
The hapless victim would find itself caught along the loose granules, unable to crawl its way back out again. The trapped insect could struggle and thrash all it wanted, but only a rare few would ever escape both the sandy pitfall and the layer of venomous pincers lurking just beneath.
But of course, Olive told himself, surely there were no shambling monsters with sharp and pointy mandibles waiting for him there within the bottom of the mire. The softest hairs on the back of his neck prickled up. He tried to blame the tremble in his arms and the blurriness of his vision on the sandstorm biting his weary eyes.
With a low, screaky groan of long-rotten wood and rusted hinges, the barn door began to creak, tilting underneath the additional weight of Olive’s body. Muddy water leaked up and bubbled through the base of the decayed frame. The only reason the doorway did not immediately fall away beneath him was due to the thick layer of silt lodged ahead.
Olive struggled to try and pry himself further upright, but the tall door was oozing its way steadily forward whether he wanted it to or not. The hinges groaned and squealed beneath layers of built-up rust, scraping hard against the resistance of sludge.
“Hey, wait, wait!” Olive could only flail out and try to brace himself against the slick wooden surface. His makeshift tee-shirt mask fell away into the murk. “Stop, stop-!”
In the moments just past calamity, the sudden commotion finally eased past the rippling splash of silt and groundwater and toppled door beams to settle back towards a state of relative silence. Pale dust floated through the drafty air, falling in waves that drifted from high atop the furthest rafters. The barn door groaned to a complete and total halt.
Sunlight could barely even reach in through the cracks of the roof, leaking past the muffled howling of the storm. Thin beams of brightness scattered far across the grimy interior.
That faint source of warmth became the weak glow patterning the walls and sunken floor of the building. Everything else within the shadows of that flooded place remained seemingly untouched, undisturbed by anything but motes of dust, waiting deep beneath the musty air of the barn.
Olive knelt in the mud. His eyes slowly squeezed shut. He could feel the liquid seeping in through the worn, threadbare fabric of his clothes, the bandages on his arm, soaked through from the chilled slurry just below. It almost felt icy beneath his fingertips. When he finally dared to open his eyes again, he could see that the floodwater had already risen up to his elbows.
Gradually, Olive leaned back. Adrenaline still coursed through his veins, jittering and numbing and blurring everything between his fingertips to his toes.
Olive looked down at the wet cloth bandaging his left arm. He banished the memories before they could begin, even if the raw skin was all but closed by then, even when the sound of rocks whirring through the air like hailstones still burned in his ears without mercy.
He shivered faster than he could try to stop. Past the dizzying haze of reoriented vision, Olive more clearly came to realize he was sitting up to his midsection in sludge.
Everything else in the abandoned room looked oddly motionless to him, as if the sandstorm wasn’t still battering over the village outside, like the wind wasn’t wailing in a rage over the tall gray walls of the barn.
Olive waited there in a quiet daze. Once his full wits finally returned to him, he glanced all around, examining the shelves crammed with cluttered objects, the dust-covered cabinets half-crushed beneath piles of rusty farming equipment.
Sleek metal instruments hung from higher along the rafters, glinting there in the deepest shadows. But it felt difficult for Olive to even try and envision a functional farm in that environment, given the current state of the land.
The hanging tools did look far more modern than what any average rural farmer could afford. When Olive squinted a bit deeper, searching past the first few layers of blotchy darkness, he realized that some of them might have even been mechanical, rather than simple wedges of stone or scrap metal tied tight to bamboo poles.
It struck him as uncanny compared to the tilted wooden frame of the building. Not enough sunlight could break through the gaps in the ceiling for his eyes to see very much else about the rusty steel.
A hard sneeze shook him without warning. Olive’s entire body trembled. He drew his knees to rest closer against his chest, staring down at the wet slump of his fallen tee-shirt mask. The fabric already looked much too muddy for him to try and easily salvage.
Olive peered around and sighed. At the very least, he reasoned, with the direction the wind was coursing, the creaky walls of the barn kept the sandstorm air mostly at bay.
Despite it all, he knew it was long past time to reassess. Olive drew in a deep breath. He blinked against the buildup of dust in his eyes, rubbing it away with one of his wrists. The positives, he told himself, those were what he must think about. They were crucial, no matter the situation.
He knew he needed to list them out inside his mind. To begin with, just as he’d noticed, there was only a faint bit of sand whirling around in the stagnant air of the barn. Secondly, his tee-shirt mask might still be able to become functional again in a few hours, if he could only let the mud dry out long enough.
Further, as a third and final positive, Olive felt sure he might even be able to find some canned food tucked away in those messy shelves, or hidden someplace deeper beneath the upturned furniture, the pieces that hadn’t yet completely been shattered or sunken into the murk.
There might very well have been supplies left there to scavenge, but Olive’s mind was more than aware of the fact that the total stillness of the barn was an illusion. That particular village had maybe an hour or two left, at most, if it was lucky, before it would all be stolen, wiped clean off the map. He knew the sinking wastes would never, ever relent.
Olive peered further around. He looked back and forth until his gaze was drawn off towards the more shadowed interior of the building. It was only there, once he looked over and tried to stand himself up from the watery muck, only then did he finally notice how the vaguest of figures in the darkness twitched and tensed from his advance.
This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.
“Oh-” Olive’s voice was cut off by a sharpened metallic click. His blood ran cold. He felt himself slump right back into the watery sludge, stumbling with a muted gasp. “No, no! I’ll, I’ll go away... I’m not-!”
“Be quiet.” The noise that crackled through the voice modulator sounded like a woman’s tone, but her words were too distorted to be certain. “Stay where you are.”
“I... I’m not a soldier.” Olive felt his breath quake. A frigid sweat poured over his skin. “I’m not. I swear. I won’t be any trouble. I won’t do anything.”
The figure beyond the shadows moved slowly, fluidly. The steel of her weapon gleamed beneath the dim sunlight.
It was a short blade, nicked across the outer edge, though carefully polished. All Olive could tell otherwise about the strange lurking person was that she took a guarded stance before him. Yet he could also just start to see that she was fully covered in a thick protective suit of some sort, concealing her slightest features beneath the deep tint of a rounded glass helmet.
“Stay right there.” Her voice broke into an even sharper crackle, hissing from whatever sound transmitter was buried deep inside her respirator. The mechanical output ports sounded too clogged with half-dried mud to be fully functional. “Got it?”
“Okay.” Olive kept his voice down to a soft, low murmur. “Please, um, I have water, and a little money, if you want-”
“No.” Somehow it looked like she began to bristle beneath the heavy suit. “It’s not... It isn’t like that.” She edged the point of her weapon aside. “But I was here first.”
Olive nodded quickly, compulsively. Despite the yielded blade, his arms still shook at his sides. He clenched his hands down into fists beneath the water’s surface, just enough to keep them as motionless as he could.
She drew another step closer, moving in a slow, deliberate pace. “Just stay there.” The respirator creaked with high pitches of feedback every time she spoke. “I’ll get what I need, then I’m gone. No trouble, if you do what I say.”
“Right.” Olive tried to keep sitting calmly. “No trouble.”
She paused only a few paces away. The heavy glass tint made it impossible to see any features inside her helmet, at least beneath the darkness of the barn. But Olive somehow still found an odd, detached sort of inquisitiveness to the woman’s motions whenever she moved towards him, like a crow tilting its head to inspect a corpse already picked clean.
When she finally spoke again, her voice began to sound a bit different. “How old are you?”
Olive’s gaze darted away. “Twenty-two.” He felt foolish before he was even done saying it.
She huffed a softer breath at him. “Don’t lie.”
“I’m-” Olive looked back up. He stared deep into the dull gleam of the respirator helmet. He wished he could see some hint of her eyes from it, at least. “I think, I... I maybe turned thirteen, a few months ago?” Olive shrugged against the sticky mud. “But, I mean, um, with the way it is here now, it’s really hard to tell.” He reached up to wave a vague gesturing motion at his surroundings, flicking the thick silt around when he did so.
But then Olive flinched back, praying silently that such motion counted as him staying still for her. He hurried to push his hands back into the watery muck.
She did not seem to take it as disobedience. Her gloved fingers only twitched over the handle of the switchblade. The weapon abruptly clicked shut. She slipped the knife away into a sheath clipped along her belt.
Even then, she still only stood there, a nearly featureless silhouette. Half-solidified mud coated a thick layer over the surface of her suit, as well as the gear on her back, making it difficult to even distinguish the various pieces of equipment she carried.
One thing in particular did stand out to Olive above all the rest: a rather odd, old-fashioned umbrella folded tight and strapped high beneath the woman’s backpack. The sleek gray fabric looked faded and tattered, but the more damaged bits were each stitched up and patched with different scraps of colorful scavenged cloth.
Olive could not help but stare at it. The woman must have taken very good care of the thing, given that it was the only object on her back not completely drenched over with mud.
But the umbrella was not what she began to reach for. The sudden motion made Olive’s entire body tense up and shiver. What other horrible, deadly weapons could she possibly have stashed away back there?
A dull thud sounded against the mud in front of him. Olive looked down. It was a well-worn, cracked, and battered respirator. Even so, it still had both filters attached to each port, though he could only guess how clogged up they might really have been.
The woman moved to slink away through the murk. She still walked with such slow, cautious footsteps, gliding off towards the shelves that stood along the nearest wall.
Olive hurried to tug the respirator mask over his face. He brushed off the worst of the dried mud from it, but then he coughed hard and pulled the entire thing away from himself with a mouthful of ashen dust.
“Shake it out first.” The woman lifted a supply bag from her packs to unzip it. “I picked that one up days ago. I don’t know what condition it’s in, if it’s even functional.”
“Thank you.” Olive scooched his knees up above the floodwater. He whapped the mask down against them to help loosen up the grit. “Can I ask you something?”
One by one, rusty cans of food clinked down into her satchel. She paused to examine a bottle that still had a narrow green label half-glued over the glass, before she hissed a sharp breath. “If you loot this place after me, don’t drink any of this shit.”
Olive leaned over to peer at the tall bottle. “What is it?”
The woman remained completely still for a moment. But then she suddenly tossed the bottle away over her shoulder.
It landed with a dull crack against the front curve of a tractor plow. Dark, pungent liquid leaked out from the fractured glass, trickling down over the rusted metal, before the entire wet mess all crumpled away to sink deep into the muck.
“Okay...” Olive shook out the respirator mask one more time. He pulled it up over his mouth and nose, fiddling with the straps while he muttered. “Guess I won’t.”
Once Olive finally inhaled through it, the air that filled his mouth still tasted old and damp, like wet clothing left in a dark place for far too long. He exhaled and tried to steel himself.
When Olive began to speak again, his voice came out somewhat muffled. The mask clearly had no voice modulator at all. “Are you a soldier?”
“No.” She grabbed for a frayed cord of jute rope from a rusty hook along the wall. “Maybe you shouldn’t ask too many questions.”
“But you look like you know what you’re doing.” Olive tried his best to keep his voice steady. “Do you know the way out of here?”
Silence filled the air. A long, slow breath rattled from her voice modulator. “Yes.”
Olive narrowed his eyes at her more unusual tone. “So... Are you getting out of here?”
“No.” She flicked one of her hands in his general direction. Tiny droplets of mud flew away from the fingers of her glove. “Don’t follow me. I’m not a soldier, but I’m dangerous. I’m no good for kids like you. Sorry.”
“But, I mean, you’re not a raider either. If you’re not robbing me.” Olive slowly leaned back in the cold water again. “You, just... You don’t want me to take any of the stuff from here until you’re done with it. Right?” He watched how the woman checked each and every drawer and cabinet for hidden caches and false bottoms. “Then why aren’t you getting out of this place?”
“I don’t see how that’s any of your business.” She did not say it unkindly, though there was still a certain undercurrent to her words, some half-hidden edge that made Olive’s skin slightly quiver. “Just because I’m not going to murder a kid in cold blood doesn’t make me safe to be around.” She finally turned back to face him. In the grasp of her hand, she held a sealed jar filled with luminous fluid. “If I could, I’d help you. I’m sorry. The best I can do is point you in the right direction.”
A weighted silence drifted between them, heavier than the desert air.
“Um, it’s only so many years, that you can get by in all this.” Olive’s shoulders slumped. He lowered his voice back down to a mutter. “Why did it all have to happen?” He reached up to swipe his hands over his eyes. “I could, maybe, I don’t know... I could keep a lookout for you, when you look for supplies? I won’t take anything until after you’re done, just like now. I promise. Our odds are a lot better in a group, right?”
“I just told you. I’m not getting out.” She sighed at him again. “Well, no, it is the way out, but it’s... It’s the long way, the way that’s definitely going to end up killing a skinny little kid like you with no proper equipment. If you think it’s bad enough out here right now-”
“I’d be dead, anyway.” Olive stopped trying to keep his tears from falling. “How’s anyone supposed to get through this?”
The strange woman did not say anything else, not for what seemed like a very long while.
The barn rafters creaked beneath the pressure of the wind. A few roof tiles occasionally flew away with a clatter into the storm, lost somewhere in the swirling sands. Sunlight leaked even further through the gaps they left behind.
When a deep, resounding groan finally echoed up from the very foundations of the barn, churning and rumbling through the slog of mud, the woman turned away. She reached for the handle of her umbrella.
“I’m sorry.” Her voice had gone softer, slower. “I’m not dangerous because I want to be. The world screwed you over. It screws over a lot of people.” She lifted the umbrella away from her pack, but not before she moved to toss the jar of brightening, lucent fluid off towards a loose beam of fallen wood. “Go northeast of here and you might make it out alive. Follow me, and you’re dead for certain.”
The glass cracked and flashed. Pale liquid broke free. Trembling droplets splashed down against the bubbling water. The fluid hissed aloud and roiled like an abruptly woken cat to swirl out fast, rippling faster.
But then it all began to settle, gathering into much longer, lazier circles to congeal and swim close around the woman’s legs and torso. Her umbrella snapped open, casting a long, deep shadow over the illuminated surface.
“That’s firefly light...” Olive stood. He stared down in shock at the watery glow. “Why would a farm ever have them?”
“There were soldiers here, I think. Maybe they didn’t have time to take all of their bugs along with them.” She waded off through the luminous mud. The swimming lights each began to follow her, but a few of them hesitated and remained. She did not wait for them to follow. “All the more reason to get moving.”
But when Olive stepped towards her instead of the door he’d fallen through, the woman halted. Olive frowned and waited, briefly. With even slower footsteps, he crept forward again, wading out into the space where the glowing water swirled all around his waist as well.
“Not wise.” Her voice sounded like she was clenching her teeth. She slowly tilted the umbrella aside. “I’m sure you’ve been told before, not to follow after demons..?”
It took Olive more than a moment to even comprehend what his eyes were first seeing, what was looming there just beside the woman’s long shadow, what was finally revealed beyond the light of the flickering glow.
For there it was, what must have been lurking in that place all along, only hidden in the darkness: an imposing, uncanny specter, the umbral creature turned alight by the whirling hum of gleaming fireflies.
That second shadow the woman’s body cast out, that looming, more menacing thing, the presence that almost looked as if it smirked at Olive with a thousand half-hidden teeth, at least twice as many watchful eyes, waiting and primed beneath an even greater multitude of flexing, grasping talons.
But in that very same moment, Olive could finally see her as well; past the hazy yet translucent glass, he could finally witness the woman’s gaunt, weary features. She was human, at least, flesh and blood bound tightly towards that ambiguous creature in the dark.
Beyond the surface of her gaze, something else strange glinted, though it did not seem to reach the rest of her expression. Hungry eyes, a mouth unwilling to bite, held fast beneath tired yet ironclad restraint.
The woman suddenly tipped her umbrella back up, righting it into place.
Just as quickly as it appeared, it was hidden back beneath the umbrella’s shadow as well. It did seem to do so with some reluctance, though only as much as a slavering wolf shooed away through the cellar door by the nudge of a mere broom handle.
“And witches are no better than demons.” The woman closed her eyes. She turned away from Olive. “Even if you don’t die from being near me, there are worse people out there who want me dead. So don’t you start following me either.”
Beneath the tall doorway, Olive watched her leave. The odd woman waded her way through the winding tracks of mud, off towards a much shallower, narrower path that reached back up into the arid dunes. She almost began to disappear from sight beyond the whirling sandstorm.
Olive could hear the rafters creaking above him. They were each breaking apart, bending in turn with a muffled snap snap snap thump of long-rotten wood.
He felt his feet twitch, moving beneath the floodwater, urging him out into the deeper sea of murk before his mind could even hope to catch up.
The drench of his clothes tried to drag him back with each step, pulling down hard at his limbs. The dusty wind clawed and scratched without end at his eyes, but the respirator mask kept his breath as clear as it could.
Olive almost lost track of the woman for a moment, unable to find her through the ashes, before his gaze finally settled on the outline of the strange patchwork surface resting just above her shoulder.
“Like I said, um... I’m dead either way.” Olive called out a bit louder than before. He wasn’t quite sure if she could even hear him that time, not through the ceaseless roar of the wind. “At least you seem interesting-” But the words felt awkward against his tongue before he even fully voiced them.
Olive tried not to wince or cringe away. Bravado had never been his strong suit. He hoped it wouldn’t make her any less impressed with him.
In the grip of both hands, the woman braced her umbrella tighter against the gusting sandstorm. She did not turn back to look at the child approaching her footsteps. “Interesting isn’t always worth it, in the end.”
All around her, the firefly light still floated close. The strange beings followed restlessly, drifting their way through the coursing wind even when she finally lifted herself from the depths of the murky water.
They each moved along with the fireflies, walking deeper into the whirling sands. A woman, a boy, the beast hidden away beneath her umbrella’s shadow.
The barn walls creaked. The gabled roof slipped even further into the mud. The structure gave one last cry of splintering wood and creaking slate tiles, sinking even deeper beneath the bubbles of engulfing sludge. The village fully drowned with little more than a murmur.
Olive glanced back over his shoulder to glimpse all that was left of that place, the soft marks of his own footprints. The wind took even those away before he could get a good look at them.
Only the fireflies remained close at his side. Olive turned himself forward again, hurrying off after the umbrella in the storm.