Evidence of just how depraved Maude’s group had grown stacked with each passing day. I’d witnessed the opening of a portal that admitted an untold host of monsters into the world. And yet, some of the worst monsters had bashed down their neighbor’s doors with tools and dragged those neighbors out of their hiding holes. Tool marks and streaks of blood suggested the course of events. No bodies remained behind as witnesses, which only further indicted Maude’s group. Of course, the monsters themselves might have pulled some of the victims from their homes, but why would the monsters use a hammer or saw when they likely had claws and fangs?
After the third home we checked and found evidence of attacks, I suggested we head north. Based on our position in Austin, a mass of fields and potential sources of non-human food lay before us. These areas might have regular agriculture if more than six months had passed.
The chill in the air blew over me and I ignored it. But Tia’s teeth chattered. “It might snow soon.” Her eyes looked up into mine. “We should find a place to sleep.”
Overhead, black clouds flew down from the North. “What season is it?”
Malia’s face reappeared. “I’m not sure, but I don’t think as much time passed as we thought.”
I slapped my head, of course. “Right, time passes out of sync inside of the Hospice. We don’t know what month it is right now.”
“I… fff…freezing, Harriet.” Tia shook as she spoke. “I want a fire.”
“Alaric’s color doesn’t look great, Harriet.” Malia slid him over to me and she was right. Alaric looked almost grey.
“How cold is it right now.”
“My fingers hhh…hurt.” Tia held her hands up and I swore again.
“Shit, this isn’t affecting me at all.” At my panic, my shawl rose and came to hand. Though it moved, it always covered what it needed to. “Does this help?” I wrapped it around Tia, something I wasn’t sure would work. I reached the end of my shawl as Tia’s eyes fluttered.
“Much warmer, thanks mom. And stop swearing…” Her head sunk against my shoulder and I choked on my own spittle.
“We need to find a place to build a fire, soon. She’s right.” I pointed at Malia. “You don’t feel the cold either?”
Malia’s face drifted in an arc as if she were considering my question. “No, I feel warm all the time in this shape.”
“Crap. Let’s get moving and gather wood as we do.”
Tia’s color improved as we made progress while Alaric’s worsened. I scanned the horizon for smoke rising from chimneys. Though it might have meant friend or foe, my hopes sank into despair as not one plume floated into the air. “There’re no fires, Malia. None.”
She’d tried covering Alaric in her sand, but it did nothing to improve his condition. At the end of our hope, we smashed the windows of a house that looked as though it had not been disturbed. In part, the architecture must have driven any looters or monsters off. Every part of the exterior resembled a mad man’s idea of a warehouse. Boxy design and corrugated metal facades made me mentally vomit as I looked up at the front of the home. Not only was this an eyesore among the many traditional ranch homes of his area, but the energy use was probably dreadful.
As much as I loathed whoever designed the house, I didn’t hate their provisions. The interior was a mixture of bare concrete floors and dark wood paneling. Most important though was the huge stack of firewood near the hearth along with a box full of long matches.
None of the homes around us had electricity, a luxury that must have faded months ago, so we left the refrigerator closed for fear of what we might discover within. But after opening a few drawers, we found enough newspaper that we could start a fire.
Malia remained in her sand form while I got the fire going. With a few walls around us, I tried covering Alaric with portions of my shawl. I could manage part of his trunk with ease, but little else. Doing too much of that distracted me from the need for a fire, so I swaddled Tia back and managed to get the wood to ignite with twisted bits of newspaper.
It took half an hour for the fireplace to warm properly, but by then we’d also found a mass of blankets and warm weather gear in the coat closets to cover both Tia and Alaric. The one boon of the modern architecture outside was that the windows proclaimed the building undisturbed, except for where Malia and I had broken in. We turned a bare metal kitchen table over, covered it with a spare quilt and blocked out the wind in the process. It wasn’t perfect, but the house would do.
Tia blinked and yawned as she stretched in front of the fire. “Oh yay, we’re alive.”
Malia, who taken her human form and now wore a complete snow jumper, laughed at Tia’s dead pan delivery. Color slowly returned to Alaric’s skin as the fire thawed him out.
The house still had water pressure and some dried noodles, so we filled pots with water and set about boiling them. None of the other appliances functioned, including the electric induction stove. Together, Malia and I ransacked the pantry and cupboards of the house, filling as many metals vessels with water as we could while we found places to store the pasteurized water once it cooled.
Hours later the northern front arrived with a vengeance. At first the snow fell in light little passes, like Santa’s elves dusting the land with sugar. But minutes into the storm, the snowfall turned into a blizzard that blotted out even the nearest homes. We took a break from boiling water and making spaghetti to stuff a few more blankets into the gaps in our improvised weather stop. Parts of the quilt froze solid as the snow collected outside.
“This is the first bad weather of the season.” Malia brushed her hair out of her face as she collapsed onto her back near the table.
I tilted my head at her and snapped my fingers. “Right. There was no other snow on the ground, was there?”
“Do you think we hit a patch of weird time?” Malia rubbed her shoulders. A few yards from the hearth and the air had grown cold enough to affect her.
“I don’t know. Gods I hope not.” I put my hand over her gloved hand. “Why don’t you take a short break by the fire and let me try to puzzle out a better solution to the massive hole we made?”
Malia bit the corner of her mouth and nodded. “Okay, but be careful. For all we know, there’s a hard limit to your weather-immunity.”
I didn’t say that Malia could just change her shape to avoid the problem. Her new form seemed to bother her; she only assumed it in emergencies and and dropped it as soon as she could. If we had time later, I’d ask about that, but for now we had immediate needs.
Among the various shelf stable foods, Malia uncovered a huge jar of loose tea and reusable tea bags. I had’t considered how much I’d already started to miss soda and other tasty delights until that moment. But as I curled up with a cup of tea in my hands and Malia’s shoulder next to mine, I found the drink sweeter than any I’d ever had.
“Do you think we’ll survive this?” Malia waited to ask until Tia had shifted onto her side and started to snore.
“If you mean the storm, yes.” I tipped the ‘kill the chef’ mug I’d chosen toward the fire. “If you mean the Collapse, everything else, I wish I could say.”
Malia dropped her head onto my shoulder. “Thanks for not lying to me.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you could have said, “sure, we’re nine feet tall and bulletproof.” Or fashioned some other survivor’s lie. But you just told me the truth. I appreciate it a lot.” Malia raised her head as she finished speaking and I turned to look at her.
At once, her eyes and face loomed far too close to my own. I gasped and fumbled with my tea, spilling the blazing hot liquid across my leg and toward my inner thigh.
Malia jumped up at once. “Shit! Are you okay?”
I stared at the drink. The danger in a cup of near-boiling water had been drummed into me from an early age, along with a host of supposedly useless facts about monsters. But the tea didn’t even hurt. As the liquid ran down my leg, Malia rushed to the kitchen and returned with a towel. She’d been as thoroughly trained as I.
She brought the towel to my legs with speed, dabbing at the pale, unblemished skin with fear in her eyes. I grabbed her hand when she started to approach my privates. “Thank you. But I can hardly feel it.”
I’d spoken the truth. Where the hot tea had touched my leg, I couldn’t feel more than a slight warmth. Anything as hot as the tea should have turned my skin red on contact. The fact that I wasn’t really wearing clothes helped I supposed, there was nothing there to soak and keep the burning liquid against my skin.
Malia looked between my hand, dangerously low on my body and my face. All of the redness I’d lacked blossomed across her face as she fell back onto her butt. “I’m so sorry…”
“For what?”
“I mean, I startled you and then I reached for your crotch.”
I snorted at her. “That’s a weird word, isn’t it? Crotch.”
Malia blinked for a moment and covered her mouth before she let out a laugh and woke Tia up. When the sparkle dimmed in her eyes, Malia removed her hand and shrugged. “I mean, yeah.”
“What were you about to do before I spilled my tea?”
The mirth vanished from Malia’s face and the bright red cast to her skin returned. “I was… I mean…” she cleared her throat and delivered a half shrug. “I guess I was going to thank you.”
“Well then, you’re welcome.”
Malia stared into my eyes, craning her head up as she hovered before me on all fours. Her gaze flicked to my midsection, over her shoulder to where Tia and Alaric slept and then back. “I should get some sleep.”
I yawned, as if her words invoked the reaction and stretched out with my back to a soft and thickly cushioned couch. “Breaking and entering is hard work.”
Malia snorted as she pulled blankets around her. She moved a pillow next to me on the couch and then laid her head down on my thigh. I froze as she turned and looked up at me. “Is this okay?”
“Yes.” It came out like a gas line with a leak, all hissing and no voice. I cleared my throat and repeated myself. With her oil black hair spilling over my milk white skin, I had a hard time speaking, but not as hard a time as I would have denying her a place on my lap.
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Malia twitched and set about snoring in moments. For a few minutes, her legs and feet intermittently tapped against the floor, like she was answering a telegram with her toes. I was tempted to stroke her head, but she hadn’t asked me and I didn’t want to disturb her out of her slumbers.
In a different time, I would have treasured that night like no other. My family lay sprawled before a fire I made with my own hands and a lovely woman rested her head upon my lap. Outside snowy winds howled despite the plugs we’d set in the broken window, but the fire kept the others toasty warm.
But the bandage around Alaric’s chest peeked out from under his blankets. The evidence of the harsh realities outside made my body shiver where the cold failed. This night was a brief respite in our journey, no more than an interlude. After titans and gods, cannibals and the elderly, and monsters of every kind, I knew that our new world would not hold back from trying to murder us. No matter how finely we slept.
The facts firmed my resolution to protect the people who lay before the fire with me. When my bobbing head finally hit the back of the couch and I drifted off to sleep, the snows had let up and the wind had settled. I fell unconscious in the winter dark, with nothing but a fire to light my world.
Voices drifted toward me from beyond the void. Their echoes carried through the blackness of the empty space and called back to me. The way the echoes interwove with the speakers, I couldn’t make out their words. Nor could I separate the speakers from their reverberations.
The only voice I could make out belonged to Whinny, but I could not understand the words she spoke to me.
I started awake as the light penetrated my eyelids. Neither Malia nor Tia lay near me, though Alaric remained in the same position he’d been in last night. My body swayed as I took to my feet and croaked out through dry vocal chords, “Tia, Malia?”
“Harriet, we’re over here!”
I spun at the sound of Tia’s voice. In my early morning haze, it sounded as though she’d been injured or taken hostage. But at the sight of her, my terror dissipated. She stood between Malia and the counter of the large island in the center of the kitchen. Malia held a bowl of light grey mush while Tia made a mess of mixing the ingredients with an over-sized spoon. “What’s happening?”
Tia’s face was covered with the mess from the bowl as were her hands, so when she snapped into a salute, matched in time with Malia, she left a new streak of mush across her forehead. “Cake ma’am.” Tia stared up at Malia who nodded and dabbed my sister’s nose with a bit of batter.
“You’re joking.”
Malia put her hands on her hips and struck a pose with one foot in front of the other. “Cake is no laughing matter, ma’am.”
Tia raised her first and twirled it in the air. “That’s right! No jokes here!”
I covered my mouth with my hands as Tia managed to get cake batter streaked through her hair and Malia’s pose broke when she tried to help untangle Tia’s fingers. “Between the two of you, a stranger wouldn’t know the world ended.”
“Jokes on them, we had to used dried eggs for this. It might be atrocious.” Malia gave up her efforts to separate the batter from Tia’s hair. “Or the joke’s on us because we’ll both need a bath when this is done.”
“Better hope the water pressure holds. And you find a way to heat it.” I didn’t mean to kill the mood, but both of their grins turned sickly at my announcement.
Tia shook her head and Malia whispered, “well, shit.”
The fact they’d managed to assemble a cake batter, but failed to account for the mess they’d made brought me right into a fit of laughter. They shot me confused looks as I waved them off and approached the disaster zone. “So cake, huh?”
Malia leaned her head toward the pantry. “I started with bread, but realized I had no idea how to bake bread from scratch.”
“But you know how to make cake from scratch?”
Tia danced on her tip-toes. “We found some boxes of mix!”
Malia gasped. “That was supposed to be a secret.”
Tia blinked and shot me a look of pure trust that only children could manage. “We can’t lie to Harriet. She saved us.”
I wasn’t sure about the saving them part, but I appreciated the sentiment. “Don’t these take eggs or something?” Eyeing the refrigerator, I wasn’t sure if anyone should be eating the cake, much less the batter, if they used eggs from the fridge.
“They had powered egg. It should work fine.” Malia took over stirring as Tia licked the batter from her fingers. “I read somewhere that these mixes used to come with the eggs already in them. But people hated using them because it felt like they weren’t cooking at all. So the companies took the eggs out and required oil, water, and eggs.”
“Then what happened?”
“I don’t know, they sold a bunch of cake mixes? It wasn’t that interesting of an article.” Malia winked at me and resumed stirring.
I stared after her as I wondered what the previous residents of the house had intended for their cake mixes. After the Collapse, would anyone ever make instant cake mix again? Would the new versions include everything but the water?
With my eyes finally focusing on something other than Malia and Tia’s antics, I noticed that they both wore matching checkered uniforms. Tia’s was even sized for her, or very close.
“Where’d you get those?” I pointed to the two uniforms.
Malia’s face darkened for a moment as she considered my question, but then she forced a grin onto her face. “It was a surprise for Tia. I found mine in the same room where we found the blankets.” Staring at me intently, I could feel Malia practically begging me to drop my question.
I nodded at her and said, “Well, I like them both. You’re total cuties.” Tia beamed at the complement and Malia blushed. The older of the two licked her finger clean and ran her hand through her hair, over her ear as if that would help her pick up on my words. “How are you going to cook that thing?”
Malia pumped her eyebrows at me. “That part’s definitely a surprise. But I hope you like it! And I hope it works.”
Personally, I hoped they figured out a way to take a hot shower. Only a few days had passed since my last, but I could already feel my skin starting to itch.
We decided to cook the cake in a large stock pot over the fire. With no temperature gauge and no way to know if we’d botched it, the unanimous decision was to check it every ten minutes or until it started to firm up.
Tia sat with her chin in her hands and her elbow on the hearth.
“You’ll burn your eyelashes off.” The warning came automatically from my lips. The words belonged to Gramps and sent a jagged piece of glass through my heart in an instant. Tia waved me off without looking away from the fire, which suited me fine.
Tears had sprung up from my eyes and all I could think of was how I’d left my grandfather behind to die, likely torn apart by savage monsters from the breach. Malia’s hand found my shoulders and she pulled me gently away from the fire and back onto the couch. Beneath the fire’s roar, she whispered. “What happened, hon?”
I couldn’t speak, I couldn’t give voice to the terrible guilt in my heart, so instead I shoved my face back into Malia’s shoulder and bawled. This was the second time I’d spilled tears and sorrow over Malia’s shoulder, which made me feel as though I were using her as a crying post.
But she never scolded me or complained. Instead she just patted me and wrapped her other arm around me. How could she know that was what I needed? I didn’t ask, I just let the tears run out until my eyes were dry.
By then, we needed to check the cake anyway. After twenty minutes it was still liquid. While the other two checked out the food, I checked on Alaric. He hadn’t eaten in at least a day, maybe two now. We dripped water into his mouth with a cloth, which worked to get him to drink, but didn’t wake him up.
If he didn’t wake up soon, I worried that he might never wake up. Whinny had healed him and the cannibals had eaten his arm. The trauma of the manticore poison might have been enough to kill him by itself but the loss of his arm… at least the flesh around his neck and chest looked normal. Nearly freezing in the cold couldn’t be good for him either. I wasn’t sure how we would deal with Alaric once he woke, but I certainly didn’t want him dead.
My shawl trailed along his body, as if searching for something, as I knelt over him. It had kept Tia warm and seemed to have some kind of magic of its own. I felt a nugget of shame that I hadn’t considered the option until then, but I pulled on my shawl and set it over Alaric’s bandages. It wiggled like a snake over him, tracing out the gaps between the bandages as if trying to enter the spaces. But then it lay still over his heart, like it gave up finding a way to the wound and found something that satisfied.
“Whatcha doin?” Tia scooted over to me and stared up the length of cloth to my shoulder from which it hung.
“Seeing if I can help Alaric get better. Not sure if it’ll work, but I figured it was worth trying.”
“It’s slinky, like a snake.”
I snorted at her. “Guess it is.”
“You should name it.”
“I’m not naming it Slinky.” I knew how Tia’s mind worked.
She pouted with her lower lip hanging down. “How about Snerpy?”
“Snerpy the snake?”
“Yeah!” Tia pumped her fist.
“Sorry, but it rhymes with derpy. Not gonna happen.”
“How about Alahisscious?” Malia walked toward us on her knees, her hands covered in quilted oven mitts.
“I’m not sure that’s better.”
“Hissy?” Tia poked the length of cloth.
“Nope.”
“Boob noodle.” Tia wrinkled her nose at Malia’s suggestion and Malia covered her mouth with her hands. “I’m sorry, that was… I mean it just came out.”
I laughed at her hard to feel the pressure from the shawl as it stuck itself to Alaric’s body. When I noticed that, I sobered up at once. “It’s like it’s attached to him. Weird.” Rather than panic, I took a deep breath and ignored the other two women stooped over Alaric. Three breaths later, my eyes lost focus and I could see a faint green energy flowing from the point of contact between my shawl and my body down into Alaric.
A set of characters appeared over his chest, blinking like a caution light and I read them aloud. “Roo.”
“What?” Tia tapped my knee with her finger. “You okay, Harriet?”
“His name is Roo. It means snake.”
Malia joined Tia in staring at me. “In what language?”
“Tibetan.” I blushed.
“How do you know that?”Malia scooted closer to my side while Tia poked her finger at the other end of my shawl.
“Hello Roo. Your name means big ol’ hoppy rat in English!” Tia danced around to my other side. “Or maybe it’s Australian?”
It was too much for Malia and I. Whatever curiosity she’d held about my knowledge of Tibetan crumpled before the seven-year old’s pondering over Roo’s name. Once Malia started laughing, I couldn’t help but follow suit.
The whole time we guffawed, my shawl remained stuck to Alaric’s body, pulsing with viridian energy as if it were feeding him.
Our cake ended up a minor disaster. It was definitely edible. But the bottom had burned onto the stock pan and the sides had ended up a bit crunchy. If not for the chocolate and company, it would have been inedible. At some point in our preparations, my shawl detached itself from Alaric and didn’t reattach when I coaxed it over to him.
Without knowing whether what I was doing was good or bad, I declined to repeat the experiment. Alaric’s life hung in the balance after all.
We devoured most of the cake, even the burned parts. It had less to do with the hunger and more to do with the shared knowledge that none of us might ever see another cake again in our lives. Searching over the house produced a pair of backpacks, into which we threw several boxes of pasta, cans of soup and veggies, and the last few boxes of cake mix along with dehydrated eggs. The other bag got filled with blankest and other sleeping gear.
I doubted we’d run out of houses to squat in, but that could change by traveling the wrong way for a few miles. My mind boggled over the piles of useless stuff that lay about the house now that the electricity had failed. Computers, the appliances in the kitchen, heck, even the phones were nothing more than artifacts from a distant age now. We still brought several smart phones with us, we never knew when we might be able to charge them again and the data on them might be incredibly useful. Everything else we left undisturbed.
It might have been easier to stay back in our little winter home for weeks. But I knew we might only have days before we were attacked or some other calamity befell. We were lucky to have two undisturbed nights of peace as it was.
With the fire roaring and re-supplied with wood, Tia, Malia and I snuggled in front of it. Outside, the uncharacteristic blizzard returned. We’d already re-set our quilts and table over the broken window, securing the fabric to the window with blue tape.
“Tell me a story.” Tia sat between us and swiveled her head between Malia and me.
“Sorry squirt, but you know all of the stories I know.” I pointed to Malia with a grin. “Tell us a story!”
Malia blushed and shook her head. For the first time since meeting her, she looked demur. “I don’t have any stories. Definitely no stories for snowy nights.”
“But…” I sensed the reluctance in Malia’s shoulders as she pulled away from Tia.
“Don’t give her a hard time, Tia.” I pulled our mess of covers back to the couch. “We’ll have to make do with just sleep tonight and no stories.”
Tia grumped at us, her lower lip acting as if it might drag over the ground if she got up. “Fine. I didn’t want a story anyway.”
I dreaded that look from Tia, because it meant she might dig her heels in and complain. Instead she stuck her tongue out at me and leaned against Malia’s shoulder and drifted off to sleep in moments. Malia mouthed, “I’m sorry,” over Tia’s head and she fell sleep a few minutes after she set herself into the crook of the couch arm.
I knew I wasn’t going to sleep right away, I felt too restless and nervous. Intuition had never been one of my gifts, but I felt certain the ache in my chest portended certain doom. Closing my eyes, I tried to meditate the way I had when I’d checked on Alaric. It felt hokey and the two people snoring didn’t help.
Sliding out of the shared quilt, I padded over to the windows at the back of the house. The sun had come up today, but it had done nothing to melt the snow away or warm the Earth up. Snow in Austin was rare in itself, but snow that lingered on the ground? The city held a winning lottery ticket in its hands at those odds.
As I stared out into the snows, I saw a pair of figures running through the drifts. Piles of snow slowed their pace, as did the way they ran through the powder with their backs turned. One of them, a man wearing a western hat and trench coat fired a pistol under his arm and behind as he raced away. The other figure hopped and tumbled through the snow, its acrobatic display somehow part of its desperate flight.
I turned away from the window, unwilling to watch a stranger die while I did nothing. The very same distaste forced me back to watch the man’s retreat. I couldn’t watch and I couldn’t ignore him.
“Shit.”