You wake up suddenly, sweating and out of breath. As always, the same nightmare memory has awoken you. And as always, a deep sadness fills you. A longing for your past life lingers, but eventually ebbs away even as the world around you comes back into focus.

You sit up with a slight groan - the hard linoleum floor is hardly comfortable to sleep on. The only padding you have at your disposal is your poncho, and it’s thin enough that it barely counts. Thankfully your messenger bag and backpack have some cloth in them, and makes for decent pillows.

You peer up over the counter and outside.

There, red daylight appears to be breaking through the sky. Although you can’t see the sun itself, you can see its light just barely striking the buildings across the street.

A part of you wonders if it’s dawn - it certainly seems like it could be.

But before you can do anything else, you feel something fuzzy bump up against your arm. You don’t have to look down to realize it’s Noir greeting you with a playful bunt. As always. The familiar feeling courses through you, and peels away some of that melancholy that your dreams impart onto you.

You pet her in gratitude, to which she responds with a reverberating purr.

You’re up early, she projects.

“Yeah, I wanna get ahead a bit today,” you reply.

Well, that’s different…

“What’s that word? Proactive? I wanna be more like that.”

Also, I thought you said you wanted to travel at night.

“I do. But I figured we could make it to Grand Mall One before noon, while it’s still cool. Could go around looting it, rest up for a few hours (or a few days), then getting a move on once we’re set for the long haul.”

Hopefully there’s gonna be some good eating in there.

Your stomach rumbles lightly at the mention of food. Though Noir’s no doubt thinking of vermin to kill, your mind is on more palatable things. Eggs and toast and bacon with a hot cup of coffee or tea, for example. Sadly, you don’t have that, and might never have that again.

Instead, you open up your messenger bag and fish out one of your protein bars. You’re not exactly salivating as you unwrap it, and you even become slightly irritated to see that its chocolate coating has melted into a gooey mess. Eating it is going to be a messy pain in the ass.

But you chomp it down anyway to help satiate your hunger. You wash it down with a few gulps of your electrolyte drink, which you then offer the remainder to Noir in the cap cup.

She laps it up as you mix up today’s batch with the last of your water.

Once you’re both done, you pack everything up, put your entire kit back on, and allow Noir to settle herself into her usual spot behind your head. You top everything off with your conical hat before heading back out into the street.

The heat hits you almost immediately, though it’s nowhere near as hot as it will likely be later. In fact, you consider it downright cool. At least in comparison to most days, anyway.

Another thing that strikes you is how calm and quiet everything around you seems to be. It dawns on you that it’s because you’re alone for the first time in a very long time. There’s an odd tranquility to the stillness around you, enough for you to question if there’s some predator stalking you through the silence.

You shake that feeling away as you walk down the streets. After all, very few things can sneak up on you, seeing as you can sense thoughts and emotions. You can almost always tell when anyone’s near, whether or not they’re trying to be stealthy.

If anyone’s sneaking up on you, they would have to be extraordinarily capable in terms of hiding their surface thoughts and emotions. Honestly, you think that’s an impossibility.

The sun rises higher and higher as the two of you travel. Unfortunately, it’s turning out to be a relatively cloudless day and the heat rises faster than usual. You find yourself dashing between shadows as a result.

Although the buildings dwindle the further you leave the city, you’re greeted by more and more trees, overgrown shrubs, and the like. Although their very tops are practically burnt from the intense heat, the lower sections of their canopies seem rather lush and rich.

You spend as much time in their shade as possible, not just because you find them cooler than anywhere else. Mostly because you simply prefer them to buildings, even if their shadows aren’t as encompassing.

You stop and give pause as you catch your breath beside a copse of trees. The ground shudders slightly under your feet, and certainly nowhere near as violently as it would with a stampede. You sweep outward with your Scan instead of your Telepathy. After all, you want to see what’s out there, not necessarily talk to it.

You quickly locate a trio of minds a few dozen meters to the southeast, to slight alarm. That’s only a block or so away, with only a few buildings between you. When you focus on them, you realize that they’re Bone Crags. Their thoughts are still as unreadable as ever, but thankfully you find their emotional wavelengths are still relatable to some degree.

The trio don’t seem harried or panicked or even violent, which encapsulates the majority of the emotions you’ve ever felt from the bugs. Instead, these three seem to be instilled with a sense of curiosity and exploration, with just a dash of apprehension and fear.

You’re able to recognize them easily since you’re also experiencing the same things. Similar, anyway. You’re certainly a bit curious about this new world around you, but you’d say you’re more than just a little bit afraid. Out here, you amount to little more than prey.

Stolen novel; please report.

Still, you all share this desire to know more. And that’s enough for you to realize that they’re not here to hunt or eat or kill. They’re here to search. But seeing as the Crags have a hive mind, you note that they can’t possibly be wayward travelers like yourself. Most likely, they’re scouts.

Thankfully, they’re too far to realize that you’re there. Or at least, if they do, they’re ignoring you.

Which is fine - there’s no need to bother them or cross their paths for any reason. They can do their thing, whatever it is. Just as long as they leave you alone, too.

So you put one foot in front of the other, stealthily, and keep on going. As a result, your trip to the shopping center is rather uneventful. It does take some time - about two or three hours at most. By then, the sun has almost reached its apex in the sky, and the asphalt has become sizzlingly hot.

You practically run across the wreck-strewn parking lot and into the shattered glass entrance of Grand Mall One - the last thing you want to happen to you is to get cooked alive.

The heat lifts significantly once further inside - it’s dark and relatively cavernous. Best of all, there seems to be a light breeze that sweeps through it. No doubt its many entrances are all wide open, which allows the wind to travel through and cool it all down.

You quickly duck into the darkest shadows and allow your breath to catch up. As you do so, you observe the mall around you. Or at least, the eastern entrance hall leading to the rest of the shopping center.

Want me to scout out the place? Noir asks you with a thought.

Nah, you reply with your own. We’d best stick together for now, take it slow. Don’t know what we’ll find in here.

Truth is that Grand Mall One has always scared you a bit. No, that’s the wrong word. Intimidated, perhaps. Or irritated. Or whatever is a mix of intimidated and irritated. In any case, this is a place you’re only barely familiar with.

Back before everything stopped, at a time when you weren’t even in your teens yet, Grand Mall One was the place to be. It had drawn in numerous crowds every single day, just because of how many individual shops it had carried. People came in droves not just from inside the city, but the area surrounding as well. It had even drawn in tourists from the other side of the country. Hell, from the entire world.

Although many people celebrated the shopping center as some great achievement, you have always thought of it as the opposite. To you, it has always been a temple where money was worshiped. And too many mindless worshipers in one place always made you deeply uncomfortable, even worse was being among them physically. So you always avoided the Mall as much as humanly possible.

But now, the place is completely different. It’s no longer a celebration of capitalism, no longer a temple for consumers. It’s a ruin, perhaps appropriately so.

You feel more amused than annoyed on this visit, that’s for sure.

Although it is rather dark thanks to the lack of power, it has plenty of windows up in the ceiling numerous stories up. Ominous red light pierces the shadows in thin strips down the middle, which causes everything inside to be bathed in a shadowy red. A bit like a photographer’s darkroom.

The shops around you are in absolute disarray. Their glass fronts are mostly shattered, and the ground is littered with various sizes of broken glass. All kinds of trash and junk is also scattered around, along with upturned benches and tipped garbage bins.

There’s signs of large potted plants at some point - circular patches of dirt and whatnot appear regularly down the middle. But someone has taken every single one of them for some reason.

Although you’re on the first floor, you can easily see the numerous banners hanging over the walkways on all the floors above you. Each of the banners seem to be celebrating the last holiday that the shopping center was going through.

Not only that, but numerous shop fronts have their own custom signs also celebrating the same holiday. Each seems as though they’re supposed to be cute and cheery, but you get no such vibes from them.

—

Black Friday Extravaganza

Open 48 hours straight!

90% Off EVERYTHING

Buy Four, Get More

Shop Until the End

—

They all amuse you to some degree. And also depress you. People actually lived for this moment - to buy more things they didn’t need. To spend money they didn’t have. Saddened by it all, you force yourself to stop reading the banners and signs altogether.

Instead, you focus your attention on the shelves in the shops. They’ve certainly been looted as well, but there’s still a good amount of stuff left on them. Well, it depends on the shop and what they carry, of course.

There’s the kitchen goods store across from you, which looks moderately plundered. Much of their cookware appears to have been taken, though plenty of appliances are still on the shelves. You spot a few things you could take, so you make note of it. You’ll definitely want to loot it later.

For now, you’ve gotta scout out the mall first. Figure out what you’ve gotta deal with, then get to the scavenging. That sort of thing. After all, you wouldn’t want to be knee-deep in valuables and sorting out your inventory, only to fall into some ambush.

You glance at the store next to the kitchen store, which is an upholstery and beddings shop. Wind chimes dangle just inside the broken shop windows, tingling and jingling as the breeze sweeps through them. Not much of it has been looted, which makes sense. There’s little need for matching sheets or cute couch pillows or crap like that any longer.

Still, you decide to poke your head in later, just in case you find a small travel pillow or something. That’d be nice, right?

You sneak further into the mall along the shadowy edges and peer into the shops as you go, making mental notes of places to loot. You find the activity genuinely joyful. In fact, you’re delighted to discover one of the large mall center maps near the escalators leading up and down. You study it with such great care and detail that you begin to map out your path through the mall.

Your joy spikes again, to a point that you become conscious of it.

You stop for a moment as you realize that you’re actually enjoying this moment. It’s been so long since you last felt it that you’re almost shocked. Not just that you haven’t felt it in a while, which is amazing by itself. It’s that this is enjoyable at all.

You like the fact that it’s the apocalypse, that you can be here without having to deal with anyone. Not a single soul to contend with or talk to or whatever.

Why?

Why do you prefer this kind of emptiness? Why does this kind of decay give you enjoyment?

Your thoughts are shattered when a shrill chittering echoes through the Mall. You crouch down even further out of instinct, even as Noir stirs from behind your head. She hops down off you, then blends into the shadows as well.

You sense her move just ahead of you, her senses alert to everything around you.

As the two of you creep down towards the source of the sound, you carefully reach out with your Scan. And as you get closer, you sense another trio of Crags at the far end of the Western Wing of Grand Mall One. They seem to be agitated about something, though you can’t tell what that something is.

You sense waves of alarm emanating from them, as though they’re raring for a fight. But that stops suddenly, which throws you for a loop. Agitated bugs never just ‘stop’ getting agitated.

This shocks you greatly, as it reminds you of the time you had done the same thing to them. You had injected those Crags with your own emotions and diverted their mindless charge. What’s happening to these three Crags seems similar.

Someone or something is affecting their state of mind, somehow. If there’s someone out there with powers like yours, then you need to find out who they are. Hopefully they’re friendly. You draw your pistol and switch off its safety in case they’re not.