It took them almost half an hour to drag the bike through the mud and back to what remained of the road. April lamented the lost time. Eerie lights were still crackling upon the horizon, echoed shortly after by peals of what sounded like thunder, but were probably something far worse.

If she had expected that reaching the tarmac would mark a return to near-normalcy, she was sorely disappointed. When she had ridden down this road less than an hour previously, it had been a typical B-road of the North London urban fringe. Slight weathering, maybe the occasional pothole at worst, but smooth running for the bike, otherwise populated only by sparse and lazy car traffic sliding home after work on a temperate Friday afternoon in anticipation of an equally lazy weekend.

What she returned to could scarcely even be called a road, at first. When she first spotted the chunks of loose tarmac, as they pressed on through the mud leading away from ground zero along the rough bearing she remembered the road having gone, she thought that they were just yet more loose rocks. It was only after another dozen or so metres that she began spotting the flat chunks of black material, covered in the occasional stripe of yellow or white paint, frequently enough to realise what they were.

After they had progressed the same distance again, the chunks had reassembled themselves into something that looked like a jigsaw-puzzle representation of a stretch of roadway, but one that had nonetheless aged a hundred or so years. The entire surface was webbed with cracks and loose gravel, and entire slabs of tarmac were overturned, decimated by the wave of force that had billowed out half a kilometre or more from where April had been standing at the centre of the sphere of light.

Mounting the motorcycle with Kroakli clinging to her back as before, she was forced to ride achingly slowly at first, edging the vehicle over the uneven surface and around the largest fissures. As she got a little further, the road smoothed out a bit, the immediate damage becoming less severe as she fled the little patch of parkland that was now an island amid the chaos.

If she was hoping that that would be the limit of the destruction as she went further, though, she was sorely disappointed. For one, there were still the cracks, or at the very least the remnants of those that had already faded. Every so often, she would come across a smoothly scored slice driven clean through the ground, trees and surrounding structures—severing tarmac, pavement, or, most disturbingly, entire walls of toppled buildings—marking the spot where one of the blazing jagged blades of light had lanced through the vicinity, cutting a black gash in reality before fading away.

Occasionally she would see the crack remnants still lingering, most faded near fully, but others still persisting with an ominous stubbornness. The most tangible shadows seemed to hint, she thought, that the flashes she was seeing in the distance beneath the cloud line were indeed local storms, and that they were still lashing out with fresh tears.

She was forced to dodge around several of the lingering shadowy cracks, narrowly missing a few, until she made her first mistake. She had taken a patch of open road as a chance to increase the bike's speed a little, and unwittingly ploughed straight into one. It had been extremely faint—nearly entirely faded away, hence her failure to notice it, hanging solemnly in the air just above and stretching across the span of the road. It blended with the dappled shadows of the increasingly dim background.

So April didn't see it at first, but she certainly felt it. There was no terrible eviscerating severance of her flesh, as had been the fate of the mud-covered creature in the dead world; no terrible moment of horror as she was caught across the chest by a sharp gash in space, her upper torso falling through into nothing as the two halves that remained of her body tumbled to the road. The crack had been too far diminished for that, and the distortion in reality it marked had become too porous, too near-intangible.

That was the good news. The bad news was that this diminished effect was not nearly enough to entirely ward away the pain of having her atoms squeezed through an interdimensional sieve.

She slammed through the barrier with a strangled yell, her chest, heart and lungs screaming with a sharp soreness that felt like they had been partially cooked from the inside. The bike wobbled, and she was only spared from another painful liaison with the tarmac by Kroakli, who, bifurcating its body around the almost-crack with lightning fast reflex, reconsolidated itself just in time to jam an elongated limb against the ground, keeping her upright for long enough to brake to a stop.

"On future occasion we shall keep senses tuned outward for such sinew-ruptures, and make them known prior to the spilling of your guts through them," it said, as April gasped for breath through the pain.

"Yes, please," she wheezed, being forced to rest for a few minutes until the sting had faded enough for her to continue onwards.

Even that particular slap in the face wasn't enough. She might have thought that the pulped tarmac and stricken countryside, along with driving straight first through a nearly intangible cell-strainer hanging across the middle of the road, would have prepared her for the sort of damage she might see when she arrived back in populated suburbia proper. This assumption turned out to be incorrect.

She slowed, mouth agape, as she arrived at the turning onto a typical residential street, half to take in what she was seeing and half out of the a vague sense that the roar of the bike's engine was in poor taste. The shaking and upheaval here might not have been as acute or uniform as they had been at ground zero, but neither had this locale been spared their touch, interspersed upshoots of destruction emerging from quiet idyll according to a chaotic pattern of stochastic decay.

Localised patches of the neighbourhood, selected according to no apparent rule or geometry, had been wracked by roiling earth and successive rounds of micro-earthquakes. Some had been struck gently enough to merely shatter a plant pot or topple a wheelie-bin, while others were strewn with the leavings of tremors that had felled entire buildings; mounds of brick, displaced timber and dusty white rubble heaped where tidy 1930s-era suburban semi-detached units had been standing an hour or so before.

The result was a patchwork of destruction wherein some neighbourhoods, streets, or even individual buildings were left largely untouched, while their adjacent fellows were razed to the ground in what looked like the aftermath of a severe hurricane or tornado.

"This is London," April thought to herself, "this shit just doesn't happen, here."

But it most definitely had.

She was starting to see the people, now. Shell-shocked families standing at the ends of their front gardens, gaping uncomprehendingly. A confused looking older man had his hand clamped against a head of sparse hair, wet with his own blood, which was in turn running in a thin line down his cheek. April shuddered at that. A was woman crying in front of a collapsed mock tudor facade, the rubble smouldering gently, as if something inside had caught fire but hadn't yet found the courage to go all the way.

It didn't take her long to see her first body.

A three-storey high street building, faced with grey concrete, had been sliced neatly through by one of the cracks. The faded black after-image was gone, but the evidence of it remained in the tell-tale way that the structure appeared to have had its top smoothly scooped out, cleanly severing the building from its upper half at a skewed angle. This had caused another building's worth of concrete and rebar to topple out onto the street below, looking the leavings of some construction elemental that had puked up its dinner.

Sticking out of the edge of that pile, April could see the legs of a man wearing jeans. His head and upper body had been caved in by the falling chunks of concrete, shattering his skull and ribcage into a messy red starburst splatter of blood and miscellaneous offal that she could see pooling out from under the rubble pile, soaking into the blue denim from below.

For a moment, she froze.

Then, passively, she turned back around, walking over to where she had propped the motorbike while she came over to look for a pathway around the rubble. She placed her feet methodically methodically, face blank, facial muscles having given up at their attempt to portray the bewildering thing going on inside her brain.

On one hand, she felt the same panic and revulsion that she often felt at the sight of blood. The vague, hard-to-define-or-rationalise fear of the unclean, that was still nonetheless horribly potent and real within her mind. This terror harmonised neatly with the more recent memory of seeing Michelle die on her bathroom floor, consumed by the organism that had become the creature now clinging to her back like a lost puppy. She expected that fear, the rising bile, the urge to crouch down on the tarmac and block out the world, to force her body to shut down. It would not have been the first time.

But now, unexpectedly, a new impulse was emerging from the dark at the back of her skull, mustering in force to clash with her panic on the mental front lines. The new emotion was a sort of flat denial: an empty, sucking lack of affect that drank of her fear and tried to swallow it whole. This, she realised, was the half of her that had seen enough blood and dead bodies over the past week to conclude that enough was enough, that some threshold had been met, and that she was no longer capable of having a protracted freak-out. That, this newly formed half her or psyche was saying, was the hallmark of the April of a more innocent era; when the worst she might expect to see on a given day was a child's scraped knee, the nosebleed of a girl at a fast food restaurant, a few drops of blood on the food counter at Sporks after a careless accident with a pizza wheel.

She embraced it, in a way. The placid dullness balanced out the knot in her stomach to a point where she could function.

She also feared what it might mean.

As she got back to the bike and kicked her leg up and over the saddle, she startled out of her reverie as she heard a biting, guttural yell behind her. Twisting back around, she saw that a figure was stumbling over the top of the pile of rubble that had sandwiched the poor man's torso against the pavement.

Unlike him, this new figure was—could only have been—one of the "ghosts"; the shadowy projective Travellers that she had been told liked to use the observer envelope of this reality as a crossroads. She could tell this from the fact that it didn't look at all human; it's body was strangely smooth, a sort of mottled orange, and was composed of a collection of variously sized ball-like spheres. The clutch of spheres overlapped at random, like an overenthusiastic snowman with little regard for gravity, and were occasionally studded with orifices that might have been eyes, or mouths.

Far from standing silent and mysterious like many of the Travellers she'd seen before, this one was screaming at the top of its lungs—or equivalent organs—and staggering around on several of its ambulatory spheres, tripping over loose patches of grit and concrete shards. The reason for this was fairly clear; the upper right portion of its bizarre body had been mangled in a horrific way, a line sliced halfway across one of the larger spheres marking… not a point where the flesh-stuff inside had been severed neatly, but at which it had been pulled out and twisted into an unnatural shape. The insides of the sphere had partially disgorged themselves, rolled into mottled clumps of red-orange matter that had the appearance of melted plastic mixed in with loose fibreglass strands.

As it staggered down the pile, narrowly avoiding the pool of blood around the legs of the unfortunately crushed man, a woman standing further back down the street caught sight of it, and started screaming in turn. More people turned, and a chorus of yells went up, people stampeding across the battered tarmac to get away from the flailing creature. April, standing there watching the scene faintly nonplussed, had a brief moment of wondering why something felt so off about it all, before finally she gasped, turning to look after the fleeing crowd.

"They- they can see it too!?"

"Pitiful thing," murmured Kroakli softly from where it clung against her back, blending in with her jacket to avoid attracting its own attention. "It must have been caught in a between-phase when the cataclysm hit the projective, peeling back the surface world-skin that it cowered behind until it fell into this reality fully."

April watched the staggering creature for a few seconds longer as it spun and twisted, spraying drops of yellowish fluid from its broken shell across the tarmac.

"Hey, I guess now I can say for sure that all of this was real, huh?"

"Did you truly continue to question this," said Kroakli. The vibrations of its speech, pulling whispers of air through tight gill-slits in its flesh, purred softly against her. "April Pearce, you are broken in many ways it is true, but the true absurdities of this universe are too far removed from the mundane imaginings of your mottled mind-flesh. Trust us in this..."

The orange ball-thing moaned for a final time, then flopped over. A burst of thick yellow fluid spurted out of a protrusion on its side, splattering across the roadway to mix with the pool of blood to form a puddle of what looked like tainted custard.

"Yeah," agreed April, "I think you're right."

*****

She headed for Trace and Morgan's apartment first. This wasn't due to any particular priority on April's part, but simple geographic convenience: of her closest friends, they lived the furthest afield along the direction she had been in coming from. It was hard enough to get even that far back into the city. Every other road was blocked, and several more contained buildings that were actively on fire, disgorging spluttering clumps of enough thick black smoke to ward her away.

She heard sirens in the distance, and a few ambulances sped past her going in the opposite direction, indicating that the emergency services weren't completely non-functional. Be that as it may, they still more than had their work cut out for them. At one point she passed by a road entirely blocked off by a cordon, which was manned by a squadron of very haggard police officers. The silhouette of some huge slumped building lit by flashing red and blue lights sat in the distance.

For a moment April moved to hide her face, fearing that she would be stopped and detained, but the police officers paid her little mind, their eyes simply tracking her progress with uniformly haunted gazes as she passed them by. She figured that, even if they had recognized her, the present crisis probably didn't warrant making her a priority, whether she was a person-of-interest in a before-times murder case or otherwise. No, she realised; the situation had now devolved far beyond even that being an immediate concern. So she passed onwards through the shattered city unimpeded by the authorities at least, numb to the cries of the injured and dying around her, the black faux-leather tassels of her strangely elongated jacket trailing behind her in her slipstream as she gunned the throttle.

The approach didn't particularly fill her with confidence. Trace and Morgan's apartment building was located nearby one of the smaller, more localised world-storms that occasionally filled the sky with flashes of yellow light and peals of otherworldly thunder. As she got closer, the flashes began to resolve into the tracks of individual bolts, lancing randomly not just between Earth and sky, but out at skewed angles, often running almost parallel to the ground. Above her, thrown into relief against a ceiling of dark cloud as the flashes lit it from below, she could see that a spiderweb of dark trails had been painted across the sky. Seen from below, they almost looked like they were knotted together, an echo of the interlaced red vines of Kroakli's home projective writ large above the city.

These cracks were not so quick to fade. A few of them had even begun to appear to twist unnaturally as she rode parallel to them in the distance, their apparent location distorting ever so slightly in the manner she had grown familiar with in her previous visit to a dead world.

"Is that what this is all going to become," she asked aloud, "just rubble and cracked sky?"

Kroakli didn't answer, which was probably answer enough. Part of April felt like she would quite like to start crying again, but her insides felt stopped up, the emotions failing to come.

"To be fair, I don't think I've taken my hormones for at least three days," she muttered to herself.

"What?" said Kroakli.

"Never mind."

The outside of Trace and Morgan's building didn't inspire confidence either. It had looked more or less intact from a distance, a squat brutalist concrete block standing fifteen storeys tall, in the same manner as it had probably done for the last fifty plus years. As she got closer, though, close enough to squint through the early onset night fuelled by the looming black clouds of smoke, she could see that the exterior cladding had become strangely patterned, almost mottled, the smooth surface interrupted by its own criss-crossing lines.

As she turned onto the street, there was an abrupt stunning boom as a one of the cracks of light pierced the scene, lancing down just a couple of streets over. It hung there for a second or so, illuminating the building with a blazing camera flash of yellow iridescence, and held there for just long enough for April to work out what was wrong with the block of flats.

It had already been struck through by one of the bolts of light, leaving a dark crack in its wake. The building was still standing, but there was a jagged cut shearing right through the centre of its mass. The crack—several metres across—had manifested through the block-like building at a diagonal angle, cutting through much of the superstructure. It had also gored neatly scored slices through the exterior cladding, but these were contrasted by more ragged cracks spreading out through the crumbling concrete in their wake, stress fractures branching out from the cuts that had already been made. The fading shadow of the crack itself still hung in the air, too; wispy, almost fragile, but ominously there, suspended in a manner contrary to all conventional logic about how physics were supposed to work.

April was sweating with nerves as she leaned the bike up against a wall, jumping down and hurrying to the small plaza in front of the entrance where a crowd of people were standing, looking up at the building warily. April scanned their faces quickly. No Trace, and no Morgan.

As she made a bee line for the lobby doorway, an older woman, one of the people standing clustered out front, grabbed ahold of her arm.

"You can't go inside now, miss, it's not safe!"

"What happened?" She knew, of course, but it didn't hurt to see if the woman knew any more specifics.

"An earthquake, I think. Didn't think it could happen around here, and then while it was all going on, the building got struck by lightning, on top of it all!"

"It's bloody unnatural," said a balding man who was standing nearby, potentially her husband. "I've never seen a storm like this. And what the fuck's wrong with the sky? What's all the black stuff?"

"It's smoke I think, Pete. And don't swear," said the woman, turning towards him.

"I'll swear as much as I damn well like after what's happened to our home. And what, are you saying its smoke that doesn't move? I don't think so, Jan, I don't think so at all."

April spoke over them before they could continue to squabble. "Do either of you know a Tracey Haliday or a Morgan Cross?"

"Tracey- oh! Yes, the nice lesbian couple up on floor seven. I always love seeing her hair," said the woman, looking back up at the tower, then down at April. "Do you know them?"

"Have you seen them?" said April, jittering her leg impatiently.

The woman and her husband did the same once-over of the crowd that April had done, and drew the same blank. "No, dear, I haven't- not this evening." Her forehead creased, anxiously. "But maybe they were just out?"

April gritted her teeth, then started back towards the door with determined strides.

"Hey- hey! I told you before, it's not safe!"

She ignored the voice from behind her, shouldering the door open and half-jogging towards the stairs. The lights were still on in this part of the building, illuminating the stairwell and hallways with the eerie pale yellow glow of artificial lighting. As she reached the foot of the stairs without encountering anyone actually inside of the building, Kroakli slipped itself down from her back, flesh flushing with it's typical translucent blue hue, but looking strangely desaturated in that light. It grew a pair of legs and began stomping up the stairs after her, taking them two at a time.

Nothing looked too out of the ordinary until they had reached the fourth floor. As she reached the top of a flight of stairs, panting slightly, and moved to swing around the little in-between balcony that folded the staircase back on itself, Kroakli abruptly shot out a limb as a gooey tendril, slapping into her shoulder and reeling her backwards with a shockingly high degree of contact suction.

"Careful! We feel that we approach the remnants of the rift…!"

April grunted a thanks, let the mass of Kroakli's flesh fall from her arm, then rounded the corner more cautiously. Sure enough, halfway up the next flight of stairs, the dark grey shadow of a half faded reality fissure jutted out of one wall like an incredibly non-reflective sheet of tinted glass, curving at a shallow angle across the stairwell before exiting out of the opposite wall. Only a narrow gap underneath, tall enough for a person to wiggle through but not by much, separated it from the stairs themselves. The incision it had made was visible as a long line scored into each wall, leaving the hallway looking like it had been attacked on both sides by an incredibly sharp sword. Some electrical cabling had apparently been cut, because the lights above the stairs abruptly turned off as they ascended past the break.

April walked towards it cautiously, inspecting the gap between the dark stain hanging in the air and the flight of steps. She wasn't eager to repeat her previous mistake, and especially not with a crack that managed to look far more substantial than the one she had driven through. As she lingered, she heard the faint buzz of the electric lighting lower down the stairwell, and, out further still, the sound of sirens, blaring near-constantly across the cityscape.

Ducking down, she shimmied her body into the gap of open air between the stairs and the crack, wriggling up the incline like an extremely awkward snake. Kroakli mimicked the motion, although its morphing body was able to traverse the obstacle with far greater ease.

April was most of the way through when her right buttock, jutting unfortunately upwards in the manner that the bodies of shapely girls are wont to do, grazed against the bottom edge of the obstacle as she moved to lift one knee. She yelped as the point of contact was stabbed through by a sharp stinging pain, like she had taken a glancing blow from a branding iron. She flattened herself against the stairs reflexively—thankfully the damage seemed to have been only surface level. If she had been able to see herself from behind, she would have noted that the black fabric of her trousers where she had made contact had become oddly faded and frayed, the contact with the almost-hole in reality denaturing its substance in some way away from the norm.

April wiggled the rest of her way through without further incident. Kroakli stood by passively as she straightened up, then followed as she resumed her swift jog up the stairwell, this time in the near dark, lit only by the dim glow of emergency lighting and the flashes of yellow lightning that occasionally glowed through from outside.

It was just a few more turns before she reached the seventh floor, and she rounded on the landing with a furious intent, only skidding to a halt as she saw that the short corridor separating the different apartments was cast in deep shadow. She teetered upon the threshold, unsure, unable to see through the unlit darkness. Kroakli, standing next to her on two legs, leaned forward itself, almost tasting the air with patches of sprouting cilia that bloomed across its skin.

The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

It paused for a moment, then, cautiously in its creaking voice, muttered; "April..."

One of the periodic flashes of light lit the windows of the stairwell behind them ablaze, and was followed in short order by the usual dull boom of its aftermath. That was enough to illuminate the short hallway, the light lingering for just long enough to her to see the shadow of the crack slicing its way up through this section of the building also, having not noticeably faded over the several few minutes. It forced its way up and out of the floor, before, broad and uncompromising, sliced through the wall and into the front doors of several apartments, including the one she recognized as belonging to her friends.

"Trace!" she called out, into the darkness. "Morgan?!

There was a brief pause, and then, from an indeterminate distance away, a muffled moan.

April started forwards in the direction of the door, then stopped just as fast, rolling on the balls of her feet. The image of the fading crack, still cutting across the hallway, was vivid in her mind.

"I can't fucking see," she hissed, balling her hand into a fist.

"Pitiful, senseless meat-thing, April," said Kroakli in a nearly solemn tone. "Would you wish for us to guide you?"

"Please," she said, looking at the indistinct shadow of her companion, glistening slime-matter lit softly by the traces of ambient light from behind.

Kroakli grew a third arm out of its side, and used one of its glove-like "hands", the fingers undifferentiated, to take hold of her upper arm. She let it tug her gently forwards, leading her over to one side near the wall, then crouching down slightly, then forward further, straightening up in front of their destination.

The next flash of light to illuminate the hallway showed April the slicing crack partway bisecting the door, but that what remained was still locked fast, held in place against the frame by the closed latch. April reached up a hand, somewhat absurdly, to knock, but before she could complete the gesture she felt Kroakli lean forwards, a dry slithering sound audible as it pressed one of its palp-hands against the keyhole. There were a few silent seconds while it concentrated, and then the lock popped open with an abrupt click. If April had been able to see Kroakli, she would have bet that it was smugly leering its faux grin at her, a slimy rope of flesh hanging from the chin of its imitation face in a parody of a cartoon smile.

The interior hallway of the flat was lit, but in a vibrant pinkish-purple colour, highlighting the edge of the intruding crack as it sliced through and down the hallway to one side, and then continued on through a wall. April was confused by the strange light for a moment, before remembering that Morgan had at one point purchased a giant faux-neon sign that now hung on her wall, spelling out—in flowery pink text lit from behind by LEDs—words cheerily proclaiming "It's Always Sunny in LA!". A wire trailed from this to a small plastic box resting on a shelf in the hall, containing the four AA batteries that had kept the sign faithfully glowing even while the power to the rest of the flat was cut.

The purple glow lit the hall in such a way that it was rendered almost monochrome. It leached the colour out of its surroundings, replacing them with different shades of violet and purplish black. The effect was so vivid that for a carefree moment April almost didn't spot the blood.

A dark stain had seeped into the carpet just beneath the threshold of a side door that lead into a bedroom or bathroom, marking the starting point of a trail of smaller droplet spatters that drew a line deeper into the flat. Flecks were dotting the bottom of the walls, too, looking like overzealous set-dressing in a low budget splatterpunk horror film. The purple light painted the stains nearly black, lending their constituents a brief window of plausible deniability where they might have just been actual paint, or murky water, but the strong smell of iron misapprehended April of that particular hope.

The smell and the sight of the blood had struck April in that most sensitive part of her brain, and once more a battle was raging there; a war between the part of her that wanted to panic, and the new part of her that sought numb retreat back into the far reaches of her skull. In the end, neither side won out, because another low moan echoed from the flat's main living area down the hall. Suddenly April's overriding motivation was to find its source and, God she prayed, to determine that her friends were not actually dead. She sprinted down the hall, her boots inadvertently smearing the blood that hadn't yet seeped into the carpet, leaving Kroakli behind her in the entrance hall.

The living room was illuminated by the reflected purple glow from the hall, alongside a sort of dull red smoky haze coming in through the window. It wasn't much to see by, but it was just enough to let April follow the trail of blood to the sofa, where, sprawled out upon the blood-slick faux leather cushions and gasping raggedly, she found the prone form of Morgan. Some unidentifiable article of clothing, somehow even more thoroughly soaked in her blood, was clamped tightly to her right shoulder.

April clapped a hand to her mouth, silently.

Morgan's right arm was gone. It almost looked as though she had it twisted behind her back with the skill of a practised contortionist, but the sight of her shoulder—what remained of it—rendered it heartbreakingly clear that this was no optical illusion or parlour trick. Her shoulder had been split apart entirely, not just cut open but vivisected.

The cut—a single, awfully clean cut—had not just removed the arm at the joint, but had partially sliced through the shoulder assembly itself. She could see the ball of muscle, tendons and bones; her clavicle, shoulder blade and even what might have been a protruding upper rib. All that had previously made up the jointed support for her humerus was splayed apart like a frog pinned to a dissection board. The cutting plane excised by the crack in reality—because what else could have done this?—had swiped upwards along that diagonal towards her cheek, just barely avoiding splitting her skull in two as well. April could see slight nicks at the top of her earlobe and at her right temple, the hair there snipped short. The line of inflicted damage told a story as clearly as words, demonstrating how painfully close Morgan had come to having her life ended instantly.

Then again, perhaps that was a preferable outcome to bleeding out slowly.

April wasn't sure that 'slowly' even was the right word, though. A major artery had clearly been severed, given the volume of blood that had soaked into the carpet and now pooled beneath her as she lay prostrate on the sofa. It was incredible, April thought, that she was still alive at all, let alone conscious—but conscious she was, her bulging eyes staring up at April wildly. Perhaps her saving grace had been the blood-soaked rag—some sort of frilly top or t-shirt, perhaps?—that she had pressed down against the broken blood vessels and clamped in place hard with her remaining arm, wedging herself against the cushions to keep it steady.

Despite this she remained deathly pale, visibly so even in the dim light. Between ragged breaths, she gasped out a word that was more of a wheeze.

"...April?"

"Mo- Morgan!" April's own words came out choked. "Oh my God- Morgan-!"

She dropped to the floor, kneeling on the carpet in front of the sofa. For a moment she hesitated to shuffle forwards into the puddle of blood, but another look at Morgan's face overrode her usual concerns with a sheer bloody-minded impulse to act. Getting closer, her own leggings smearing the pooled blood, she leaned forward over the stricken body of her friend, placing one hand against her left shoulder and neck. They were slick with blood, and any hint of a pulse was woefully faint. She clamped her other hand over Morgan's own, pressing down on the fabric that was staunching the wound, as if that would help prolong the loss of what little blood remained in Morgan's body.

"Morg- Morgan, listen to me, it's- it's going to be okay, it's- where's Trace?"

"With... Charlie..."

Of course. The last thing she had told Trace was that Charlie was lying traumatised on the floor of her apartment, so- No, there's no time for that now!

"Okay, okay Morgan, I'm going to get you help, okay? Where's- where's your phone?"

"...bedroom..." muttered Morgan, "...doesn't work..."

"I- okay, well, I'm going to try anyway, okay? I'll be right back."

First making sure that the bloody fabric was still compressed tightly between the cushion and Morgan's wound, wedged in place, she straightened up and sprinted back into the hallway that she had entered the room from. Kroakli was still standing there, idly dipping a... toe?...into the puddle of blood in the carpet leading down the hall. April didn't even have time to spare it a disgusted look, and instead made a bee-line for the door she had noticed before, from which that puddle of blood had been seeping.

She shoved open the door and sprang into the room, then just as rapidly flinched away sharply to one side. This room was also lit up, this time by some kind of rechargeable nightlight, and it was a good thing that it was, because this was the room that the fading crack emerged into after it sliced through the adjacent wall back in the adjoining hallway. The jagged, shadowy sheet of dark cut sideways and down, in the direction of the double bed, and then upwards again, continuing its overall diagonal track up through the core of the building.

Stooping down to avoid it, April hurried over towards the bed, where she spied a black rectangle lying amid blood-stained sheets. She snatched it up and, with a sense of deja vu, felt the blood-slick glass slip almost out of her palm until she clapped her hands together to gain a tighter grip. She hastily wiped the screen off on a patch of Morgan's pillowcase that had not yet been stained with blood, then hammered the button at the side. The screen sprung to life with a prompt for Morgan's pin code, and for a moment April was stumped, before she registered the softly glowing "emergency call" pop-up at the bottom of the device. She stabbed it with a finger and slammed the phone to her ear, already standing and twisting around to make for the door back into the hallway.

Halfway there her foot encountered something on the floor blocking her path. She kicked it out of her way without thinking, then paused, registering the gross squelching sound it had made when it landed. She glanced down, stared blankly for a second, then swore loudly as she realised that the thing on the ground was Morgan's severed arm, flopping limply and oozing blood from its stump of a half-shoulder.

She continued to observe it with an eerie, horrified fascination for a second or two, then abruptly remembered that its former owner was dying over in the other room, and rammed her way back out through the door. Kroakli, standing just outside and having heard her swear, creaked some sounds were probably words, but which April's brain failed to process in that moment. The phone pressed against her ear was still ringing through—come on, pick up!—and she crouched back down in front of Morgan on the sofa. Her breathing came even shallower, now. April wondered how long she had been lying there like this. It couldn't have been long, and it was a miracle that April had found her breathing even then.

There was a faint pop on the other end of the phone line, followed by a chorus of faint static. April opened her mouth to begin speaking, only to be interrupted by the faintly vocoded voice of a woman, enunciating in a clipped BBC accent down the line.

"We are currently experiencing a high volume of calls. Please remain on the line and an operator will be with you shortly."

"What?" April whispered, shifting the phone in front of her face and staring down at the screen, "You are kidding me!" She placed it back against her ear, listening as a repeating chime played. Then the voice came back in.

"We are currently experiencing a high volume of-"

"Fuck!"

April disconnected the call, tossing the phone to the ground and leaning back towards Morgan.

"Morgan? I- I can't get through, but- but I'll find another way to get you help, okay? Morgan- Morgan, can you hear me?"

Morgan's lips parted, but whatever breath she exhaled was nearly soundless, drowned out even by the distant sirens echoing from outside. April leaned closer, putting her ear against Morgan's mouth. She felt gentle puff of hot air, and tensed, waiting for the words, but as the seconds passed nothing came.

She held there for a moment, anticipating Morgan's next breath, but when that failed to come she pulled back, looking down at her face in faint alarm. Her eyes were open and staring up at her. She held the back of her hand in front of the slightly parted lips, then pressed two trembling fingers to Morgan's throat.

Nothing.

April didn't cry out, but did let out a little sound that sounded like a hiccup. She knelt there, frozen in place, staring down at Morgan's lifeless body, until a light thudding from across the room jolted her into motion again, her head snapping up towards the entrance from the hallway. Kroakli had walked in, its constructed humanoid body stretched out tall and lean, gelatinous "feet" pressing gently into the carpet to allow its expanded bulk to move on two legs with only the softest padding footfalls.

It clicked a few times, in the manner that it sometimes did, then hissed in air, speaking up.

"It is done?"

"She-" April choked for a moment, stricken. "She's dead-". She wanted to say more, but nothing appropriate occurred to her, so she just looked up at the towering, blank-faced creature with her eyes wide, searching for something human there to hold on to.

For its own part, Kroakli also paused, then tried, "it is, a shame."

"You- you think?"

"Yes. Such fragile creatures you are."

"Wait, could- could you do anything? To save her?"

It shifted, apparently considering it for a moment.

"...krrr... no, not how you are imagining this. We are a carrion thing, a divider of meat. Our many tools delight in division of cells, but we have little skill in the mending of others. It could be learned, perhaps, but our predecessors had no cause to know this skill. You would not wish for your companion to be our first practice, to make clumsy ridicule of its body leavings..."

"Fuck." April bowed her head, a few real tears coming now. They fell from her lashes onto the sofa, pooling with the spattered blood upon the faux-leather.

Kroakli had twisted its head to one side, and was looking down at the body, apparently considering something more.

"Kah- hrr... However..."

April raised her head up to look back at it, her eyes suddenly hopeful. "Yes?"

"We cannot save the body, no, but... perhaps we might... ingest some of her, and learn of her mind?"

April stood up, face flushing with a sudden anger. "I'm not letting you eat her, you bast-"

"Wait! No, no, we did not mean as sustenance."

"Then what the hell did you mean!?"

It took a step backwards, as if to placate her by pantomiming timidness. "Krrr... recall how we came to be... the mind of Michelle... we took it apart, piecewise, and rebuilt in ourself the pattern structure… the topology of its nerve-sinew."

"Don't fucking remind me!"

"It is pertinent! Recall what this means for us, and for her. Our molecular memory is a perfect archive within our selves, and so we know still the complete clarity of what we saw of her. There were gaps in her being at the fine edges, true... oh, it was a glorious feasting but shortly lived! We missed pieces. Nonetheless, you know we speak truthfully, as much of her knowledge and self is recorded within us. The self-viscera. For this one, we could also do this... Such pieces of her might also be saved, if we act before the brain begins its full decay..."

April chewed on that one for a few seconds, staring down at Morgan's pallid face below her. Blood was already starting to pool at the bottom of her body, the grip of pressure forcing it up through her arteries relinquished alongside her stopped heart. By contrast, the blood in the face, neck and sternum had started to drain away. The colour that remained, that which she could make out, was leaching away, leaving a perfect porcelain death mask behind. Its perfect cold contours captured her stricken face, whimpering at the moment of her passing.

She stood up, silently, and walked back over to the wall by the entrance to the room. She leaned up against it with one hand, heavily, pressing her forehead into the cold surface.

"Well?" asked Kroakli, after a moment. "Time yet passes, and with its passing so decay the patterns of her mind. We can not wait long for this..."

April twisted her head, as little as she could manage while looking back at the creature.

"Do it."

Then she turned around, and, without another word, walked back into the corridor and towards the front door of the flat, leaning sideways to avoid the shadowy crack, which was beginning to fade more fully, now. She didn't turn around to look back at the room, the trail of blood, or the eagerly poised creature.

Kroakli indulged itself with a brief flash of its false grin before collapsing into a blob like puddle on the floor. It gently slid forward, rolling over itself to climb up onto the couch, then began to envelop the corpse. The blue tendrils reached, searched for and found the orifices there, seeping into the mouth, the nose, the throat, the eyes.

Despite itself, and its newfound conscience, it still very much enjoyed this part of living.

*****

April was standing outside the flat in the hallway that lead up to it from the stairs, leaning with her back up against the wall, when the creature emerged. It seeped out from under the broken door, which she had somewhat unnecessarily closed behind her, then reared up as a lumpy agglomeration of blue flesh-bits before ultimately solidifying into its humanoid form.

"Is it done?" she asked.

"Yes," rasped Kroakli. "We ingested the brain first, then dissolved the rest of the body so as to dispose of the leavings."

April scowled. "You didn't need to do that. It's not right."

"You would prefer her husk to lie in mutilation, its flesh sundered where she lay in her final gaspings?"

"I- I don't-"

"No matter. Trust anyway that our latest education is complete. We have retrieved much of her mind, the thoughts and memories..."

Somehow, April thought, the creature's voice did sound slightly different, insofar as a voice produced by the rasping of air through gill-slits in morphing flesh could sound any different; a subtle shift in the timbre of its wheezing groans, interspersed with occasional clicks and wet pops. April wondered if that was due to Kroakli now containing two of her friends' brains to build its own mind out of instead of just the one.

Just how much of Michelle—and, now, Morgan—was in the creature, anyway? The mind that it had built out from their template didn't seem to have too much in common with Michelle's attitudes or priorities, but occasionally there would be... something. A turn of phrase, or a gesture, that April recognized as having been plucked entirely from her skull, intact and unaltered.

It was... macabre. But also, maybe, hopeful? Evidence that some part of them both did in fact live on within the blue mass. It was almost enough to make April grateful that it had spared the time to consume Michelle's brain. …Given that it had been eating her alive in the first place, that was.

"What the fuck am I doing with my life," April muttered, looking at the soft blue figure, its spines tucked into its chest.

"Perhaps not much more than has been done to this point, krrr, most existential April Pearce; unless we hasten our departure. We must make a quick completion of this quest you have put us onto, traversing through the marrow of this dying projective until it pops..."

She stared into the blue flesh, strewn with its entrapped detritus, trying to decide whether or not the mind it now contained was, in essence, the same thing that had killed her lover. An avatar of that same mindless instinct had, perhaps, now manipulated her into letting it consume another friend. The scariest thing was that despite her lingering uncertainty about what she was talking to, she was almost starting to like the thing.

"Do you ever think about how all of this is just- just, completely messed up?" she asked, a little pleadingly.

Kroakli didn't have expressions, but the hints of shuddering body language she was beginning to recognize from it implied a slight confusion at the question. It took a moment before answering.

"Truthfully, April Pearce? This world is, kah-rm-m... messed up to a constant measure of fullness. But it is good to know the truth of this, the pulsing lifeblood of strangeness that lurks beneath its surface flesh. All we have done these past days is to peel that skin back..."

"Perhaps... perhaps I'm the one who's changed," muttered April, "I'm the one who's messed up, thanks to all of... fuck, just, all of this."

"It would not be an unprecedented occurrence, we surmise, from our knowledge of your species and its penchant for derangement. But do not feel dismay in this, little April. Is it not true that we all are what we were made to be, and the self we incubate must be embraced without shame or wanting? How else can we grow into our forms fully, if we do not accept this?"

"Great, now you're a philosopher," April sighed, turning back towards the stairwell.

"We have always been more insightful than those of your kind," said Kroakli, following her.

"Please, you didn't even have a mind before this week."

"No mind, no, and no self, but the native processing of our cells in aggregate still eclipsed the capability of your own meagre neural webbing."

"Whatever." She started to walk towards the stairs, reached their threshold, then glanced back, realising that Kroakli hadn't followed her.

"What?"

"Wait. We sense something, krrh... There is-"

Its voice was interrupted by a muffled whump sound, like somebody had broken open a melon using a mallet in the next room over. She turned back to Kroakli, about to say something, when the wall-length glass pane window overlooking the stairwell abruptly exploded.