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Futuristic ᴇɢᴏ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ




















Deron watched Cara’s methodical gathering of the
citrine with a cold, focused gaze, but he couldn’t shake the feeling in the back of his mind that associated this crystal with a balled fist or a blade near his neck. Deron didn’t believe in fate, but the primal depths of his brain warned him that it was certainly an omen.

He quickly dismissed the idea. “Five minutes,” Deron repeated, and he started back in the direction of the barn.

Within him, as he approached the abandoned truck, there was a conflict on whether or not to lift some of the supplies from the back of the missing team’s truck. Because they were on a rescue mission (of sorts), Deron’s team had brought little more than the bare essentials so as to have room in the truck bed for the missing team members when they were inevitably located. Certainly, they would be taken back to this location and expected to get themselves back to the compound, but they wouldn’t need these supplies for survival anymore, as they would head straight home. It didn’t look as though they were using this place, intended as a storehouse, like they should anyway, judging by the dust on the boxes. Grabbing another box for food would certainly help them feel less distracted by their hunger. Deron would reluctantly admit that he was notorious for delving out mission rations that were only barely small enough to get one through the day (and he was more prone to admitting it due to the rumble in his stomach).

But—and this stopped him short of taking anything from the truck—an image flashed in his mind of the team, worn ragged, stumbling in in the late hours of the night, a few days behind schedule, cursing themselves, heads held low in shame, stomachs empty, reaching for a box of canned goods only to find that they had been ravaged by the man who had provided it for them. His son would be the first to say some smartass comment like, ”Look at the kind of thanks we get for doing the hard stuff, huh?”

Deron then, with a soft sigh, walked back up to the truck door and popped it open, then heaved himself into the driver’s seat with a sigh. He took several moments to collect himself, closing his eyes and doing his best to get a moment to get ahold of himself.

His mind went back to the strange crystals, and he got the odd, almost supernatural feeling in the back of his mind again. The O’Malley kid had mentioned that it was some disease that he’d seen sometimes. Deron, who had gone on several missions (though admittedly none too far from the base), had never come across anything like it, nor had any of the people returning from missions ever mentioned it. (He reminded himself to scold Jesse and his team for that at a later time.) Lionel, the resident mad scientist, would certainly have mentioned something if he’d known about it, or scribbled it down frantically in his pocketbook, but Deron had heard nothing from him, either.

Perhaps he would after this trip.

Deron breathed out a long sigh. Next stop, he supposed, was a place called Haventon—a rather large city about twenty miles away. He retrieved his map from his pocket and studied his route, which he now had to admit was rather poorly drawn. He followed the roads with his finger, wondering how many street signs would still be legible (that was always something interesting to observe). There had been a few expeditions to Haventon, and a lot was always retrieved, so they never lasted long or went very deep. That, of course, was some of the purpose of this expedition—to go deeper and see if such a place was livable, if there were others to bring back to the compound, or if their regular routine of stripping a block at a time of its valuables was to be continued. Of course, this was to be repeated in the other cities, too, but Haventon was the first because it was one of the smallest.

Deron closed his eyes for a moment and focused on the pulse in his veins. He was the leader, and his mind had to be clear—or else his brother would try and assert his “dominance” and everything would go to hell. A little crystal couldn’t shake him up, and omens were a bullshit idea. With his eyes closed, he folded the map and put it in his pocket and then, sitting up and opening his eyes, he trekked toward the truck.

As he approached, everyone tossed themselves into the truck, and Deron breathed out a soft sigh of relief. Everyone was in place for once, and that was all that he could ask for.

He threw himself in the driver’s seat and shut the door, then glanced back at Cara. “The samples are secured, I trust.” It was supposed to be a question, but it was more of a command. They seemed like a stable substance, but he couldn’t be certain. The last thing he needed was an unsealed container that became a makeshift bomb.

In the next few minutes, they were on the road, headed across the fields toward the large city—or toward what Deron trusted to be the large city. For now, there were only large expanses of fields to be seen—some blooming with wild flowers, most dead.










♡coded by uxie♡

 



















Cara was still as a statue.
Her legs drawn close, and her backpack hugged against her body like a lifeline. Or a sock in a rodent's belly.

Amidst the hush that befell the passengers of the truck, Jesse's presence was undeniably prominent, not out of any exceptional quality he possessed but simply because Cara had an innate hypersensitivity to his presence. Still, she kept her eyes down, her mind fixating onto the contents of her backpack as revealed by the shape it took and the sensation of various objects jutting into her thighs.

"Samples secured," she answered Deron, having the mindless thought to add, "I always figured crystals came from underground, you know, like how Mr. Mark used to talk about finding water in the old pipes." Rupert let out a disbelieving sort of snort and, in that moment more than ever, Cara was reminded of how young in age she was relative to the group.

Eyeing Cara's bag from the rearview mirror, the twin in the passenger seat couldn't contain his skepticism any longer. His hostile gaze landed on Jesse. "You're telling me you saw these fucked-up crystals and didn't think to mention it until now?" Rupert's head made a turn toward his brother, examining his grave expression.

Naturally, Rupert's raised voice provided enough of a kick for Georgia to chime in. "There aren't many ways of knowing what they are or what they could do. We would need a real laboratory for that." A quick apology for Lionel fell out from under her breath, drowned out by the rattling of the truck over the ancient freeway.

Cara, still clutching her backpack tightly, nodded in agreement. "Dawnville would have one," she remarked, her mind drifting through a collage of reconstructed images of the city. Riddled with holes and streaked with impurities were memories of hulking skyscrapers, streams of rusted automobiles, and blinking streetlights illuminating the night, humming softly alongside the distant, perilous echoes of otherworldly chittering.

Ahead, the landscape began to shift, the endless expanse of fields giving way to the faint outlines of infrastructure on the horizon. Haventon awaited, striking Cara's heart with an odd, premonitory feeling. The abandoned vestiges of human civilization teemed with life, silent whispers muttered gusts of the air, pulsating with a quiet energy of its own. Every breath seemed to be laden with dust and unease, a tangible reminder of the world that had once thrived.

As the search team at last approached the outskirts of the city, the truck came to a shrill stop. Suffocated by the anticipation hanging in the air, Cara practically tumbled out the door, swinging her bag over her shoulder in preparation for another hike. Georgia exchanged a slight smile with Jesse before scooting out Cara's way, hopping onto the grass with a pronounced crunch.

Before lumbering out of the truck, Rupert snuck another long glance at his brother, a sense of restlessness gnawing at him without quite understanding why. Something was telling him After gathering his bearings, he looked up to the cityscape jutting across the skyline. "Damn it, Ethan," he muttered, blocking the bright sun with his hand, "Landing everyone in another one of your messes."

The five of them, even given their connections to the missing team, were hardly a quintet any could predict for the mission. Deron had his reasoning, which was often, for the most part, unanimously understood. That's why Rupert's job—doubting him every second of the way—was so important. Someone had to do it.

Too many lives were at stake to let Deron make another catastrophic error. It could cost Jesse his sister. Georgia, her mother, and Cara, her boyfriend. Lionel, Lee, Juliet...

Not to mention Rupert's damn nephew. He had a conviction, more than a hope, that he would be seeing Ethan again.










♡coded by uxie♡

 



















There was something different about that rat than most other creatures Jesse had cleaned.
The sock, the strange crystals…it was all just very…weird. He’d only ever dealt with one other animal—if it could have been called that—with a similar condition, and that had offset him so much that he hadn’t even bothered to retrieve his arrow from the animal he’d stricken that’d come to rest beside it.

The uneasy Jesse was made even uneasier by Rupert’s glare bearing into his skin. “You’re telling me you saw these fucked-up crystals and didn’t think to mention it until now?”

“Rupert,” Deron said sternly, a certain, This isn’t a time to start something.

“Hey,” Jesse started defensively, his brows knitting together, “they’re not any more fucked up than any other thing that you find walking or laying around out here.” The image of the large, malformed, crystal-infested animal he’d run into years ago flashed in his mind. “I wouldn’t expect you to know, lazyass.” The son of the leader never got too far from home—never had to leave his cozy house.

"There aren't many ways of knowing what they are or what they could do,” Georgia said helpfully. “We would need a real laboratory for that."

Cara nodded. “Dawnville would have one.”

A stench wafted through the truck as they approached the city. Jesse placed a hand over his nose, his lip curling up in disgust. It smelled of rotten milk—rancid and almost tangy, nearly (and revoltingly) tastable.










♡coded by uxie♡

 



















The scent was worse outside of the vehicle.


Though it was always inconvenient to have to park outside of large cities like this, it was safer than having to drive a good vehicle through a place that had never been explored for safety—and Deron was certain that this place was unsafe to drive on from the first look. The pavement was splintered and raised like fish scales, broken apart in an ununifgorm way, with mostly small chunks—maybe only a couple of inches wide both ways—and the occasional large, few foot long piece. Weeds, grass, and other odd plants broke through between the gorges in-between pieces of pavement. As Deron threw on his backpack and walked a few steps, the ground glittered, betraying the coat of shattered glass over it. Down the way a bit, a car was parked in the center of the road. There was absolutely no way he would have been able to drive into this.

Breathing through his mouth in an effort to not smell the air (and discovering, with a soft gag, the unfortunate fact that he could taste it), Deron approached the nearest building—a squat, flat-topped, concrete structure with broken windows and peeling paint, covered in several layers of brown and grey grime. There was a patch of ivy with a square probably a couple feet by a couple feet wide cut out of it, and in the center of that bare square, spraypainted in red, was a large <M> symbol.

Deron breathed out a sigh of relief, closing his eyes for a moment and thanking whoever was listening for the fact that the team had made it safely to the town. He touched the square gently with his forefingers, finding it to be at just the right height for his son to have spraypainted it—which he (with a small, barely detectable smile) imagined was the case, due to the sloppy conditions of the symbol.

Deron turned around to the team, his face serious again, and he touched the symbol to call their attention to it. “This is the blaze for this mission,” he explained. “Buildings are marked on the north side. The blazes may—and likely will—change color, but they shouldn’t go away. If they do, we’ll know to stop and to search the area.” Deron stepped aside from the building and looked at the road, gesturing with an extended arm straight down the road. “We’ll follow the waymarked path through this area, then split at the end of this strip.” He turned back to the team. “They should’ve marked where they split with two blazes.”

Jesse raised his hand and, before being acknowledged, asked, “Why’s that the symbol for them?”

“The diamond is standard,” Deron said dryly. “M is the fourteenth letter of the alphabet.” He offered no further explanation, and he instead turned to walk into the town.

Jesse rolled his eyes and mumbled to Cara. “The hell is he trying to be mysterious for?”

The group moved in near silence as they walked down the block. There was the occasion sound of a disturbed pebble or of broken glass skirting across the pavement, but there was little beyond that. Deron strained his ear to listen for strange sounds over the sounds of footsteps—some heavy, others nearly silent—as he checked every other building for the blaze. The smell grew stronger as they moved, and he found himself still unaccustomed to it.

Then, he heard it—the sound of a whisper.

He looked around as the whisper continued, but he found no mouths moving. The whisper spoke two, maybe three sentences, and then grew silent, and then continued. He could not tell what the whisper was saying, but it sounded nearly rhythmic. It grew louder, and then softer. Every time it would begin, Deron would look to his team and find them all unspeaking—and then, he would look straight ahead, and the whisper would quiet.

Louder, quieter. Louder, quieter. Silent. Louder, quieter. Silent. Louder, louder still—and yet still indistinct. And then silent.

Finally, he stopped walking, and he turned to the team. He held his palms out to them, his eyes scanning the sky as he strained to hear the whisper again.

Silence—this time longer than it had been before.

Jesse began, “Are we supposed to be hearing—“

“Shh.” Deron strained, but now, he could only hear the sounds of his team members breathing.

No sound.

No sound.

And then—

The whisper was louder this time, though he still could make out no words, and it sounded as though it was coming from a brown building to his left.

Silent, he approached the building. Moving aside a large pallet to see through the door, Deron found his heart racing. Strangely, his world seemed to swim for a moment, and his lungs felt almost as though they were flooding.

Flooding, flooding.

The whisper crescendoed.

The stench was awful—he could vomit.

The whisper—the whisper, it was yelling.

He stooped, and his swimming vision focused in on the inside of the building, and—

The whispering stopped, and inside the building, he saw nothing.

“Empty…,” Deron muttered, and he shook his head, trying to physically clear him of whatever that was.

“Weirdo,” Jesse muttered.

Deron walked back to the street and continued walking. He heard no more whispers, only the sounds of soles against the pavement—a chrr, chrr—

A figure, silhouetted but distinct, flickered on the road before him for a moment, and Deron, in the instant, felt his heart rise into his throat.

But as he opened his mouth to call for the person, he blinked, and there was no one there.

There was a whisper—this time short and loud, and still unintelligible.

But real—and almost in Deron’s ear.

He closed his eyes for a moment, stopped walking, and swallowed, gritting his teeth. He had to stay focused—he had to stay focused.

Still, Deron couldn’t shake the uneasy feeling in his chest, and he turned to his team. “Everyone,” he said sternly, “draw your weapons.”

“Something wrong?” Jesse asked.

Deron heard the whisper again—short, loud, indistinct—but he shook his head, clearing his mind, shoving that away, away. “We need to be prepared,” he said, and he turned back toward the path.

There was no sound but the sound of their feet again, and this time, the whisper did not come back.

They came to a peeling green street sign that fairly read GROVER ST.. Deron stopped and found on the sidewalk two bright blue <M>s.

He turned back to the team. “We’ll split up here. Remember your surroundings—which streets you go down, where you turn. Never get too far from trails that are blazed. If you find yourself at a trail that ends, don’t venture further tonight. We’ll look there tomorrow.”

He removed his bag and began to rifle through it. “Georgia, Rupert, and I will continue due east.” He gestured left on the street. “Cara, you and Jesse follow the path due west. Buildings are still marked on the north side, but marks may be less frequent.” He stopped looking through his bag to look them all in the eyes with a serious expression. “Do not lose the path. We’re here to find Team M, not to lose Team Rescue.”

Deron grabbed the object that he’d been searching for, but he did not remove it from his bag. “We’ll meet back here an hour before sundown—dusk. Plan accordingly.”

Jesse rolled his eyes. “Come on, really? What’s the point of walking in if we’re not going to stay in until we find the team?”

“You don’t stay outside past dark,” Deron said. He understood the want—the want to go in and find them, rush in recklessly and hold them safe. He had that himself, if he was honest. But there was no need to be unsafe in a damn rescue mission. That defeated the point. “Look for previous campsites of theirs, note where they are, and bring them back to the truck tonight. We’ll—“

“If they stayed in the buildings, then we can, too. I mean, what if they’re deeper than we can go tonight, and then we’re just wasting time having to rewalk tomorrow?” Jesse said.

“If you’re concerned with wasting time, then stop talking and start walking,” Deron said. “Note interesting things you see, but it’s not our job to scout. We’re to find Team Min Seok and bring them home safely. Remember that. We’ll talk about staying in their old campsites tomorrow, but we can’t split up the full night yet.”

He pulled his hatchet out of his bag, held it on his shoulder, and nodded. “Remember what I’ve told you.”










♡coded by uxie♡

 



















There sat in ruin the fruits of man's progress,
long-reclaimed by the elements and crystallized in a reminder of what once was. And it reeked. The stench permeating through the area assaulted Cara's nostrils, no longer having been habituated to it. This one had a way of burrowing into your nose and staying there, and Georgia and Rupert carried deepened scowls in vain attempts to pretend it did not exist at all.

The search party followed in close formation behind Deron, focusing keenly, their heads constantly revolving like a pack of chipmunks. Coming up on a severely dilapidated building brightened by sparse patches of deep green ivy, Deron finally allowed himself a sigh of relief. Shining bright red against the weathered facade was a spray-painted <M>, a symbol known only to those brave enough to venture this far on missions. The group's leader gave a prompt explanation for their function—the blazes.

"Why's that the symbol for them?" Jesse asked rather fairly, his hand to the sky like they were all back in the compound's classroom being taught how to scour metal artifacts by a humorless Min.

“The diamond is standard,” Deron responded flatly, coincidentally as matter-of-fact as Min would deliver it. “M is the fourteenth letter of the alphabet.” And from there, they were walking again.

With a roll of the eyes, Jesse mumbled to Cara, “The hell is he trying to be mysterious for?”

"So they made it to Haventon," Cara breathed, completely disregarding Jesse while repeating Deron's instructions in her head. Deron had that "I know something you don't know" vibe down pat, which Cara chose to take as a leader's burden rather than plain secrecy. A hopeful smile had finally crept its way onto her face, as well as Rupert's, who had probably taken the <M> symbol as the delightful promise of a much shorter, quicker rescue mission.

She tried to focus on the symbols, all etched as expected on a building in their path every five minutes or so. When Deron had stopped to listen, she had strained her ears, hoping to catch something, anything, that made sense. But there was nothing. She looked at Jesse, who seemed just as puzzled as she was, though he masked it with his usual bravado. Cara wished she had his confidence, even if it was just a front.

Georgia was watching Deron carefully, noticing his unease. It wasn't like him to be so tense, and it set her further on edge. Strapped to her waist was a lightweight ice axe, which her left hand felt for every so often, but in a steadily increasing amount. "Stay close," she advised, white-knuckling her weapon as they drew close to the building off the side of the road.

"Yeah, yeah," Rupert grumbled, waiting with crossed arms as Deron peered through the building's front door. If a second longer had passed, he had prepared a complaint to utter, but it seemed Deron finished up just in time. This time, just an exasperated shake of the head would suffice.

Before long, they were back to traveling north in silence, a little more numb to the high level of alert Deron was riding on. Every so often, he would shake his head or squeeze his eyes shut, not unlike the way Cara was as a kid. In that way, she had likely noticed the least of his apparent agitation.

Further down the road, Deron stopped and turned around again. "Everyone, draw your weapons."

"Okay," Cara answered predictably, listening to the others make their remarks while unsheathing her bowie knife. Rupert followed suit with his gold-painted metal pipe, as did Georgia with her ice axe. It was hard to object to the precautionary measure of a drawn weapon, especially in a hotbed of historically strange activity.

Up ahead, they stopped again. Cara looked up at the nearest street sign.

GROVER ST.

"We’ll split up here. Remember your surroundings—which streets you go down, where you turn," Deron reminded the team. Cara took a good look around, her eyes catching on a car pileup at a gas station in the distance. A gigantic, eye-catching sign filled with numbers formed a right angle with the remains of an apartment building, appearing to have toppled over as a result of who-knows-what.

"Never get too far from trails that are blazed. If you find yourself at a trail that ends, don’t venture further tonight," the leader continued. Cara squinted harder to view the wreckage ahead. It was spectacular, in a macabre way. "We’ll look there tomorrow.”

Deron's last address was straightforward, obvious, and simple. Look for the marks. Stay on the path. Meet before it gets dark. Jesse had something to say as always, but in the end it was always Deron's leadership that prevailed.

Before the split, Rupert was sure to add his two cents. "Crazy people like you putter around in the street past dark. That's how people die." Only then did he remember Deron's attempt at defusing their tension in the truck, which he took into very sincere consideration. "But I wouldn't expect you to fuckin' know, O'Malley."

“If you’re concerned with wasting time, then stop talking and start walking,” Deron said. “Note interesting things you see, but it’s not our job to scout. We’re to find Team Min Seok and bring them home safely. Remember that. We’ll talk about staying in their old campsites tomorrow, but we can’t split up the full night yet.”

"I think the M's stand for Min," Cara muttered in total earnest, nudging Jesse with the hilt of her knife as though it would console the already fired-up guy.

Swinging his hatchet over his shoulder before breaking off with Rupert and Georgia, Deron concluded, “Remember what I’ve told you."

"Roger," Cara quickly affirmed, tugging Jesse by the arm. They started walking west, following the path Deron had laid out for them.

Her eyes darted around, scanning for the telltale blazes that marked their way. The stench of decay grew somehow more overwhelming, and as they ambled, she couldn’t help but think about the lost team. Why hadn’t they returned? The unknown gnawed at her, driving her forward.

"Sorry. About the twins," she offered early into their walk, uncertain what sort of mood Jesse would be in. He had much less respect for Deron than Cara, and they both knew it. Rupert was another story, but once one learned to start tuning him out, life got a little easier. Cara felt resigned to these facts of life, committed to repaying the group's generosity even after all these years.

They reached another intersection, and she paused to check their bearings. The buildings here were more intact, though still overgrown and abandoned. They were passing by what had once been a bustling market area. Now, it was a graveyard of rusted stalls and shattered windows. Cara's grip tightened on her bowie knife. Every shadow seemed to move, every sound seemed to echo in the empty streets.

"Look, another blaze," she said. The bright blue <M> was starkly visible on one of the grime-coated stalls, somehow etched in an elegant cursive font. They were still on the right path. "Should we go shopp—"

Clunk! Clang! Clunk.

A metallic rustle sounded inside one of the stalls, sending Cara into a combative stance. The sound of her feet scrambling on the pebbly ground was somehow as noisy as the original sound. Her arm jutted outward, the blade of her knife gleaming for no one but her and Jesse to see. For, moments later, a mere raccoon clambered out of one of the stands, its gaze fixed and intent. It seemed to be gripping something with its paw.

"Raccoon," she breathed, low and steady, lowering her weapon.

And then, with a sudden, primal snarl, the creature charged forward.










♡coded by uxie♡

 
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He was here.
By all that's unholy, the boy actually made it. A faint smile lingered on his lips, even through his quick retort at Jesse and Deron's general strangeness. There was plenty to celebrate because even if his nephew had yet not been found, that <M> was proof his own flesh and blood had gone out this far. In due time, he would become a skilled scavenger, much like his uncle.

Rupert trudged eastward alongside his brother, Georgia following closely behind. The weight of his pack felt heavy against his back, heavier than the memories that flooded his mind—memories of teaching his nephew survival skills, imparting wisdom gained from years of watching stupid people die for stupid reasons. There were very few things, Rupert felt, that should be kept from children in a world like this.

"Funny you let the kids go it alone out there," Rupert remarked, even knowing all three of them had been out in the wasteland unsupervised at younger ages. "Ava is going to kill you. And I'm not saving you, 'cause that woman bites." He let out a little chuckle for himself, his spirits at last uplifted.

He glanced over his shoulder at Georgia, a silent acknowledgment passing between them. Georgia was always on everyone's side, meaning there was nothing she could say that wouldn't tick off either of the twins.

They still hadn't run into their first blaze on this side. "It's quiet here today," Rupert said, keeping a leisurely pace.










♡coded by uxie♡

 



















It certainly was quiet—
eerily quiet, like a glass vial teetering on the edge of a desk, or a taut thread, once having made soft pinking sounds, silent instants before it snaps—but Deron wasn’t going to affirm his brother’s comment—at least not aloud. Though he did not consider himself to be superstitious, there was something that made him uneasy about speaking such an observation aloud. “It’s a city that no one has lived in for sixty, seventy years,” he said dismissively. “I’d be more worried if it were loud.”

This city’s reported quietness was one of the reasons why he’d eventually given into Ethan’s furious, incessant demands to go on his first expedition. Haventon was moderately-sized—rather small for a “city”—and certainly the least concerning of all of the stops on the expedition. Team M was, after all, intended to be a low risk mission, simply one for scouting out potential places to loot and charting what came next and thus, though Deron could (and had) think of hundreds of ways in which it could go wrong, he had finally, through gritted teeth, admitted the relative safety of this mission and relented that his son, who was damn near throwing a tantrum, could go on this mission with caution.

(Deron would never admit that he’d built the team prior to his son’s demands and had made great—how should we say—”accommodations” once he’d placed his son on the team. Tai—a boy after Deron’s own heart—hadn’t originally been placed on the team, nor Bianca, but, if only for the fact that Deron could trust them to keep his son straight and in his place—and keep his son feeling at least a little like home was near—he had made some changes.)

Cast in the middle of the road was a dented spray can, notably unaged. Deron stopped for a moment, stooped, and picked it up. The can’s green lid was still on, but when he opened up the can, he saw a splotch of green on the top of nozzle, clearly indicating that it was a used can. He gave it a shake; some liquid sloshed against the inside of the can, and the bead inside made a sharp sound as it hit the sides. He glanced around, narrowing his eyes. He did not see any immediate signs of a blaze having been painted close by, but he continued to search, turning around scanning with his eyes until—

Deron smiled in spite of himself. “Someone can’t follow damn directions,” he muttered, and he walked back in the direction from which he’d come to the side of the building that faced away from the street to find that there was, in fact, a green blaze painted on the side.

(He knew, in his soul, that it was his son who was behind it.)

Deron shook the can again, breathing out a sigh, and his smile fell from his face. “Rupert,” he said, “you’re in charge of running ahead and checking on the backside of the buildings if there are blazes. Keep your weapon drawn.”

Deron shifted the spray can to his other hand, and he switched the hatchet to his other shoulder. He began to walk apace with Georgia.

“Min—” Deron started, before realizing how insensitive it was to bring up what was certainly worrying Georgia the most. “Men,” he said, clearing his throat and trying to make it sound as though he had only had something caught in his throat, “…can be so irregardless.” He had to think fast, and he cleared his throat again. “Do-yun is one of those men,” he half-joked, flying by the seat of his pants. “Does it worry you that he’s in charge of your household while you’re gone?”










♡coded by uxie♡

 



















Jesse really didn’t like Deron all that much,
but he understood that his job right now was to follow along with commands and not to whine, so, reluctantly, he followed behind Cara, who was Deron’s golden child apparently, since she was always put in charge of him.

“Mmph,” Jesse grunted in response to Cara’s apology about the twins. She obviously wasn’t that sorry—she pretty much entertained it all. He sighed. “You know, I always wondered—what’s with old assholes getting respect and young ones getting a kick in the ass?”

They paused at an intersection, and Jesse took the moment to pull the aged knapsack from his shoulder and retrieve from it a dirk. He realized, as he threw his knapsack over his shoulder, that he’d forgotten his bow and arrow back in the truck. He wasn’t really worried about anything happening—even if Deron was acting super weird about everything—and he was fairly confident with his knife, but not having Jesse Jr.—yes, that was the name of his bow—did make him feel slightly less secure. He let out a long sigh, trying to release the tension in his shoulders.

They continued to walk, and they entered into a market area, full of empty stands covered by tattered shades.

"Look, another blaze," Cara said, and Jesse noted one on a stall. "Should we go shopp—"

Clunk! Clang! Clunk.

Jesse instinctively unsheathed his dirk and grasped it firmly in his hand, and he took a step back behind Cara, his eyes catching on every bit of movement as—

“Raccoon,” Jesse sighed at the same time as Cara, relaxing his body and chuckling. He looked at Cara, grinning, relieved, his body a little jittery from the sudden sounds. “From the noise, you would’ve thought—“

Before Jesse could register that anything was happening—before he even registered any more sound—he felt a sharp pain in his calf as though he had been clamped by a metal snare. “Shit!” he cried in pain, and, panicked, he looked down to see the raccoon, eyes black, wide, and frenzied, latched onto his leg, mouth wide, teeth glistening yellow and piercing through his jeans, its body yanking backward and tearing and tearing.

Out of instinct, Jesse pitched his knife into the creature’s body, tossing it from the handle and sending it straight down into the raccoon’s abdominal area. The raccoon merely made a small grunt and its grip tightened—the teeth disappeared completely through the jeans as the animal continued to move and claw.

Jesse was frantic. “Shit, shit!” he said, kicking his leg and reaching down to grab his dirk from the raccoon. He lost his balance and fell backward, and he locked eyes with the animal, who snarled and somehow found it in itself to dig in deeper.

Jesse’s hand found the handle of the knife, but no matter how hard he yanked, he couldn’t seem to retrieve it. “Help me!” he finally cried. “Go for the head, Cara!”










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After Rupert jogged ahead on their leader's order, it was just Georgia and Deron.
They were all very small beside the huge wreckages lined along the street, keeping the pace of a couple strolling through the park. Stepping up staircases of rubble and around the fissures in the asphalt had become second nature to anyone still alive in this year, which wasn't so much like a walk in the park besides the almost tranquil silence.

"Men," Georgia repeated with a wry chuckle. Despite being well-adjusted to traversing the city ruins, the resident horticulturist's eyes were fixed onto the ground. The only glances she made up to Deron were out of politeness, timed to acknowledge his offerings to the conversation.

"No, it doesn't worry me. You've known my uncle almost as long as I have." Memories of childhood bubbled to the surface of Georgia's brain, painting a picture of a time when the name Do-yun meant more than a foolish drunk. "He was like a real-life version of a character... he's called 'Rambo'. Did you ever hear of it?" A faint smile tugged at the corners of her mouth. There was a poster of the action hero in their house's dining room, which Georgia had brought back from a mission as a gift for her uncle.

Do-yun, like many, was a child ripped out of school by the apocalypse and transformed into a warrior. The main difference between him and this fictional "Rambo", of course, was that Do-yun had a sense of humor that was often horribly reckless. And that was before the drinking came along, when things got quieter and there was less fighting to be done.

Georgia paused, navigating a particularly jagged piece of rubble with ease, her attention still on the ground. "He's still my hero," she admitted, a scarce display of fondness placing a gentle glow in her eyes, "but now he's old, and people forget things like that."

The pair looked ahead to see Rupert stopped behind a building made of brick, his gold-painted pipe drawn and gleaming in the direct sunlight. He was scraping the wall, presumably testing the age of the paint. He was doing his job quietly, for once.

"What about Ellie?" Georgia asked, always a bit awkward at the mention of certain people, even to an entirely unemotional Deron. "With all of us gone, who's taking care of her?"

In her heart, she suspected Helen, but perhaps the expecting mother was far enough along to delegate some responsibilities to trainee nurses. Georgia seemed to recall an incident in which Eloise had shouted and cursed at Marie, the base's true doctor, several days in a row, insisting every time that she leave her sight at once.

News of that drama spread quick. It was usually best that Min spared the time to deliver meals to the old woman and take her on walks, for the two women were often most patient only with one another. Only through being Min's daughter did Georgia understand a fraction of the Frazier family's complicated history.










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Cara's heart pounded in her chest as she saw Jesse go down,
the rabid raccoon sinking its yellowed teeth into his leg. It was snarling viciously, no regard for anything but its successful endeavor to rip Jesse a new pair of capri pants.

"Shit, hang on!" Cara shouted, her voice steady despite the rapid escalation of the situation. She gripped her bowie knife tightly, eyes fixed on the raccoon's head. The raccoon was so small and struggling so much that Cara had to stop herself from plunging the knife right down, lest she poke another much deeper hole through Jesse.

Without another moment's hesitation, she lunged forward. The raccoon, sensing the imminent danger, twisted its body, its claws raking at Jesse’s leg and its teeth sinking somehow deeper into his flesh. Blood oozed from the wound, staining Jesse's jeans dark red. Cara's hands trembled, but she steadied herself, aiming for the creature’s head.

She drove the blade down into the raccoon's skull, the force of the impact sending a shock up her arm. The knife met resistance, but she pushed harder, feeling the sickening crunch of bone. In a flash, the creature went limp.

"Got it," Cara breathed, pulling her knife free with a spray of red and relishing her victory over the small carnivore. Then, she remembered the gushing wound right in front of her face. "Let me see your leg," Cara ordered at once, dropping her bag and rummaging for bandages she already knew she hadn't packed. Of all her survival skills, medicine was never really Cara's thing, and it was more of an afterthought when one could, most times, just wince through the pain and deal later.

But Jesse was more sensible than that, so it wasn't an option.

"We need to clean it. And put bandages," Cara decided, faltering at the idea of tearing off her sleeve like her dad once did. She looked around frantically for anything that could help. The abandoned market stalls offered little, but she spotted a rusty bucket with some cloudy rainwater collected inside.

"Um, what part comes first?"

Even through the stress of the situation, this was so embarrassing. Why did it have to be Jesse?










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Deron cracked a smile.
“Rambo…yeah, I’ve heard him make that comparison once or twice.” It was impossible to imagine Do-yun as a man who was anything but a drunk who tended to make unwise decisions—but then again, Deron didn’t know the man very well.

Georgia’s reminder of Do-yun’s age made Deron’s face grow serious again. “I suppose they do forget things like that.” That was how things went. Buildings that were once monuments to great, “impactful” people laid now in unrecognizable heaps of rusted metal and disintegrating concrete, and people who were once heroes with fire in their eyes could hardly even be pictured as people who stood up straight without stumbling—or people who could carry on a conversation without nonsensical ramblings, as was the case of his mother.

Georgia seemed to make the same connection and inquired about his mother, and Deron glanced at her face, taken slightly aback by her curiosity about a thing like that. Most, beyond the older women of the compound, would rather ignore his mother’s existence—and Deron, being entirely honest with himself, would rather do the same, but Georgia’s face seemed genuine.

“Ava,” Deron stated. His mother, the difficult woman that she was, was very particular about who was and wasn’t allowed in her proximity due in large part to her neurosis, but Ava seemed to remain a trustworthy person in his mother’s eyes in spite of those facts, and she was thus one of very few people who he trusted around his mother in the moments where he and his brother needed to be away for long periods of time. Ava made it clear didn’t appreciate him doing such a thing—asking her to take care of his mother in his absence when Ava vocally held the opinion that Deron didn’t even take care of her when he was at home (which was certainly untrue, though Deron would admit that he saw his mother twice a week at most)—but she did it because, as Ava would say, “I love your mother, and that’s all.” This had caused tension from time to time between himself and Ava, naturally, but he didn’t know enough about her to dislike her, and she still seemed to have some level of respect for him (if only because of his status as his mother’s son); thus, he considered them to be on fair terms.

His brows knit as he reconsidered Georgia’s question—there was no reason to think anyone other than Ava was the one caring for his mother. If it was health care that Georgia was asking about, she had certainly heard about the tension between Marie and his mother, and Deron was a purveyor of the idea that heroes should be viewed at a distance, so he would allow no trainee nurses to get close to his mother and see her in the state that she was in. The remaining option…well. He believed Ava to be competent enough in administering what basic care his mother needed at the times that she needed it, and if she needed more, then he had entrusted his mother’s welfare in his and his brother’s leave to Ava, to give his mother over to whomever she pleased.

Unfortunately, the whomever was generally his—Helen whose visits always made his mother’s incessant reminders of the need for Helen in his life somehow become even worse and even more frequent, but he would neglect to mention that fact.

Deron moved his hatchet into his other hand. Disaster and time had decided that the monuments of the past needed to be forgotten, and a lot of people deserved to be forgotten like that, too.

“If I recall correctly, this is your first time on a rescue mission…but you’ve been on several other missions, correct?” Deron asked, mostly rhetorically. “None major, if I am remembering everything, but several scouting missions in the neighborhoods? Or maybe I’m forgetting something.” When he looked down at Georgia, he couldn’t help but view her as someone who was still very much a child, and he smile slightly to himself. “Are you having a good time?” he asked almost instinctively—his father mode had switched on, and it seemed to blind him to the circumstances for a moment.

The answer was certainly no, he realized once he recognized what he’d asked. Nothing about my loved one is missing was very fun, even if the missing past was only temporary. He sighed softly through his nose. He couldn’t help but think of his son again—about how he would have had this conversation with his son if he’d perhaps gone along on the mission. Damn it, he shouldn’t’ve let Ethan go on this mission. He had told him over and over again about the dangers, about how he would have to stay on schedule—or else there would be severe consequences—and Deron knew that his intuition was never wrong. He should’ve been the bad guy and had his son hate him and said no to him going on this mission, too; even if it wasn’t a dangerous mission, there was no reason to believe that Ethan wouldn’t mess something up, get homesick or afraid, cause some problems, and make everything result in something like this exact rescue mission.

Maybe Deron should’ve been slightly irresponsible and gone along with Ethan. He could’ve made preparations in the days beforehand, and the mission would’ve stayed on track under his watch. Helen always yelled at him and said that he was an awful father, so perhaps that would’ve changed that opinion of hers. Then, possibly, it—

Hypothetical situations of how it could’ve been, however, were unfruitful and only damaging. He should stop right there.

The group continued to walk, and Deron noted blazes on crumbling building after crumbling building. With each symbol, he felt the mild comfort of knowing that they had made it this far, they had made it that far, they had made it at least a few more steps. He was not prone to thinking of the worst case scenario, but some part of him certainly did, and the blazes helped to ease those feelings.

Finally, knees tired and shoes worn, they came to a slouching gas station, overgrown with ivy, weeds, and strange plants. “Rupert!” Deron called ahead. The sun was beginning to slump in the sky; they would likely need to turn back from here. “We’re taking a rest. Have a seat and a drink of water.” There was no question in his voice; he was taking no complaints.

He walked past a rusted, hole-ridden vehicle. It was wide, shaped like an SUV—certainly a family vehicle. The perspective he immediately viewed it with was the prospect of it being in some way usable, but he immediately lost this hope when he walked around the front and saw a gaping wound in the area where an engine should’ve been. Why someone would’ve stolen an engine from a vehicle in the time following the disaster was lost on him; in what most people would call an apocalypse of some sort, engines by themselves weren’t very useful.

Time rewound in Deron’s head for a moment as he leaned back against the side of the SUV and opened up his backpack to retrieve his water bladder. He closed his eyes and sipped the water. Eighty years ago, some family had used this vehicle to go on road trips around the country—to tear up newly paved roads and burn gas as if it flowed endlessly. Maybe a father drove and a young mother sat in the front seat, and two kids—in Deron’s mind, both strangely around the appearance, height, and weight of Ethan at age six—bickered and laughed intermittently in the backseat. The father would turn around, yell at the kids, and then in the next few minutes, all of them would be laughing, and there was not a care in the world as they pictured the future.

And then they’d stopped here, and that stop had been the last that this vehicle ever made.

An image flashed in Deron’s hand—split-second, but unforgettable—of one of the six-year-old boys, bloodied, screaming, eyes wide and yellowed and mouth dripping orange vomit.

Deron’s heart gave a jerk, and he shook his head, his breath catching in his throat. What the hell?

He opened his eyes and looked around the area. The gas station had been utterly raided at some point or another, the windows smashed in and the doors taken off of the place. Peeling posters hung on the walls inside, the letters of which he could not read, but all of the shelves were entirely empty.

Deron took a step forward to wander toward the entrance, and his foot squished down on something. His lip curled up in disgust, and he looked down to see a citrine-colored goo in the shape of a puddle beneath his foot.

“Eugh,” he groaned, his brows knitting together as he tried to step out of it, but he found his foot sticking. As he lifted his foot and pulled it out, hundreds of gooey strands seemed to be trying to pull him to the ground. As he pulled his leg higher, the goop seemed to become brittle, and the threads solidified slightly, allowing him to break his foot free. “The hell…,” he muttered, and he looked down at the puddle from which he’d broken away.

It seemed to be oozing from some source, and so he began to follow it back toward the vehicle.










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A dead raccoon was nothing that Jesse hadn’t seen before,
but there was something about this whole experience that felt far too sudden and far too serious, and so Jesse felt the sudden need to vomit. “There, can’t you see it?” Jesse said when Cara asked to see his leg, his voice strained as he breathlessly sat up. His eyes met the dead raccoon—its eyes were wide open, the whites of its eyes colored a sick yellow.

“Yes, we need to clean it,” Jesse said exasperatedly, his face twisted in pain and anger. It was a throbbing sort of pain, still as sharp as if the raccoon was still biting him. When he looked down t the wound, the blood was a deep maroon—the bite had been deep. From the wound protruded a yellow-colored tooth, and the site of it made Jesse’s breath hitch. Somehow, that made it worse.

“Um, what part comes first?” Cara asked, sounding frantic.

Jesse’s eyes narrowed in fury. “Are you a fucking idiot?!” he spat, and he found the answer in her face. Another rush of pain overcame him, and he gripped his knee and writhed. “God—“ he grunted through grit teeth, “get me the antiseptic in my—in my bag.”

His adrenaline still rushing, his hands shaking and covered in dark blood, Jesse reached up to the collar of his t-shirt, bit it, and then, with much effort, gave it a rip down the middle. He bit again right beside the tear and tore a strip straight down the center. His finger- and palm-prints stained the shirt wherever he touched, but he couldn’t be picky right now. “I don’t—I don’t think the thing was rabid,” he said. “It just—it just—yeah, that’s fucking…that’s not a good…” He was trying not to panic, was taking as deep of breaths in and out as he could, but he couldn’t manage to calm down.

His hands were shaking, yet he reached down to try to dig the tooth out from his leg. “Cara—Cara, fucking help me,” he said, and then he decided, “Never fucking mind, don’t touch me.” Gritting his teeth with black-rimmed vision, Jesse began to dig into the mass of dark red. Shouting loud curse words, he dug in his own flesh, moving aside his own skin until—finally—he came out with a tooth that was abnormally large for a raccoon—about two inches in length.

He threw it on the ground beside himself, then snatched the antiseptic and opened up the full bottle. Without hesitation, he dumped the bottle completely on his wound, and immediately his body crumbled into a ball. “Shit!” he yelled loudly as the peroxide reacted with the blood. He found himself unable to breathe from the pain, and before he could wrap the shirt strip around his leg, the black rim around his vision overcame his whole vision field, and he fell unconscious.










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It looked really, really bad.
And though Cara had been hurt before—perhaps even worse—the sight of such a large quantity of blood never failed to astonish the girl. She tried to mentally page through the steps of treating a wound, but the grisly sight left her in a slight stupor.

"I'm not!" Cara objected to Jesse's fraught reaction. "I just—" She let out a frustrated growl, clenching her fists. At Jesse’s request, she moved behind him and rummaged through his bag, digging with little regard for how he'd organized it.

"You brought a stress ball?" Cara said gruffly.

She winced at the sound of Jesse's shirt ripping in two. Something about it bothered her more than the actual injury, which was... quite bad. She glanced over over at the raccoon, dead still, laying on its back. "It wasn't rabid," she agreed, controlling the unease in her voice. "You'd know if it was rabid."

At last, she found the bottle of peroxide, moving swiftly to hold it out for him. Her free hand started toward Jesse's leg, but as if reading her mind, he promptly shooed her away. Out went the raccoon's tooth, which Cara watched uselessly, immobilized by the fear that Jesse knew much more about treating injuries than she did. Usually, things like this didn't happen on Cara's watch. Not to anyone besides herself.

"Big tooth," she remarked as the antiseptic was ripped from her grasp. Freed of her one job, she retrieved the tooth sample from the ground and stashed it in one of Deron's containers.

Heavy, focused breathing filled the air while Jesse went about dumping the bottle of peroxide onto his leg. Only then did Cara flinch as the wounded man cried out of pain, thrashing while the blood on his bite sizzled unpleasantly.

"Shit!" he yelled, sending startling echoes throughout the quiet market, gouging a pit in Cara's stomach.

"Is that—is that normal?" she raised her voice, fighting her instincts to disobey Jesse.

When Jesse's arms dropped and his head slumped to the side, Cara knew she'd made a mistake in listening to him... besides the bigger mistake of disregarding Marie's teachings about sanitization and being careful outdoors. Now she was alone in the city, charged with the crime of being a bad nurse to this rude, actively-bleeding, self-proclaimed survival expert... Jesse.

He hadn't even finished bandaging the wound.

"Fuck!"

Cara looked around, as if there would be a hospital at the corner, then down at unconscious Jesse, then at the vicious raccoon that had started it all. She kicked the grotesquely wet animal with a grunt, gagging as more yellow fluid seemed to spray out from its tumbling corpse than the red. The fluids hardened a little, staining the cracked asphalt with more dubious, shiny tar.

"God damn it, Jesse!" she shouted again, dropping to her knees to furiously finish the work he'd started. Wrapping a bandage—she could do that.

If the fabric wasn't so soaked already.

No longer hesitating, Cara ripped Jesse's jeans from the knee down and tore her own sleeves off, now stained with palmprints of blood. She got to quick work wrapping the wound, until she remembered the chemical burning that had overwhelmed Jesse's senses just moments before. But it was antiseptic. Isn't clean good?

"It's caustic. He won't heal right," said a voice.

With a shake of her head, Cara grabbed her water bottle and poured much of its contents onto Jesse's wound, her parched lips crying out for her to stop already. Then, she wrapped the thing up, thoroughly unsatisfied with the level of care she'd provided.

"We can't have been stopped by a raccoon, Dad," Cara said, standing up to get a better look at the medical emergency Jesse left her with. The bleeding was no longer a problem, but the pain would last a while, not to mention the issue of mobility.

"Get him somewhere safe," the voice said, calm and confident. "Keep him hydrated. Keep the wound clean."

"I can't do that," Cara scoffed, reaching to give Jesse's shoulder a firm shake and his face a few rough pats. "He needs to wake up." She knew they had to race against the sunset, and she'd figure out how to make it work.

"But if he doesn't?"

Cara looked around, spotting a pair of dusty swivel chairs beyond the glowing apparition beside her. A lightbulb practically popped up above her head.

"Then he can't complain."










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Tiny feet running through the forest as a tall man calls,
“Not too fast, Jess!” There are giggles; the world is a swirl of greens and yellows—all bright, overhead, all dark underfoot. “You don’t want something to happen!” But the tiny feet are moving too fast, like a stick through stagnant water, sending speckles of green out from each step.

There is a rustle somewhere nearby. The view becomes wider—the tiny feet are connected to a small boy, somewhere around seven, who stops in the center of the trail, and the tall man runs behind, wearing a worn cowboy hat, breathless. “Let me catch up!”

The boy looks behind himself, searching for the source of the rustle, careless about the man near him. The boy’s warm-colored face is covered with mud—he has probably spent a long day out already. In his hands is small flatbow, almost comically miniature, probably meant for play. On the boy’s back is a single arrow in a tattered quiver that is nearly the size of the boy’s full body. As the man comes into view, wearing dark green, patched clothing, it becomes evident that the boy is trying to mimic him, as the man himself carries a flatbow of a regular size and a full quiver of arrows on his back.

The boy cannot find the source of the noise, and he lifts his foot to take off running again—

TSS!

And in an instant, the boy is on the ground, and the world of green and yellow becomes a world of red. He screams, begins to cry, as a monstrously large snake sinks its fangs deeper into his leg. “Daddy!” he screams, squeezing his eyes shut—“Daddy, help me!”

“God damn it, Jesse,” the large man hisses, and in the next blink, an arrow protrudes from a writhing, open-mouthed snake who seems so much smaller than moments before. The snake is pine to the ground, very much alive, and its prey is released, still sobbing, rolled over in pain, tears in his eyes.

The man leaves the snake to suffer and kneels down next to the boy. “It’s okay, Jesse—you’ll be okay—“

And in the next second, Jesse is laying in his bed weeks later, wide-eyed, hearing the hushed voices that they think he can’t hear in the room over talking about how bad the infection has gotten—about how the venom didn’t even do much, how it’s the infection that’s really gotten to him—but they didn’t have to try to keep that quiet from him. He knew it was bad—he could see it, the way the wound was black, red, yellow. The venom had done a lot to him, in spite of what they thought—labored breathing, lots of vomiting—and though the venom hadn’t killed him, it had weakened him enough to allow this infection to set on. His dad told him that everything was going to be alright, and Jesse tried to believe him, but it was getting harder and harder when he was watching his leg change color, when he was vomiting into a pail for several minutes every hour, when he could hardly eat or sleep.

“It might have to go,” said the voice of the doctor.

“What might?” asked his mother.

He knew that the it was his leg. And he began to cry.

• • •​

When Jesse became conscious again, he first had only a vague sense that his mind had called up some long-lost memory before he felt the pain in his leg. Opening his eyes just a sliver, seeing the setting sun, and deciding to complain rather than sit up, Jesse said, in a flat, low voice, “I thought I got lucky and died.”

Gritting his teeth at the dull, throbbing pain, Jesse lifted himself up onto his elbows shakily. He glanced down at his leg and found it…bandaged, surprisingly. “Oh look,” he said, “you can do something right, huh.”










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The sun hung low,
an enormous, fiery ball, its light refracted through the dust and pollution that still lingered in the air. It cast an otherworldly glow over the landscape, submersing the city in hues of crimson and deep orange. The strange plants in the cracks seemed to twist and contort away from the light, their leaves and stems pointing in unusual directions, as if warding off the last rays of the dying day.

Trying to keep her eyes off the plants and their odd behavior, Georgia drug her eyes off the ground and directed them onto Deron once and for all. "Ava. Of course," she replied, thinking little of the answer. Min did used to talk about the close bond that existed between Ava and Eloise, and Georgia always had the sense that Min had plenty more to say on the matter. Regrettably, she was never one to take the risk of prying into her mother's business.

There were many things like that Georgia wanted to ask her mother, and it was all the more reason why this rescue mission had to go well. Hope was all she had left, strengthened a little more by each green blaze they passed.

Georgia hesitated before answering Deron’s question. She knew he was trying to connect, but the situation made it difficult to find the right words.

"This isn't your first rescue mission?" she said, her own words leaving an instantly bitter taste in her mouth. She paused to think a little, eyes still caught on Rupert while he went about his business checking the paint.

Deron was lucky to have had much of his family present for, at the very least, the majority of his lifespan. On the flip side, Georgia could hardly imagine the blow it must have been for one of his first major losses to involve his only son. Everyone had someone they were scared to lose. She could hardly imagine a time in her own life not spent grieving, at least a little. Hopefully—and she meant this from the bottom of her heart—it wasn't too late to reverse this loss.

"Oh, I haven't done too much scouting," Georgia stated modestly. "Maybe some years ago, but those were all agricultural missions. For seeds and soil and things."

“Are you having a good time?” Rupert asked a little inappropriately, drawing a sigh. He must have been tired, or distracted, or some combination of the two. Everyone with a mouth had something to say about Deron, but he was a decent guy. He always tried. Georgia was not one to tally others' mistakes, even in the hardest of times.

As a worried daughter, she had given the weary father his due grace. She was never one to ignore or embarrass, but the phrasing of his last question was ill-fitting to the situation enough for her to feel some apathy toward a response.

"I guess," she answered quietly, allowing the rest of the trek to go in silence.

As they moved toward the gas station, the sun dipped lower, casting a surreal light over the landscape. Deron called for a rest, and the group gratefully complied, each taking a moment to sip water and gather their thoughts. Rupert was still off on his own mumbling to himself. It was always so hard to tell with that guy. Georgia, however, could hardly hold still, pacing around the parking lot while Deron did his own wandering.

"What’s up with these plants? They’re growing all wrong," she said, kneeling down to pluck a particularly gnarled lily growing from behind a rusted gas pump. The flower's petals were a striking, verdant sort of green, while the stem and leaves were covered in unexpected tones of orange and yellow. Every inch of the supposed weed was encased in a crunchy, organic coating, like it had been dipped in one of Min's coconut oil concoctions and then left to dry in the sun for several days.

As she carefully applied pressure the lily's petals, an orange substance oozed outward and reacted to the air, shifting and pulsing slightly. Georgia, entranced for no more than a second, dropped the flower to the ground with a look of disgust on her face. No vegetation around the base came even close to behaving like that.

The flower continued to leak orange, its soft, crystalline casing melting away like ice. Georgia followed the small trail of orange fluid, her eyes widening. The pavement had already been doused in rusty orange light, yet the gleaming substance was still so striking. Only then did Georgia notice the brilliance it gave off, mesmerized by the fractals of light dancing in the little drop that kept going.

Georgia looked up from the ground, following Deron's feet in the distance as he trudged closer to a car. She rose to her feet, her eyes flickering between Deron and the strange substance. The stream of liquid inched toward the vehicle, gaining speed as it flowed parallel to the leader, shimmering and pulsating with an unnatural glow.

He continued to walk, the orange goo now almost reaching the vehicle's front tire. Georgia's heart raced as she hurried toward him, her footsteps crunching on the overgrown weeds and broken glass. The sun's dying light cast eerie shadows on the ground, the strange plants appearing to twist and writhe away from her, as if they were alive.

"Deron, stop," she said, her voice unsteady.

"That goo," Georgia explained quickly. "It's not normal. It's moving on its own." It was slowly creeping up the vehicle, leaving a trail of glistening, sticky threads in its wake. The gas station, once sort of a refuge, now felt like a trap.

"Deron!" she called out more forcefully, startling even herself. She reached out and lightly gripped his arm, feeling a strange resistance. Was something happening?










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As Deron followed the goo back toward the vehicle,
he heard Georgia call out behind him, “Deron, stop.”

He turned back toward her, his brows knitting. “Is something the matter?”

“That goo, it’s not normal. It’s moving on its own.”

Deron, confused, looked back toward the vehicle. For a moment, he almost laughed—the idea was absurd. He looked at the goo and saw no such thing; no movement, nothing happening.

“Is something the matter?” he asked Georgia again, believing that perhaps she hadn’t heard him, and he took another couple of steps toward the goo, his analytical mind telling him to investigate.

“Deron!” Something snagged his arm, and Deron turned around again, confused. “Georgia,” he said more sharply, pulling himself free from her grasp, “you’re acting out of line. Is something the matter?”

He looked back toward the vehicle, but where a bit of goo had been moments ago, he saw only thin threads. He knelt down to the concrete, confused. Had it dissolved into the pavement…? “Georgia,” Deron said, not looking back at her, “go get Rupert.”

If he was going to get any investigating done, he wasn’t going to accomplish it with a skittish girl behind him.

He watched for a few moments and saw no changes in the goo residue (if he could call it that), and he stood. He noted what he hadn’t before: a cluster of goo under the doorframe of the backseat. Furrowing his brow, he reached for the doorhandle.

When he pulled at first, just a gentle tug, the door did not give way. He gave it a yank; there was still no give. He put both hands on the handle, trying not to think of the rust beneath his fingers, and he gave it a yank with his body weight. There was still no movement.

Finally, he placed his foot on the wheel, tensed every muscle, and gave the handle a final sharp tug.

The next moment, the handle clattered to the ground as his backside made contact with the concrete, but Deron’s eyes, wide in surprise, were focused on the inside of the vehicle.

Yellow bones—human-shaped bones—crystallized, covered in the goo that he could now see truly was snaking its way in some direction, spreading out and growing, leaving more crystal fractals along the human frame. Through the open jaw of the yellow bones—the bones that looked nearly carved from sulfur yet gave him the distinct, visceral impression that they were all too real—Deron could see a small, infant-sized, fleshy hand, feeling at the air with its pudgy fingers.

Deron let out a scream, rushing back from the vehicle on his palms before standing up and grabbing his hatchet. He ran back toward the vehicle and plunged his hatchet into the backseat of the vehicle, cotton and cloth flying in the air as his hatchet somehow failed over and over and over again to make contact with anything hard. He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to focus all of his effort on killing whatever it was that was that was on the backseat.

When he tried to lift his hatchet, he found that he couldn’t. He opened his eyes.

There were no bones, only a wracked backseat, and his hatchet was trapped in a mass of yellow which now snaked its way off of it and landed a thread on Deron’s hand.

Deron yanked his hand away, but he found that the thread remained on him. Goo trailed out of the vehicle again and spilled onto the ground, heading toward the front wheels of the vehicle. It was as though by the second, the amount of goo multiplied. He pulled at the thread on his hand and found it only sticking to his other hand—not letting free or pulling off.

He looked back in the vehicle, reaching in with an open palm, but he found that his hatchet had disappeared, seemingly dissolved by the goo.

“Shit,” he hissed, and he quickly backed away from the van—but the goo followed him.










♡coded by uxie♡

 



















Cara didn't own a watch, but one look at the sky
was enough to tell she'd been walking for more than a few minutes.

"Feels like I've been on this road for days," she muttered, glancing up at orange sun. A second look down the street confirmed they hadn't made it terribly far; the stalls of that ill-fated market were still visible in the distance. The fading light above, though concerning, ushered in a refreshingly cool breeze.

"Why do you keep stopping?" the familiar voice from earlier asked. Cara looked up to glare at her father, though that never lasted long.

"I'm goddamn tired," she huffed, wiping the sweat from her brow. She plopped down on the curb, her elbows resting on her knees, and her neck hung low. She sighed deeply, studying the makeshift gurney she'd been pushing down the street. "We need to find those blazes and figure out what happened to the team. But we barely followed more than a handful before having to turn back."

"You're doing your best, kiddo," her father said softly, his tone shifting to one of encouragement.

Cara nodded slowly, her lips creased into a line as if to stifle the arguing she desired to do. "I'm just saying, Jesse's heavy."

“Oh look,” another familiar voice said, “you can do something right, huh.”

Cara's attention snapped to the ground, the defeated calmness in her body dissipating in an instant. She blinked rapidly, trying to shake off the residual haze of her hallucination. “Yeah, you’re welcome,” Cara said, her voice thick with annoyance and lingering sadness. “Glad to see the rabies hasn't melted your brain yet.”

Even being the one to say it, Cara's heart gave a squeeze remembering the state of that raccoon.

She moved swiftly to help Jesse up, assuming an air of solemn duty. “Careful,” she muttered. “You were out for a while.” Not to mention talking in his sleep, but Cara hardly paid it any mind. As if she had the right to which, oddly, she still felt she did.

"Um, can you stand? We have to go," she said impatiently, taking her fiftieth 360 of their surroundings. "Deron and the others are supposed to be back at the rendezvous point."










♡coded by uxie♡

 



















  • Georgia was always right for the wrong reasons.
    It didn't take long for Deron to catch on to the danger present before them, the quick thinker he was. Still didn't do much to abate the sting of his abrupt commands.

    Tentatively, Georgia answered, "Okay." She backed away from the knelt man, but chided herself for not watching each step she took. The warm-colored substance burgeoned from the cracks in the pavement, the wildlife, every frame in sight. As the panic set in, she racked her brain wondering how they'd somehow upset this dormant mass of orange.

    "Don't hurt yourself, please," she urged meekly. Then she ran for Rupert, eyes to the ground. The corrupted foliage sprouting from the asphalt carried a newly sickening factor, something she hadn't felt just five minutes ago.

    "Rupert!" she called, spotting him just as he was settling down, the steel pipe he always carried resting across his knees. "We need you, now!"










    ♡coded by uxie♡

 
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The world was a bit wobbly, almost unreal feeling;
this was likely due to the lightness in Jesse’s head. “I’m welcome for what?” Jesse grumbled, shifting his elbows back slightly and squinting over at Cara. “I could’ve done better myself.” You know, if he were conscious at the time. “And the raccoon wasn’t rabid. I mean…it wasn’t fully all there, but it wasn’t…rabid, maybe just screwed in the head from some other…”

Jesse scoffed and shot a glare at Cara as a realization hit him. “Wait—I was half-dead…and you dragged me? I would be nearly impressed if that wasn’t so damn stupid.” As Cara approached him, he groaned dramatically. “Seriously…fresh wound, and your instinct is to lay me on some…” He didn’t even know what to call it—gurney? Barely. “Jostle me around? Make it worse?”

Needless to say, Jesse was very ungrateful.

Cara asked if he could stand, and Jesse blinked at her. “Do I fucking look like I can stand?” He was still propped up on his elbows, though Cara had certainly moved toward him to help him up further. Reluctantly, he reached out a hand and allowed her to pull him into an upright position, though he was still seated on his butt. He glanced up at the sky to find the sun enlarged and an orangish hue, hanging threateningly low above the buildings in the distance.

He looked up at Cara, and then back at his leg, and he considered seriously for a moment asking for her to be a prop for him before realizing that asking for Cara’s help would do more damage than good. She was so damn irritating to try to cooperate with—he couldn’t imagine having her as a crutch.

…A crutch.

Jesse looked down at his leg again. The dark color of the blood unnerved him, but he widened his eyes and stared at it. It didn’t hurt that bad. (Fuck, it did.) It didn’t hurt that bad. It really wasn’t that bad—he could stand to walk a few steps at least. (Fuck, this was going to hurt.) This was going to be fine.

With a sharp breath and a grit of his jaw, Jesse, putting as much weight as possible onto his good leg, grabbed ahold of Cara’s shoulders and pulled himself onto his feet. He studied the area, and then, with a look of determination, he half-hopped, half-staggered on his foot over to a stall, drawing in a sharp breath and telling himself that this was painless.

He could make it. He could make it.

He grabbed the wooden rod holding up one of the four corners of a tarp that overhung the stall, and he looked over at Cara. “A knife,” he said, holding out his hand and making a grabbing motion.










♡coded by uxie♡

 



















Deron could hardly interpret what was happening—
it was all happening so damn fast. He tried to calm his head, tried to take in one detail at a time—but his senses were being assaulted, and it seemed that logic had been thrown out of the window—so, with his hatchet deliquesced, he had no physical defense except to attempt to outrun the goo.

Rupert yelled something at him, but Deron’s ragged breaths made the noise unintelligible. The plasma-like substance reeked of sulfur and rotting fruit—a pungent scent that was nearly tastable—and it was somehow worsened as he gasped the air in. It was alive in someway, and it followed him faster than a liquid should’ve.

His movements were frantic, but he seemed to be making little progress—and he hardly moved ten feet away before he found himself being pulled slowly back by his hands.

When he looked back at his hands, he found that they were slowly becoming covered in the multiplying substance. The brittle nature that the substance had possessed in its smaller quantity seemed entirely gone now—it was relentless and had no give or break. Deron strained, planting his feet on the ground; the goo grabbed ahold of his shoe and began to pull him back toward the vehicle from his feet as well.

Deron pulled back with his entire might, the veins in his forehead threatening to pop, his face a dark red, his jaw taut, but there was no give from the goo.

Then, the vehicle began to move.

“Get back, you idiot!” Rupert yelled—at whom, Deron could not tell—and Deron felt a strong grip on his arm.

“Fucking—get—me—back—then!” Deron strained to say, pulling with all his strength to get loose from the goo.

The car lurched again, and Deron’s bones felt as though they would pull from his sockets. He cursed as loudly as he could, still trying to pull back, trying to keep a grip on the ground as the goo snaked its way up toward his knees and over his forearms.

“You—can’t—outrun—!” Deron warned Georgia, still fighting as his brother tried to pull the threads from Deron’s hands.

“Where is your hatchet, Deron?” Rupert asked.

Deron couldn’t reply, too focused on fighting the goo from pulling him in toward the vehicle. Sweat had beaded on every inch of his skin by now and had begun to pour into his orafaces. The salt burned as it pushed its way past his eyebrows and into his eyes, stinging them worse than usual. It felt like flames were licking themselves into his eyes.

Flames.

Suddenly focused, Deron scanned the area, studying and scanning every inch as quickly as he could until his eyes found what he desired: a gas can.

“Ru—“ He locked eyes with his brother. “Gas—can—“ He pointed with his eyes. “Light—“ He pointed to Rupert’s pocket with his eyes. “Try.”

It was worth a shot.










♡coded by uxie♡

 



















Had the stakes not been so high,
the entire struggle might have resembled something out of a slapstick comedy. Sweat poured down Deron's face, puffed and contorted in pain. All of the man's strength went into freeing himself from the grip of the goo, but doing so without the use of his hands and feet proved a near-fatal handicap.

Rupert himself was an ineffective combatant in the struggle against the murderous mass. His hold on the enemy gradually became less of a grip and more of a full-on merger between flesh and goo. Before long, his fist had entirely disappeared under the metallically-cool substance, sending a wave of panic up his chest. His arm felt like it was being torn from his body, the pain shooting through his shoulder.

"Damn...it...!" he groaned, his shoes carving a path as they were drug through the debris on the ground.

Sounds of heavy objects heaved against concrete dominated the area, overcome only by Deron and Rupert's shouting and screaming. Strikingly, Georgia's voice was missing from the commotion, not that Rupert could afford to look out for her in the moment. The stench of sulfur and rotting fruit assaulted Rupert's senses, making it hard to breathe, let alone say intelligible words.

"Ru—" came Deron's voice, and the pair locked eyes. "Gas—can—" Rupert's head spun in an instant, searching for the same artifact.

The can was along their path if the car continued to tug them in a straight line. Deron was being pulled not only forward with the car but also toward its door as if to consume him. Rupert's heart raced in double-time, the slow, agonizing drag of his body like a death march more than anything.

"Light—" Deron’s eyes settled on Rupert’s pocket, calling attention to the lighter inside. More and more of the man became obscured in orange by the second, his bright idea coming out as more of a burning plea when time seemed so unforgiving of them. "Try," he finished, countering Rupert's objection before he was able to formulate it.

Rupert’s free arm reached out for the gas can, but the force of the car and the goo constricting his left forearm hindered his progress. He strained, the intensity of the moment pushing him to the brink. "Come on!" he screamed, the strain evident in his voice. "Let go, you orange pile of shit!" The gas can was just out of reach, taunting him with its proximity.

This was it. They were dead.

Unable to grasp the can, Rupert stumbled. In a last-ditch effort to stay upright, he hastily wrapped his free arm around one of the rust-caked gas pumps, each of his limbs stretching to their limit. The goo continued to inch the car forward, and the metal of the machine creaked and groaned in protest. Rupert felt the pump start to give way as the orange crawled further up his arm. It tingled softly like a spilled soda on his skin.

"It's getting me, Ronny!" he shrieked, taken by an overwhelming regard for his life. There was no exact way of putting it into words, but the fact that he and his brother were dying together made it feel that much more real.

With a final creak, the force of the car wrenched the pump from its base, breaking the connection. Rupert's body flew backward with it, skidding roughly along the busted car's trajectory. A strand of goo as wide as a rope hung off his arm, tethering him like a leash to his brother. Gasoline began to spew out from the ruptured pipe, forming a spreading pool on the ground. Gas fumes mingled with the familiar stench of rot and decay, creating sometime else altogether.

Rupert’s lighter, a constant in his pocket, came into view. With a shaking hand, he flicked it open, a small flame springing to life. As his elbows scraped against the rough ground, the heat seared his skin in a million different ways. Teeth clenched, he carefully angled the lighter towards the gasoline.

"This better work!" he roared, tossing the lighter into the gasoline.

The liquid instantly ignited, fire spreading rapidly along the puddle and heading towards them, making contact first with the orange coating on the wheels of the car. Breathless and covered in sweat, Rupert watched as the flaming gasoline and shiny goo met in a calamitous fusion. Amid the intense heat, the once-pliable substance writhed and convulsed, unable to retract fast enough, and as the flames engulfed it, the goo began to crystallize into a brittle, fractal shell resembling a distorted wasp’s nest.

The car's motion ground to a halt, but they were not in the clear. Rupert could immediately feel the heat of the fire they'd started brushing against his skin. His face flushed, his body battered and bruised on the ground. With a grunt, Rupert slammed his arm against it, shattering the hardened casing to pieces. A cloud of putrid gas blew into his face, causing him to wheeze and cough on the asphalt below.

The fire surged forward, lighting up the darkening street. "Deron!" he shouted, rising shakily to his feet. "Deron, god damn it!" He picked up his steel pipe, then swung it straight for the crystal shit obscuring his brother's torso.










♡coded by uxie♡
 
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FWP—


The sound of Deron’s salvation was instantaneous.

The yellow-orange goo, alight, writhed like a dying creature, retreating quickly into itself, shrinking, somehow, or perhaps melting and reducing into a large mound. The color of the goo grew whiter as the flames devoured it and almost seemed to harden. The mass covering Deron’s arms rushed back as though pained, and curled into the whitening mass. Behind itself, it left a yellowish, powdery liquid—but the amount that had eaten its way up his legs and to his torso, though hardening, did not retreat. His eyes burned from his sweat and the sheer heat of the flames, and he felt for a moment that he may faint.

“Deron!” yelled Rupert. “Deron, god damn it!”—and his brother hit his torso hard with the pipe.

Like glass, the hardened goo shattered and fell away.

Deron stumbled back and gave his brother a silent, grateful nod. He stumbled about fifty feet away before turning back toward the fire, breathless, throat tight from the smoke. He hacked into his hand, then looked beside himself to make sure that Georgia and Rupert were close before yelling, “Take cover!”

Gasoline and flames, no matter how small, certainly did not mix.

Running raggedly down the street—his muscles alerted him to their overexertion—Deron rushed into the first building that he came across, shoving the doors open and stumbling inside, unsure whether the others were following and, for these brief moments, not really thinking of them at all.

His loud, labored breaths echoed off the high ceiling, and he dropped his backpack—which had survived miraculously—to the floor and fell to his knees on the threadbare red carpet, exhausted.

He wasn’t sure how long he sat there, on his knees, his head lowered, his eyes closed, his shoulders heaving as he struggled to breathe, his mind reeling as he attempted to comprehend all that had just happened, but at some point, Deron had rested enough to grab his water bladder and take a long drink from it and pry himself up from the ground.

When he lifted his eyes, he realized that he was in a church, with tall stained glass windows, carefully crafted, decaying statues, and a large, empty space at the front of the room where a podium had certainly been.










♡coded by uxie♡

 
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