Chapter Text
Naomi Mariner-Sykes-Gomez liked to believe in logic. Liked to have concrete answers. She’d accepted a long time ago that she’d never have them for everything, but she craved to know what to think, why to think… and right now, to know if there was a chance in Crawler-hell that she could do this without getting shredded, poisoned, and eaten alive, possibly in that order.
But she didn’t, she told herself with finality, shaking with sweaty hands on the steering wheel as she pulled into the parking lot. This wasn’t an ideal situation for her skillset, it was a last resort.
But what she did know, was that she wouldn’t have much left to live for if she couldn’t pull this off, and the finality calmed her more than it probably ever should. It made the choice pretty simple.
She hid her small, mid-sized van among a gaggle of parked cars near the hillside end of the lot, most of them probably abandoned for months – it was coming up on eight, now, the exact date happening sometime next week. She took a moment, crouched down as low as she could get in the front seat, to look upward through the angled windshield and watch the sky.
Clear. Like it usually was.
Naomi had only personally seen flying Crawlers three times, usually from far enough away she couldn’t even narrow down a species. Just because they existed, didn’t mean they were common at all. She’d heard there were more, flying and otherwise, further inland and to the south, but they were rare here on the not-quite east coast. She’d never personally seen a bear either, and those had been around these parts for a lot longer.
With a steeling breath, she opened the car door and stepped outside.
The air had changed again, in the fifteen minutes she’d been driving. It was hot now, and Naomi took a moment to unzip the outer layer of her weatherkit, the semi-reflective teal jacket instead hanging like a waistcoat when she tied the sleeves around her middle. With a practiced motion, one of the bright orange elastic bands from her wrists now held her dirty-blonde hair back in a short ponytail to keep it off her neck. Comfortable once more, Naomi closed her eyes and took a collective, mental snapshot with all her senses, keeping it in her thoughts as she made her way across the pavement toward the empty supermarket.
The windows around the pharmacy entrance were all shattered, and she could see it was dark all the way inside, as opposed to the light coming through from behind the other entrances. The generator was apparently still running, just not powering every section of the store, and stepping into the darkened interior before her gave her a dual sensation of reassurance and quiet terror.
She felt safer, the stealthier she could be.
But Crawlers liked the dark.
The pharmacy stock was all disheveled, shelves turned over and prescription bags littering the floor like a nest. Intact counters within the main space made a loose circle that closed off the center of the room, and with a disturbing thought, Naomi made herself silent and still, listening.
It sounded… like a long, undulating gurgle.
Crawlers was a word people used because nobody wanted to seriously say giant bugs out loud, but the world’s new reality was still what it was. The thing living here, the reason nobody had looted this place clean months ago, was curled up in the middle of its domain, probably digesting the last person who’d tried to do exactly what Naomi was attempting.
Well, hopefully not the exact same thing. That would make Naomi existentially sad in a way she couldn’t afford to try to process right now.
She wanted to look at it, see what kind of bug it was – nobody who reported these things seemed to care for those kinds of details – but she had to take a brief, scolding moment to remind herself there wasn’t room for that in her win conditions. She needed to get in, get what she came for, and get out.
Quietly.
A brown paper bag crunched loudly on the floor.
Naomi looked instantly to her own feet. She’d been avoiding that exact thing by sliding her shoes, nudging the scattered bags aside, how could she have—
Another crunch – the most carefree thing in the world.
Okay, not exactly. There was an attempt at stealth, she could tell, but not nearly a good enough one. The stealth of someone reasonably afraid of being found, but still unaware there could realistically be anyone – let alone a Crawler – in this very room.
Naomi’s frantically-searching gaze found, first, the only other visible entrance another person could have come from – light filtering through a large and rough tear in the segmented metal security doors that cordoned off the pharmacy from the rest of the store interior. Drifting left from there, her vision was just able to catch a humanoid silhouette by a faint reflective edge cast by that light.
The white outlines of surprised sclera were just enough for two pairs of eyes to meet in the darkness.
The other girl was shorter than Naomi, maybe a year younger, with vaguely chin-length black hair framing her shocked, yet cold and purposeful face. Said hair was only vaguely chin-length because it looked like it had been cut unevenly, messily, and recently by someone with little experience. The light reflection revealed she was wearing the outer jacket of a weatherkit, deep purple in color, and maybe a few sizes too big for her smaller frame. The rest of her clothes looked black enough in the darkness to probably still be black in the light, but she was holding something that trended towards orange or yellow, held steadily in both hands like a pistol.
Unfortunately, there wasn’t time left to properly introduce themselves before a stormy sound of rustling paper broke the silence and a new silhouette rose up from between the inner counters.
Crawlers didn’t generally make noise, at least not true vocalizations, which was probably even creepier than if they gave off roars or screeches to signal their approach. Instead, it was an absurdly casual change in the tension of the room that there was now a cobra-like neck sticking up to twice a human’s height, and a pair of long, whiplike antennae sweeping like writhing, inverse-gravity snakes around the surface of the ceiling. In the dark, the whole creature looked blood-red in color, with inward-curving, sharp hooks framing its looming maw and a dozen or so evenly-spaced pairs of jittering legs extending from the ‘neck’ – which was really the giant centipede’s elongated body.
Centipede. Awesome!
…No, wait, scary! SCARY!
In a panic, Naomi looked to the other girl – who was now doubly frozen in shock, gaze tilting gradually upward to take in the size of the creature, uncomprehendingly. What the fuck? she slowly mouthed, already-wide eyes nearly bulging.
Since she’d been the one to make the noise, it seemed the centipede was able to detect her first, as it aimed its mouth-end squarely down at her in turn. Naomi barely had a conscious semblance of a plan when she dove immediately across the distance, reacting just faster than the centipede could complete its instinct and tackling the mystery girl around the midsection to shunt her out of the striking arthropod’s path of attack. They rolled into a pile of paperwork and medication bags while the centipede sheared through the air just behind them, also causing a ruckus among the debris as it hit another outer counter and curved in the opposite direction.
As the centipede’s many-meter-long body began a rumbling, aimless charge around the perimeter of the pharmacy, the girl in Naomi’s arms recovered with heavy, forced breaths and raised the weaponlike object she still had a death grip on. It was a heavy-duty nail gun, right out of a hardware store, but seemingly modified with various attachments including what looked like a set of targeting sights along the top rail.
Naomi put her hand on the gun to bring it back down – a mistake, by the girl’s combative flinch, but Naomi pushed through. “Bad move,” she hissed out a little louder than a whisper.
Her eyes apparently held enough seriousness that the girl appeared to trust her, thankfully saving her from Naomi’s too-long explanation about how bugs’ circulatory systems weren’t like humans, and Crawlers couldn’t really bleed out from a bullet or something resembling a bullet, that it was less like a needle in a water balloon and more like a thumbtack in a jar of applesauce and that—focus! What’s important?
“Watch the chelicerae!” she insisted instead, the centipede already halfway back around the room and heading towards them. “They’re venom-carrying, if it hits you—”
“The what?” the girl rasped out, having difficulty speaking but determined enough to match her irritated glare.
“The fangs,” Naomi relented with a sigh, “though they’re not really mouthparts, they’re actually modified legs…”
Her last several words were a rapid-fire jumble as an open mouth – framed by said modified legs – plowed through the pile of debris directly to their right and Naomi hurried to help the other girl to her feet and quickly out of the way. They’d been careless in trudging through more of the floor debris, and as soon as the centipede passed them, it stopped running, its head raised off the ground and curving back. One of the sweeping antennae whipped close enough to Naomi to brush the end of her ponytail as she ducked, and the creature reacted immediately again, lunging and biting onto one of the counters as the other girl pulled Naomi quickly behind it.
The touch on her arm was… distracting, just a bit, but also grounding, and while the centipede gnawed on the counter, Naomi focused. In a flash, another elastic band was off her wrist, drawn back with the warm metallic edge of a quarter pressed along the pad of her thumb. Angles lined up in her head as she aimed her makeshift slingshot, all other inputs slowing to a crawl…
At the apex of a held breath, Naomi launched the coin across the room, bouncing it first off the defunct cooler near the drive-thru window, then off the one, thin and bent-up support beam supporting the ceiling. The zig-zag shot sent the coin spinning along a back shelf, displacing a number of pill bottles with a loud rattle and even causing a few to tumble off the edge.
The centipede let go of the counter, raised its head, and turned in the direction of the multiple disturbances. While she had it distracted, Naomi took again the hand that had just been on hers, two pairs of eyes meeting once in agreement before she steered the other girl toward the tear in the shutter door and slowing down just enough to ensure they could both angle themselves carefully through the passageway’s rough edges.
Once in the light of the main supermarket area, Naomi veered to the left, backing them both up against the outer wall alongside the opening. What she’d feared from guessing the hole’s origin and purpose manifested a moment later, as the searching ends of the centipede’s writhing antennae followed them out, tapping and sweeping the air and floor outside. In the light, their segmented surfaces were a brighter red than blood, but still had the same sort of sheen as if they might have been coated with it. It was cool, in a creepy way.
Naomi and the other girl held their breath as the centipede’s head followed its antennae out, a domed, round head-plate looming over the opposing sickle-curves of its chelicerae. There were some black spots that might have been its eyes, but it didn’t seem to spot them immediately. It did lunge completely out of the hole, its entire glistening body exiting its den to trample over the fallen rope-barriers that once marked the pharmacy’s waiting lines, but it only made one very fast, panicked circle and retreated immediately through the hole again, made skittish by the light but apparently unable to walk backwards and needing a full circle to turn around.
With hearts beating fast, especially from that one last, terrifying scare, Naomi and the other girl walked a careful line between catching their breath and inching further away from the creature’s den – along the wall, past more doors, and finally up into the proper aisles of the disheveled, ransacked supermarket. The smell of rotten eggs permeated, the coolers in the dairy section apparently one of the parts of the store that hadn’t retained power.
In the light, tucked behind some shelves already long-raided of first-aid-kits and bandages, Naomi noticed the other girl’s deep brown eyes, and pale skin. “I’m… Naomi,” she offered softly, consumed in a temporary mood characterized primarily by gentleness and warmth.
She received another pointed look in reply, as if she’d missed the point of the situation by a mile.
Still…
“Amethyst,” the girl half-hissed, half-choked out.
“Like the crystal?” Naomi perked up immediately. “Purple quartz?”
Amethyst – such a pretty name! Kinda wish I’d been that creative now… – flinched, then glared.
“…Right, you probably know that already…” Naomi scolded herself, rolling her eyes trying to nervously escape the tension. “But should I, for short, like, call you um… Amy? Or Thyst, or Meth? Probably not that last one?”
“…Amy’s fine.”
It was another grumble, with an exasperated shrug but only a half-hearted glare this time. She looked caught in thought, like it might have even touched her somewhat to think about, so Naomi decided she was comfortable thinking of the girl as Amy, at least for now.
And Amy… seemed to find it a struggle to talk, Naomi had been noticing for a while now. Not exactly nervousness, like she didn’t want to, but more like it physically hurt or discomforted her to speak. Her voice came out raspy, gravely – like she wasn’t used to speaking at all, and might have even permanently atrophied her vocal cords from disuse.
Amy gulped a bit, like she was trying to soothe the very pain Naomi was hypothesizing, but she forced her next words through, her eyes drawing a clear line back in the direction of the pharmacy. “What the fuck was that?”
“A centipede,” Naomi grinned, unable to curb her excitement. It was finally catching up to her that she’d seen a new type of Crawler up close, even fought it!
Amy didn’t seem nearly as excited. “You know I mean why the fuck is it THAT BIG?”
Naomi… had to pause. Really look at Amy. Her brows furrowed when she saw nothing but honest, irritated – though clearly jaded – bewilderment. “It’s a Crawler…”
“Okay. The fuck is a Crawler?”
Really confused – and concerned – now, Naomi prepared to launch into a cautious explanation, but was cut off when Amy’s eyes widened, for the first time fully consumed by fear.
“Are there more of them?”
Amy’s hands were bunched in the white fabric of Naomi’s shirt, shaking enough Naomi could feel the panic surging through her skin underneath. “Y-yes?” Naomi stuttered out.
“HERE?” Amy breathed and shouted in the same whisper.
“N-no, probably not?” Naomi felt the tension ease, but only a little. “Centipedes are territorial – not always, but—”
“M-my s-sister…” Amy began to spiral, not looking at Naomi anymore, though her fists still gave a halfhearted shake. “She was getting food, she doesn’t know!” Her eyes wandered through the store as if she could spot her – it was a big store, chances were probably slim unless they started moving, but Naomi looked too.
She was worried, feeling panic rising – not to match Amy’s, how could it ever? But Naomi could feel her heart twist just at the words – at the idea—
“We’ll find her,” left Naomi’s lips, and even Amy was shocked completely out of her spiral by the emotion that slipped into the words without intention. Puzzled, maybe a bit disturbed eyes refocused on Naomi.
Amy let go of Naomi’s shirt and just stared at her.
Umm, she’s my sister, not yours, what the fuck? Amy didn’t actually say, but Naomi filled in the blanks from the look she was getting.
Naomi froze. Should she… apologize? No? Why would she apologize? She just cared. Sure, apparently it was enough to make her whimper and bring her toward tears… no, almost to tears and… not stopping anytime soon… at the idea of Amy losing her sister, but what was wrong about that? She was an empathetic person! She was…
A crashing, glass-shattering, interruption from a fair distance away made her flinch at the same time Amy did. It was coming from one of the store entrances, and a voice soon followed.
“They had to have stopped in here for supplies,” a gruff man complained under his breath.
“Manners, Temper Tin!” a second man scolded in a posh, British-sounding accent that made Naomi narrow her eyes curiously, even if she still couldn’t see either of the men from between the aisles. Amy grabbed her wrist and pulled her further back into the store, up a long aisle lined with greeting cards and magazines, until they could swing around and take cover behind the endcap displaying decorative paper gift bags. They were now in the intersection with the store’s main through-aisle, with at least five reasonable exit paths in range of a quick sprint – two that would allow them to hide on the other side of an island-style display a few meters out behind them, in the relative darkness of the dairy section with cut power.
Far down on the other end of the card aisle, a knight walked past, searching.
A knight. Plate armor, sword, shield… although the armor was actually more reasonable, Kevlar-style tactical gear with the historic metal plating partitioned aesthetically over it in sections to recreate the medieval look. The shield was a simple metal panel in the shape of an oblong octagon trending toward a diamond, fixed along the left gauntlet to allow continued – albeit restricted – use of that hand. The sword looked normal, a standard saber with crossguard, but then the man lingered long enough in the intersection that Naomi saw the edges begin to light up, like the heating elements on the inside of a toaster. The blade soon became outlined in neon, golden yellow.
“Okay, my turn to ask,” Naomi whispered shakily, again joining Amy in squatting low near the gift bag display. “What’s up with that?”
“Knights Tempered,” Amy hissed through grimaced teeth. “They’re here for me and my sister.” She took a shivering breath and looked down. “Mostly for me.”
Naomi had heard of roving gangs, even themed ones, cropping up in the aftermath of the Scarring or even before it, but this one was news to her. Maybe they’d been hiding under the same rock Amy must have been, if she hadn’t even known about—
“Gotcha!”
A shape whirled around from the side of the aisle divider they hadn’t been watching. Naomi wondered if, subconsciously, she’d been expecting the Knights Tempered to make heavy, clanking footsteps, but they were surprisingly stealthy in their hybrid armor. The man in silver was reaching out with his shield arm, and Naomi found herself roughly pulled to the side, then shoved to stumble backward as Amy raised the nail gun in her hands.
Its modifications did let it just shoot the nails out like bullets – regular ones probably weren’t supposed to do that, but Naomi wasn’t complaining. The first two nails skipped harmlessly off the knight’s armor, but the third hit him somewhere that made him flinch. He snarled but kept coming, bringing his shield to its purpose and charging ahead.
Amy sidestepped and Naomi followed suit. The knight was herding them toward the island display, which was up against the side wall of the store. Amy tried to overcorrect into a full circle, but the knight lashed out threateningly with his glowing sword, keeping them semi-confined. A glance down the darkened aisle to their right revealed another pair of knights blocking the other end, limiting their options further.
She found her hand caught in Amy’s left as she was pulled back into the dwindling space where they were only in direct line of sight of the one knight in close range. Amy’s right hand still held her nail gun, but the knight still had his shield ready to block anything she tried. A second knight stepped out of another aisle further behind him, this one’s armor cobbled out of a few different metallic shades, but primarily bronze.
Amy tensed, very visibly, at the sight of him, but Naomi watched her muscles rebound slowly, as if dragged back into awareness by invisible tendrils commanded by her forceful, defiant sneer. She aimed past the closer knight to send a few nails flying at the bronze one, but they all ended up deflected or casually sidestepped.
The bronze knight chuckled amiably. “Fiery,” he said with a laugh. “Worry not, we’ll have that trained out of you soon.”
His voice was one of the ones Naomi had heard earlier – the posh, British, now obviously intended as knightly one as opposed to the gruff one. Amy fired another nail at him. He backhanded the projectile with his silver shield. He sighed.
“I’m here to protect you, Amethyst!” the bronze knight insisted. “We are to be joined under the Crystal’s eye! It’s been approved on all sides! Don’t you understand what that means? Once that happens, I can protect you from your father!”
“In exchange for what?” Amy muttered under her breath with an eye roll. She wasn’t speaking loudly enough to be truly arguing – she clearly didn’t see the point. It might have been more for Naomi’s benefit, a quiet plea for understanding.
Naomi twisted her hand up into the grip Amy had on it, giving a firm, reassuring squeeze. Amy shot at the bronze knight one more time.
“…see reason eventually,” the knight muttered tiredly to himself, his helmet swiveling around in exasperation. “Temper Pewter,” he commanded. “Could you please just apprehend her…”
The silvery knight closest to them stepped forward, now corralling them from their left and pushing them against the aisle endcap to their right. Amy aimed her gun but something else was quicker – a black blur dropping from the ceiling.
A dark laugh escaped Amy’s small, relieved smile. Her tiny voice was chillingly defiant.
“Don’cha know? I already have a knight.”
Naomi had barely processed it. One moment the Knight Tempered was still advancing, the next he was still as a statue, the black-clad shape of a smaller human being now perched on his back like a monkey. Dark clothes, lightly-tanned face, wild eyes and a smile that would be most at home on the crazed, killer villain from an over-the-top action movie. Amy’s sister pulled a knife out of the man’s throat that Naomi hadn’t even seen go in, and pushed off his falling body, toes pointed with grace as she dropped lightly to the ground beside his corpse and bounced once on her heels.
If Naomi was figuring Amy was around a year younger than herself, her sister looked a year or so older. She was taller, at least, and her hair was lighter – brunette, and in a long ponytail that trailed and then fell behind her once she’d landed. It was in contrast to the primarily black color of her clothes – a black catsuit, really, but a bit more comfortable-looking one than the ones in movies. She had a belt around her waist and another diagonally up her chest, both loaded with knife holsters and other attachments, with even more knives holstered on her left thigh and at both ankles, and silver gauntlets around her wrists that looked like they might do something cool. Cooler still were her shoulderpads – or, no… pauldrons, that was the word. They were light panels of armor, curving with the shape of her outer shoulders like protective shells over them, but they were cast in an eye-catching translucent red. It was probably a synthetic material, with their size, but they almost looked like they were cut from solid ruby.
Amy’s sister dropped a one-strapped backpack on the ground next to her feet, then looked directly at Naomi and smiled at her – a cocky smile, a little sinister but enticing all the same. But her smile dropped as her eyes moved across to her hand, still in Amy’s. It was quickly replaced, though, like she hadn’t meant to slip up.
Naomi wasn’t always very good at reading people, but… she didn’t think the replacement smile was entirely fake or forced. More like… bittersweet. Amy’s sister closed her eyes and nodded gently, as if making a quiet peace with something unknown.
“I can protect you from your father…” the bronze knight spat again, now audibly angered and taking heavy steps while posturing with his sword. “…and I can certainly save you from your disgusting, vile sister!”
Amy startled and shrunk into herself at the harshness of the knight’s tone. Amy’s sister had a reaction too – a falter that was less stricken and more exposed. A shudder passed through her and she made no effort to stop it, but when it passed, she looked up again, expression cold.
The answer to the knight’s taunt came not from her.
Fists clenching, then unfolding, a recovered Amy now stood to her full height with an inner fire Naomi had seldom seen, cupping her hands to her mouth to deliver her crass, bellowed rebuttal.
“KICK HIS ASS, IGNEOUS!”
Igneous, Naomi thought, as Amy’s sister whirled into motion, a pair of knives in her hands and scraping sparks off one another as she made a zig-zag rush towards the knight’s position. One of the main types of rock, alongside sedimentary and metamorphic. The knight’s wide, one-handed sword swipe aimed for the relative waif of his opponent’s figure, but Igneous twisted around it with seductive grace, guiding the sword the last bit off-course by the crossing edges of her daggers. Most well-known as the result of volcanic activity.
Created under heat and pressure.
Forged in fire.
The edges of her smaller blades already had the same hot-iron glow building on them as the knights’ swords, but rather than golden yellow, Igneous’s neon shade of choice was a sickly lime-green. The bronze knight tried to crush her with his shield arm, but in such close quarters, Igneous ducked inside of his reach rather than trying to escape it, then backflipped over the shield’s edge as the attempted downward strike left a dent in the floor. The extra height allowed her to clear a low wall of twisted metal former-shelving, feet wide apart and in a froglike crouch as she landed with a new barrier between herself and her enemy.
With a brief flourish to regain his wits and footing, the knight turned and made to approach the barricade. Igneous simply watched from her cover, no more than five seconds passing, one knife held in reverse grip as a guard near her throat and the other hidden subtly behind her back.
Example: Obsidian.
The other knife, wavering up and down on her bobbing wrist. The green glow shining brighter and brighter along the edge. Cooking like a grenade…
Beautiful. Like polished glass. But durable, and sharp.
Deadly.
Igneous slung the blade forward, the trailing green glow imitating a laser through the air. It seemed real enough to make the knight recoil, a hiss of smoke marking the impact, only for Naomi’s eyes to resolve the truth a moment later – the heated knife’s edge had bypassed the bronze armor, blade nearly vanished entirely inside the man’s chest near the left shoulder. Igneous’s second knife followed a moment later, getting closer to his sternum, and she wasted no time drawing yet another, unidentifiable weapon from her back – this one a long handle with an offset, still-narrow rectangular block forming the end.
She had something else in her other hand, but it disappeared in her motions, hidden by the flourish as the first object unfolded several times until the last hinge swiveled a thin, silver, hooked and curve-edged blade into place. In the process of unfolding not a fanciful battle axe, but a precision weapon more like a longer tomahawk, Igneous had twirled her body around the far end of her metal barricade, rounding to quickly return to melee range. The knight had only managed to haughtily pull one steaming knife from his chest before being forced to focus again on using his sword arm for offense, but his intended cleave was hooked out of his control by the axe blade catching his weapon at the crossguard.
From its hiding spot behind the axe handle appeared Igneous’s second weapon, a nearly machete-length hunting knife, its edge already a powered-hot green. Once again inside the reach of the knight’s unwieldy shield arm, Igneous made a horizontal slash that brightened the air and hurt Naomi’s eyes a bit, until the trailing arc had disappeared and the bronze knight was left falling to one knee, the hand of his shield arm slapping in a clearly pained reflex over the deep gash cut into the left side of his midsection.
Raising a foot, Igneous kicked him over so he fell on his face, no resistance even from his more powerful build as he moaned loudly and rolled on the ground.
In the meantime, a few more Knights Tempered had approached the scene, loosely surrounding the combat but daring not to interfere. Igneous was back to Amy’s side in an instant, her glowing weapons displayed to the remaining knights in warning.
“All of you stay the hell away from my sister!”
It… actually sort of subtracted from her intimidation factor. The words were steady, dripping with conviction, but her voice was another exxagerated accent, dainty but raspy and cartoonishly villainous. Naomi would have described it as ‘scorned duchess gone mad from too much ether, announcing she’d just poisoned the water supply.’
But if anything, it firmly readjusted the perspective from the brief whirlwind of combat. Despite everything, Igneous was still just another kid, playing a part on a stage and praying it would be enough to get the world to move around her the way she needed it to.
By the many knights now closing in from multiple directions, it didn’t look like it would be.
Naomi thought of her trademark elastic-band-coin-slingshot, but dropped the idea, since one of her hands was already occupied in Amy’s and she’d also probably look incredibly pointless next to the two sisters with actual weapons. She wished desperately that she’d planned ahead to fight other humans today – though, with the armor, she couldn’t think of much besides Igneous’s heated blades that wouldn’t be just as pointless against the knights as most weapons were against—
There was a shuffle, somewhere in the distance.
Naomi waited for anyone to react, but… no one did. Not Amy or Igneous, not the knights… maybe that was what happened when a particular event didn’t have a distinctive sound to go with it. It could have been part of the store collapsing from instability, or just another one of the knights accidentally bumping into a display while in a rush to catch up with the rest.
But Naomi… knew it wasn’t.
Damn the odds, the certainty, she felt it in her gut. The ominous feeling that filled her with dread at the same time she found herself wanting to smile. All her previous suspicions collated and fed her a high probability there might be only one person in this room who knew the world had ended – and for once, that particular feeling wasn’t annoying.
Layers upon layers of detail resolved in Naomi’s mind, merging with relevant knowledge, recent memories, and every sensation on her body, her surroundings slowly taking shape as one massive pinball machine – and in her hand, the plunger, drawn back with a ball loaded.
The rustle of wind on her sleeve gave her the distant shape of a whip testing the air. In the corner of one glancing eye, she saw red.
Sticking a foot out, she hooked one of the paper gift bags off the bottom shelf of the display on the aisle end, then raised her foot and stomped on it once it hit the floor. It made a loud, crackling, popping sound as paper compressed and air was forced out. She leaned quickly forward.
“Thiswayrightnow!” She hissed into the sisters’ ears.
Her other hand snagged Igneous’s upper arm as she jolted them to the left, at the same moment a storm of greeting cards and greeting card envelopes was kicked up like an indoor tornado. A long, red, whiplike antenna caught one of the Knights Tempered across the throat, sending him flying backwards in a cartwheel to slam against a faraway door in the freezer aisle.
Igneous screeched. “Oh, what the hell is—"
“Centipede!” Naomi laughed as she pulled the others down the nearby aisle.
If the few times Naomi had seen the Crawler run around weren’t enough to know what to expect now, she’d also seen how normal-sized centipedes moved. It wouldn’t be like a herd of charging bulls. It would be like the splashdown from a tsunami, and even that was something most people couldn’t properly conceptualize. It was like that thought exercise with the silverback gorilla and the five black mambas – most people didn’t realize a black mamba was a snake that could slither faster on open ground than a human could run at full sprint.
Luckily for she and Amy earlier, the cramped pharmacy hadn’t counted as open ground, and luckily for all three of them now, this store aisle didn’t either – if only because at least two Knights Tempered had chased them down it. Naomi didn’t look back to see what became of them, but she heard shouts and screams and hoped their armored bodies were at least somewhat cumbersome obstacles for the charging death that hung over them like a guillotine blade already falling.
Naomi kept her eyes on one goal – a section near the back of the aisle on the left side, where looters had already removed the larger, bulk packages of napkins, leaving an empty space between shelves that was close to the floor and just large enough for her frantic plan.
For one shining moment, she and Igneous acted in perfect synchrony, hurriedly forcing Amy all the way back into the narrow space of the shelter. Igneous protested with a squawk a moment later, when Naomi pushed her in second and then herself crawled in last, lying on shoulder and hip lengthwise, her back facing the outside as she shielded them both with her body.
Naomi hadn’t really processed how ready she was to die for them, but it felt right. She was the one with an expiration date. She was the one who’d never had the chance to form the kind of connection the two sisters had. She wasn’t important to anyone, the way they were important to each other. If one of them had to die, there were so many reasons why it should be her.
As chaos swarmed in a tempest, as the aisle shelving shook violently from multiple impacts of the writhing centipede, Naomi opened her eyes to find Amy’s wide ones only inches from her own, gifting her a strange look of fear and awe that might forever remain a mystery. Naomi smiled, and wondered what it would feel like when the pain started.
But it never did. Soon the violence of the impacts was decreasing, not increasing, and Noami could tell the centipede had passed them by. It would be hitting the back wall of the store and diverting around into another aisle. Her ears gave her the direction of the rumble.
Adjusting quickly, Naomi backed out of the shelter. The perforated metal shelves above and below her were dented inward, probably from a leg hitting them, but they hadn’t buckled enough to either crush her or allow her to be impaled. The knights were lying dead on the ground, and Igneous ducked near where Naomi stood, picking up and stowing away the weapons she’d likely dropped at some point to prevent accidentally hurting her sister.
“Never do that again,” the girl hissed. “That’s my job!”
Naomi flinched, swallowing a sudden feeling of loss at Igneous’s comment. The disapproval cut deeper than she’d—
“No the fuck it’s not!” Amy changed the mood completely before it could settle. The jab at her sister was sharp, but also tired, like they’d had similar exchanges many times before. “I still need you…”
The words were almost drowned out by the screech of metal sliding on tile floor, the centipede dislodging the walls of its maze as the sisters fell in-step behind Naomi’s sprint. Back in the main through-aisle, a knight in the middle of the freezer section only had time to point, not even shout, before he simply vanished to the red blur that crossed the other way through the intersection.
Naomi could see the best route in her head, each sensation still feeding into the bigger picture.
A rustle of fabric and then a metal scrape on the floor behind her as Igneous scooped up both the backpack she’d dropped and one of her knives, then a crinkle of cardboard as she leapt up to swipe something unknown from the top shelf of the next aisle they ran down, all while Amy’s footfalls remained steady behind and to her left.
She stopped them for just a moment at the end of the last aisle before the registers, offsetting their forward pace by one step so the centipede’s head had rounded another endcap six aisles over and was already running back up the next one by the time they would have entered its potential sightline. They were still in the sightline of one Knight Tempered, who’d managed to avoid the buzzsaw of the centipede’s quickly turning body, but the final lash of the whiplike ultimate legs at the end of its tail sliced him across the midsection in a way that would’ve likely cut him in half if he wasn’t wearing armor. After he was sent flying through the circular number sign above one of the registers, then bounced off the far wall to the floor, whatever damage it did to him internally kept him from getting up again.
The centipede was now heading for the back right corner of the store, and would be corralled there for a while by the walled-off employee section in the middle, which turned the whole right side into one big loop with no view of the middle and left. It would be a quick and relatively un-risky sprint to the nearest exit, and both sisters seemed to pick up on that as well.
But Naomi stopped.
“I didn’t get what I came for,” she spoke quietly, eyes panning to the right and locating the now un-inhabited pharmacy. “You two can go, but I need—”
Igneous had her wrist and was running alongside her – not toward the exit, but back toward the tear in the shutter door where Amy was leading them both. In seconds, the shade seemed to block out the chaos, and Naomi was scrambling toward the general vicinity of the shelf location she had pretty well memorized. Hopefully, the centipede hadn’t scrambled the fallen product too far from where it had originally been knocked over from, but with how long it had been living here…
“What are you looking for?” Igneous’s gentle timbre hit her like a breeze, and made her shudder like a cold one.
She hesitated. “Est… estradiol.”
“Okay,” Amy said simply, and Naomi heard her start digging through the bags on the floor.
Naomi considered that they might not have the context to know what it was for, but… something about how they’d both acted told her otherwise. Compared to what Naomi would’ve expected from victims of confinement or isolation, they seemed pretty informed on the outside world, just not the last eight months of it. Maybe she was just stereotyping, or maybe there was more to their story that would explain it, but that wasn’t an answer Naomi was really concerned with right now. She still had bigger fears she was trying desperately to not let get in the way of her search.
Igneous was beside her for a moment, a hand squeezing her shoulder in a way that somehow gave her all the reassurance she needed. She let out a breath, calmed her nerves, and got back to trying to read small printed labels in the low light.
After a few minutes, Naomi felt the ticking clock wind briefly backwards, and spared just a tiny exhale as her hand closed tight. “I’ve got one!”
“I’ve got three,” Igneous echoed back, and holy shit!?
She turned around, in disbelief, but confirmed with her own eyes the packages Igneous offered her while still turning back to look for more. “This is enough!” Naomi forced out in one quick breath, signaling the others up to their feet as they raced toward the broken windows and finally left the supermarket for good.
It was cold again outside, but Naomi endured it rather than take the time to adjust her weatherkit. As she ducked low to keep hidden behind the abandoned cars, she turned a glance toward the store entrances and saw… horses and covered wagons parked out front. She shuddered and audibly hissed.
She’d once naively thought the pairing was a cute image, but knowledge of what people who traveled like that generally did within the borders of their own communities, with no one lifting a finger to interfere, had spoiled it forever. She wanted to burn the wagons, maybe even kill the horses – it took a lot to make Naomi want to kill animals, but there was apparently a line, and it had been crossed. She now had a much better picture of the life Amethyst and Igneous had been stuck in all this time, and she was even more determined to make sure no one could ever drag them back.
Fuck you, cars rock, she thought as she opened the door to her mostly hollowed-out, silver minivan. There weren’t back seats anymore, but Amy and her sister took no issue just sitting in the makeshift storage space, huddling behind the driver’s seat. With steel on her face and one middle finger escaping her solid grip on the wheel, Naomi sped out of the parking lot and onto the open road.
It took about ten minutes of calmly navigating mostly-empty streets before the silence was broken.
“Is anyone going to explain the giant centipede?” Igneous piped up with a steady grin, but a bit of a nervous shake in her words.
In the rearview mirror, Naomi could see she was braced with her back against the side of the van, legs parted and folded around her sister who leaned up into her chest. Igneous was running her fingers soothingly through Amy’s hair. Amy had her eyes closed, but didn’t look asleep.
Naomi kept her eyes on the road, but kept that image in her head. The longer it went on, the more she felt like she won. Like she won the end of the world, conquered it. She was in a fistfight with fate, and was beating it into submission for every additional moment she could continue to let the two of them find peace in one another’s closeness.
“So, uh…” she began, trying to ease the tension with a faint laugh. “You two missed a lot. Long story short… bugs. Bug apocalypse. I know we all thought it was gonna be zombies, but no, it’s bugs. We call ‘em Crawlers. Which does get annoying when we start talking about the flying ones. Or the ones that mostly jump, strictly speaking.”
“And this all happened… when, exactly?”
“A little under eight months ago. Didn’t… did…” Naomi hesitated, unsure how to ask this. “There was a, um… a big, flash of light in the sky? Like a lot of it, all at once? Did you…”
“They fed us some story about how it was a… sign from the Crystal,” Amy spoke up, tiredly.
Naomi nodded in quiet understanding. “That was an event called the Scarring. A lightning storm from space… it knocked out a bunch of satellites and technology, and carved huge, open fissures up and down the planet, called the Scars. People say… they cut so deep into the Earth they opened up underground caverns, and that’s where the Crawlers came from. There’s also been crazy weather patterns, from whatever it did to the atmosphere… heat wave one minute, snowstorm the next… didn’t you notice those?”
Igneous was giving her a weird look through the mirror. “I think you’re just describing weather?”
Naomi opened her mouth, then closed it. “For here… yeah, that’s a good point. But it’s definitely gotten more like that.”
“Mhm, mhm,” Igneous took it all in, ambiguously skeptical. “So um… why are we just driving around in a normal car?”
Another car lazily passed them in the opposing lane. “This is my apocalypse vehicle,” Naomi muttered, only a little annoyed. “As you can see, I’ve modified it into a combination living space-slash-mobile headquarters.”
“I just would’ve expected it to be, you know… armored, or something?”
“What, and get singled out?” Naomi rolled her eyes, putting her turn signal on and slowing to a brief, but complete stop at the stop sign before proceeding. “Everyone who tried to put spikes on shit and walk around in kink leather got laughed offstage in the first two weeks and took their toys home. Most people would rather pretend the apocalypse never even happened.”
“And the… giant bugs that are supposedly everywhere?”
“People around here treat them the same as when a coyote or a mountain lion gets sighted somewhere residential. Granted, Crawlers have killed a lot more people than coyotes or mountain lions probably ever have, but it turns out that’s just not a big enough deal to get anyone to give up their normalcy. Even if continuing on like this, with no functioning societal framework, is guaranteed unsustainable in the long run.” Naomi sighed and dropped her voice to a near whisper. “And some people are running out of time faster than others…”
As she stopped seeing the same everyday landmarks and started seeing the ones she remembered only from occasional, longer trips, it finally occurred to her that she was… leaving. For good. The town she’d known her whole life.
Naomi had planned that, if she survived the supermarket, she’d still have around an hour left for reminiscing, making one last stop at all the places that still held meaning for her. But the sisters needed to get out of here fast, before anyone chasing them figured out how to catch up to them.
(She wasn’t dumb, the knight guys were themed after metals and the highest ranking one she’d met was bronze, there had to at least be a gold guy out there somewhere…)
It meant she wouldn’t get to see her parents again, but… they might have not even made the list if she’d still had the time. Naomi had the best parents out of anyone she knew – which was the lowest bar imaginable, but they still cleared it by a mile. Even then, though… she hadn’t been able to look them in the eyes since they gave up on fighting for her.
It wasn’t their fault, there was nothing they could realistically do, but it still changed things, irrevocably. She was happy they had each other, and had told them as much. She’d told them to do their best to forget they’d ever had her.
To not be too sad about it when she was just… gone, one day.
“That’s… got something to do with where we’re going, hasn’t it?” Igneous pried for her attention slowly, seemingly picking up on her change in mood. “I appreciate the fact you’re getting us the hell out of dodge, but at some point are you going to let us in on what the plan is, from here?”
Oh, shit…
“Sorry!” Naomi winced as the wheels screeched a bit, panic taking hold until she calmed herself. “I didn’t mean to like, kidnap you…”
“Well, it’s not like we have anywhere to be in a hurry,” Igneous shot a wide smile back.
Naomi breathed, helped along by the… she was pretty sure it was supposed to be a joke. “There’s um… up in the northwest, there’s a real attempt to try to rebuild society going on. I don’t know how far they are with… I just… if I get there, I know I can at least not die.”
Don’t think, just…
“And it’s um… I’m heading to a rendezvous point, to get on the Express. It’s the only safe way through some of the dangerous areas further inland. It’s slow, but it’s defended, and it takes a path where it can actually cross the Scars – because of course they’re vertical when I need to go horizontal…”
“Sounds good,” Amy’s voice broke in, weak but bright, and closer than she expected.
She felt the hand on her shoulder first, just a point of grounding before Amy moved it to around her waist and leaned down into her shoulder, hugging her from behind the chair. Only against Amy’s body did Naomi realize she was shaking. The tickle of recently-cut hair against her throat and the slow breaths teasing the sensitive skin above her neckline gave her cheeks a flush. Her stomach tingled at the sensation of bodily warmth and soft pressure crossing it. The burnt-orange cargo pants of her weatherkit got a bit tighter in the crotch.
Amy stayed like that past all the points Naomi began to figure she’d consider it long enough and pull away. Miles passed. Residential buildings disappeared and were replaced by farmland. Snow flurries started dusting the windshield and Naomi had to turn on the heat. Amy was still latched onto her, and little by little, the ever-present, whirling doom spiral had faded into the background of her mind. Replaced mostly by the embarrassment of her continued arousal.
“S-sorry, I’ve… I’ve never… talked about that out loud.”
A different hand squeezed at her left shoulder. “Does make us kind of hypocrites, you know,” Igneous mused guiltily. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s-it’s fine!” Naomi replied on instinct. “You needed an explanation!”
“I just need to know we’re going anywhere but here.”
Amy wordlessly squeezed tighter. Naomi sighed and let the matter drop. She felt the outside chill creeping up from the floor of the van even with the heat on. “It’s still about an hour drive. You two can use the sleeping bag back there. Stay warm.”
It took another minute, but the two sisters untangled themselves from Naomi. She could hear Igneous crab-walking back into the storage area, but she felt Amy’s presence linger in the space beside her a little longer.
A pair of soft lips touched her cheek, then withdrew as Amy finally moved to join her sister.
With wide eyes and a faint gasp, Naomi felt herself heat up again.
Forty-odd minutes later, Naomi was still thinking about Amy’s kiss – and how kiss still didn’t seem like the word she wanted to use for it. whatever had happened on her cheek felt more intimate, more meaningful and beautiful, than if it had been on her lips.
Yeah… calling it a kiss bothered her.
Did she want Amy to want to be close to her? Yes, definitely. Her body had certainly had the prerequisite reactions and then some. But did she want Amy to be pursuing her? Like… dating?
…No. That bothered her. That wasn’t where Amy belonged.
She checked in the mirror to make sure Amy was still where she really belonged – squeezed into the same sleeping bag with her sister, both of their eyes restfully closed but neither of them truly sleeping. Because being pressed in that close, body to body, with someone they’d known their whole lives and trusted with their most vulnerable selves was something worth staying awake for.
Naomi didn’t have anything like that – she couldn’t. It was too late. Having someone become interested in her now, for romantic or – hopefully not – sexual reasons was a consolation prize at best, and not a very good one. Dating Amy, or… or Igneous felt hollow. She wanted…
Tearful eyes glanced at the mirror.
She wanted what they had.
She was jealous. She had to be. Except she was pretty sure jealous didn’t usually involve valuing the other two people so much more than herself that she was willing to die for them. Around them, she’d let down all her self-defensive instincts without really realizing. It was still the apocalypse, she couldn’t be completely sure the sisters weren’t just going to kill her and take her stuff. That fear hadn’t gone away, it just… didn’t sound so bad. She had some really useful supplies. Amethyst and Igneous could use them to protect each other.
A bump in the road jolted her from her thoughts.
Shit, that was dark…
It also stirred the sisters, movement and stretching soon heard from the back.
“Are we almost there?” Amy said groggily.
Naomi took a long exhale and smiled. “Yeah. Almost there.”
The two sisters moved forward to linger behind the seats and center console, Igneous’s hand climbing to Naomi’s left shoulder again and soothing back and forth along her collarbone. Naomi’s smile stayed.
“Why are the trees like that?” Amy asked, looking around through the windshield at the charred forest now present on all sides. The snow had long-stopped, and the road up the mountain passed through tall, dark tree trunks devoid of foliage and barren, dried-out soil.
“They got burned in the Scarring. Never recovered.”
“This is a Scar?”
Naomi shook her head. “No, this is what’s called a scar flare. Secondary bolts of lightning that branched off from the main Scar impacts. Less powerful, more erratic. They don’t go the full length of the Scars but some run in parallel for miles and miles.”
Igneous seemed deep in thought. “You know, it’s been a while, but um… there are bugs in your bug apocalypse, right? Feels a little lacking.”
“Don’t jinx it,” Naomi snorted, then feigned a careful search of the forest around her. “Hey, maybe some of these are tree bugs. Who would know?”
Amy arched an eyebrow. “Tree bugs?”
Naomi shrugged. “Well, stick bugs, but you know… scale.”
It was the first time all three of them shared a laugh.
Maneuvering through the shorter, more oddly angled roads on the mountainside felt like the magical last fifteen minutes of a long road trip, anticipation building at the same time the actual process of traveling became slower, quieter, calmer. She wondered if Amy and Igneous were feeling that for the first time. She hoped they were.
The mood became more solemn as they crested the hill and started to move through the abandoned town that had been caught in the scar flare. Like in the woods, the pavement that made up the roads had survived, but the buildings were as charred as the trees, some with their rooves or higher floors burned clean off. Identically-colored piles of what used to be various cars were all shoved to the sides of the main four-lane road that ran longways along the ridge.
Finally, they found a block where various unburned, multicolored cars were parked anywhere there was space, all in the vicinity of a square building with its top a hollowed wreck but its first floor intact and sturdy. A human sentry with a compound bow, not unlike the one Naomi had stored away in her supplies, waved her over and directed her to an open spot.
Amethyst and Igneous had their tactical gear all reattached before the car came to a complete stop, Amy’s nail gun looped through a left-underarm holster made to fit it beneath her oversized coat. They seemed to linger over offering to help Naomi collect her supplies, but she’d had most of it packed up already. They did insist on helping her carry the bags, and in short time, they’d climbed the intact flight of stairs to the second floor that had – with the exception of a few intact wall portions, mainly corners – more or less become a flat roof open to the sky.
They weren’t the only ones there, and Naomi could tell that made the sisters uncomfortable. She was in the same boat, if put largely at ease simply by the presence of the other two. Still, the few people already waiting were courteous and kept their distance, some absorbed in conversation among themselves. One man with a pitched tent, probably camped out for days, offered them a silent toast with his water bottle, but let them be.
“So, considering the lack of tracks, I’m guessing this ‘Express’ is not a train?” Igneous attempted to defuse the tension, though there were traces of her nerves.
Naomi shrugged. “It’s more like a train than it’s like anything else.”
When she offered no further details, Amy spoke up behind her. “Fine, keep your secrets.”
For a moment, Naomi was worried – she knew very well what it was like to not like surprises – but as she turned around, she found Amy giving her one of the biggest smiles Naomi had seen from her. She let out a breath of relief, and smiled back. “It’s a little bit like a pirate ship, too. We’re a couple hours early, though. Should probably get settled in.”
The sisters chose the most shaded, but also most dangerous-looking place, the back corner where the largest section of second-floor-wall was still standing, even including a mostly-intact staircase up to a tiny remaining portion of the third floor. They settled in the shadow of the wall, making a nest of all the bags. Naomi found herself taking a moment to watch them as they seemed to wordlessly debate the best way to get comfortable.
They were so at ease with each other… mostly. She’d noticed a bit of tension, awkwardness, mostly on Igneous’s part, but nothing that didn’t resolve itself quickly, usually at Amy’s insistence.
As much as Amy favored the quiet, shutting down and letting Igneous speak for her whenever she could get away with it, there was a cold strength inside that could easily break out of her meekness when needed. She took charge of others because she had to, and didn’t shy away from that, even if she clearly liked being the little sister, resting contently in protective arms. Naomi wanted to just… cup that soft cheek of hers and press a warm, chaste kiss to her lips, to show her how much—
…Huh?
Hadn’t she just decided she didn’t want to kiss Amy like that?
She tried to shake off the confusion, paying attention to Igneous instead. The taller girl had just gently edged a bag into place with her foot, and now stood with one hand on a hip and the other on a thigh, tilting her head to get a different angle on her work.
Naomi still wasn’t sure how Igneous… felt about her. Recently she’d been quietly reflective and sympathetic, but her signals overall were incredibly mixed – there had been moments where she was clearly irritated at Naomi’s presence, but just as often, there was this… sense of relief washing over her, like a weight lifted.
Naomi hoped that meant she was overall on the girl’s good side – thinking back to how she’d fought that knight… she’d be extremely protective of Amy, that was for sure.
Not just protective, but protector. Like a role she’d taken on. Anyone would be lucky to have Igneous as a big sister. The way she was standing, her waist-belt drew the eye to her figure’s hourglass curve. It might be soft if Naomi put her hand there, at the small of her waist. Maybe even softer if they were slow-dancing, with the lights dimmed—
…wait, what the fuck?
Those… were not thoughts Naomi had about anyone. Not in a long time, if ever. A strange chill shuddered through her, the feeling of certainty, control slipping from her grasp. What the actual fucking fuck!?
Sure, Igneous was conventionally attractive, but that had barely registered before. Naomi was too used to thinking of bodies as ephemeral – if you were going to be with someone, you should have a better reason than that. Plus, it hadn’t even really been a lustful thought. That, she could at least understand, even if she would never realistically be comfortable acting on it.
Naomi breathed slowly.
She… took a step back, and cautiously ran through her head the idea of dating both of them, just to be sure. She pictured… leading them along a boardwalk, eating at beachside restaurants, walking them home in the rain under one big umbrella…
It was nice.
It was really nice, actually. It felt good.
But the good parts about it were… not being alone, having someone to care about, spending quality time with them, laughing with them… all the things that overlapped with platonic feelings. Naomi hadn’t even really been sure there was a difference between romantic and platonic feelings. But those vivid images of several minutes ago… yeah, she was pretty sure that was romantic attraction.
And no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t feel it again.
“…Naomi?”
Amy’s voice startled her, and two sets of eyes looking at her with worry made her briefly panic. She must have looked totally spaced out.
She laughed it off.
“Just… having a weird day, is all.”
Igneous snorted. “You’re telling us!”
Noami chuckled and rolled her eyes. Amy smiled, took her hand, and guided her back into the shade, where the two had set up a space to lay down, blocked off from view by an old, charred cupboard. It looked just big enough to fit the three of them, in close quarters.
“You sure you don’t want your space?” Naomi offered, out of caution.
Igneous shook her head. “You drove. If anyone deserves a good rest now, it’s you, I’d think.”
Naomi didn’t think that was an entirely fair assessment, but she didn’t argue as they pulled her down, purposefully giving her the spot in the middle. They settled close enough on either side that all three of their heads could fit on the soft cushion of the rolled-up sleeping bag, and with one arm from each of them laying over her waist… Naomi was glad she was wearing enough compression layers that her body’s reaction at least wouldn’t be visible.
…Maybe she should stop thinking about relationships for a while. The sisters seemed open enough to seeing if a real friendship could take hold between the three of them, and that was… well, five minutes ago she would’ve said she liked that better than the idea of dating them. But then her brain had made her a hopeless romantic for a few random seconds she still didn’t know how to replicate. That was probably going to bother her for a long time, but… maybe she could stop dwelling on it, for now. If romance was going to tease her, then still remain as elusive to her as always, she would just go with her original plan and try to find some sort of friendship, with another girl or in this case girls, that would carry her through the rest of her life. She didn’t have much faith it could ever be as deep or meaningful now as it could have been if it had started earlier, but intellectually she knew that was probably just her skewed sense of time acting up again.
Holding onto that little bit of hope, Naomi stared up at the sky. If was funny how after everything, you could at least still look up at the sky and pretend it was the same world as before… well, except for the charred brick wall sticking up in the corner of her vision, blocking out the glare from the sun as it sank gradually lower toward the horizon. She quieted her thoughts, and let herself get lost in the soft breathing of the two bodies beside her. If she tuned out the distant voices of the other people on the rooftop, she could hear their heartbeats, too.
After what felt like close to an hour, or more, Amy stirred. She’d rolled mostly onto her back, and for a long pause, she seemed to be staring skyward as well.
“I’m going to climb it.”
She sat up abruptly, then stood and eyed up the staircase leading to what had once been the third floor. She took a tentative step, then made a slow, but determined ascent.
“Wait, is that safe?” Naomi sat up after her, Igneous’s hand pulling back to the side of her waist and giving her a faint squeeze there. She was going to take that as approval of her concern, and try to let her sudden blush dissipate.
Amy was halfway up the climb when Naomi started at the bottom. It felt sturdy, maybe just as sturdy as the rest of the building, and if everyone was fine with using the rest of an old ruin as a makeshift train station, this one piece of it probably wasn’t going to crumble away under the weight of a few curious teenage girls. Probably. Naomi tried to ignore any remaining doubts as she followed Amy to the top.
It wasn’t quite sunset yet, but it was close. Naomi took a quick look all around her to scan for flying Crawlers, but the sky still looked clear. Eventually her eyes settled on what Amy was staring at, and she turned quiet and still.
Up to the north, and a little west, almost all the way to the horizon, the scar flare they were standing in the middle of had continued and cut a path right through a city. There was a gap in the middle, where a couple more buildings probably used to stand, and the ones to either side looked jagged and hollowed out, parts of them having burst and collapsed from the energy impact.
“I thought I’d be happy. But… I don’t know.”
Amy’s voice was faint, devoid of emotion. Naomi tried to be gentle. “What… do you mean by that?”
After another silence, Amy swallowed through a couple self-reassuring nods, then still hesitated a moment longer. “My sister’s the strongest, the best person I know,” she mumbled, seeming afraid of the words. “She endured… so much. So much for me.” A tear ran down her cheek, and it made her snarl. “But she’s different now. She used to… nothing h-h… c-could do t-t-t-h-r could ever break her… but you know… you know what did? You know what fucking did?”
She threw out a hand, laid down in the air, fingers outstretched in a halfhearted gesture toward the ruined city.
“They did. It wasn’t even… knowing no one was even trying to help us, it was… knowing that even if she got out, the ‘good’ people out in this world would hate her just as much as the bad ones would. Now it’s like they got judged, and I want to say… good. They deserved it. They all deserved it.”
A shudder coursed through her, and she lowered her hand, head bowing as if in shame.
“But she wouldn’t want that.”
Naomi carefully closed the gap between them and looped her right arm around Amy’s shoulder, her other hand finding Amy’s sleeve and holding on gently. “It’s okay,” she breathed, her eyes drawing closed as Amy’s head leaned into her shoulder. “I… feel a little like that sometimes too.”
Amy shook, and let out shuddering breaths against her chest. The hand on Amy’s purple sleeve searched downward until it found soft skin, and Noami slowly intertwined their fingers.
She held Amy, as quiet footsteps finally followed them up. There was just enough space remaining on the floor for Igneous to step up and add another arm to the hug. “Shit,” she voiced breathlessly, a dawning horror coloring her tone, as she spotted the ruined city in the distance. “How many?” She asked shakily. An urgent, rhetorical demand.
Naomi didn’t really know if she meant the city, or the planet. “A lot,” she answered simply.
Amy moved, trying to collect herself, but once she’d lifted her head, she stilled and stared in confusion. “What…”
Naomi adjusted her eyes to follow, and across the echoes of devastation, found a smile.
Because a little lower and to the west of the decaying city, the supermarket Crawler’s larger, non-carnivorous cousin was meandering in from the horizon. Built as wide as the four-lane highway it slowly strode upon, and with a length of several city blocks and then some, this Crawler bore less resemblance to its more well-known, normal-sized equivalents and instead took most of its notes from their prehistoric ancestors – it’s smaller, wide, round and beady head, bearing short antennae, was shielded overtop by the first segment of a flat, wide-brimmed carapace that rivaled its leg span. Stone grey in color, with a subtle purple tint that was rendered more vibrant in the beginning of the golden hour, the creature’s natural spectacle was only the first tier of the wondrous sight falling defiantly on sore eyes.
Because atop the flat carapace was built an array of lightly-tanned wood scaffolding like the deck of a sailing ship, itself hinged at segments to shift with each winding curve of the creature’s body. A double-row of small, house-like passenger cabins with rooftop gardens populated the hinged scaffold into one long, moving village, waning sunlight tousling the green vegetation and reflecting off water features. Defensive mounted cannons glinted like dark, polished marble where one was fixed at the edge of the rotating turntable platform that bridged every scaffold-segment joint, a few extra armaments stowed away and ready to unfold near where the crew buildings were concentrated at the front of the ‘train.’
Next to her sister, Igneous seemed equally dumbfounded at the sight of the Express. “I… see it, but… what am I looking at?”
The corner of Naomi’s grin rose gently to a smirk.
“A millipede.”