Family of the Dead City
'Do you ever wish mom died in the earthquake?'
The girl's father looked up.
'I don't know if I could say that. Maybe if she didn't feel it too much. If that's what she wanted. Sounds bad to say though huh?'
The studio flat overlooked a park of paved walkways and grassy clearings in Sector 5. The grounds were diffused under dull lights with the browned utilitarian surface of a public arena stripped of serenity by the character of actual use. A gray seesaw sat off to the left with a makeshift wooden seat on one side. A long row of swings had three still operable, occasionally occupied by bored children with unimpressed stares and limp leg pushes.
Thirteen year old Audrey scrubbed the dishes while her father methodically set the small table.
'Do you think she'll come here?'
'What do you mean?'
'To the same place. Here.'
'Maybe, it's hard to say.'
'I hope so.'
'Hmmm. What is it tonight?' He looked over to two boiling pots.
'Green beans and turkey.'
'Mmm, smells good.'
'I should have made the potatoes. They'll go bad soon but we'll need something for tomorrow.'
The ceiling fan between the kitchen counter and the table ratika ratika swung in a lopsided centripetal tilt. He pointed up.
'How long has that been going on?'
'A couple of hours.'
'We can't have that.'
He dragged one of the two wooden chairs from the dining table and stood up under the fan, pulling the chain until it slowed.
'Why don't you mess with it later?'
'It shouldn't be that much of a problem.'
He pulled down the glasses from his forehead to bridge of his nose and gazed downwardly. He pushed his rolled sleeves farther up his thoroughly haired forearms. His hands were still greased from machine work at the wire factory. He left behind a smudging trail on everything he touched. Audrey looked up and pursed her lips over a jaw made trim and defined from limited food and secretly sacrificial portions.
'Why don't you wash your hands before you go touching everything?'
'Eh stop your worrying I'll wipe it off.'
She turned away from the palpitating mess and stood up on a stool in front of the upstreams of simmering food. All the lights and stove burners shut off in a black flash. Bronze light from the park lamps shined through the window from down low and narrow cutouts shown on the ceiling in the blackness of the room. The fan and the air vents slowed to a low interval heartbeat and stopped with a dead unnerving silence.
'Didn't you pay the power!'
'I walked by. I forgot.'
'They said they were going to cut it off. I wrote it down!'
'I'm sorry.' He sighed. 'I was twenty dollars short.'
'You should have me go in if you're embarrassed or something. They'd understand. Better than having the power cut off. Guess we're eating mostly cooked food in the dark.'
He stepped down and crumbled on the chair with a heavy breath.
'Well maybe it'll be like a blind person and your senses will be sharper. You know so you can taste the food better.'
'Stop being such a kid.' She turned the burners to the off position.
'Stop being such an adult.'
Audrey dug through a drawer that sounded like it was filled with scissors and rocks. She struck a match and lit a candle and placed it by the stove. She lit another and set it on the opposite counter.
'Don't waste all the candles.'
She raised her brow indignantly.
'Is two wasting them? Why? Because we may need them later? That's just sad. If we can't afford fire tomorrow I'm leaving.'
He laughed with his full chest and belly only letting out a high pitched pig squeak every few breaths.
'I thought you were lighting more.'
'Hey why don't you turn on the TV? Ohhh, that's right you didn't pay the power. It's okay we'll just listen to the radio.' She sucked in through her teeth. 'Sorry...forgot.'
'You're just a riot tonight.'
She waited for some of the remaining heat to soak into the meal. The pot still steamed fluidly. She stabbed the boneless turkey slices and let them drip. Gory impressions of the falling water bled on the fire dancing walls. She sifted the fork through the water searching for the rest of it. Seemed like there should be more. She regretted not trying to make some kind of stew. Her defined petite forearms strained and flexed like the legs of a Chihuahua as she hoisted the heavy pot about two handed.
'You worry too much. We'll be fine next week. Just need my first paycheck.'
The beans were more plentiful. She stared at the plates longingly with locked lips. Hunger clenched at her midsection like five elongated fingers slowly squeezing tight. She thought about her father's long work day and blew out the stove candle and in the darkness shoveled a much larger portion onto his plate.
She carried the plates over and stubbed her toe on the way and snorted forcefully through her nose.
'Damnit!'
He looked down.
'I know. It took too long to find a job.'
'No, I stubbed my toe.'
'Oh.'
Audrey chucked the plates on the table with a rushed waitress crash. She filled two glasses of tap water handed one to her father. The wooden chair stutter screeched on the floor as she pulled it out to sit down.
They ate in the dark, forks chiming on mostly empty plates. Audrey took tiny bites to draw the process out. Even so the food was quickly gone as though a creeping troll had used the veil of darkness to sneak bites. She drank the water in the hopes it would fill her belly. Her father ate on and then finished.
'Will you pay it tomorrow?'
'We're still short.'
She grabbed the candle from the counter and brought it over and pushed twenty-five red dollars across the table.
'Where did you get that?'
'I babysat Kayla today.'
'Melissa and John's kid?'
'Yeah.'
'They gave you twenty-five dollars for all day?'
'No they gave me thirty but I have to buy something for us to eat tomorrow.'
'What's the extra five for then?'
'You have to eat lunch.'
'What about you?'
'I don't eat as much.' She leaned back, lightheaded.
'We'll have a lot more soon, I promise. And we can move to a bigger place. Just hold out this week.'
'I know.'
She cleaned up and then crawled on the floor to find her two inch thick mattress. Her father lay on his mattress a few feet away. She stared with drowsy eyes at the park lights shining up on the ceiling.
She dreamed of her old home and the wide echoing hallways. The family dogs playing across the sunny deck. Her mother and father in the living room each reading but still in conversation.
Then the earthquake of impossibly long intervals. Pictures fell from cracking walls. The TV shattered on the floor. The dogs were nowhere in sight.
The ceiling fell in chunks, small at first and then with a tree trunk snapping crunch a beam plummeted down. Audrey, her mother and her father were on the floor yelling back and forth. Another beam came down and her father instinctively pushed his wife out of the way. Audrey and her father lay under the heavy beam, him with a cracked spine and her sucking in wet breaths with broken ribs and a punctured lung. Her mother went for help.
She woke in the dark hyperventilating and flailing her arms. Her father grabbed her and held her, rocking back and forth.
'Shhhh shhhhhhhh.'
They rocked in the dark until her breathing slowed.
'Do you feel like you made the wrong choice?'
'What do you mean?'
Her lip shook and was moist and salty from cold sweat and tears.
'If you could only save one person. I think everyone would save the one they love more. I would. But you didn't know you'd be stuck with me. Would you have saved me so you could be with the one you love more?'
'Hey hey, what brought that on? It's not like that. Don't think like that.'
The notion made him teary. After a long silence he laid her back down.
'If I have to be stuck with anyone I'd want it to be you.'
She bit into her pillow and cried silently. She wanted the quake to have a name and a face at which she could direct all of her hatred. Instead it was just an evidence of all that was unstable in even the most stable of conditions. The notion of reliability seemed contradictory.
When she woke her father was gone to work. Without day or night the feeling of an extended dream mixed with bouts of insomnia was ever present. Audrey felt that if only she could sleep long enough or deep enough that morning would come but it always remained one sleep away and then the next after that.
The same park lights shown on the same spot on the ceiling. Her hands interlocked behind her head. She followed the razor edges of the light with her eyes that led around and around like a sharp polygonal race track.
There was a loud knock at the door.
'Just a second!'
She jumped up and wiped her eyes and opened the door. The normally dull hallway lights seemed like wafting floodlights and she squinted.
A dark woman in her late thirties held a child on her side.
'Hey Melissa. What's up?'
'Did you just get up? You're getting worse and worse with your schedule. It's almost one.'
'How can you tell?'
'Don't you have a clock? Well, is there anyway you can watch Kayla till six tonight?'
'Six. Yeah, no problem.'
All the lights and TV flashed on at once. Audrey exhaled and rubbed the back of her head with a smile.
'What's all that?'
'Ahh my dad didn't pay the power yesterday and it was off. Guess it's back.'
'That's no fun. It's happened to us before.'
Melissa lowered the girl to her feet. The child wobbled clumsily in.
'Awedre.' The child smiled with only two small front teeth showing and heavily blushed cheeks and curly blonde hair soft as eagle down.
'Hey Kayla.'
They waved back and forth.
'Thanks again, I don't know what I'd do if you weren't around babe.' She handed Audrey a few juice boxes and a lunch bag.
'Ahh, don't worry I kind of like it. I get bored here.'
'Tell me about it. Oh well, I'll see you later.'
'Later.'
Kayla's interest already shifted to another part of the room as she wandered around stomping her feet. Audrey thought about the juice boxes and the contents of the bag but quickly reprimanded herself.
The child grabbed a squishy ball of Audrey's and she chased it around the room as Audrey threw it. The child would try to throw it back but she often released it behind her and then went stumbling around for it again.
The downstairs neighbors banged on their ceiling with a broom.
'Hey, keep it down. You'll make the neighbors complain on us again. I don't know how a twenty five pound girl stomps around so hard.'
The child laughed. Kayla's parents lived on the ground floor and the floorboards didn't make sound like they did on the third floor. The child experimented with all kinds of over zealous stomps with giggling glee.
After a few hours Kayla looked up every time she heard hallway footsteps or knocks at another door.
'Mom?' She pointed to the door and looked at Audrey.
'No not yet. She'll be back at six.'
The cold days passed with the same muted time, without sunlight or rain. Occasionally as Audrey would walk a straight path in the park she would fall to the ground and brace herself to the unstable earth.
The week ended and she waited for her father who came home with two armloads of groceries.
'Ugg we may actually eat this week!' Audrey dug through and took three consecutive bites into an apple.
'We'll get more, this is for tonight hun. I know you've been hungry too.'
She hugged his side and he squeezed with a one armed hug. Her shrunken stomach ached as she eyed the food.
'I know what I'll make.'
'Let me help.'
'Psh, no way. You're terrible.' She shooed him away.
'Okay, sheesh.' He sat at the table.
'No, not there I'm going to put dinner on the table wait over there.'
'Yes ma'am.' He raised his brow and opened a book and half snoozed while the girl cooked.
She methodically set out a table as she had envisioned it with more dishes than was possible for the two to finish. Steaks and potatoes were on the main plates with other dishes laid out to grab at. She turned on the TV to the news and it was the serene picture she had imagined.
'Okay, it's ready!'
Her father put down his book and walked from his mattress to the table.
'Looks great hun. Feel better?'
She nodded with a full mouth.
'You?' She snow plowed a mouthful of mashed potatoes with her tongue and talked lowly.
'Well yeah. I was just hoping for you to get a little more cheerful again.'
She smiled.
On the TV news a helicopter camera scanned over some eclectic fires like sheer opals in a path through the city. Overhead it looked like a highlighted cracked fault line and Audrey was short of breath.
'What is that?'
Her father looked back at the TV.
'Not sure, I know some rescue crews were headed south today. I was going to check it on the news.'
'It looks like it missed us.' She said hopefully uncertain of what it was.
He walked over and turned it up.
A female newscaster spoke over the pulsing helicopter.
'What you're seeing now is the initial path. We have reason to believe the trail cuts of and picks up near the north bridge in sector five. Officials advise to stay off the streets and absolutely do not approach any subjects meeting the description. Rescue workers are rushing round the clock to evacuate the injured to a safe distance. In the event that you see a subject meeting the description immediately dial the number below. With no confirmed visual, all reports indicate a white female between the ages of fourteen and twenty with black hair, wearing a black hoodie and jeans. Again absolutely do not approach the subject and dial the number below if-'
The fan, lights and TV cut off with a black flash.
'Dad?'
'Yeah?'
'Did you pay the power after you got paid.'
He sheepishly smiled.
'I got a little preoccupied with the food.'
She giggled.
'I didn't think they would cut it off, how much did you pay when you went in?'
'Half, I'll give them the other half in the morning...bunch of snakes.'
'At least the foods cooked this time.' She sighed.
A shadow flew past the window blinking on the race track edge cutouts on the ceiling.
'What the hell?'
A storm of stomping feet echoed all down the hallway. Audrey stood up.
'Wait here.' Her father said and went to the door.
Her heart sped.
He opened the door and the power was out everywhere. People rushed up the stairs in muted confusion and pale faces of revelational importance. Hushed voices and scared rodent eyes glossed from the miniscule glow of scattered flashlights.
Melissa ran up holding Kayla.
'Can we come in?'
'Yeah of course.'
He shut the door behind her.
'Where's John?'
'Still at work. I hope he's okay.'
'What's going on?'
'There's something in the streets. Down on the streets. The apartments a few blocks over were attacked. Nobody wants to be on ground level. The news said it's name is Nikki. They say it's some new kind of wraith.'
'I don't even know what the old kind is. What are we supposed to do?'
'Wait until it passes. There isn't much else to do.'
Audrey stood shaking with a fork still in hand. She sucked in breaths like an asthmatic and fell to the ground hyperventilating. Another shadow flew past the window and this time she flinched.
'Honey calm down. It's fine. Lets just wait until this is over.'
She imagined the world shaking and knew it couldn't be real. She closed her eyes and sucked in breaths through her teeth and laid flat on the ground. The screams of her parents echoed in her mind.
There was a low distant sound that began as a wind under a bridge as cars passed overhead and it grew into a horrible harpy shrill like metal on metal screeching like a swarm of prehistoric bats. More shadows passed by the windows with such speed that the light on the ceiling became a strobe with an occasional flash of a nightmare creature of outstretched claws.
Outside the inky black monsters of skeletal muscle tissue, teeth, claws and reaper cloths swarmed the black abyss of the dead city.
And the buildings shook all around. Audrey still clenched her eyes shut and held her hands over her ears. The ceiling began to break apart and Kayla cried as she was rushed all over to avoid the crumbling debris.
The layers of the building crumbled one after the other with an impending deep earth roar. Audrey felt a car crash jerking around and a deep stomach pain as she vomited.
The fallen building stabilized in a sharpened partial wire frame of what it once was.
Audrey opened her eyes in a thick cloud of dust with scattered fires illuminating like candles behind frosted windows. A ceiling was held just above her as she barely squirmed. A cool wind blew from the outside destroyed wall.
Her father lay motionless under a monolithic slab of concrete propped up and holding her safe by mere inches.
'Dad!' She curled her lip and cried. She shook him and nothing. Her hands and body trembled.
Kayla cried.
Audrey writhed out from under the slab and worried she would find Kayla horribly injured. Instead the child sat upright, rubbing her dusty eyes in a terrible fit. Audrey snatched her up. She touched her nose wiping the wetness away. Blood coated her hand like a candied apple. Melissa was gone under the debris with an unmoving hand reaching out. Audrey touched it and knew.
She touched herself and Kayla all over inventorying for injuries. Everything looked black in a moment of deep shock. Her head pounded. The third floor apartment was now ten feet from the ground with slabs laid like slides leading down. For the first time since she'd entered the city it rained. Softy at first and then a near hurricane torrent pulled at the rising dust and the fires like trailing comet tails.
Walking past the park into an intersection a single girl surrounded by the flying reaper monsters screamed out. Her grimy inky black hair blew in the wind. Audrey set down the child who cried in her spot. Audrey tumbled over and out of the building. Tears fell from her face, invisible in the storm as she picked up a rock and threw it towards the monster girl and it curved away in the wind.
She ran up to the intersection. The monster girl dripped black blood from her mouth and she screamed and glared with beaming infectious hatred.
A police van barreled around a corner towards the girl. Audrey stopped and hoped it would run both her and the girl over. A membrane of black tar coated the ground and expanded outward from the girl. The reaper monsters swarmed the van, claws ripping through it like can openers. They turned the vehicle up on its side. The monsters ate the men inside, skinning them and ripping their bodies limb from limb as they screamed into the unhearing city.
Audrey tried to kindle her anger, to hate the responsible one so much that the hate could burn through everything inside but the monsters were ripping people apart everywhere and she was again infused with the fear and animal pain of a crumbling world.
She ran and climbed back to Kayla and clenched the child in her arms through the crying storm, until all was calm and until the world around them was cinder and debris and bodies.
She rocked the child back and forth.
'Shhhh shhhhhh.' She peered into the blackness of the city with the hate of ten people, despising god and imagining a unstable world of endless suffering for Nikki.
The girl's father looked up.
'I don't know if I could say that. Maybe if she didn't feel it too much. If that's what she wanted. Sounds bad to say though huh?'
The studio flat overlooked a park of paved walkways and grassy clearings in Sector 5. The grounds were diffused under dull lights with the browned utilitarian surface of a public arena stripped of serenity by the character of actual use. A gray seesaw sat off to the left with a makeshift wooden seat on one side. A long row of swings had three still operable, occasionally occupied by bored children with unimpressed stares and limp leg pushes.
Thirteen year old Audrey scrubbed the dishes while her father methodically set the small table.
'Do you think she'll come here?'
'What do you mean?'
'To the same place. Here.'
'Maybe, it's hard to say.'
'I hope so.'
'Hmmm. What is it tonight?' He looked over to two boiling pots.
'Green beans and turkey.'
'Mmm, smells good.'
'I should have made the potatoes. They'll go bad soon but we'll need something for tomorrow.'
The ceiling fan between the kitchen counter and the table ratika ratika swung in a lopsided centripetal tilt. He pointed up.
'How long has that been going on?'
'A couple of hours.'
'We can't have that.'
He dragged one of the two wooden chairs from the dining table and stood up under the fan, pulling the chain until it slowed.
'Why don't you mess with it later?'
'It shouldn't be that much of a problem.'
He pulled down the glasses from his forehead to bridge of his nose and gazed downwardly. He pushed his rolled sleeves farther up his thoroughly haired forearms. His hands were still greased from machine work at the wire factory. He left behind a smudging trail on everything he touched. Audrey looked up and pursed her lips over a jaw made trim and defined from limited food and secretly sacrificial portions.
'Why don't you wash your hands before you go touching everything?'
'Eh stop your worrying I'll wipe it off.'
She turned away from the palpitating mess and stood up on a stool in front of the upstreams of simmering food. All the lights and stove burners shut off in a black flash. Bronze light from the park lamps shined through the window from down low and narrow cutouts shown on the ceiling in the blackness of the room. The fan and the air vents slowed to a low interval heartbeat and stopped with a dead unnerving silence.
'Didn't you pay the power!'
'I walked by. I forgot.'
'They said they were going to cut it off. I wrote it down!'
'I'm sorry.' He sighed. 'I was twenty dollars short.'
'You should have me go in if you're embarrassed or something. They'd understand. Better than having the power cut off. Guess we're eating mostly cooked food in the dark.'
He stepped down and crumbled on the chair with a heavy breath.
'Well maybe it'll be like a blind person and your senses will be sharper. You know so you can taste the food better.'
'Stop being such a kid.' She turned the burners to the off position.
'Stop being such an adult.'
Audrey dug through a drawer that sounded like it was filled with scissors and rocks. She struck a match and lit a candle and placed it by the stove. She lit another and set it on the opposite counter.
'Don't waste all the candles.'
She raised her brow indignantly.
'Is two wasting them? Why? Because we may need them later? That's just sad. If we can't afford fire tomorrow I'm leaving.'
He laughed with his full chest and belly only letting out a high pitched pig squeak every few breaths.
'I thought you were lighting more.'
'Hey why don't you turn on the TV? Ohhh, that's right you didn't pay the power. It's okay we'll just listen to the radio.' She sucked in through her teeth. 'Sorry...forgot.'
'You're just a riot tonight.'
She waited for some of the remaining heat to soak into the meal. The pot still steamed fluidly. She stabbed the boneless turkey slices and let them drip. Gory impressions of the falling water bled on the fire dancing walls. She sifted the fork through the water searching for the rest of it. Seemed like there should be more. She regretted not trying to make some kind of stew. Her defined petite forearms strained and flexed like the legs of a Chihuahua as she hoisted the heavy pot about two handed.
'You worry too much. We'll be fine next week. Just need my first paycheck.'
The beans were more plentiful. She stared at the plates longingly with locked lips. Hunger clenched at her midsection like five elongated fingers slowly squeezing tight. She thought about her father's long work day and blew out the stove candle and in the darkness shoveled a much larger portion onto his plate.
She carried the plates over and stubbed her toe on the way and snorted forcefully through her nose.
'Damnit!'
He looked down.
'I know. It took too long to find a job.'
'No, I stubbed my toe.'
'Oh.'
Audrey chucked the plates on the table with a rushed waitress crash. She filled two glasses of tap water handed one to her father. The wooden chair stutter screeched on the floor as she pulled it out to sit down.
They ate in the dark, forks chiming on mostly empty plates. Audrey took tiny bites to draw the process out. Even so the food was quickly gone as though a creeping troll had used the veil of darkness to sneak bites. She drank the water in the hopes it would fill her belly. Her father ate on and then finished.
'Will you pay it tomorrow?'
'We're still short.'
She grabbed the candle from the counter and brought it over and pushed twenty-five red dollars across the table.
'Where did you get that?'
'I babysat Kayla today.'
'Melissa and John's kid?'
'Yeah.'
'They gave you twenty-five dollars for all day?'
'No they gave me thirty but I have to buy something for us to eat tomorrow.'
'What's the extra five for then?'
'You have to eat lunch.'
'What about you?'
'I don't eat as much.' She leaned back, lightheaded.
'We'll have a lot more soon, I promise. And we can move to a bigger place. Just hold out this week.'
'I know.'
She cleaned up and then crawled on the floor to find her two inch thick mattress. Her father lay on his mattress a few feet away. She stared with drowsy eyes at the park lights shining up on the ceiling.
She dreamed of her old home and the wide echoing hallways. The family dogs playing across the sunny deck. Her mother and father in the living room each reading but still in conversation.
Then the earthquake of impossibly long intervals. Pictures fell from cracking walls. The TV shattered on the floor. The dogs were nowhere in sight.
The ceiling fell in chunks, small at first and then with a tree trunk snapping crunch a beam plummeted down. Audrey, her mother and her father were on the floor yelling back and forth. Another beam came down and her father instinctively pushed his wife out of the way. Audrey and her father lay under the heavy beam, him with a cracked spine and her sucking in wet breaths with broken ribs and a punctured lung. Her mother went for help.
She woke in the dark hyperventilating and flailing her arms. Her father grabbed her and held her, rocking back and forth.
'Shhhh shhhhhhhh.'
They rocked in the dark until her breathing slowed.
'Do you feel like you made the wrong choice?'
'What do you mean?'
Her lip shook and was moist and salty from cold sweat and tears.
'If you could only save one person. I think everyone would save the one they love more. I would. But you didn't know you'd be stuck with me. Would you have saved me so you could be with the one you love more?'
'Hey hey, what brought that on? It's not like that. Don't think like that.'
The notion made him teary. After a long silence he laid her back down.
'If I have to be stuck with anyone I'd want it to be you.'
She bit into her pillow and cried silently. She wanted the quake to have a name and a face at which she could direct all of her hatred. Instead it was just an evidence of all that was unstable in even the most stable of conditions. The notion of reliability seemed contradictory.
When she woke her father was gone to work. Without day or night the feeling of an extended dream mixed with bouts of insomnia was ever present. Audrey felt that if only she could sleep long enough or deep enough that morning would come but it always remained one sleep away and then the next after that.
The same park lights shown on the same spot on the ceiling. Her hands interlocked behind her head. She followed the razor edges of the light with her eyes that led around and around like a sharp polygonal race track.
There was a loud knock at the door.
'Just a second!'
She jumped up and wiped her eyes and opened the door. The normally dull hallway lights seemed like wafting floodlights and she squinted.
A dark woman in her late thirties held a child on her side.
'Hey Melissa. What's up?'
'Did you just get up? You're getting worse and worse with your schedule. It's almost one.'
'How can you tell?'
'Don't you have a clock? Well, is there anyway you can watch Kayla till six tonight?'
'Six. Yeah, no problem.'
All the lights and TV flashed on at once. Audrey exhaled and rubbed the back of her head with a smile.
'What's all that?'
'Ahh my dad didn't pay the power yesterday and it was off. Guess it's back.'
'That's no fun. It's happened to us before.'
Melissa lowered the girl to her feet. The child wobbled clumsily in.
'Awedre.' The child smiled with only two small front teeth showing and heavily blushed cheeks and curly blonde hair soft as eagle down.
'Hey Kayla.'
They waved back and forth.
'Thanks again, I don't know what I'd do if you weren't around babe.' She handed Audrey a few juice boxes and a lunch bag.
'Ahh, don't worry I kind of like it. I get bored here.'
'Tell me about it. Oh well, I'll see you later.'
'Later.'
Kayla's interest already shifted to another part of the room as she wandered around stomping her feet. Audrey thought about the juice boxes and the contents of the bag but quickly reprimanded herself.
The child grabbed a squishy ball of Audrey's and she chased it around the room as Audrey threw it. The child would try to throw it back but she often released it behind her and then went stumbling around for it again.
The downstairs neighbors banged on their ceiling with a broom.
'Hey, keep it down. You'll make the neighbors complain on us again. I don't know how a twenty five pound girl stomps around so hard.'
The child laughed. Kayla's parents lived on the ground floor and the floorboards didn't make sound like they did on the third floor. The child experimented with all kinds of over zealous stomps with giggling glee.
After a few hours Kayla looked up every time she heard hallway footsteps or knocks at another door.
'Mom?' She pointed to the door and looked at Audrey.
'No not yet. She'll be back at six.'
The cold days passed with the same muted time, without sunlight or rain. Occasionally as Audrey would walk a straight path in the park she would fall to the ground and brace herself to the unstable earth.
The week ended and she waited for her father who came home with two armloads of groceries.
'Ugg we may actually eat this week!' Audrey dug through and took three consecutive bites into an apple.
'We'll get more, this is for tonight hun. I know you've been hungry too.'
She hugged his side and he squeezed with a one armed hug. Her shrunken stomach ached as she eyed the food.
'I know what I'll make.'
'Let me help.'
'Psh, no way. You're terrible.' She shooed him away.
'Okay, sheesh.' He sat at the table.
'No, not there I'm going to put dinner on the table wait over there.'
'Yes ma'am.' He raised his brow and opened a book and half snoozed while the girl cooked.
She methodically set out a table as she had envisioned it with more dishes than was possible for the two to finish. Steaks and potatoes were on the main plates with other dishes laid out to grab at. She turned on the TV to the news and it was the serene picture she had imagined.
'Okay, it's ready!'
Her father put down his book and walked from his mattress to the table.
'Looks great hun. Feel better?'
She nodded with a full mouth.
'You?' She snow plowed a mouthful of mashed potatoes with her tongue and talked lowly.
'Well yeah. I was just hoping for you to get a little more cheerful again.'
She smiled.
On the TV news a helicopter camera scanned over some eclectic fires like sheer opals in a path through the city. Overhead it looked like a highlighted cracked fault line and Audrey was short of breath.
'What is that?'
Her father looked back at the TV.
'Not sure, I know some rescue crews were headed south today. I was going to check it on the news.'
'It looks like it missed us.' She said hopefully uncertain of what it was.
He walked over and turned it up.
A female newscaster spoke over the pulsing helicopter.
'What you're seeing now is the initial path. We have reason to believe the trail cuts of and picks up near the north bridge in sector five. Officials advise to stay off the streets and absolutely do not approach any subjects meeting the description. Rescue workers are rushing round the clock to evacuate the injured to a safe distance. In the event that you see a subject meeting the description immediately dial the number below. With no confirmed visual, all reports indicate a white female between the ages of fourteen and twenty with black hair, wearing a black hoodie and jeans. Again absolutely do not approach the subject and dial the number below if-'
The fan, lights and TV cut off with a black flash.
'Dad?'
'Yeah?'
'Did you pay the power after you got paid.'
He sheepishly smiled.
'I got a little preoccupied with the food.'
She giggled.
'I didn't think they would cut it off, how much did you pay when you went in?'
'Half, I'll give them the other half in the morning...bunch of snakes.'
'At least the foods cooked this time.' She sighed.
A shadow flew past the window blinking on the race track edge cutouts on the ceiling.
'What the hell?'
A storm of stomping feet echoed all down the hallway. Audrey stood up.
'Wait here.' Her father said and went to the door.
Her heart sped.
He opened the door and the power was out everywhere. People rushed up the stairs in muted confusion and pale faces of revelational importance. Hushed voices and scared rodent eyes glossed from the miniscule glow of scattered flashlights.
Melissa ran up holding Kayla.
'Can we come in?'
'Yeah of course.'
He shut the door behind her.
'Where's John?'
'Still at work. I hope he's okay.'
'What's going on?'
'There's something in the streets. Down on the streets. The apartments a few blocks over were attacked. Nobody wants to be on ground level. The news said it's name is Nikki. They say it's some new kind of wraith.'
'I don't even know what the old kind is. What are we supposed to do?'
'Wait until it passes. There isn't much else to do.'
Audrey stood shaking with a fork still in hand. She sucked in breaths like an asthmatic and fell to the ground hyperventilating. Another shadow flew past the window and this time she flinched.
'Honey calm down. It's fine. Lets just wait until this is over.'
She imagined the world shaking and knew it couldn't be real. She closed her eyes and sucked in breaths through her teeth and laid flat on the ground. The screams of her parents echoed in her mind.
There was a low distant sound that began as a wind under a bridge as cars passed overhead and it grew into a horrible harpy shrill like metal on metal screeching like a swarm of prehistoric bats. More shadows passed by the windows with such speed that the light on the ceiling became a strobe with an occasional flash of a nightmare creature of outstretched claws.
Outside the inky black monsters of skeletal muscle tissue, teeth, claws and reaper cloths swarmed the black abyss of the dead city.
And the buildings shook all around. Audrey still clenched her eyes shut and held her hands over her ears. The ceiling began to break apart and Kayla cried as she was rushed all over to avoid the crumbling debris.
The layers of the building crumbled one after the other with an impending deep earth roar. Audrey felt a car crash jerking around and a deep stomach pain as she vomited.
The fallen building stabilized in a sharpened partial wire frame of what it once was.
Audrey opened her eyes in a thick cloud of dust with scattered fires illuminating like candles behind frosted windows. A ceiling was held just above her as she barely squirmed. A cool wind blew from the outside destroyed wall.
Her father lay motionless under a monolithic slab of concrete propped up and holding her safe by mere inches.
'Dad!' She curled her lip and cried. She shook him and nothing. Her hands and body trembled.
Kayla cried.
Audrey writhed out from under the slab and worried she would find Kayla horribly injured. Instead the child sat upright, rubbing her dusty eyes in a terrible fit. Audrey snatched her up. She touched her nose wiping the wetness away. Blood coated her hand like a candied apple. Melissa was gone under the debris with an unmoving hand reaching out. Audrey touched it and knew.
She touched herself and Kayla all over inventorying for injuries. Everything looked black in a moment of deep shock. Her head pounded. The third floor apartment was now ten feet from the ground with slabs laid like slides leading down. For the first time since she'd entered the city it rained. Softy at first and then a near hurricane torrent pulled at the rising dust and the fires like trailing comet tails.
Walking past the park into an intersection a single girl surrounded by the flying reaper monsters screamed out. Her grimy inky black hair blew in the wind. Audrey set down the child who cried in her spot. Audrey tumbled over and out of the building. Tears fell from her face, invisible in the storm as she picked up a rock and threw it towards the monster girl and it curved away in the wind.
She ran up to the intersection. The monster girl dripped black blood from her mouth and she screamed and glared with beaming infectious hatred.
A police van barreled around a corner towards the girl. Audrey stopped and hoped it would run both her and the girl over. A membrane of black tar coated the ground and expanded outward from the girl. The reaper monsters swarmed the van, claws ripping through it like can openers. They turned the vehicle up on its side. The monsters ate the men inside, skinning them and ripping their bodies limb from limb as they screamed into the unhearing city.
Audrey tried to kindle her anger, to hate the responsible one so much that the hate could burn through everything inside but the monsters were ripping people apart everywhere and she was again infused with the fear and animal pain of a crumbling world.
She ran and climbed back to Kayla and clenched the child in her arms through the crying storm, until all was calm and until the world around them was cinder and debris and bodies.
She rocked the child back and forth.
'Shhhh shhhhhh.' She peered into the blackness of the city with the hate of ten people, despising god and imagining a unstable world of endless suffering for Nikki.
© R.J. Vickers
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.