After seeing that, Sam stayed home, inside, for two weeks. The water kept running, for the first few days, and she managed to fill the bathtub, every sink, all her water bottles, and the spare air mattress with water. The toilet continued to flush for a few days after that, and afterward she simply used the alley as disposal, promising herself to pay a few extra dollars in taxes the next year to pay for cleanup.
In the nighttime, she had waking terrors, shockingly similar in effect to those horrific nightmares she had suffered as a child.
If there are taxes next year, her brain said meanly, if there’s a government at all.
Shut up, Sam said in a hushed voice.
You’re going to die here, her brain whispered, just like the man in the alley.
I don’t know what that was, Sam replied, but it wasn’t a man.
Her brain smirked, and carried on, do you even know what happens when you run out of your medication?
Sam considered this for a long time. Her brain nudged her with a sharp elbow, forcing her back awake. You should be considering other options, her brain cackled gleefully. Like your neighbors gun.
Sam had no clever retort.
The hospitals were closed, so she couldn’t go there. Her medications were expensive, sure, but not because they were any fun to abuse; an overdose would simply make her feel groggy and without imagination. So most drug dealers wouldn’t have them in any helpful supply. The pharmacies were abandoned or taken over by thugs with guns and knives, and she had nothing to trade. It seemed ungodly stupid to trade food for meds. Water? She may as well stay out after dark if she wanted to die an idiot’s death.
So she took a sharpie from her desk, drew two big gridded rectangles on the bedroom wall, and parsed 15 days worth of medication into 2 months worth of smaller doses.
In two months you’ll be dead anyway, her brain snickered.
Sam smiled like they taught her in the hospital, a half-smile, and pretended not to care.
That night she watched the city skyline bloom with fire, and wondered to herself what in those shiny office buildings made such dark red flames. Her food supply was counted and recounted, in the dark, by touch. She slept in the bathroom, on blankets and pillows from the bed, and dreamed of the green-eyed girl.
The green-eyed girl was alone, in a roughly plastered room, with the dead-eye phalluses of cut pipes dotting the walls and ceiling. She was hungry, more than hungry, famished and starving and weak. She had a knife, at the very least, something to defend herself, although Sam knew she would most likely hurt herself all the worse if she were attacked. And THEY, they were going to attack her. THEY would kill her when they found her, and play with her first, and stain the walls oxblood with her screams.
THEY were of an ilk of subhuman that relished the madness in the streets. THEY loved to find families, huddled together in their makeshift shelters, and kill the children first, slowly, and making sure the parents watched. THEY had food from raiding households and stores, and were nowhere near above eating their kills. THEY believed in nothing, delighted in agony, and when they were bored, would kill one of their own, once again slowly, savoring each moment.
The green-eyed girl had watched them take her mom, defiling her in every possible way, and leaving nothing to mourn but a wet spot on the street.
Sam prayed, as all agnostics pray, to a nameless faceless god, for blindness, as she watched THEM bite and tear off pieces of the green-eyed girl’s mother; but she was able to watch to the very lingering end.
The green-eyed girl had been hiding in a doorway while THEY sliced her mother to pieces, biting her fist to hush the cries and screams. Thankfully, and Sam indeed thanked all the gods she could name, THEY were so delighted in their ‘games’ that they never noticed the green-eyed girl at all. Still, she stayed in the doorway, sobbing, until long after her mother and the horde of demons were gone. After a time, in the darkness that followed twilight, she crept to the nearest apartment building and broke a window with her fist. She took off her oversized coat, laid it over the rough edges of the windowpane, and crawled inside.
As the night wore on, the green-eyed girl could hear other families destroyed, shrieks of pain and heart-wrenching anguish, until finally exhaustion overcame adrenaline and she fell into a fitful asleep.
That was a good one, said her brain, as Sam struggled out of sleep.
Fuck you, she replied, fuck you and THEM.
Oh, they’ll fuck you, her brain replied, and for your sake, hopefully they’ll kill you first.
You’re an asshole, you know that? Sam said unnecessarily, hanging the sheets on the curtain rod to dry.
I’m you, said her brain, suddenly serious and not jovial at all, and when those pesky meds are done, I’m all of you that’ll be left.
Sam mulled this over, and chose to not reply. Bullies like her brain feed on fear, and that was almost the only thing she felt anymore. Fear, and hunger, and something she did not recognize. It was similar to how she felt at the hospital, when they told her she could not go home until she was stabilized. Perhaps if she were older or wiser at the time, she would know it as grief.
Kindling: Xibal, Sam and Tom 