Warning: There's some slight violence and bad language in this chapter, but I thought it wasn't enough to warrant an [M] rating. If anyone feels differently be sure to let me know and I'll update it ASAP. Enjoy reading :)

What does it taste like? This flitting freedom of mind and body. This feverdreamt trance. This precious stupor from which to wake is to be stolen away from a fate much preferred. Try and hold it, Seulgi. But then it falls away and she is left with nothing and she wakes in the cold and the dark with Yeri and Wendy sleeping quietly beside her.

In the bitter black morning they rose and moved again. Through the forest and out the other side upon wastelands untameable and sere lifeless slagpits where not even the wolves would wait for them. Where else to go but there. Seulgi led them and they kept a strong pace and by the early afternoon they tracked maybe ten or fifteen miles. There was a brief sun too. It cast them minute against the earth and they passed on the umbral luckless jackals of that terrain. They came to great ashhidden fields and at the far end a low stone wall and a wiremesh fence and beyond that more woodland. The trees long since dead but still thick enough to carry the black snow. They hopped the wall and Seulgi took the hatchet and hacked away a hole in the bottom of the wire and held it open as they scurried under and came out the other side.

The forest carried them on. They found a dirt path and Seulgi stopped and turned and looked about. She took the binoculars from the satchel and glassed the woods and when Yeri asked her what she was doing she said: ‘Somebody’s been down here. Recently.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because the ash hasn’t settled.’

They went on with caution. An hour later it was already dark and they had to use the flashlight for vision beyond their own peripheries. They came to the rusthulk of a caravan home a ways away from their path and stopped. Black ivy sprung from its metal pores. Behind it there were another two caravans and a trailer with its wheelbearings sheared. They waited and watched in the shadow of an outcropping. Nothing moved and it was silent save for the vultures. They waited some more. Nothing. Seulgi led them closer. They stood in the centre of the caravan circle and looked about. Still nothing moved and they were alone. Wendy pointed at the wheelless trailer and then at the caravans. They looked like rare prehuman relics. Aeruginous arthropods put to rest.

‘Alright,’ Seulgi said. ‘You two look in those.’ She pointed to the trailer and one of the caravans. They split up. She went to one of the other caravans and pried open the ancient door with the hatchet. Inside just darkness. Faint reek of woodsmoke. Broken ceramics strewn across the floor and an unruly staleness that she didn’t much like. She opened the cabinets and then the drawers and found nothing. All had been emptied long ago. Years perhaps. She checked the bathroom. A grimesoaked waterless toilet. Glass in pieces over the seat from a broken mirror hanging above the sink. She checked the taps and pulled the toilet chain to be sure. Nothing. She went outside and checked the gas tank and found it empty nor was there even the smell of gas. Yeri and Wendy had disappeared inside the trailer. She went to the other caravan and took the hatchet and wedged it into the door crack and jarred it open. Dark and dim. Immediately the stench of the rotten dead. She closed the door and backed away and refused to look.

They came out of the trailer with nothing and they went the three together to the final caravan and searched it top to bottom. Lightless dust motes thick in the air. Peeling floor and halfhanging wood cupboards that were empty. In a cabinet below the sink unit they found a small sealed pot full of screws and nails. Seulgi left it. They searched the gas tank to no avail. Then the trailer again. When they were finished they left the circle and took the road and kept at a strong pace. How many more caravans like these. How many more trailer parks. Roadside carstalls. Makeshift hotdog bars. Jeep seatvendors. These lost indicatives of a null world.  

In the evening it grew colder. Even in the woods the wind was bitter and they were forced on without safety or shelter. Red battered faces. Seulgi still the bloodied vision of some daemonic slaughterer. Yeri trailed behind them but she did not stop. Seulgi turned to her in the black snows. Fractal beauty and fractal innocence. Such unbearable pain. Where would she go from here? Irredeemable heart and unparsable mind and spirit. Would she be the same again? Would she live but for a dreamer’s hope of greener fields? What left in her but violence and misdirection? Could it be fixed and by whom and when? Did it even matter? When they came to rest Seulgi watched her quietly. Some feet away from them. Such devastation. An aimless anger rising in her but what was its purpose. Senseless. Senseless.

By last light they came to another field. A slanted hill up towards more woodland. Snow thick over the ground. In the middle of this vast waste a sight unreckonable by sanity. Four charred bodies run through with great wood stakes. Smouldering spits and their blackened inhuman remains. Their faceless faces. What dead flesh remained from their bloodless arms like ashwet paper. In the air still the rancid stink of decomposition. Beside them a small stool and a stack of packingcrates set like some pulpit primed for choirsong or last rites or recitation of holy scripture for the harrowed unwilling dead. They went on past.

‘Don’t look,’ Seulgi said. ‘Jesus, don’t look.’

Around them used tinder and snowswept brambles and leaves where there had been a great fire. Flies picking at what was not yet victim to nature’s godless course. And that stench. Seulgi led them on from behind. Don’t look, she said again. Mother of mercy, please don’t look. What depravities to stoop so low. What of man’s higher order or perhaps not at all and in this ravaged hellscape his truer nature yet still made for purpose. To become this or live to become perpetrator of this inhumanity. This heinous unspeakable sacrilege. Oh god. Seulgi turned and saw them again. Saw them there. What in their last minutes to think of? Where to even begin. Oh god. But to allow this what of his presence on earth at all. She ducked to the side of their advance and doubled over heaving. Nothing came out but dry spit. There was nothing left of her.

‘Are you okay?’ Wendy said.

‘Keep going. I’ll be fine.’

They did. To the top of the field and then into more woodlands amidst dim moonlight. Minute alien figures adrift in an unguided land. Where the wolves in this place? Where to be? Seulgi pushed on ahead. An hour they walked. Then she began to cry. The others did not notice nor did they stop. By midnight they came upon a silhouette faint and indistinct. It stood just off from the path. Seulgi stopped them. They went prone in the deep ash. She took the binoculars again and scanned that dismal atavism beyond worldly shadows. Long and wide and unmoving. Sloped roof of black soot. Windowless woodwalls. She put the binoculars away and stood and the others followed. Wendy turning to her and saying: ‘What is it?’

‘A cabin,’ Seulgi said. ‘Come on.’

‘Is it safe?’

‘We’ll find out.’

It was a logcabin long since put to use. They entered into darkness. The familiar air of pineglue and woodsmoke. Stale breaths in that hollow place. Dust settled across the floor and up the walls and motes painted brightly in white moonlight pale as milkglass through the door’s opening. Inside it seemed untouched. A sofa of weathered ageworn fabric. A dusty carpet holding the patterns of extinct civilisations. Empty logless fireplace. Not much more. They checked the cupboards and the drawers and then the small bathroom and found that everything had been taken save the furniture itself. Empty. They sat in darkness and Seulgi took out the flashlight and set it down and turned it on. Lit there in the dim glow they looked almost angelic. Filthridden faces and their stink of sweat. Unwashed hair thick with all manner of unwanted sortings. What to do with them. Pale sightly children without aim. What to do.

‘I’ll be back soon,’ Seulgi said, rising. She made for the door and Wendy called out to her.

‘Where are you going?’

‘Need to get something. I’ll be around.’

‘You’ll be around?’

‘Yeah.’

‘What does that mean.’

‘It just means I’ll be close.’

‘Close.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Okay.’

‘I won’t be long.’

She went out towards the trees. Keeping the cabin in her sight. Along the trail she took wayward twigs and brambles and began collecting them. In a few minutes she had enough for a small fire. She turned back towards the cabin. A weak yellow light through the door’s shimmerglass. A pallid ripple without warmth. She let the twigs fall from her arms and stood there watching the door with no real cognition. What beyond that door? What to lie there? And if she were to open it, what on the other side? What but those halfframed creatures, her warrants, her protected kindred. Her timeless vindication in its finality. What of them. She began to cry again. Tears hot and wet on her numb face. She looked from the door to the sky. A gibbous moon hung. She stood there and said: If this is not your punishment then make it so that I never have to endure such for I cannot take it much longer. I cannot. Give me a sign or if not then something. Give me something. Anything.

She came back in with the twigs and set them in the fireplace and took the zippo from her satchel and began trying to light them. They would not burn and they had no gasoline left. She tried it again. It was too cold to even think. Bitter hands she could not feel. She turned to Wendy. ‘Give me the bag,’ she said. From it she took the toilet paper and tore a good amount off and lit it and set it under the brambles and prayed. It rose in a tiny fire full of cinders and she knew that it would not last long but it was something.

‘Come on,’ she said. They sat in front of the fire and boiled some of the water with one of the cans of corn. When they had finished they took a mouthful of the peanut butter each. Seulgi watched them eat. Gaunt faces and she could see their jawbones click like mechanical pistons. Their deathly thin frames and still in Wendy’s eyes that same sickness as if in waiting. When she slept at night Seulgi would stay awake and hear the fluid in her lungs and know that it was bad, know that she was worse than she would ever admit. Then to Yeri. Mute unapproachable soul. Lost somewhere far back along their path. Lost in that storeroom with a hatchet in her hand. A killer’s hands.