Chapter Text
They continued on past where they had initially met, into uncharted territory; Seff noticed Rohan bristle a bit. She, too, stiffened, and again, walked a bit ahead, hoping to at least shield Rohan a bit. They passed a few more bent and dented street signs, and Seff thought of monsters and wondered whether the signs had always been that way.
As they walked further, Seff swore the scent of pine around them grew a bit weaker, and the scent of asphalt and stone, though still muffled by the snow, grew stronger.
“See anything ahead?” she asked.
“No,” Rohan said, and the two continued on. Seff strained to try and catch the smell of stale gasoline, but came up with nothing. They came to a fork in the road, and the forest thinned out, though it was too dark to see very far, even for a wolf.
“I think it should be to the left,” Seff said. “Left and straight on.” She turned and gestured for Rohan to follow along, perking her ears up and checking to be sure the faint sound of footsteps and the light cast behind her wasn’t leaving.
The road was mostly flat ahead, though it did curve downhill for a time. They arrived at one of the slopes, and Seff looked back at Rohan.
“I’ll take the lantern again,” she offered.
“I can handle it,” Rohan replied. “Here.”
Without waiting, she sat and pushed herself down the slope, sliding easily on the ice. The light disappeared with her. Seff rushed to catch up, crashing through the snow as she ran and stumbled. Rohan sat at the bottom of the slope. She looked up at Seff.
“See?” The lantern swung from side-to-side in her paw.
“Right,” Seff said. “I believe you. Don’t do that again.”
The smell of asphalt was stronger here, while the forest had faded; a few suburban homes dotted the sides of the road and grew greater in number the further Seff strained to look. Unsurprisingly, all of the lights were off. A few in the distance even appeared to have burned down, though she wasn’t certain. Silently, she thanked Rohan.
“Do you think anyone lives in those houses?” Seff asked.
Rohan shrugged. “I’m from another street. I didn’t see anything.”
“Should we see if any have food? If they’re unlocked?”
Rohan nodded and followed Seff up the driveway and to the front door of one of the houses. She found it, surprisingly, unlocked, and after straining for a moment it fell open, casting out glittering pieces of ice onto the porch.
Seff had, in some exceptionally anxious part of her brain, expected to be met abruptly with the overwhelming smell of death, but though there was a pervasive and subtle smell of rotting plant matter drifting throughout the place and lingering in the back of her throat, Seff gratefully assumed the house was corpse-free.
Of course, she noted, the cold could have also just preserved things; she decided she would continue walking in front of Rohan. She hoped the inhabitants were dead; she assumed they were, and merely somewhere else, having frozen to death someplace far away.
“Let’s just check the pantry for canned things,” she said, making her way through the front hall.
The house was perfectly preserved; she could have called it "lived-in" if she had thought anyone there was still alive. It smelled faintly of cobwebs, a few of which glittered in the corners of the hall, and of new layers of stain on the hardwood floors, and beyond the sound of her footsteps, was completely silent. As she made her way to the kitchen, she glanced at the sofa in the living room; blankets were strewn across it and piled atop each other, seemingly as many as were in the house. Toys littered the floor; plastic soldiers and barricades, mostly, still organized in their battalions. Condensation had gathered on the walls, as if they were encased in diamonds.
Seff looked away.
She opened the pantry and looked in the back, on the top shelf. Rohan held up the lantern, and Seff took it from her and used it to check the very back. All together, she came out with a few cans of spinach and two of chickpeas, though without any meat or tuna; Seff assumed the house belonged to members of those species without the palate for such things.
“This should be good,” Seff said. “Spinach and chickpeas.” She opened the bag and stuffed the cans inside. “That should tide you over for a bit. Do you want to turn back, or keep going?”
“Did you get anything?” Rohan asked.
“Yes, I just said I got spinach and chickpeas. Can you not have those? I’m sorry. I don’t know much about, um, your species.”
“No. No, I should be able to have those. At least from time to time. Don’t want to be picky,” Rohan replied. “I meant for you. Did you get any meat?”
Seff shook her head. “I’ll survive. I have a little bit left.”
“We should keep going, then,” Rohan said. “Until you find something. If you see a barn, go inside and look for hay. I think it keeps well, and I can live off that. Maybe there’ll be something dead you can eat.”
Seff turned around. Rohan looked up and met her gaze.
“Maybe,” she replied.
She zipped the bag shut, passed the lantern back to Rohan, and gestured for her to follow out of the house.
“What do you normally get at the grocery store?” Seff asked, stepping back out into the cold. “Maybe we can find some of that.”
“Fresh vegetables.”
Seff clicked her tongue. “Right. Not an option. Anything dried or canned?”
“They sell hay in the back. That’ll work.”
“Anything but hay? It’s hard to carry a lot of it.”
“You want me to starve?”
Seff sighed and moved the bag over her shoulder.
"I, uh," Rohan said. “The hay is for me. You worry about the canned stuff. I’ll carry it.”
“You’re small. We both will,” Seff replied. “Don’t worry.”
They walked back up the driveway and past more houses; Seff decided any more they visited would be on the way back. She caught the faint smell of rot from the windows of a few, and made a note in her head to avoid them, and strained her ears to try and hear any distant conversation ahead on the road; she came back with nothing, and chose to continue walking, rather than reflect on it. Every so often, she checked back behind her just to make sure the lantern was still shining. She watched it swing once in a while, like it was trying to break free from its holder, and made sure Rohan’s skinny, fragile paws never came too close to the flame, though it was trapped behind glass.
The hills had largely evened out, and as the trees vanished to row after row of houses, Seff watched for the point the road would abruptly cut and take a sharp left; into parking lots that already felt archaic, and when it came she no longer smelled the dying forest and only could detect what might have been meticulous storefront landscaping, several weeks before. She recalled there having been hydrangeas in a few spots before, as she turned into the street and cut across the snow-blanketed lot, but everything was obfuscated by the same smell of cold rot that slashed across her nostrils.
The trees that had speckled the asphalt, in an attempt to make things feel a little less barren, or maybe to blindly flail against everything that had been done to the environment, had all died already; most had fallen, faster than the old trees in the forest, and others, once held stable by stakes as they grew, strained against their chains, desperate to collapse under the weight of their own death.
Seff turned away and towards the old grocery store. Its glass door, though closed, was smashed clean through; she took this as an indicator of life, albeit life that was potentially strong and prone to violence and had potentially exhausted some or all of the resources inside, and felt a bit conflicted on the matter.
"Be careful," she advised, stepping over a few shards that glittered in the moonlight and mingled hesitantly with the ice, though the majority had fallen inside the store. "Don't cut yourself." In truth, it was more a reminder for herself than for Rohan; she was far larger than the rabbit, and struggled to fit through the opening without lacerating anything, though by tucking her ears back and making herself as small as possible she managed to slip through unscathed. Rohan slipped through after her, taking care only to avoid the places where the jagged edge of the broken glass rose up a bit too high for her to step over.
Inside, the store showed no trace of the destruction of its entryway, barring a few toppled shelves, which appeared remarkably peaceful; so much so that Seff barely noticed them at all. The same pervasive smell of rot remained, though it was minimized by the cold; most things were. Towards the back, the entire butcher's counter had been ransacked; behind it, stacks of hay remained untouched; even without prints and tracks, and even, hopefully, long-gone, the broader shape of the culprit, or culprits, betrayed itself easily. She hoped they had lacked the foresight to go after the preserved food, too; she hoped they hadn't been here in weeks.
She and Rohan made their way to the back edge of the store, navigating over fallen bottles of sauces and vinegar. Seff's boots crunched against broken glass in places, remarkably similar in tone to the ice outside in the few places it had collected. She kept an eye and an ear out with each sound, but noticed nothing too out of place, though the silence was itself bizarre.
Seff was unsure what she had expected: the faint buzzing of refrigerators or fluorescent lights, perhaps. She subconsciously expected, at the very least, flies to accompany the rot. She recognized that all the flies were probably dead. Flakes of some sediment between ash and snow drifted up from the ground with each step.
She thought for a moment she heard faint conversation, but pricked up her ears to nothing at all.
As they walked through the store, Rohan wrinkled her nose.
"Something smells terrible," she said.
"A lot of what's here is rotting," Seff replied. "I've been smelling it for a while. The cold suppresses it a bit, but I assume it was at least warm enough here for a while for things to get going. Even if all the bacteria are dead by now, they left something pretty foul behind."
"Gross."
"It was probably decently insulated, too. If I had to guess, there was a period of time between the power going out, their backup generator failing, and it being as cold as it is now. If you've ever forgotten meat in the fridge for a while, it's sort of the same principle."
Rohan looked up at Seff.
"Why would I have done that?"
"Right," Seff replied. "Never mind. I mean, the produce here is probably all sludge by now, too."
"That's not refrigerated, is it?"
"I actually worked at a grocery store for a bit," Seff replied. "A lot of it gets taken out to be refrigerated overnight. But it doesn't matter. It probably got left on the shelves in all the panic, and either rotted or froze. Like everything else." She made her way to a more open part of the store. "See?"
A collection of baskets sat out in the center of the floor, filled with avocados and apples and various unrecognizable things, all of which had turned sickly shades and broken down. Behind them stood rows of darkened shelves containing stacks upon stacks of frost-blackened, once-moldering, wilted produce.
"I think these were starting to spoil," Seff said. She didn't feel particularly compelled to get any closer. "The cold did the rest."
"So what are you going to do?"
"Well, hay doesn't rot or freeze, does it?"
"It does if you let moisture get in," Rohan said. "We had a few issues with that. We considered buying a dehydrator, but it was too expensive to get one that was big enough."
"Big family?"
Rohan shook her head. "Just me and my parents. We just eat a lot," she replied. "I guess I had a twin brother. But he died when I was a kit. Like, a year old."
"That's sad," Seff said. "I'm sorry that happened."
"Doesn't matter." She shrugged.
"I mean, I'd be sad if I had a brother and he died."
"I don't remember him at all. He was Alder, and I was going to be Rowan, but my parents decided they didn't like the sound for whatever reason, so it's a little bit off. I guess they just didn't care for the 'wuh'. They thought it sounded too messy."
"Is that your…" Seff tried to think of a better word than "lore" (perhaps one which didn't evoke mostly fantasy-themed video games with three hundred in-universe books, the details of which had been drunkenly exposited to her one night and now formed an inextricable association with the word) and couldn't really find one. "Is that the story of your name?"
"I guess. It's probably better they changed my name, since it would have been kind of stupid if we were both just trees. And it works better now that I'm on my own."
"Were they going for a matching set?"
"Exactly. No match, though."
"I used to make cabinets out of alder every once in a while. It's a beautiful wood. Never rowan, though," Seff replied, stepping over another fallen shelf and taking some hay from the pile, checking it gingerly for moisture, though the cold made it hard to tell. She didn't see any mold, at least. She sniffed it, but wasn't sure what to compare it to. "Does this smell all right to you?" She held out a bit for Rohan.
"I think so," she said. "It's too cold to be sure."
Seff stuffed a bit in her bag and passed more to Rohan. "Can you carry that?"
Rohan nodded. "It feels dry. Will the lantern set it on fire?"
"It's behind glass. It should be fine. We can douse it, though, if you really want." She hesitated. "I can probably find the way back without."
"I don't trust that," Rohan said. "No offense."
"My night vision's pretty good," Seff replied. "But fair enough."
"The glass will protect it, though? The body won't get too hot?"
"I'm not sure how hot the bottom part gets. I can't say I've ever thought to touch it."
Rohan held the lantern high up and kept the hay under her other arm.
After a moment, Seff asked, "Do you remember where you last saw your parents?"
"What?" Rohan asked. "Where does that come from?"
"Just thinking. You want to get back to them, yes?"
"Of course I do. Jesus. What do you think?"
"I mean, I'll help with that, once you're fed. I just want to know if you have any leads."
Rohan took a bit of hay off the pile and ate it, as if to make a point, and as if she had only just realized how hungry she was. "Great. Glad that's the plan, and you're not going to kidnap me forever."
"I'm not kidnapping you. You can leave whenever you want."
"Voluntary kidnapping," Rohan replied.
Seff sighed.
"I saw them running into the woods," Rohan said. "I tried following them, but I kind of ended up splitting off and just focusing on hiding." She trailed off subtly, and averted Seff's eyes. "Just ran into the other bit of the forest."
"We'll find them eventually," Seff replied. "Promise."
"Don't do that," Rohan said, with the same hesitant quality she had gained a moment before. "You're going to disappoint yourself."
"I'll try, then. No promises?"
"Better."
"Do you have anything of theirs?" Seff asked, taking some more hay from the pile after checking it for moisture.
"Not directly," Rohan replied. "I mean, they gave me everything I have. Does that count?"
"Sort of? It's fine," Seff said. She turned around and made her way to one of the other aisles, and Rohan followed. "I'll make it work. If I had something they had been in a lot of contact with, like a scrap of clothing, I could track them that way. Otherwise, I'll just assume they smell and look like you."
"They don't look like me. Their fur is white," Rohan said.
"Yeah?"
"Our undercoats change in response to the sunlight, but there was always something wrong with mine. It never changed in winter. Or, apparently, now." She paused. "You've been calling me a rabbit for a while, and I thought it'd be awkward to say anything, but technically, I'm an arctic hare."
"Oh." Seff said. "Sorry. I should've known better." Once, a long time ago, she'd been observant enough to see the distinction, at least once it formalized into cliques. She supposed it had been a while since she'd seen either. "But it's good their fur's white, isn't it?"
"What?"
"They'll blend in."
"But we're looking for them," Rohan pointed out. "That'll make it harder."
"I mean if there's danger," Seff said. "It's, you know, a defense mechanism."
"Right," Rohan said. "So I'm the unlucky one."
"I never said that."
"You implied it."
Seff squinted. "You're putting words in my mouth." She walked through the aisle and took a large can of preserved meat from the shelf. "Hey, that's good."
"What is?"
"Whoever ransacked this place clearly thought they were too good for salted preserved meat product," she replied, stuffing as many cans as she could in her bag. "But I'm not."
Rohan narrowed her eyes. "I heard that stuff screws up your blood pressure." She clarified after a moment, in haltingly paced sentences, "I mean, that's what my mom said when it came up. Not like it did very often, 'cause she never ate it. For obvious reasons."
"Starvation does worse," Seff said. "That's kind of my primary concern."
"Okay. True."
"I can think about my blood pressure when I'm sure I'll be alive for the rest of the year."
"Me too."
"You'll live," Seff said. "And you don't have to worry about your blood pressure. You're twelve. And you don't eat this stuff."
"Well, I'll worry about my blood pressure if I end up being your age."
"You will." Seff hesitated. "End up being my age, I mean. You won't have to worry about your blood pressure. I shouldn't have to worry about my blood pressure." She paused for a moment to allow her sentences to regain some structure. "You brought it up. How old do you think I am?"
Rohan shrugged.
"C'mon. I literally told you earlier. What year do you think I was born?" Seff asked, looking through more of the items on the shelf.
"Zero."
She turned and raised her brow.
"Like Jesus," Rohan clarified.
Seff sighed, and Rohan stifled a laugh. "I am in my late twenties," she replied.
"I know," Rohan said.
"Whatever," Seff said, but her lip curled up at the back as she sorted through more cans. "Ooh."
"What is it?"
"Corned beef. If I can find some rice, I can dilute all this stuff down so it's not so unbearably salty."
"Corned beef and rice?" Rohan asked.
"Yeah. They eat it somewhere. I forget what region."
"Huh."
"I'd look it up online, but, y'know." Seff shrugged and put the cans in her bag, which was looking quite full already. She walked around the aisle and into another, and returned a moment later with about a pound of uncooked white rice. She tossed it into the bag as well, on top of everything else, and zipped it shut. "We can come back," she said, looking back at Rohan. "Now that we know what's here."
"Should we head back?" Rohan held the hay close to her chest.
"Unless there's anything else you want, we can head back. Or look for more people."
"I think we should drop this stuff off before we look for anyone else. So they don't steal it," Rohan suggested.
Seff nodded. "Then, anything else you want?"
"Candy?" Rohan asked.
Seff darted off to another aisle and found a bag of oversized lemon drops. "Hopefully these kept," she said, walking back to Rohan.
"Do you think lemon drops rot?"
Seff shrugged. "Do you think I know anything about candy?"
"You were a kid once."
"Yeah. A boring kid with a dentist for a dad."
"Is that true?" Rohan asked.
"Oral surgeon, really. But yes, I was painfully boring. Still am."
"Damn."
Rohan sighed dramatically. "Of everyone who could have kidnapped me."
"I apologize for my unforgivable ignorance and for the fact that I do not own a PlayStation Vita." Seff tucked the lemon drops in the bag. "At least there's candy. Small concession."
"Small concession," Rohan agreed.