Chapter Text
"I guess there are other people here after all, huh?" Seff said under her breath. Rohan nodded. She continued, "I wonder how they got electricity. Generators, probably. Seems stupid to waste it, but maybe they want to advertise their presence." She took the lantern from Rohan and doused it.
Rohan shuffled up to Seff's side and shrunk up against her. "I don't trust it," she said.
Seff shook her head. "Me neither, but maybe it's worth a shot." She walked through the open doorway. Rohan clung to her arm. "If something goes wrong, I'll deal with it. You run or hide."
They walked through the wide aisles together. Freezers flickered aimlessly, full of things that had no doubt spoiled already. Things had been cleaned up to some extent, though most things remained on the shelves. The wilted and blackened produce which had been there once was mostly gone, though some still remained on the ground. Despite the overt appearance that the place had been somewhat cared for in the time since they were last there, the sick smell of rot lingered throughout the store. Whatever central heating had been enabled was futile in its job of keeping out the cold in most respects, and only seemed to make things worse.
The wind made a faint rushing noise as it weaved through the shelves, disrupting the familiar stillness in the air; the motion was a product of the heating, Seff guessed. She sniffed the air for people, but the smell of rot disguised them. Seeing no other choice, she called out, "Is anyone here?"
No response. She and Rohan kept walking.
One of the back doors swung open. Seff felt for the knife silhouetted against her.
"Hello?" came a voice from the back. "Is someone here?"
Seff stepped forward. "I am."
"Oh!" The source of the voice came forward in turn, into the light. It was a lynx, wearing an old military coat and thick, heavy boots that echoed with each step. Their eyes lit up as soon as they saw Seff. "I wasn't expecting a wolf with that voice. We heard some stomping a few ticks ago. Was that you?"
"Who are you?" she asked, her tone guarded.
"I'm Rory," the lynx replied. "You?"
Seff hesitated. She supposed there wasn't really any risk in Rory knowing her name. "Seff."
Rory nodded. "Interesting." He took another step forward and looked Seff up and down as though he were appraising her.
"I haven't…" She glanced around, looking for Rohan; she had disappeared without her noticing. Her heart dropped; her ears pricked up. "I haven't seen anyone else in weeks."
"Come in," he said. "You'll be cold otherwise." He placed a paw on Seff's back and led her away, into the room he'd emerged from.
"Wait—" Seff said, but Rory kept walking, and suddenly she felt weak and awkward trying to pull away. She made a vague gesture into the distance and hoped Rohan saw.
The area Rory led her into was dark; darker than anything outside, Seff felt, however impossible that was, and as soon as he closed the door behind them she could not even see her own paw in front of her.
As she entered, she felt the temperature of the air drop, abruptly, by about twenty degrees, and then continue to fall. She had not noticed before how well the heating had worked inside the store, even with the door smashed open and the generator running in shifts. The passageway felt almost like a shadowed forest, like one of the places off the road outside, though she was sure it was just a storage room. She felt around for a wall to get a sense of space, and found nothing.
"What is this?"
"We're looking for an enclave," Rory replied. "Isn't that vague?"
Pointing out the uselessness of an unhelpful statement, Seff thought, did not make it any less so. "Frustratingly. Is anyone else here? Have you set up any sort of community?"
"Sometimes," Rory said. "There are others. They're not always here, but now they're back a little further."
"How'd you get power here?" Seff heard Rory's footsteps shrink away to someplace distant, ahead and to her right, and ran until she wasn't so far away from them.
"Generators."
"Do they not work in here?" She felt the urge to gesture around vaguely, though she suspected it was slightly pointless.
"It's difficult to explain," Rory replied. "But, effectively, yes. Any attempt to let light in here, past a few feet from the door, seems to fail. It's not much further now."
"Why?"
"Why anything?" Rory asked. "How have you gone this long avoiding it?"
"Avoiding what?"
"You think the sun's just disappeared out of some mundane logic? The world's stopped spinning or something? Earth's been ejected?"
"Yes?"
"How often have you gone out?"
"I've been trying to avoid it," Seff replied.
"Have you seen the moon?"
"Sure," Seff replied. "It's still shining. That throws a wrench in a lot of things, I'm aware. I know that much."
"It hasn't just stopped shining. It's been full for dozens of ticks now."
Seff froze.
"That's not true," she replied. She began to consider whether there was a way out, though she almost got the sense she'd not be able to find the door if she began walking backwards. Instead, she continued following Rory, anxious to not be left behind.
"It is. We've been watching. I've been watching."
"The sky?"
"Lots of things."
Seff felt the cold nip at the tips of her ears.
"Haven't you seen them?" Rory continued. "That should have been the first sign something was wrong. The moment you laid eyes on them."
Seff shook her head. "Them?"
"I don't know. You want me to call them monsters? It's probably apt." Rory laughed. "God, even now—" he paused abruptly, "—even in here, we have to watch out, have to listen for them. You don't think the cold alone killed everyone, do you? You don't think everyone was eaten or starved? You don't think that's why you haven't found anyone?"
"I assumed—"
"You assumed wrong. They come out outside. Inside is safe. Outside doesn't like light. Outside swallows it up. Inside lets it in. Inside we can run the generators." Rory's voice took on an almost frantic note. "This is outside."
"We're inside a store, Rory. Are you feeling all right?" Seff said.
"Don't use my name like that. You're being obtuse," he replied. "It's not about location. It's just a property of space. Affinity for light, for comfort." He sighed. "Outside, there are things… creatures. Sometimes we see them as other things, more like people. Sometimes we see them for what they are. They're just shadows, really. Transparent."
Seff didn't reply.
"You think I'm crazy. You think I'm talking about ghosts."
"I don't think you're talking about ghosts."
Silence. They kept walking.
Seff was not as shocked as she had expected to be, nor did she think Rory was nearly as crazy as she had expected to. This almost seemed as good an explanation as any, though she didn't understand it at all.
"There's something wrong with the world," Rory said after a moment. "There's been a line drawn, all of a sudden, between what's safe and what's not. You're lucky to be alive."
"How far is it until we're back 'inside'?" The word felt unfamiliar in its context.
"I don't know. Outside places seem to take a while to traverse, no matter what."
"It didn't seem too strange outside the store."
Rory hesitated. "It's not a… stark line."
"What do you mean by that?"
"'Outside' is just a word," he said. "Some places are outside. The whole world's outside now. But some places, like in here, are more outside than outside. It's a semantic distinction, but it helps. It's good to know the nomenclature if you'll be with us."
Seff was not any less confused, but in that confusion was a dull sort of awareness. She could only liken it to the sense one gets in a particularly vivid dream where, despite the dream following its own, nonsensical logic, and despite nothing in it ever being clearly explained, one understands at once the workings of the world. Seff felt she was on the verge of that sort of understanding: she could very nearly intuit what Rory meant, and was simultaneously the closest and furthest she'd ever been to understanding what had happened to the world.
The two of them came to a point. She felt Rory's paw on her abdomen stopping her as she tried to step forward.
"We're here," he explained, and opened a door. Light poured into the space, swallowed up after only a few feet. Seff hungrily rushed into it.
Inside, the space felt oddly mundane. It was a storage room; Seff was not sure what she had expected during the trek, but it was not what she was met with. The room was heavy with lukewarm air. Stacked, crumpled boxes lined the walls. One or two inspirational posters with houseplants on them were taped behind them. Inside sat a brown bear and a fox; the bear turned to Seff, while the fox looked away. In the corner of the room, a generator sat, humming and sputtering, beside a can of what she assumed was diesel or gasoline.
Rory stood in the light. Even with the lights in the store on, she felt somehow like this was the first good look she could get of him. His fur shone with a bright toasted silver color, while his eyes, gold and bright, looked tired and dead and hungry somehow. She shuddered.
"Aren't you worried about the fumes?" Seff asked, gesturing to the generator.
Rory shook his head. "We leave the door open and shut it off at intervals, every tick or so, to air out the room. We can't leave it outside unsupervised. We don't know what'll happen to it."
"What about the store itself? It's larger."
"It's easier to access the grid from here. Plus," Rory gestured around the room. "It's secure here. I mean, the store is secure, mostly, but the door's still smashed open, and it activates on motion detection, anyways."
"Why wouldn't you cut off the door's power and board it up to keep them from getting in?"
"They don't like light," Rory explained. "They being the shadows. Monsters. Creatures. Hunters. Call them what you will. I think epithets are a bit exhausting, personally. I'm not worried about them coming in the door. I'm more worried about thieves. And thieves are smart enough to find another way in." He turned to Seff. "You're not a thief."
Seff shook her head. "No. I have a generator of my own. I haven't been running it because I don't want to run out of fuel."
Rory nodded. "Fair."
"I don't think I could haul yours all the way back to where I live."
"You look strong."
"Not that strong." Seff glanced around again. "What is this place, anyways?"
"Like I said," Rory replied. "An enclave."
Seff narrowed her eyes. "You still haven't told me what that's supposed to mean."
"I thought you'd catch on," Rory said. "This room. It's an enclave. An annex, maybe? I don't have a thesaurus on me. It's a place that's inside, in what I can only assume is a whole impossibly large space within and behind this grocery store that is not."
"And by inside, you mean…"
"Having an affinity for light," the bear piped up. "Containing an affinity for light and warmth, or at least a tolerance for retaining those things."
"Exactly," Rory said. "This room is warm. The lights function. We can run the generator here without fear that it'll be destroyed or disappear. Nobody will just vanish."
"And it's the only spot in this whole back area like it?" Seff asked.
"As far as we can tell. We haven't done much exploring. We're content to live on what's here. It's too risky to go far into the dark, anyways. We just walk in a straight line. If we think very hard about not reaching this room, it seems to get easier. If we focus too hard on getting here, we get all turned around."
Seff felt once more like she was losing her mind.
There was a break, an abrupt, imposing silence. Rory's eyes darted to hers, then back away; he tapped his paw against a box, let a claw out, and pierced the cardboard.
"We lost someone once," he said. His voice cut through the silence like an icicle cutting through the still air under an awning. "He disappeared when we were trying to get here. He was separated from us."
"Was he trying to get here?"
"As far as we can tell, he thought too hard about what he wanted. He detached from the group and wandered off someplace else out there."
"Someplace else?" Seff asked.
"We found his body," Rory replied. "Eventually. We don't go outside much, but we went on an expedition once and found him. It must have been a w—about seven ticks—later."
"Where?"
She wanted to ask what they had done with it; she held her tongue.
"In the woods."
"In the woods," Seff repeated. "And he was in"—she gestured back to the door—"there when he got lost, correct? In the dark? Trying to get here?"
"He was wandering in the dark with us, repeating it to himself," Rory said. "'Stockroom stockroom stockroom'. Wouldn't stop."
"Halfway gone before we lost track of him," the fox added, with a note of bitter sadness.
"We had to shut him up before he vanished, or we'd all be where he ended up. It was listening," Rory continued. "To our thoughts. Our words. It was trying to trick us."
"You're saying it can tell where you're trying to go?"
"Seems like it, at least to some extent," Rory said. "Now, I don't claim to understand any of it. It's just what we've observed."
Seff hesitated. "Why are you telling me all this?" she asked haltingly.
"You seem like you'd be good to have on our side. At a glance, at least. We have food, but not forever. We're working on putting together a team for an excursion." He said it with the same degree of friendliness as everything else, but the way he emphasized the word gave it an air of malice that Seff couldn't quite place. "Figuring out if anyone's ranching anymore, if it's even possible." Rory gestured vaguely to himself. "Sustainably getting meat is, you know, the priority, given." He didn't broach any sort of alternative, but Seff understood. She narrowed her eyes.
"Ranching?"
"If anyone's still raising real animals, that's the goal. Four legs is fair game. Birds are fair game. Fish is fair game. That's what we're looking for." He hesitated. "We're not monsters, Seff."
"And you're going out in the dark?"
"Outside, properly. Where there's still a moon. I, at least, get the sense that the dark in here is worse than the dark out there."
Seff felt she had already established her confusion plenty. "When did you get here? Did you just put all this together?"
"We've been here about two dozen ticks. We just got the generator running recently, but we've been operating it in bursts to not wear out the fuel." Rory took a seat beside the bear. "Another reason for the excursions."
"How long is a tick?"
Rory paused. "A day. I thought you'd catch on. It felt a bit silly to call them days, given those aren't really a concern."
"Probably," Seff conceded.
"We have a clock here that's been running for a while. We just make a tick mark every time it hits the twelve twice. That's where the name comes from. I figure, even if time isn't working right, we might as well keep track of what we can, given the clocks still run. Particularly since there's nothing else to go off."
"How often are you planning the excursions?"
"We haven't come up with a regular schedule. We're planning on leaving again in a few ticks. I hope you decide to come with us."
"Right." Seff turned to the door and placed one paw on the handle. "Listen, I should really be going. I have things to attend to."
"Be sure you know what you're doing out there."
She turned the handle. The door made a low creaking sound. She paused.
"Wait. Before I leave," Seff said, "have you seen two white hares?"
"Describe them."
"A man and a woman, I assume. I don't have many other identifying details. Probably fairly small, but I suppose I don't know that for sure."
Rory stopped to think, then shook his head.
"That's all, then," Seff said. "Thanks anyways."
"Are you looking for them? Maybe we could help," Rory said. "Are they friends of yours?"
"Sure. We'll call it that." She hesitated. "I'd appreciate the help, actually."
"Let us know if you need it," he continued. "We're happy to come with."
"Thanks. I will," Seff replied.
“Oh, and please come back once you’re done. We could really use someone like you for the expeditions. One of us will be here, almost certainly,” Rory said. He offered Seff a disarming smile and perked his ears up.
Seff nodded. If nothing else, Rory seemed eager to assist, and she supposed it wouldn't hurt to have more eyes on it. “I’ll be back eventually,” she said. "Maybe in a day—a tick—or two."
She opened the door, stepped out, and was swallowed by the pitch darkness.