by Jones, Isla
“Food is food,” I chided, spooning clumps of soggy rice into his bowl.
I’ve never been very good at cooking.
Castle hummed and shut the door behind him. He put something on the floor—I couldn’t see past the second armchair—then dragged the shelf in front of the door. That was it, I thought. No more toilet breaks until dawn. One of the many reasons I hate night.
I’ve always hated the night. It’s full of danger. The darkness that sweeps over the world, the shadows that slink down the streets—it releases the worst in people, as if what they do in the dark will never be seen.
Darkness is our poison.
The scrape of the shelf pulling over the floor almost drowned out my voice: “Did you find gas?”
“Not much,” he said.
My eyes still widened and I stared up at him. I hadn’t expected him to find any at all. “There was gas down there?”
“Two canisters,” he said. The shelf was now firmly in place. He lifted up the red canisters. My heart swirled—red meant petrol. Castle put them in the kitchen by the barricaded door and draped a blanket over their stench.
When he walked back in, I spotted a brown-leather book tucked into his armpit.
“What’s that?” I asked through a mouthful of rice.
Castle dropped onto the mattress in front of me and handed the book over. “Something I found in a box down in the basement.”
With a frown, I reached forward and took it. A leather string tied the book together. I unfastened it, then flipped it open. Thick pages looked up at me, clean of ink and lines.
“It’s a journal,” he said. “You were always writing in the old one. I thought you’d want to start another one.” As if embarrassed, he gave a dismissive shrug and lifted the bowl. He ate, his gaze fixed on the mac and cheese.
I pressed my thumb on the edge of the book and flipped through the pages. “I need a pen.”
Castle reached down and slipped one from his jean-pocket. It was a plain old ball-point pen. I took it with a mumbled ‘thank you’ and tucked it into the diary. This diary.
I slipped it under my thigh before digging into my dinner. “If you had a diary,” I said through a mouthful, “what would you write?”
Apple-green eyes burned into my face. He looked at me from beneath his dark lashes, mulling over my question.
“Would you write about Leo?” I surprised myself with my question. It was bold, maybe insensitive. Then again, I wondered if he cared at all about Leo’s death.
“I don’t know what I would write,” he admitted. “Do you write about him?”
I stirred the rice into the leftover cheese sauce. “Sometimes.”
“Who else?”
“Everyone I meet.”
He inhaled through his nostrils. “I’m not sure I’d like to know what you write about me.”
“The truth.”
“Your truth,” he said.
I frowned at him.
“Your perspective,” he explained, “moulds the way you see and think of me. So your truth might be wrong.”
The bowl was empty; I abandoned my spoon in favour of my fingers. I wiped up the remaining smudges of sauce and licked my fingers clean. “Can you guess what I wrote about you?”
The sharpness of his green eyes gleamed in the darkness, as if they were candles in the shadows of the dark cabin.
“I’d rather guess your occupation first. Like I said, I might not like what you wrote.”
“If you didn’t want me to write you in a bad light, you shouldn’t have been such an asshole.”
His head jerked up. By the flash in his eyes, I suspected no one had spoken to him like that before. Castle was stunned, but his composure swiftly pieced back together, slipping his go-to iciness over his stony face.
I shrugged. “It’s true.”
Castle put his bowl on the floor. Silence pulsed between us, saying unspoken thoughts.
Then, he voiced the thoughts. “I didn’t expect to be reunited with my comrades in that way.” His gaze was steady on mine. “To find that another civilian had weaselled their way in to our group was … troubling.”
“You mean the deltas.”
“Yes. Vicki wasn’t the first to get close to one of us. I tolerate her, she’s not too nosy and her skills come in handy. But you,” his gaze lingered over me, “I didn’t understand.”
“Not to be too modest, but I doubt I’m very complex.”
“It’s not you exactly that I didn’t understand,” he said. “It was your place with us. It wasn’t with the other survivors. It was with the deltas. I suppose I was a little hard on you.”
“You wanna know what I think?”
“You’ll tell me whether or not I want to hear it.”
I sat up primly and raised my chin. “I think you were jealous of Leo and me.”
He stretched out and lounged on his back. His head tilted to the side, eyes watching me. “Maybe, though not for the reasons you might think.”
I made to reply, to ask of his reasons, but the words caught in my throat and the hairs on the back of my neck prickled. Castle jolted up on the mattress; I froze, fingers twisting in the blanket beneath me.
A hollow sound, like the wind whistling through a cracked window, pierced through the walls. The cry ripped out again; strangled and pained. Not human. It was a rotter.
Castle lifted his finger to his lips, silently hushing me. If I wasn’t so afraid, I might’ve flipped him off. It was just common sense not to make noise with rotters around—I didn’t need him to tell me.
The rotter cried again. I could hear the pain in its howl. I’d never heard them like this before, like a bear caught in a trap, weeping in agony.
The urge to peek through the curtains clutched me. I resisted it, fighting back the temptation.
Was it lost? Did it cry out for its nest? Did it even understand pain?
I shuddered. The howls were so close, close enough to hear the whimper at the end of the melancholic sound.
Castle slipped off the bed in one smooth motion. He blew puffs of air at the candles, until we were left in complete darkness. But even in blackness, the rotter’s pain reached me.
I stayed quiet, and crawled closer to Castle. My heart thudded against its cage of ribs and I sank down beside him.
We were silent that night. The howls kept us awake. The rotter wandered near the cabin for hours.
And when I finally fell asleep, I dreamt of rotters—the ones who lost their children and searched for them, the ones with broken legs left on the street like roadkill, and all the while I felt their pain and I cried.
6.
Come morning, I woke to my clothes stuck to my skin as if pasted on. The hollowness of my dreams lingered with me even after I fixed myself a coffee—something I’ll eternally crave in this world—and nibbled on a protein bar.
The rotter was gone. But for how long? It could find more, it could come back, a nest could be tucked away nearby. We had to leave the cabin.
Castle fixed the tank back onto the Jeep and put the fresher fuel in. It was an all-day job, one he insisted I leave alone—‘your ankle needs time to heal’, he told me. I couldn’t count on my hands and feet how many times he’d said that to me since we’d fled the farmhouse.
No matter. I knew how to spend my time to fight off boredom of the day alone.
I wrote my first entry that morning. I wrote and wrote until my wrist hurt and calluses appeared on my fingers. It wasn’t until Castle came back inside to make lunch that I stopped.
Castle crouched by our cooking station in the fireplace. He gestured to the diary at my side. “It was a good find, then?”
“Better than good,” I said. I was thankful, grateful—but bitter too. A new diary. It seemed so final. It wasn’t just a new chapter in my life without Cleo; without my heart. It was a new story altogether, a beginning of a life I didn’t want to lead. I cleared my throat, as though it would banish the Chihuahua from my thoughts, and shifted
on the mattress. “How are you going with the Jeep?”
“It’s almost ready,” he said. “If we’re to leave tonight, we need to pack everything we can. Food, blankets, water; whatever we can fit.”
He was asking me to do it. I nodded.
“Do you have everything you need?” he asked. “It’s a long drive to the meet-up point.”
I frowned. “I think so.”
There was a meaningful look in his eyes that baffled me. Unspoken words swarmed in the green irises. He glanced downwards—it was so quick, that I almost didn’t catch the look. But I realised what he meant.
A smirk tugged at my lips. “Are you talking about tampons?”
A light flush spread over his cheekbones.
“Seriously?” I said. “You spent your life killing people and now we live in blood—and you’re embarrassed about periods?”
Castle turned his face to the side. I choked on a laugh as he emptied packets of two-minute noodles into a pot of water. I hate that he does that—the noodles should go in after the water has boiled. My annoyance showed in my narrowed eyes.
“You’re well supplied, then?” he asked, lighting the small fire beneath the pot.
“I have loads of tampons,” I said. “Vicki told me they were valuable in the group. I never did get a chance to trade them, you know. Mind you, the others didn’t like me; I doubt they would’ve traded with me anyway.”
Castle nodded, then turned his stare to me. “While this boils, we should have a look at your injuries.”
I climbed to my feel, balancing my bad ankle off of the mattress. Castle reached out to steady me, but I swatted his hand away. I stood on my own. He followed me into the kitchen, where I perched on a stool.
“Leg up,” he said.
The first-aid box was open on the island bench.
With a sigh, I kicked up my leg and gingerly rested my foot on the other stool. Castle rolled up the leg of my jeans, revealing the beige elastic bandage. It was a bit discoloured from sweat and wearing it in the lake.
“The swelling in your foot has gone down,” he said, unwinding the dressing from my ankle. “Normally, sprained ankles take around six weeks to heal. But it looks as though yours might take a little longer.”
“Why?” I asked. “You just said the swelling isn’t as bad.”
The bandage slipped from my foot to the stool. He was right—my foot didn’t look like a balloon anymore, but the purplish tint to my skin spread over a lump at my ankle that had only gotten bigger.
“Wear this,” he said; he grabbed a black ankle-brace from the first-aid box, then fitted it to my foot. “It should help.”
He released my foot and stepped around me. His fingers reached out and slid the sleeve of my singlet off my shoulder. The dressing on my gunshot-wound had been white once, but it was now a murky shade of brown, like the colour of sewage water. He shed the bandage from my skin; I winced as it peeled from the wound, taking some congealed blood with it.
When Vicki changed my dressings, she at least said sorry for hurting me in the process. Castle said nothing; he grabbed a bottle of amber liquid—antiseptic.
Castle must’ve sensed my sudden panic; I stiffened on the stool, titling away from him and the bottle. He guided me back towards him, and unscrewed the bottle.
“It’ll hurt,” he said, “but not as much as an infection will.”
He splashed the liquid onto my wound; my hands slapped to my mouth, eyes clenched shut, and muffled a cry. My skin burned, it was on fire, being stripped to the bone by the liquid. Even through my closed eyes, tears leaked from the corners, and I trembled. I fought the need to pull away from Castle, but then he threw another splash onto the wound and I couldn’t fight it any longer.
The stool scraped against the floor as I flew from it. I landed with a thud and curved over the bench. “Fuck!” My curse rebounded through the cabin, hoarse with stifled groans.
The muscles that clenched to my bones, as if trying to protect me from him, didn’t relax as I heard the lid being screwed back onto the bottle.
“Grab those bandages for me,” said Castle. There was no emotion in his voice at all, not even the slightest hint of apology. Asshole.
I snatched the fresh roll of bandages from the tin and shoved them into his hand. My narrowed eyes followed him, watchful and cautious, as he unfurled the dressings.
After the pain of cleaning the wound, the touch of the new bandages was barely felt at all.
When it was done, he said, “I’ve seen children react better than that.”
I sneered at him. “Had they been shot?”
He quirked his brow. “Some.”
My sneer faltered as I fleetingly wondered what his life had been like before the world ended. Had children been caught in the crossfires of wars he fought? Or was it children from the group, shot by the defected deltas who were after our cargo?
I decided I didn’t want to know, and pulled away from the bench.
“I should start packing.” It’s not a chore I wanted to do, but in that moment I just didn’t want to be around him.
I’d scavenged cardboard boxes and old suitcases from the basement. It was a treasure trove down there. Tucked away in sloped boxes I’d found hair-ties, books, batteries, board games, and even jewellery boxes overflowing with real gems—diamonds and rubies and emeralds; stones I’d never seen before or touched.
But we could only take what we needed. Even still, I rammed some of the treasures—books, mostly—into a suitcase and carried them up to the kitchen one by one.
I’d managed to fit everything from the pantry in three boxes. Then, I filled up my own backpack with a few packets of muesli bars and cracker boxes. Just in case. You never know when you’ll be separated again.
By afternoon, I was carrying the lighter boxes out to the shed and dumping them beside the car. With my ankle and shoulder, I could only do so much—and even then, I was exerting myself.
Castle had fixed the tank back onto the Jeep already. He stacked the boxes into the back seat, leaving the large trunk of the car untouched. When we’d packed away most of the boxes, I gathered blankets and pillows for the trunk—that’s where we’d sleep.
“If we keep going at this rate,” I said as I spread out the quilt, “we can leave before the sun goes down.”
It was nearing dusk, but we still had another two hours or so. Plenty of time, I thought, to finish up with the car and eat. Castle rummaged through sheets of metal at the back of the shed. “We’re behind schedule,” he said. “We need to reinforce the windshield and glass.”
I frowned at him. “Why?”
“It’s a long way to the meet-up point. We’ll have to sleep in the car; I’d sleep better knowing rotters won’t break through the glass.”
It made sense. It would make it safer for us. I knew that, but I couldn’t ignore the churn of cold dread that took me. I slumped in the boot of the Jeep and huffed.
Castle heaved a roll of wire mesh from the scraps of metal.
“How long will it take?”
“To do the windshield, four passenger doors, sunroof, and back windshield?” he said with a sigh. “Couple of hours, if we work fast.”
I fell back on the blankets with a thud. A few hours didn’t sound like very long, but when the rotters came out at night, time became precious. I didn’t want to be stuck in the cabin for another night, listening to them calling out into the sky.
“All right,” I said, shimmying off the boot. “What can I do to help?”
He glanced over his shoulder, his brows meeting in the middle. His piercing emerald eyes washed over me for a moment. “I need measuring tape, pliers and, if you can find one, a welder.”
I hobbled over to the shelves to find what he needed.
“I’ll put the wire mesh on the inside,” he said, but I suspected he was speaking to himself. “And if there’s time, I’ll use those poles over there to build a solid barrier on the outside.”
The sky had taken a
pinkish sheen by the time we’d finished. Mesh wire was fixed to all of the windows in double layers, bolted to the car. The poles were laid out for tomorrow’s labour, with the welder and nails neatly beside them. There wasn’t enough time for the barriers that night.
Castle had gone inside to get the last of the heavy boxes. I was at the bonnet, piling tools we might need later into a red toolbox. A spanner slipped from the hood. It clanged to the concrete floor and bounced just behind me. I cursed under my breath.
I twisted around and reached down to grab it, but —my fingers didn’t touch the metal. I froze, my hand dangling just above the spanner, my upper body twisted away from the Jeep. My eyes were glued ahead at the lot, at the thing on the lot.
A rotter stood there.
Browned blood clotted in the straggly hair that sat atop its head in a tangled mop. The torn dress that covered it was ripped up the side and hung off of its skeletal body.
The memory of the lone-rotter’s howls the night before flooded my mind. Was it the same one? This rotter … it looked lost; old and confused.
It swayed on the spot, bloodshot eyes glazed over as it stared at me. For a fleeting moment, I think it was trying to figure out what I was. But that thought was drowned in ice-cold dread when its head twitched and its fingers flexed at its side. And that’s when I saw its hands, really saw them. They were lathered in fresh blood, and bits of its nails had been snapped off at the skin. Whatever pity I’d felt for the rotter vanished as I took in its ragged, bloodied appearance—it had killed someone, I realised. It had killed recently.
The hoarseness of my breaths echoed through the shed. I couldn’t move. The rotter just kept staring at me. If I moved, even a little, it would attack. And if I shouted for Castle, who knew what it would do—or if more were nearby.
I didn’t know what to do. But I had to do something.
The muscles in my back tightened as I slowly straightened up. The rotter watched me with those glassy, red eyes. It didn’t make a sound; not even a growl. I’d never seen anything like it before—a docile rotter. They were wild, they were savage and cruel. But this one was different somehow, like the rotters that looked at me when I used my trick.
