Katie Volker

Brick.

I live behind a lot of walls.

Some are mine, the ones that I put up; armour I use to protect myself. The person I try to present, or the person I try to hide. Those walls are in my soul. They are my home and also my prison.

Others go up on their own. These are the walls in my mind; the ones that throw themselves up when I’m trying to concentrate but for some reason the wiring won’t connect. In those moments it’s like I’ve been locked out of my own mind, unable to access thoughts that should just… be there.

I can feel it. Pressed up against my forehead the rough, jagged surface of the brick wall. Trying to think is like pushing my head harder and harder against the wall, trying to reach the other side but instead finding nothing but pain.

Then, of course, there’s the walls of my home. These are the real walls, the walls of my body; the ones that I hide myself behind on the days when the world is too big and I am just so small.

The problem with walls, no matter how much they can protect, they also stop you moving forward.

Sadness.

Most nights, during D’s shift while Nick was asleep, D would allow herself to cry.

She’d started doing this not long after Nick had taken her in. Late night watches were long, and there was nothing to do during these times. D would find herself sitting, watching, feeling the minutes drag by, and it wouldn’t take long for her mind to wander.

The first night she cried, she wasn’t even sure why. Everything was just a lot. For a world so quiet, everything around her seemed so loud, the silence completely deafening. All she wanted was to curl up in a ball and vanish - from herself, from Nick, from all of it. It wasn’t that she wanted to die, she just didn’t want to be for a little while.

After that, she found other things to cry about. She’d cry from pain, cry about her missing memories, cry that the world was basically a hellhole. But after a while, she ran out of things to cry about, and yet the sadness, the pain that she felt in her chest, never shifted. She carried it around like a weight on her heart, as if someone had taken a scoop and hollowed out her soul.

Nick helped with that. One night, just as they’d started to trust each other, Nick was asleep and D was unloading the emotional baggage she’d been holding in that day. She had to catch herself a couple times as sobs tore out of her, soothing her sad, sad soul and hollowing her out even further. She knew if she was too loud the tide might hear and come calling.

She didn’t expect Nick, though.

Nick had never seemed… emotional. In fact, it was one of the reasons she’d begun to trust him. You could look into his eyes and see someone simple, honest, but also broken. She never got the feeling like he wanted something from her, and she appreciated that she could see her sadness somehow reflected in his eyes.

That night, though, as she wept, she missed the sound of Nick waking up. Head in her knees, she didn’t see him pick up her blanket and drape it over her shoulders. She reacted to the weight of it, instinctively reaching out to grab the edges of it and pulling around her. Nick planted himself down next to her, never saying a word. He passed her a glass of water, which she took.

For a moment, they just sat there together, watching the flames shift and change. D calmed down. And, in a moment of desperate need for closeness, she rested her head on the shoulder of a stranger.

Nick just held her that night, cooing and shushing her slightly to calm her, reassure her. In the morning, he didn’t say a word, it was just business as usual.

Eyes.

When Nick met D, he wasn’t looking for company. He wasn’t looking for something to care about. In his mind, everything died the moment his family did, everything else was just purgatory; wandering the slowly dying Earth searching for a good death, one that Anna would relent to when he turned up in the afterlife, he would his shoulders and tell her well, i tried.

He didn’t care. He may as well have been one of the tide, going where the wind blows and following the same paths over and over again. Get up, pack up camp, travel forward, find food, make new camp, sleep, repeat. In the months since they died, Nick had come across other people in the world, but he’d stayed clear. If he interfered at all, he left without another word.

That’s what he told himself he was doing when he watched the man enter the shop where D was fighting off a few straggles of the tide.

He’d seen the guy a few times over the past few days. He’d been moving around that area for about a week, coming into the town most days to see if any new bodies showed up. New bodies meant possible loot. Anything to survive.

Nick watched as this man lulled people into a false sense of security, before killing them himself. He had watched the man take pleasure in pushing the tip of his knife up through the jaw of a living man, smiling as his victim gurgled on his own blood. So, when he entered town that day and watched this man enter the store, walking toward this feral looking kid, he couldn’t ignore Anna’s voice anymore.

Help.

“Only for you,” he whispered to her, before heading in.

He’d used the gun because… well, he was going to leave after this, what did he care? If he brought the tide here with this, then at least he’d know where it was.

One shot and then he was gone. Save the kid’s life and then leave. It was meant to be so simple.

When D looked up at him from that shop floor, he knew why Anna’s voice had some to him. He could see his wife in D’s eyes. The bags under them were immense, and she looked as if she’d been in more fights than just this one in the past few days, but she had the same piercing stare that Anna always had. The one that always broke him down, made him a better man.

He’d tried to leave, he really had, but then D followed after him and tried to threaten him with a knife as she used the door frame as a crutch. She could barely keep herself stood up, but she was still fighting. Even then, he marveled at her.

When she’d taken those few steps forward and fallen to the ground, even though there was no one left in this town, he could still feel himself being watched, and in his heart he knew it was Anna. Anna, saying this one, protect this one.

Blue.

“So, I’m pretty sure the house is next to a lake,” D said one morning. She was getting little clues from her dreams every night, like her brain was starting to open up to her again, allow her to explore. “Or, I dunno, some big body of water.”

Most of these clues were unhelpful in the short term - there was a tree next to the house; the walls inside had green peeling wallpaper; a light outside shone into one of the bedroom windows - but she knew that these little things would stitch together when she saw the place. She would know her home when she saw it.

Last night’s dream wasn’t like that, though. Last night she dreamt of water.

In her new life, D had never seen the sea. She wasn’t sure if she’d seen it in her old life either - such was the nature of amnesia - and she had no idea if she could swim or not, but that night, after she woke Nick up to take his half of the watch, she slipped into slumber and into water.

The first thing she was surprised about was just how… blue it all was. Something in the back of her head told her that she must be close to the surface because light couldn’t travel that far down. The second thing was that she wasn’t breathing. The realisation made her panic for a moment before she realised that she also wasn’t drowning. Her lungs weren’t bursting, she didn’t feel the urge to inhale, she just was.

Life hadn’t been exactly easy the past few months, - in her waking moments, she had just enough light to keep her from jumping into the tide or blowing her own brains out - but in that moment, surrounded by nothing but the vast expanse of ocean around her, she felt calm. Reflexively she’d been moving her arms, kicking her legs, in order to stay mostly in the same spot (so maybe she could swim?) but as she let go she allowed herself to go where the water wanted to take her.

For what seemed like forever, she floated in the loving embrace of the sea.

A flash of movement in the corner of her eye caught her attention, bringing her back to the moment. Something like black ink moved quickly through the water toward her. At first, she just stared at it, but the ocean had made her soft, dulled her senses. Before she could react, the blank ink jumped at her face and forced itself up her nose, into her mouth and down her throat.

It was then she started drowning.

She kicked as hard as she could, trying to head toward the light above her, but everything inside her burned. She screamed out into the water as the ink moved into her veins. She saw the black lines on her arms and across her body and watched as it began to take over her vision, the blue around her turning to an absolute black.

Fall.

When D told Nick she knew where to go, she didn’t actually know where to go.

“We have to start there,” she said. “That house was my house, I’m sure of it.”

Nick was all in on this mission; they had been wandering about for so long with no real aim, he appreciated the opportunity to go somewhere, do something. He got up from his bedroll, making himself seem enthusiastic.

“Where is it?”

D’s face fell a little as the practicalities of this search dawned on her.

“I don’t know…” she said, slowly.

A spark of irritation hit in Nick’s gut. As he tried to push it aside, he found it lead onto a soft familiarity.

His son was much the same way. All spark and creativity, he would often just do the first thing he thought of, before realising the scope of what he was attempting and abandoning the project. The house was filled with half-finished sculptures and other art projects. His laptop was filled with stories half-written. Nick had desperately attempted to teach him how to follow-through on a project, how to make sure you had enough stamina to make it to the end.

You have to take a second to consider everything before you start something, he’d said to him. Pace yourself, or you’ll keep burning yourself out within the first day. And you don’t have to start every project as soon as you think of it. Save a couple of ‘em for a rainy day, eh?

He was sure he was beginning to learn when the world ended. Then, a few months later, all the projects stopped.

He saw that same fervor in D now; the desperate need to do something overriding every single sensible bit of planning that needed to be done. Nick sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose as he tried to think of a plan.

Start at the beginning, he thought.

Or the end, a voice seemed to reply somewhere in the back of his brain.

“The town,” he said after a moment.

“What?”

“Where we met. We’ll start there, move backwards. See if we can retrace your steps or jog your memory from there.”

D beamed. He could see anticipation building inside her. There was nothing like a search for answers that could bring a spark to the eye.

They packed up that morning, finally leaving the little run down shack off the main road. Nick remained surprised, but thankful, that the tide hadn’t found them there. His optimism drained a little as he realised the leaves on the trees around them were slowly going yellow. He could feel a slight chill in the air and smell rain on the wind. Fall was coming, and winter followed. It was going to get harder to protect themselves when the weather turned.

He nearly said this out loud, but as he turned back to D the sentence died in his throat. She smiled at him, more drive in her face than he’d ever seen from her.

“You okay?” She asked, pulling her backpack over her shoulder.

Nothing else mattered. Not the weather, not the tide - there was only this.

God help us, Anna.

“Yeah, let’s go,” he said.

Past.

“Okay kiddo. Where to first?”

D blanched. She’d been thinking about how to tell Nick everything in her strange and empty brain, but what to do after that hadn’t even occurred to her. How do you chase memories you don’t have?

“I… I don’t know,” she said. “I guess I hadn’t gotten that far in my planning.”

She wasn’t quite sure why she was expecting him to be irritated by that, but she felt herself tense as he looked away from her for a moment, as if her body was anticipating a reaction her mind wasn’t aware of. But Nick’s face just showed thoughtfulness, his eyes darting back and forth while staring at nothing, as if searching for something in the distance that D couldn’t see.

“Hmm,” he said, finally. “Yeah that’s, ah… That’s a tricky one.”

“Well,” she nudged him a little to bring him back. He turned to look at her as she continued. “Maybe we don’t have to start today. I’ll keep milling it over, and if I come up with something I’ll tell you and we’ll start there.”

Nick forced a smile.

“Sounds good, D.”

He looked about as nervous as she felt. Later on, when the sun had gone down, D had yawned and Nick insisted she go to bed. She told him not to try and take the whole night shift alone, which he agreed to with his words, but she wasn’t sure she believed.

It was during that night that she had a new dream.

Her dreams were usually quite abstract; set in nowhere and about nothing, they were always unsettling and nightmare-like. That night, the dream felt more like a memory she was watching from the outside.

She watched a mid-thirties couple exit a car with a little girl, who was playing with a small teddy bear. D hadn’t seen her reflection in a long time, but she knew that girl was her. She watched the couple share a small kiss as they all walked up to the house, a for sale sign pulled out of the ground and strewn on the grass.

The dream barely felt long enough to be a dream, but she still woke up gasping. Her head pounded, as did her heart. Nick looked at her, an action man ready to fight, but D just waved him down.

Simple.

Everything seemed so simple when I was younger.

Throughout school, all my plans seemed like foregone conclusions. Pass exams; go to university; immediately enter career that I love and will satisfy me for the rest of my life.

I think it all fell apart when I didn’t get into the university I had my heart set on.

Well, that’s not true. I met a lot of lovely people at the school I went to instead. People who are some of the most important in my life. I also learnt a lot at that school, and did a lot of things that I don’t know if I would have if I had gone somewhere different. It’s hard to say. But not getting into my first choice university was the first of many moments in which my life went barrelling in a different direction to the one I very specifically planned on going in.

Since then, it’s been a lot of little things. It’s been not being able to move out of my house. It’s been taking a job that I thought was really going to set me going on my career, and realising that actually within five months I feel like I’ve gotten all I can out of it. Okay, so quite big things, actually.

Today is Valentine’s day and I’m sat here, alone in a house full of people, realising that nothing has been as easy as I had convinced myself it was going to be. I’m feeling isolated and my self-esteem is so fucking low I’m finding myself so angry that I let myself get beat down again. I’m a shitty employee. My job bores me. I have no time for myself anymore. I’m not happy.

And the worst part – the shitty, no good, completely unfair and entirely ineffable part – I don’t know how to fix it. I need a job. I have a job. I don’t like this job. But no job means no money and I can’t go back to having jackshit again. Not with the car that needs constant attention and the fact I’m STILL LIVING AT HOME FULL TIME. I don’t have a life, I just have the shell of one, and I don’t know how to fix it. I don’t know how to figure out what it is I want. I don’t know how to be scared and do something anyway. I don’t know how to stop hating most of the things I write and actually learn how to get better. There’s no time, and I am so tired.

God.

Light.

Anna had this saying:

You’re like a happy grey cloud on a sunny day.

Nick, for the longest time, had no idea what that meant. She would never explain when he asked, she’d just smile - knowingly, like she always would - and say:

You’ll see.

Not long after she… Nick had been walking. It’s not like the end of life as he knew it could have come at a good time, but in the middle of summer is possibly one of the worst it could have been. He hated the heat. It always seemed like it affected him more than anyone else he knew. When he was walking, he did his best to stay under tree cover, but there were long stretches on the road he took which were just open air. The sun would beat down on him, jackhammering him over and over again. He’d look up, searching desperately for a sign of cloud cover, but the sky was as blue as could be.

A couple hours later, though, and a single, grey cloud made its way across the sky. It passed slowly in front of the sun, casting the land below into shadow. He watched it come. He praised the heavens when he drifted in front of the sun, and took a moment to appreciate a moment of respite.

Anna’s words crept up on him. A happy grey cloud, blocking out the sun.

That was the first time he cried since he left the house.

D reminded him of that too. Individually, they were just grey clouds, hoarding baggage. Together, they were a storm cloud brimming, waiting to explode. If one went off track, the other had to balance them out. He was going to have to be the sun behind that cloud, and he didn’t know if he could do it, but he had to try. D needed something to lean on now, and he would make sure it was him.

After she opened up, the emotional toll of the moment became a little much for her, and D went to bed. Nick didn’t think of himself as a religious man, but he’d pray to Anna every night. Protect me as I hunt tonight, protect those who don’t have my skill set tonight, protect D tonight. She’s the best of us.

Nick had made this pact with the heavens. If he prayed, and a dark cloud passed right over the sun, he knew someone was listening, and tonight someone was. It was that, and only that, that gave him the courage the next day and say:

Darkness.

D lived in the dark.

It seemed to represent every part of her, right down to the raven black of her hair. She hid in the shadows between things, so unknown that she didn’t even know herself. If she was being honest with herself, it was comfortable that way. No matter how badly she may have wanted to know the truth, there was something that always held her back; a hesitation to step into the light and finally open her eyes.

It shouldn’t have scared her as much as it did.

Knowing had to be better than not, right? And yet every time she remotely dared to stare into the abyss of her memory, fear attacked her like sharp knives in her brain. She cowered from it. Eventually, it became easier not to look at all. She couldn’t even say it out loud. These simple things, stating the truth… There had been times, at night when she and Nick would share dinner together, that she had opened her mouth to tell him. It wasn’t a secret, she wasn’t trying to hide it from him, and yet every time she tried to force out the words it was as if her throat closed up. She’d force herself to take a breath, check her lungs were working properly, but it would be like breathing through a straw. The good thing was she was aware of herself enough to know that she was teetering on the edge of panic, and she could make the choice to step away from the ledge.

After many attempts, she’d given up. They didn’t talk about that kind of thing anyways. They talked around each other, saying everything except what they were keeping in their chests. This process made it okay for her to keep her secrets, and she was glad for it. But with every day that passed, every moment she was painfully aware of that she could have said something, it just became harder and harder. The desire to say something grew, but so did the fear that it might change something. That she might have to face the dark again.

Funny thing about anxiety: sometimes it has a loophole. Turns out fear of dying cancels out fear of the dark.

He didn’t push. Of course he didn’t, but she knew he was waiting to talk about it. The few days after she woke up, he had been particularly kind, as he was sometimes. He had hunted and brought them more water, insisted that she rest more. They both know staying in one place for this long was suicide, but the walls provided enough cover that it might take the tide a little longer to find them than it would if they had stayed out in the open.

One night, finally, D found some semblance of courage.

“Nick--” she’d started, but Nick cut her off.

“You don’t have to.”

“No, no I do.” She smiled a weak sort of smile. The kind that indicated sadness than any kind of joy. She put her face in her hands, fighting the internal urge to run from this again. Not this time.

She took a deep breath.

“My first memory is not long before I met you. I woke up in the woods, bag in one hand, knife in the other. All I could think about was water. I don’t think I’d eaten for days. My knife, my clothes, everything was covered in blood that I don’t think was mine. It was all dry. I couldn’t remember my name, couldn’t remember where I’d come from. No mother, no father -- it was just dark.

“Some part of me knew that this world wasn’t safe, and when I saw the monsters in that shop you found me in, I wasn’t surprised. Certain things feel like a forgone conclusion but everything else is… It’s just not there.

“I think… something must have happened, and whatever it was my brain couldn’t cope with it, so it shut it all down. I don’t remember my childhood. I don’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up. I don’t know if I had siblings, or a house, or dreams of a bright future. All I see when I close my eyes is the dark, and I don’t know how to shine a light into it. For a long time I was okay with it, but now…” She turned to Nick, who was watching her so closely. “I need to know. I think I want to find where I lived, figure out what happened to me. But I can’t, I can’t do it by myself. I can’t go into the dark by myself not again, not again.”

She couldn’t help it. The fear bubbled up in her chest and the next thing she knew Nick’s arm was around her, keeping her safe. He cooed softly in her ear, calming her slowly.

“You won’t,” he said, “we can go in together. I swear.”