THE DAMNED

     ‘You’d be surprised how picky people can be, the second you give them any semblance of an option.’

Potatoes were bland, relatively speaking, but then again most of what she was able to cook was, without much in the way of salt or butter or cream. Once upon a time, someone had traded her a plastic baggie filled with fast food salt packets and she’d almost cried at the sight of them, cooked herself a feast. But it had been two years, maybe more, since then, and no matter how much she tried to savor something, it always ran out eventually. 

But potatoes were plentiful, easy to grow in the space she had, easy to multiply. They’d been the first thing she started growing, in this greenhouse, other than taking care of and revitalizing the few things that were already there. They had been her staple crop for years, now, bland and a little sad looking, but filling nonetheless, especially for people who didn’t have anything else to fill their stomachs with.

     ‘Might want to wash those, too, while you’re at it,’ she suggested, gesturing to the clothes in his hands – now that they were in the closed quarters of the greenhouse and all its warmth, the scent of the dirty clothes was easy to pick up; she’d become relatively immune to pungent smells over the past few years, as there wasn’t much you could do about them, and usually no point in wasting the water or soap necessary to clean them when there were so many other uses for soap and water. But a fresh, clean set of clothes went a long way as far as creature comforts went, and she produced enough purified water through the system she’d set up that if he wanted to give himself a sponge bath and do a bit of laundry, she wouldn’t be opposed to letting him. 

It was strange, still, how normal this kind of thing all felt. Inviting a stranger into your home, giving them whatever you could. But she had come to quite like the quiet company of strangers.

More and more, it seemed like Donna really had things figured out. She knew things that Maks didn’t, things that kept her from living the way that Maks did—a rabbit running scared, just trying to make it through another day, just barely scraping by. If Maks had been the first to find this place, he wouldn’t have known what to do with it, would have passed it over without seeing the potential in it, without knowing what it could become, an oasis in the middle of the wasteland where things were living instead of dead, growing instead of decaying.

A world where there was safety, and warmth, and food, and even laundry. He spent so much of his time on the move—even if somewhere seemed safe, there was no guarantee that it would stay that way, wouldn’t be found by someone else or by a walker. Most of the time, he didn’t want to be chained to one location for longer than he had to be, everything he owned ready to pick up and run if he needed to make a quick exit.

That didn’t leave a lot of time for him to wash—(or, really, just rinse)—the layers that he kept close to his body day after day. And besides, the temperatures were cold and getting colder, so he didn’t want to be without them for long. The best he did was just rotate through them, so the same one wasn’t directly next to skin for too long, had some time to be worn on the outside to maybe air out. It wasn’t much, wasn’t nearly enough, and so the offer to make himself a little bit more clean, a little bit more human, even if it wouldn’t last for long, was one that he appreciated.

He wanted to be careful, wanted to be kind in the ways he could, not feeling like he’d ever had too much practice at it. And while he wanted to be sure to not take too much, he didn’t think he would ever kind enough to pass up on something freely offered to him. Couldn’t imagine a time where he would ever not be in need like that, not as desperate as he was. But he was willing to pay it back, which he thought was what counted, trusted that the two of them would come to some equal exchange of his labor for her hospitality.

_________________________

It used to be weeks, months, sometimes even years, where Otto wouldn’t think about his father. In his youth his father had become a burden to him. He was someone who always stood at the end of Otto’s mistakes telling him how useless he was: a disgrace to the Falkenrath name; an insult to his genetics. Young Otto used to brush it off with a fag, a shot of whiskey, and a joy ride with his mates. He’d ignore his father until he flirted his way into the biggest mistake of his life — the biggest mistake according to Mr. Kurtis Falkenrath — not Otto. To him, getting someone pregnant and having a daughter was his favourite mistake and he forgot all about his father.

               He forgot about him until the day he dragged his charcoal body from his burning childhood home. A man that had once yelled at him to grow up and become a man lay at his feet withered by flame, small and shrivelled. The image of his blackened flesh seeped into his thoughts and merged with the darkness of night.

               Otto gazed at the young man before him and tilted his head. He wondered what mistakes he had made in his previous life. ‘Previous’ because before the war seemed so long ago now he was detached from it although memories of it haunted him. He lived a new life in a world unrecognisable from the last. What life had this man led that made him the person that stood there now full of attitude and anxiousness?

               "My father could be,“ he responded with tight lips and a frown. There were times when he hadn’t been. When he’d taken Otto camping or hunting or fishing or taught him how to tie his shoe laces and stand up to bullies. It was hard to focus on those times when there were so many others that cast a dark shadow over them. "You lived with him? You’re grandfather?” It was a query that Otto used to fish for a better understanding of a guy he didn’t trust.

As usual, it occurred to him too late that he might have wanted to watch his tongue. In this new world, who knew what was a sore spot, who knew who would take offense at ill being spoken of the dead. It wasn’t a principle that Maks had chosen to live by—to him, irreverence was a principle all on its own, one that he’d been living by long before the bombs fell, one that he held to like it held the key to his own identity.

His grandfather had not become any more beloved to him in death, he flung his name outwards with the same disdain he’d always showed him in life. He was only being honest.

If Mykola was more beloved now, it was because Maks had learned to love him for the first time while he was still alive. If death had done anything, it had made him want to unlearn that. Nightly, he tried to blame him: he was too stupid and too soft to do what he needed to do to stay alive; he hadn’t listened to Maks, when Maks told him what he had to do to stay alive. If he was sacrificed so Maks could stay alive, it was because he had forced Maks’ hand. If it could have been different, that was Mykola’s fault, and not his.

Maybe his reaction to a stranger speaking of Mykola to him would be different, with all of that weighing him down. But his grandfather wasn’t the albatross he carried, and so he cursed his name with something close to a clear conscience—the first thing he thought of wasn’t the blood on his hands, a brick held in his slippery grip; if he’d betrayed his grandfather, his grandfather had betrayed him first.

The man in front of him doesn’t seem to quite have the same ease, if the frown on his face is anything to go by. Or maybe it’s just strange—talking of fathers and grandfathers with someone whose name Maks hasn’t even asked. Maybe he was doing things backwards, or out of order: it’d been awhile since he’d had someone to talk to or at, and maybe he’d skipped a little too far ahead. Still, no guns were drawn and no voices were raised, and so he barrelled forward with a feeling of impunity.

yuri-sokolov:

This man was big, but Yuri revelled in the idea of being bigger. Despite their hunger, their dire thirst— the twins managed to conserve their strength for their larger productions, they saved a small amount of flair and gusto for a grand finale, as the stranger bucked and reached, he summoned more from himself to keep him tethered. It was better when they struggled, they tired quicker: sometimes, they were fortunate enough to pass out before Zoya managed to stick them up like needlepoint, those were the individuals that they left at the side of the road to be the responsibility of some other foolish good samaritan.

“She looks like a ghost, doesn’t she?” Yuri laughed at the words and the way that they scrabbled at the air, barely clinging to be formed. “Most people stop because they think she looks like someone they knew. Someone dead that they loved.” He liked to talk during this process, not for any reason other than the fact that there were so few people left in this world to talk to. Zoya had heard all his stories, she was as tired of his voice as Yuri was.

The threat made him snicker, shaking his head while his sister began to empty the bag, rifling through for whatever she saw was of use. Rarely did they clean someone out completely— carrying too much was just as dangerous as having nothing at all, to be weighed down meant to not have the freedom to run at a moments notice. “You’ll kill us?” Yuri tore at the handles savagely, tightening the wire just a touch. “That doesn’t really inspire much confidence to keep you alive, does it?” It was for this reason that they rarely did keep those that they raided alive. In the early days, when the twins had spat the same bloodied threat, they had meant it. The promise was kept, and it was served bitterly, with not only Zoya’s long knives, but the axe that he had taken to carrying.

Pale eyes dropped down to the boots that kicked at the earth. “Those look about my size. I think I want those as well.” To his sister, he turned more of his attention. “Does he have any food?”

@zoyasokolov

Zoya may have come to look like a ghost, but she had just grown to echo what they had all become. Colour leached from her as years passed, the failing sun revealed the translucity to her skin, the colourlessness of her hair. She grew thinner, willowy, like a birch tree in the thick of winter. Yuri still looked like a living man, his cheeks cut out with hunger but still holding a flush, eyes that held a fierce blue flame, burning so brightly it lost colour. The thick fur around his shoulders had belonged to someone stately. On someone else it would look refined, classic. On him, he looked more feral than ever. More bear than boy. They made quite the pair, stood side by side.

Pulling back at her loosened hair, knotting it at her shoulders, her upper lip curled at the man’s threat, choked out through Yuri’s grip. He wasn’t begging for his life, and for that she would give him credit. It was easy to give in, for the curses to be replaced with pleading. “Careful,” she tutted, directing herself to her eager brother, eyes flicking to the white knuckled grip, the slim line of the wire pressing into skin watching for the beads of blood that threatened to spring to the surface as the man thrashed. “You’ll send him to sleep.”

Kneeling, Zoya began to dig through the bag, pulling out the things they would be taking. It wasn’t a large haul, but it was enough to make the whole performance worthwhile. She layed out a piece of tarp, the first thing taken. Stripping the tenderly wrapped cans of fabric, she held them aloft to show Yuri, a wicked smile taking over her features. “He brought the whole picnic.”

Searching further she pulled out two bottles. Opening the cap of the smaller one, she sniffed it. The sharp burn that followed made her rub at her nose. Bleach. Opening the larger she repeated the same process. “Is this water?” Zoya asked without looking at the previous owner, setting it aside and moving onto the other things. Rifling quickly she picked out a lighter and a flashlight, both still producing a tiny pool of light. She left the remains, an old sleeping bag and a pocket knife too rusted for her to bother with. Her own knives glimmered under her tender care.

Wrapping it all together, she set it in a neat pile before eyeing his shoes, laced tightly on his still kicking feet. “He’s very feisty. I don’t think he’ll just let you have them.”

@maksvoloshyn​

Everything in the world he had to call his own was in that backpack. They were all he had—some of them, he’d carried since Ukraine, since the first months after the end. Some he’d picked up painstakingly along the way, digging through rubble and dodging bandits like these, or choosing carefully who could trust enough to trade with.  Nights when he was alone, all of it strewn out around him as he unpacked and repacked his backpack to better distribute the weight for another day’s trek, it seemed like so little. Now, watching it being taken from him, it seemed like everything.

The food he’d been carefully rationing, even when his stomach growled and twisted in on itself; the tarp he’d put between his sleeping bag and the ground to keep the moisture away, or awkwardly wrapped around his backpack to keep the rest of his belongings dry when it rained; the child-sized sleeping bag that had used to fit him much better, ripped in places and patched with what other fabric he could find; a lighter that still had enough fluid to produce a tiny flame—because he’d been so careful with it, saved it for only the coldest nights.

All the things he’d painstakingly saved or maintained, just for this moment. Just so he could lose then. Just so he could be grateful for the scraps of his own possessions they decided to leave behind to him, like it was some great mercy to have nothing but an old sleeping bag and a swiss army knife.

And what he still had hidden on his body: the bulletless gun held between the waistband on his pants and the layers he’d piled on over it; the knife tied to his belt underneath his coat; the cross necklace he’d taken off of Mykola’s corpse safe in a zippered pocket. Maybe, just maybe, he’d be able to get away with those.

Maybe he’d be able to get away with his life, the wire still a sharp presence at his throat, tight enough now that his fingers couldn’t find any space to dig under to give him some relief; tight enough that his vision felt like it was going dark around the edges, tears springing to his eyes that he wanted to believe was from the struggle and nothing more, a reflex and not a weakness; tight enough that the words that sprang unbidden up from him died in his closing throat, unable to force their way up and out—

 Unable to force their way up and out, until the taunting voices behind and before him seemed to zero in on his shoes. They could take his food, they could take his water, but if they took his mobility, forced him to cut the soles of his feet to ribbons and expose them to the creeping cold, then how would he ever get more? He didn’t want to beg, he never wanted to beg, relied on bravado even when his back was against the wall—but this was enough to crack his bravado right down the middle, made him force out wheezing words, groping outward with a useless hand until it found fabric and flesh to hold onto: “Not—not my shoes, please.” 

They shook their head in response. People had so little, these days, barely enough to live off of; they didn’t need to take things from anyone who didn’t need them, even in return for what they had done. They didn’t save people in order to earn anything – it would have been an impossible trade, after all, for what did a life cost? What was equivalent, in trade, to another day, or another week or life, or even another year? 

No, they had never asked anything in return for what they did. They saved lives in order to save lives, and it was as simple as that. That this boy had listened to them when they told him to run was enough; he’d let them do their job, let their actions mean something significant and something good, a spark of goodness in this fallen apart world. 

     “No, please,” they said, shaking their head again. “We want for very little, right now, we wouldn’t want to take anything from you that you cannot spare.”

Theology was a complicated thing at the end of the world, when words like charity and alms stopped having meaning, when words like duty had changed so drastically. It was impossible to be selfless, in a world that wanted to destroy you piece by piece until you were no better than the beasts the Days had been hunting. But Darya held firm that it was possible to be good, even in the worst of circumstances, that God would not have put them up against something they could not face with prayer and understanding and determination. And compassion. Every hardship was a test.

And all they wanted was to spread the knowledge that it was possible to be good, even at the end of all things.

     “But if you have a chance, one day, to save a stranger’s life yourself, I hope that you will take it.”

Fear had ruled him since the day the bombs fell, and he hated what it had turned him into. He’d used to be so proud, so stubborn, his head had never bowed under the discipline his grandfather had tried to rain down on him, but now he spent his every day bowing and scraping, scared to look anyone in the eye, lest they take that as disrespect, lest they cast him out on his own. There was a hate steadily growing in him, but it was impotent, useless, would do nothing but rot and fester in him. In this world it was better the devil you know.

It shook him, to see someone who didn’t seem stooped under that burden. Who could have taken anything from him in exchange for his life, and wanted nothing. Who seemed better than him in every conceivable way, so different that it didn’t even seem aspirational—he couldn’t imagine himself in their shoes, couldn’t imagine himself free from the horrible, stinking fear he carried around with him.

And then, on top of the one that Maks already carried, they placed another burden. One that he could tell would weigh on him, come back to haunt him whenever he tried not to look a stranger in the eyes before or after their group left them fallen in their path. We wouldn’t have killed them if they didn’t fight, his own voice would say to himself, say again to Mykola in the dark of night. If you have the chance, one day, to save a stranger’s life, I hope that you will take it, he’d hear after, and know that he hadn’t. That he couldn’t.

What a fucking joke, he thought, bitterly, trying to muster up the anger, push it outward instead of letting it reach into his own chest. Couldn’t they tell that he was never going to save anyone? That he would never be the one to choose whether someone lived or died, that he would just drag himself along, belly to the ground, do everything he could to make sure it wasn’t him who died? That that, for him, was the best he could do.

     ‘If you grown anymore, you aren’t going to be able to walk through doorways,’ she joked, looking up at him – he already dwarfed her, by comparison, all thin limbs, but then again, most people did. She’d never been a tall woman, and arthritis and age and quite possibly some miserable interruption of scoliosis of some kind had meant she’d shrunk with age, even just in the past few years. Either he was still growing, all six feet of him, or she’d shrunk since the last time he’d been by. She squinted, pursing her lips for a moment, and then decided she didn’t want to think about it, and made her way back into the warmth of the greenhouse.

The warmth, at least, was as good for her body as it was for the plants, kept some of the aches and pains at bay during the night. A little cocoon of warmth, and even though it had stopped getting properly cold at night, it was good to have somewhere to shelter herself from the wind and the ash and feel comfortable, or as close to comfortable as one could get.

She busied herself as she waited for him to follow her in, getting out the cast iron pot someone had traded her long ago, and an old wooden spoon – cooking utensils, at least, seemed to last ages, and she wouldn’t need to trade for new ones for a long time, yet, though the hot plate would need repairs sooner or later, as she couldn’t light a fire inside the greenhouse – the amount of oxygen inside, with all these plants, might turn the place into a bomb, and she didn’t fancy cooking outside – and she missed the convenience of a real hob.

     ‘There’s always work to be done here, if you don’t have anywhere better to be,’ she said, and left it at that. She never asked anyone to stay, even if she needed the help; she’d determined, long ago, that she couldn’t let herself be dependent on any one person in particular: it made the loss that much harder, when they inevitably picked up and moved on, or never came back. ‘Now: parsnips or potatoes? They’ve both just come up this week but I’m running low on salt, either way.’

Maks had never known his grandmother. She’d passed away before he’d gone to live with his grandfather, in that long stretch of time when his grandfather and his mother weren’t talking, when as far as Maks knew he didn’t even have a god-fearing grandparent in a fishing village a couple of hours away by train and car. And though the end of the world had a way of giving you rose-colored glasses for what came before, when he remembered his mother, he mostly remembers that simmering feeling of resentment: that she’d taken him and Mykola back there, that she’d fallen so easily back into being a cowed daughter, didn’t put herself between Maks and his grandfather even once.

What tenderness he could muster for her was this: gratitude that she died quickly, after the end. He’d told Mykola that what he’d done to their grandfather was a mercy killing, but they both knew it hadn’t been. His mother, though, he would have wanted to show real mercy to, wouldn’t have wanted to suffer, but he wasn’t sure he would have been able to, without either enough love or enough hate to move his hand.

So it wasn’t deja vu, wasn’t anything he could remember having, but it felt nostalgic somehow all the same. Not for a life that he had lived, but for a time that he’d lived in. A life that he could have lived, maybe, if some things had been different. He didn’t know if Donna had any children—he’d never asked—but he wondered if it felt the same for her as he followed dutifully along behind her, lulled into obedience by the promise of food, his discarded layers clutched in his hands in a wadded-up ball of smelly fabric—it’d been awhile since he’d been able to wash them, or even really air them out. 

“Maybe not up, but I could still grow out.” He didn’t know if he ever would grow out of the teenage lankiness to his limbs—if it was even age, or just the lean times he lived in. He wished he could, that he could cut a more imposing figure, instead of trying to camouflage the gangliness of his limbs in as many layers as he could fit underneath the oversized leather jacket that had been an early apocalypse find—one that he’d relished, at the time, because he had always wanted one of those.  

yuri-sokolov:

And like an actress stepping onto a podium, Zoya had won. She wouldn’t break character, not now, not when their prize was so close; but he could taste the satisfaction that she gave off, the choked theatrical sob, the waver in her already thin voice. Yuri couldn’t have been prouder, watching the man give in— he broke down like they all did, bitterly; as though it wasn’t their decision to be subject to the whims of a waif as pale and as delicate as this one.

The stranger bent, his warning was spilled and while his attention was caught between both Zoya and his bag, Yuri moved. The trees parted silently, as though they were nothing more than curtains to indicate the rise of the next act— enter the villain. His stride was long, in three silent steps he had chewed up the space between them with the grace of an alley cat, loosening the garrotte in his grip to form a make-shift noose. He could have laughed, Zoya’s gaze lifted and clear blue eyes slipped from those of the stranger’s to his own, had she of been anything less of a professional, Yuri was certain she would have winked. Signed, sealed and delivered: the wire swooped around, snagging the other man’s throat.

He yanked back violently, hoping to hear the wheeze of air leaving his chest, widening his stance to prepare to battle against the struggle of a baited fish. “Is that all you could spare?” The words were a coo against an unwilling ear, leering in their tone. “Not even for a girl, all alone?” His body was larger, tugging at the other man’s made him bend closer to the earth and away enough so that the soles of his shoes couldn’t graze his sister’s nose should he buck backwards. “Sounds awfully selfish to me.” Yuri’s chin lifted, gesturing towards Zoya. 

@zoyasokolov​

The world had converted to something simpler, an eye for an eye. They were all hungry, desperate. But still, she couldn’t deaden her heart completely, tinges of guilt would prick it from time to time. This was a weakness that required burying, that she knew. He gave in, because they all gave in. It wasn’t their responsibility to fight fair, even a wolf can look like a dog until it goes in for the bite.

Yuri arrived, right on cue, coming up behind the man like a wraith. She rose slowly, like the prima ballerina rising from her deep bow at center stage. The tears looked ridiculous on her new expression, twisted winner’s smile, and so she swiped them away with the sleeve of her coat. Zoya drew her own blades, two knives longer than her forearm, thin and sharp. Yuri’s grip was practised, the garrotte tight enough to cut off the urge to struggle, but still with enough to slack to keep the victim from passing out.

Avoiding the man’s legs in case he did get courageous and decide to take a swing at her, (it wouldn’t be the first time, she’d had bruised shins for weeks to prove it), she came around to his side, the tip of one blade angled around his ribs, the other slicing through the backpack strap slung on his shoulder, letting the bag hit the ground.

“A little selfish,” Zoya agreed wickedly, her knife lingering a moment at his ribs, before she kicked the bag away to root through it, “We will have to take it all.”

@maksvoloshyn​

There hadn’t been a single church service that Maks hadn’t sat and scoffed his way through, when he had been forced to attend. But maybe some of its black-and-white morality had crept its way through, because as panic took the place of the air he could no longer breathe, a part of him felt betrayed. Hadn’t he been good? Hadn’t he lived his life like a vulture, but not as a thief, scavenging among the destruction, taking only what was still unclaimed?

Sometimes, he thought he would be more brutal, if only he were stronger, if only he were better with the gun shoved down the back of his pants, if only he could. Sometimes, he dreamed that he was back where he was however many years ago, and instead of fleeing in the night, hurting only those that tried to stand in his way, he’d used the gun he’d stolen to put a bullet in the head of every single one of them. But his feet scrabbling uselessly in the dirt like this, up close and personal with this kind of brutality, made him realize that the weakness wasn’t in his punching arm or the aim of his trigger finger—it was in his stomach, in the very core of him.

He’d killed before, when his back was against the wall and his life was on the line, pushed past some invisible point that made him lash out.. But even that had been motivated by the mindless fear of a cornered prey animal. It hadn’t changed him as irreparably as he thought it should, hadn’t turned him into something that matched the figures that had descended upon him now.

That didn’t seem like virtue. Or maybe it was, just a useless kind, the kind leftover from a world that didn’t exist anymore. He’d never wanted to be virtuous, and he didn’t want to be now.

His hands had risen to his throat, trying to dig their way underneath the wire cutting into his skin, create some small space for him to gasp in air. “Not—alone—is—she?” He pushed out through gritted teeth, the anger that simmered underneath the fear making him use the breath that was left to him unwisely as he twisted and thrashed, tried to jerk his body towards his bag where it had fallen from him, into the arms of a thief who was going to take him for all he had. “I’ll kill you,” he tried to spit, but it came out as more of a wheeze, ineffective as the bared teeth of any animal caught in a trap. “I’ll fucking—kill you.”

Kuba didn’t know what to make of him. So he tried not to.

“Jakub.” He held their gaze as he slowly wrapped the knife back up in the plastic bag. “But I go by Kuba.” After another beat, he added, “What are you, Ukranian? I hate speaking English.”

It had been months since he’d told someone else his name. The sensation was not unpleasant, although he felt miserly about it, as if this Maks were about to snatch this remaining fragment right out of his hands. Kuba noticed the lupine way in which he carried himself. There was a studied air of ease about him, as if he were tense but pretending otherwise, that made Kuba feel angular almost in retaliation. An uncomfortably awkward sensation threatened to overwhelm him, but he shrugged it off with a curt gesture.

He lead the way from the hallway into the living room. The heat from the fire greeted them the moment they passed through the open doorway. The house was old enough to have thick, old-fashioned walls, the sort that were vaguely lumpy with plastered-over hay. It kept the warmth in unlike any place Kuba had squatted in before. Without looking at his strange new companion, he continued to cross the room to open the shutters further. Grey light faded into leaping shadows, which illuminated his nest of unkempt blankets. The mattress upon which they tangled was dusty from where he’d dragged it from one of the bedrooms. In the stark light evidence of his surprise was plain.

Kuba didn’t bother picking up the tins of food. He only shoved his rucksack onto the floor and threw himself wordlessly onto the mattress. Pulling his knees up to his chest, he recommenced tending the grate. There was a gulf between them, a yawning space, that Kuba had not encountered for a long time. Five months, at least, since the last person he was with. He found he wasn’t entirely sure what to do or say.

Realizing he was fidgeting, Kuba made himself wind his hands around his legs. He glanced in the stranger’s direction from beneath a mop of hair. Part of him didn’t want to look up at… Maks’ face in the light. The thought made something tangle in his empty stomach.

“Get your weapons if you want,” he said flatly. “Better they were up here than down there.” Where anyone could find them. Kuba shifted his butt, then added accusingly, “You gonna tell me where you were going? No one’s found this place before.”

“Kuba,” he said, more to himself than to Kuba, wanting to take the name somehow and hold onto it. There was a part of Maks that wanted to hear him—Jakub, Kuba—say his name in return. There weren’t a lot of people who could, weren’t a lot of people left who knew him. A ragtag group of former neighbors and countrymen, all from small fishing villages along the black sea coast, the kind that had been dying even before the rest of the world had, with everyone flocking to the cities. They probably wouldn’t want to see him again, if they were even still alive, wouldn’t say his name in friendship if they ever did.  An old woman in a greenhouse, who probably would, in her own way. Maybe—maybe his father, if he were still alive, but Maks didn’t know that. Couldn’t know that.

It seemed like a pretty pathetic list. But, at least, it had just grown by one more. In a world like this, it seemed like a certain kind of intimacy. It seemed like enough, then, to Maks, to make them not strangers. “Ukrainian, tak. From Odessa, South.” Where people spoke Russian just as much, if not more, than Ukrainian. Speaking it, just thinking about it, made his throat feel tight. He hadn’t been to Odessa since he was barely nine years old. Maybe he’d never go back again—he certainly hadn’t done a good job at getting himself back there so far. He cleared his throat slightly, looked at Kuba moving through his space as Maks hovered in the doorway, feeling like an intruder for the first time. “What are you? Your accent’s funny.”

Tearing his gaze away from Kuba—something real, something alive—was harder than it should have been but, when he did, the room looked cozy, lived in, from the fire radiating warmth to the lines carved into the doorway he leaned against to the tangle of blankets on the mattress that Kuba had thrown himself onto. It was close to what he’d imagined, when he’d smelled the smoke from the fire from downstairs. It was what he had wanted, but standing at the threshold of it he felt a little awkward, somehow reluctant to take it. And maybe part of that was due to Kuba, how comfortable he seemed here, though he still seemed maybe uncomfortable with Maks’ presence. Not like Maks could blame him.

And so his offer took him by surprise. When he dropped his weapons downstairs, he’d resigned himself to spending a night at the mercy of someone else’s, hadn’t considered that whoever he found would give up that upper hand. It made him hesitate, for a moment, pinned in place as Kuba asked him another question. “I—one second,” he mumbled, though he did flash Kuba a quick smile—a small thing, still a little tight, but grateful nonetheless, what he could offer in lieu of a thank you that never felt that easy to say—as he clattered back down the stairs to retrieve them, hurrying back as quickly as he could to the warmth of the bedroom.

He didn’t say anything, but he let Kuba see them, as he fumbled them from his hands into his pack, where they’d be safe but useless, nonthreatening. A knife with a makeshift sheath, scraps of fabric wrapped around the blade and twine to make a belt he could tie around his waist, the width and bulk of it enough to imply that it was the kind intended for use on animals that were still alive, instead of already dead. The pistol, beat up on the outside and perpetually clumsy in his hands, its intimidating outside obscuring the fact that it was empty.

_________________________

Fingers tapping on the recently retrieved match box, Otto debated. He wanted to head towards the river too, but with this guy heading in the same direction, side by side, he knew he was pushing his look. The other seemed flighty the way he shifted from foot to foot, the way he had come speaking a blend of two languages like the words spilled out of him in a panic. Otto eyed him, the tip of his right forefinger absentmindedly crushing a corner of the match box. The card was flimsy. It had thinned out to become glorified paper and to the touch it felt dusty as the fibres lifted from age. Otto would wait. He would study what this guy was about.

           He pushed the little box into his trouser pocket because it was safer to store them there for now then get his bag off his back and make himself more of a target. He’d use those matches in the next few days — he might even treat himself to an easy lit fire.

           The younger man gave a sharp laugh that raised one of Otto’s brows. As far as he was aware he hadn’t said anything that was funny and his eyebrow questioned that. It was clear that the other was much younger than Otto. He was jumpy, questioning, quick to laugh. Age was hard to judge by sight now as everyone looked bedraggled, their faces worn and creased with worry. Sometimes you had to rely on character traits.

           A snarky response and Otto folded his arms across his chest. Despite lack of food, Otto had managed to keep his body broad. He had wasted from what he used to be, but his chest and arms refused to narrow as he carried heavy weights and trekked across countries. “That’s something my father would have done,” Otto responded, bitterly understanding the guy’s paranoia but mildly irritated that it had been applied to him. He wasn’t that old — was he? “Now isn’t the time to be learning lessons by walking into something hungrier than you. If you have to learn that way then I don’t think you’d be standing here.” Otto unfolded his arms, allowing them to hang freely at his sides. “You must have known some assholes,” he added, surprised by how much he was talking to a stranger. Maybe it was due to the flighty nature of the other that Otto didn’t find imposing.

It was hard to know how much time had passed. Sometimes Maks tried to count days, tried to mark them down, keep some record—but he kept messing up, kept forgetting days, or maybe marking the same day twice, thinking he’d forgot. People said it was years, and he believed that. Enough time for him to not be a teenager anymore, maybe, not that it really counted for anything, anymore. Not that it mattered, whether he was nineteen or twenty or what—either way, he was still the same, still younger than most of the people he encountered, still weaker, still more afraid.

He tried so often to make it seem like he was bigger and stronger than he was, a kid hiding behind an unloaded pistol and a shell of bravado. But people didn’t always believe him. Probably hard to, when it seemed so hard to believe it himself, like all he did when he let his mouth run away with him was talk himself into trouble he couldn’t talk himself out of.

But he wasn’t in trouble now, though, he didn’t think. He’d mouthed off to a stranger, and he didn’t seem to care much. Maybe it should have been a relief, but it felt like a little bit of an annoyance all on its own: he’d always liked getting a reaction from people, back when pissing people off seemed like a harmless thing to do, and it rankled to see his words roll off of someone, in every way that counted save for the stranger’s folded arms. Like he was just that irrelevant.

They understood the skepticism: they were faced with it often enough that it never surprised them the way it had the first time, when they were suddenly up against comprehending the fact that not everyone saw the end of the world the way they did. They had explained it over and over again, to other travelers, to trading partners, to those they hoped would join them. It had been hard, at first, to find people who didn’t let desperation turn them away from the promise of a better kind of life.

They had thought, at first, it wouldn’t be possible. But the Days had slowly built up around them, and they had made something, here, something good, and they couldn’t imagine turning their back on it to live another way.

     “We saved you,” they said, but their tone was one of explanation, not of guilt or persuasion. They didn’t need his thanks; that wasn’t why they had done it. “We saved a life, today. And more will be saved who might have been killed by the walkers we slaughtered. That is enough, for us.”

It might not have been enough of an answer, for him, but it was enough of an answer for them. If he didn’t understand that someone might still want to do something because it was good, all the words in Russia couldn’t have made him understand why they lived as they did, why their goals had manifest into this. It didn’t matter, in the long run, if he didn’t understand; they had come to learn that there were many kinds of people in this world, and that tragedy hit everyone in different places. For some, personal security was enough. For some, personal security was hard enough to come by that it had to be enough.

They seemed unruffled by their outburst—and, really, why would they have been, when they faced down hordes of walkers without flinching? It made him feel doubly foolish, doubly young, something like a flush coming to his face while he looked down at his lap. And maybe something a little bit like guilty: they’d saved Maks when Maks wouldn’t have done the same for them. They’d saved Maks when Maks couldn’t have saved himself, let alone save anyone else.

He tried to push it down. Squash it ruthlessly. There was room for only one soft heart between him and Mykola, and it wasn’t him, wasn’t his. He lived a life that was the opposite of what this person was telling them: cruel where they were kind; passive where they were active, and all the more cruel in his passivity. He didn’t hurt people, maybe, but he looked the other way while people were hurt, and he benefited from their pain. Ate their food, wore their clothes, carried their supplies on his back.

He’d never saved a life, other than his own, other than Mykola’s. And most days that felt miraculous, like the answer to a prayer he hadn’t been able to pray—because if he’d started praying when the bombs fell, then what was the fucking point of a life of obstinance and blasphemy? He’d never thought that was anything to be ashamed of, until someone showed him how much more they could accomplish and aspire to.

Maks didn’t know if he would be like them if he could—(minus the sniper rifle, and the skill with it, that he’d take in a heartbeat)—he just knew that he couldn’t.

She let out a huff of a laugh before pretending to consider his question, playing along with the joke. ‘Well, let’s see… it’s an even bet between forever and next time a heavy wind passes by, depending on where the tree branches decide they want to fall and crack everything they land on. I really ought to take a few more of these trees around here, while the wind’s not bad, but I’ve been saying that for months.’

Months. It had been a long time since she thought of time in calendar terms. Days only had meaning because, even without the sun, the sky still got dark for nine or ten hours a day; weeks didn’t mean anything when you had nothing but the cycle of waking and sleeping to anchor yourself, and months were even more meaningless. It wasn’t as if anyone had a schedule to stick to, an appointment to arrange. And years? If you’d asked her how many years it had been since she found this place, since she made it her home, she could have given you a decent guess, but it would have been wrong. 

She’d lived for routine, in her old life: giving lectures, running experiments. Choosing doctoral students for funding in her lab, every spring, like clockwork. Watching them grow up and grow past her, move on to bigger and better things. Morning breakfasts and afternoon teas, evenings by the fire and the telly. Anniversaries, birthdays, Christmases. Her life had passed her by, year in and year out, marked only by those things that forced her to think about the passage of time. How had she changed, so much, to not even know what day of the week it was? 

She walked over to the glass, under the guise of examining his work, put a hand on the clean, in-tact pane of glass, firmly in place. A wave of warmth washed over her, the feeling of security. Like a fresh coat of paint or a sturdy lock; this glass would keep the wind out, let her do what she did best for another few months, maybe another year, if her body didn’t give out first. She wished she could give herself a fresh coat of paint, replace her broken parts with things that would hold up a little better, last a little longer. 

For a moment, she wondered if she’d even be here, the next time Maks came around.

But there wasn’t time for her to linger in thoughts like that. Not when there was work to be done, inside, vegetables to harvest, beds to re-sod. Lunch to cook, for the both of them, over the hot plate she’d put together from broken old parts. 

     ‘Getting hungry?’ she asked, turning back to him.

If the greenhouse seemed impossible, that it was sturdy and standing and growing things, then the trees around it seemed like a different brand of impossible, too. There were trees everywhere, Maks had definitely seen his fair share of them, in the off-the-beaten path routes he tended to travel, but when he considered the ones around the greenhouse and really thought about them, there was something impressive about them.

They were still standing. Despite the bombs, despite the dust and the ash, despite the poison in the air and the water and probably the soil. And who knows how old they were, how long they’d been there, what droughts or floods or fires they might have seen before. After all that, didn’t they deserve to stand for as long as they could? After all that, didn’t it seem a little bit absurd to think that Donna or Maks or anyone else might be the thing they couldn’t endure?

But he still offered: “If you need help with the trees, I could stack around for a few more days. You know, if you’re not sick of me already. Or—next time I’m around.” They both knew it wouldn’t be for free, he didn’t say that, would have felt a little bit cheap about naming his terms. The thing about a safe place was that it felt that much harder to leave, made it that much harder to keep moving, heading into the unknown and the vague direction of home. He didn’t know what was in Odessa, what perils might lurk along the way there, and sometimes that felt paralyzing, kept him retracing old familiar steps.

And if he went too far, he wouldn’t come back here, and then what would Donna do about her glass or her trees? (Find somebody else to help, probably, there was no shortage of people who needed the things that she had, who would do the things Maks did. He just wanted to think, maybe, if he didn’t come around for a long time, that she might wonder about him, even if she didn’t worry.)

yuri-sokolov:

They both knew their roles well, tonight wasn’t their opening night, this straggler wouldn’t be the first to star in their well-rehearsed matinee. Their victim was alone, Yuri’s pulse didn’t racket against his throat while he approached his sister. Zoya’s eyes widened, her voice was musical, but husky. The fragility in it was measured, he grinned proudly from his place in the dense brush.

He didn’t dare move from his place— this was the dangerous part of the ballet, the crescendo. The hesitation was palpable and Yuri could almost taste it on his tongue, leering in the dark. She would win him over, or he would step in; in any instance, they would rise with their own bags full. The vultures could use another body to rip into with their sharp and curved beaks, this man would do them well. The threat that was tossed made him tense, light eyes narrowed.

It had happened before, they had bitten off more than they could chew. When they had been beaten, they had beaten back twice as hard— those that did not kill them knew better than to stick around triumphantly. The wins racked up further on their court these days, perhaps it made them braver. Hunger struck the weasel and the shrike, this was someone that they wouldn’t so easily let away.

The ball was still in Zoya’s court, he waited for his sister to volley it back.

@zoyasokolov​

There was no weapon in his hand, and that rendered his threat meaningless. She stepped forward more quickly now, shoulders hunched and pink palms held aloft, eating up the space between them before he could dig something out the bag he was holding onto so tightly. Part of her considered letting him try it, to see what he could produce. The broken blade of pair of kitchen scissors? A gun with only empty shells rattling around inside? The last person they ambushed had pulled a rusting piece of twisted pipe. They hadn’t even gotten two good swings out of it before Yuri’s garrotte silenced their will to fight.

“Please,” she choked out again, her voice bordering on water logged, unshed tears springing to her eyes. Tears may be overkill, but no one could say Zoya didn’t go the extra mile. “The others, down the road… they took everything.” From the way he spat out his threats she knew he could relate. Everyone was stolen from, or did the stealing. There were more bandits left in the world than there was kindness. For the grand finale, she crumpled like a rag doll, hitting the ground hard on her knees just a few feet before him, like a sack of bones. Like something already dead.

“Just a little water, please. Something to keep going,” she begged, eyes cast down. She needed him to step forward, for his shadow to loom over her. This was her role, bait and place, get the victim in the prime position for Yuri to conduct the crescendo. She knew he was hidden not too far away, teeth bared and rearing to lunge.

@maksvoloshyn​

He’d drawn himself up, spat out his best threat, and still she kept coming. His jaw clenched, teeth grinding together. His throat worked convulsively around words he couldn’t find. He didn’t know what his next move should be. Did he like this? Being mean to girls? He didn’t. He didn’t want to hurt anyone, when it came down to it, just wanted to quietly make his way in the world. Keep himself safe. But kind people, or people who were scared or suffering, would steal from you just as surely as the cruel. They’d beg you and they’d thank you, sure, but in the end they’d rob you just as blind, if you let their pleas touch your heart.

But they weren’t anything special. Everyone was struggling. Everyone needed something. Maks had a hard enough time taking care of himself, and so though didn’t want to hurt anyone, he didn’t want to help anyone, either.

Sometimes, at the strangest times, he missed the group he’d traveled with. When they’d hardly ever let him hold a weapon, he’d never had to hurt anyone, just looked away while they did it for him. Ignored the tears their victims shed and told Mykola to suck it up when he expressed his discomfort at their barbarian ways. He never had to make a decision, either, never had to decide what to do or who to trust. He just followed orders. For awhile, it had saved him. In the end, it’d been the thing that had ruined him, too.

But there was just him here. And, as far as he could tell, his panicked scanning of the treeline beyond betraying no one lying in wait, there was just her. The decision was his own. She seemed desperate, but she didn’t seem afraid. She was in his path, had come so close despite his warning, so he couldn’t just walk around and over her—he imagined her grabbing onto a wrist or an ankle, holding him there with a strength born only of desperation. And even if he did, he could see her stumbling after him. Calling to him. Wearing him down, or worse, drawing whoever else might be near towards them both, whether they were human or walker.

“Don’t move,” he said again, trying to put even more steel in his tone, hoping she would listen this time. Without taking his eyes off of her, he pulled one arm out of the strap of his backpack, swung it around to his front to rummage inside. His searching hand closed around one can, and he decided that would be his sacrifice. He pulled it free and held it aloft. “I’m going to put this down and, when I’m gone, then you can take it. It’s all I can spare.”

He tried to keep his tone authoritative, his back straight and shoulders back to hold himself to his full height and breadth even as he knelt down, reached in front of him to place it in the dirt halfway between them. The space between them had shrank. He could have spit on her, if he wanted to. If he was one of the men from his former group, he would have. “You take this, and then you leave me the hell alone.” 

The sound of something hitting the floor made Kuba sweat with relief. At least this stranger was sensible. If they had come charging up the stairs, group or no group, weapons be damned, Kuba knew his reflexes well enough to estimate he might only have a fifty-fifty chance at not being skewered on the spot. He was tall, but he was thin, and without an army regime he was woefully out of shape.

When the first creak of weight on wood sounded, Kuba swallowed thickly. He adjusted the grip on his knife. Nerves made him unsteady as a junkie: with his free hand he pushed a mop of hair from his eyes and peered down the stairwell. 

The figure that emerged, like an apparition from a story, was still frightening despite its anonymity. And then they stepped onto the landing, and Kuba’s throat tightened.

The first thing he noticed was that they were of age, or close enough. Dusty light tangled around his silhouette, casting him half in shadow, but accentuating his harshly cut cheekbones and cool, unwavering gaze. Kuba kept his knife held in front of him as he glanced over the stranger’s clothes. Rough, dirty, scavenged. No sign of dog tags or faction brands. Dimly registering the stranger’s build, Kuba’s pale eyes dropped once to the boy’s mouth, then shot away. Their gaze met.

Kuba chewed his bottom lip. “Yes,” he answered quietly. Although he only lowered his knife a fraction, the air between them lessened slightly. He eyed the stranger on an angle, his head tilted towards the dark as if to obscure his identity. After a beat, he reached up to tug his cloth mask free.

The fire crackled invitingly from the other room. Kuba sensed their attention drift, as one, to the idea of warmth and safety. He fidgeted with his knife for a moment before his hand dropped to his side. 

“What do I call you?” Kuba asked with more assurance than he felt, a trace of his old schoolyard bossiness sifting to the surface. Turning his face so they stared at each other head-on, his expression hardened.

His hands lowered to his sides, the knife held in the stranger’s hand lowered slightly too, and while he knew he should keep an eye on it—(it was, after all, the only weapon the two of them currently had between them)—he felt his attention consistently being dragged away, eyes flitting to and fro across his frame to take in some new detail: the set of his shoulders or the slope of his nose or the cast of his mouth. It was more curious than wary: so much time spent alone, so much time spend hiding, being around another person often felt, at least at first, like an overwhelming onslaught of sensory information.

But there was too much to take in all at once for him to feel completely relaxed. He wanted the knife gone. He wanted to warm his hands in front of the fire he’d smelled from downstairs. He wanted to study this stranger in the light instead of the half-dark and see if his instincts were correct—(that maybe, just maybe, finding this farmhouse was a stroke of luck instead of just another danger he’d wandered into)—or if just however long it had been of loneliness and solitude had lulled him into a false sense of security. If it was nothing more than wishful thinking winning out over carefully nurtured wariness.

It happened, no matter how much he didn’t want to admit it. If being alone ever got easier, it hadn’t yet.

There was a certain type of boy he’d tried to model himself after, barely fifteen in Ukraine and figuring out who he wanted to be. The type that listened to American music, that skived off school and smoked cigarettes by one the abandoned buildings on the edge of town. That always smirked like they knew something that you didn’t. That were cool, modern in a way that made Maks’ grandfather curl his lip and made Maks ache in way he couldn’t begin to describe, unsure whether the longing was to be someone or be around them, or just to be anything and anywhere other than what and where he was. 

________________

Conversations now were few and far between. Not very often did it happen that Otto would allow himself to get within speaking distance of another unless they caught him off guard. It was safer that way. Speaking distance meant they could hurt you, betray you. It was easier to be alone and have conversations with your own demons rather than the demons of others.

               Everyone was a demon now, born in the fires that created this new world. Everyone was made new. That didn’t mean better, revived, free of sin. No. They were baptised by fire and smoke and now they would live just as they were created; with a burning desire to destroy all that isn’t theirs. They would walk this earth taking what they could and never giving, reaping and pillaging, deceiving and murdering.

               Otto didn’t know where he stood with that. He was probably a demon to — virtues forgotten as he did what he could to survive. As he knelt there in the dust, his fingers itching at the knife in his boot, his eyes wide at the survivor before him, he knew he faced a cross roads. Life gives you choices, decisions to make, even when you feel at a loss or out of control. In this situation he is out in the open faced with a potential danger and Otto could simply think that he had been dealt another shit hand, but he had options. He could draw his knife and charge — get the upper hand ­— and make himself the demon. He could sit there and allow himself to be more vulnerable which may also present himself as not a threat — making the situation defuse or him the victim. He could ignore the man and hope he went away. Otto took his life into his own hands. He gripped onto his freewill like it was the last thing he could truly own.

               The language the other spoke was a mash up and it took Otto a few moments to pick apart what had been said. He could speak butchered Russian, but his English was better so as it jumbled together it was a strain on the ears. Despite himself a low chuckle croaked at the back of his throat. The man seemed more eager to avoid a fight that he did. So eager, in fact, that one language just wasn’t enough to express it in. Otto’s itching fingers relaxed. “You’re about ten minutes out,” he replied to him in English, his German accent being muffled by the fabric that wrapped the bottom half of his face. He kept his eyes on the stranger while he rummaged in the pockets of the ravaged body. “You want to head East from here,” he added as if it was common knowledge while his fingers made contact with what felt like a small box. Pulling it out he saw it was a match box. Four matches. Better than nothing.

               Standing slowly so as not to spook the stranger, he squinted at him. “In the future, don’t admit you’re lost. Someone might purposely give you the turnaround.”

They both had choices to make. Even as Maks waited for the stranger in front of him to make his, he still had choices of his own: there was an itching in his heels, he could just turn tail and run; there was an itching in his palms, too, he could reach for his hunting knife and hope the element of surprise would be enough to give him the upper hand. He didn’t do either, though, just stood still and waited. He spent so much time trying to avoid people, but while he knew that solitude was safer he still hated it. When he did run into others, he found they had a strange gravity, that it was harder than it should have been to drag himself away.

Sometimes he just wanted to know that there was another set of ears listening to him than just his. Remind himself that he existed.

But he still held himself tense, showing the stranger his open palms and a hopeful expression, as if to say look at how nonthreatening I am. It was a gamble, not being a threat was the same thing as being an easy target, but when it came down it Maks would always rather be robbed than murdered. His weapons should have been enough to grant him safety, but sometimes he felt like he was so bad with them—(or just so squeamish)—that he might as well not have them at all. 

But then the man laughed, at Maks felt the tension in his shoulders ease. He felt his next breath come a little bit heavier, almost a sigh of relief, shifting his weight from foot to foot and rolling out his shoulders a bit as if he could shake the stiffness that had gathered there while he held himself frozen.