Rhiannon Cooper

They had been walking for the better part of the day, and the sky was growing dark enough that Rhiannon was beginning to have trouble seeing the road at her feet. There was no sign of shelter for miles, but that wouldn’t be a problem, she thought: with two of them, they could alternate watches throughout the night, keep alert for anyone or anything passing by, and still get some rest, at least, if not some sleep. It was better than walking on in the dark, where they risked tripping over the uneven road and injuring themselves, or walking straight into a trap or some other unseen danger.

They could make camp, just off the road -- there was a ditch, of sorts, that would hide the light of a small fire from those on the road until they got close enough to hear, would prevent anyone from sneaking up on them. It wasn’t ideal, no -- an abandoned house or a burned out car would have been better, along the side of the road, but she hadn’t seen one in the past hour that they could turn back towards, and she worried about pushing further ahead where they might lose the advantage of the ditch without guarantee that they’d find anything better. 

    ‘We should stop here, for the night,’ she said, turning back for a moment to look at her current companion. She could barely see the other woman, in the dark, just a smudge of pale skin and dark hair in the dim dusk. They had been traveling together, like this, for a week or two, maybe slightly longer. Rhiannon had lost count, already, found herself mixing up her impressions of Emilya with thoughts she’d formed about other people she’d traveled with. Was having trouble remembering what had happened with whom, or when she’d even met the woman now walking with her. That was, she liked to think, the way she wanted things to be. No personal attachments, no growing reliant on someone in anything other than practicality.

Traveling in pairs was easier than traveling alone, in case something bad happened, but the second Emilya asked anything of her, she’d be gone.

Canned food couldn’t last forever. Eventually, or maybe soon, they would have picked the world clean of everything that had been there before, only be able to rely on what they could make now. The people that grew things. The people who could hunt, or turn radiation-mutated animals into cultivated livestock again. When that happened—if that happened, if Maks were alive to see it, he’d be on the outside. Forced to rely on others for what he couldn’t prove for himself.

Other than scavenging—something that anyone desperate could do, Maks had little to offer. The one thing he could do, however, was fish. The most useful survival skill he had, and he’d learned it from his grandfather, from a man who had never planned to live this long—(though he claimed he knew it was coming)—and who, indeed, hadn’t. 

It didn’t take much: a bit of bone he’d found that he thought (hoped) was animal, carved down to a point at either end; a bit of dental floss wound through the groove he’d put into the middle, strong enough to act as a line; and then a little bit of the food he had remaining to bait his homemade hook, and he had something fall back on when cans of food seemed to be in short supply. All that was missing was a stick to tie the other end of the dental-floss line to, but he figured he could find one of those easily along the banks of the Dneiper, when he got there. And then, all that would be missing were the fish.

Sometimes it seemed hard to believe that there could be any lurking down in the murky depths of the river, that it hadn’t became poison, something in which nothing could live. But, even then, they were all living in poison, breathing it in day after day—and they were still standing, so why should the fish be any different?

His hands full of his makeshift line, the first thing he saw wasn’t the person on the banks of the river, but the river itself, and the concerning sheen to the oil floating at the top—frowning, he considered if it were enough for him to call off his day’s plan: if the oil floated at the top, and the fish were at the bottom, then they should be fine, right? His grandfather had never told him anything about this.

But the woman caught his attention, and he didn’t immediately retreat: she was seated, didn’t seem to be in a posture of readiness, of waiting to strike. If anything, it seemed like Maks had the upper hand, and so maybe that meant they could quietly and warily coexist for as long as it took for Maks to either catch a fish or get tired and give up. “Hello. Privet,” he said, voice raised enough to carry, trying as always to strike the right balance between being a threat and being an easy target. “I don’t mean trouble.”

She should have heard the footsteps coming.

That was the thing, about this dehydration: it was making her sloppy, careless, too distracted by the rasp of her own throat to focus on the sounds of the world around her. It wasn’t until he spoke that she turned and saw the man standing behind her, at the river’s edge, something in his hands. At first glance, she thought it was a garrotte, thin line ready to strangle her and take her bag, raid her body for whatever meager supplies she carried. He wouldn’t find much, that way, a few days worth of food and a gun with dwindling ammunition, a ratty falling-apart paperback romance novel, an empty water bottle. 

But then she saw the hook on the end: a fishing line. Or maybe just a cleverly disguised garrotte, though she was certain he’d get more worth taking with a fishing line than with a weapon, from her, provided he knew how to use it. She didn’t know if the fish in the river had survived the oil spill that was currently confounding her, but she imagined there had to be something to eat down there, even if it had three heads and six fins and, hey, honestly, more meat that way, right? 

She sank back on her heels, fully moving to sit on the ground. If this was it, she’d rather die a quick and painless death at this man’s hands than die of dehydration, delirious, over the course of the next few days. How long, again, could someone go without water? Three days? How long had it been, since her own thirst had last been slaked? The bottle on her bag had drops left in it, but she didn’t think it would help much, in the long term, unless she miraculously found more.

@novacrp: the sovereign

The sludge in the water had her concerned.

She’d sought out the river because she needed water, and desperately. The jug she carried strapped to her backpack had been running low for weeks, and it hadn’t rained in longer. The creeks she normally relied upon had started to run dry, and so she’d followed them upstream, further and further until she reached the large body of water she knew must have been the Dneiper river. And then, just as she thought she’d finally caught a bloody break, she’d dipped her hands into the flow and seen them come out black and glistening with oil, the rainbow shimmer of it covering the surface from shore to shore. 

There were only so many options she had, now. Go into a town, likely overrun with walkers, and hope she found somewhere whose boilers had not yet been emptied, or a store that still had something on the shelf. Wait it out until another traveler came by and take their pack off them, through force or deception or something else altogether. Keep walking, knowing she would grow delirious soon from dehydration, and hope she could make it upstream past wherever the spill had originated... 

Each one sounded worse than the last. She let herself fall back, from the crouched position she’d adopted over the edge of the water, onto her arse so she was sitting, knees up, hands still oil-slick. She wiped them, unceremoniously, on the fabric she kept wrapped around her neck, which normally protected the skin of her face from the rough, rusted edges of the gas mask currently tied onto her pack. It reeked, like petrol, and the scent would follow her wherever she went, now, but there was nothing she could do about that except stay away from open flames until she found an abandoned shirt or jacket she could shred apart to replace it.