After The Awakening

The storage room for the store was underground, but that was all I knew. The iron bars and the tiny window gave me no entrance, but it did give me hope that somewhere hadn’t been picked completely clean yet, or maybe hadn’t even been found at all.

Zoot was nearby, as always, doing his own thing. He launched lithely from the cracked and filthy sidewalk to the windowsill, his little grey paws making no sound as they landed. There were bars on this window too, surrounded now with jagged shards of glass still holding tight to their frame. The door was covered over with a metal plate and padlocked shut. These people had fought to keep their store open as the world ended around them, so many security measures. I bet they were killed for it.

“That’s what happens when you try to take care of too many in an apocalypse, Zoot.” I told him. He croaked a meow at me in agreement. “You don’t even know what I’m talking about.” I rolled my eyes at him. “How can we get in?”

Zoot jumped down again and trotted away and around the corner. I followed. He’d taken it upon himself to climb a pile of broken bits of furniture leaning sodden and rank against the wall, and was now on the roof.

“I can’t get up there.” I whispered to him, exasperated. He came back and peered down at me, then his posture changed and I saw him grow wary and furious. Without glancing around I moved immediately to hide, finding a small space beneath an overturned armchair that stank of urine and mouldy stuffing. Men’s voices, not even trying particularly hard to be discreet so they were definitely trouble. I closed my eyes so they wouldn’t sense me staring, and I focussed on breathing, lowering my heart rate, from a sprint to a walk. With my eyes closed I could start to feel the waves in the air, disrupted by their bolshy movements, their aggressive attitudes. I doubt they’d have felt mine even if I’d been screaming inside, they were causing too many disruptions of their own. I didn’t dare stare though, sure that they would at least feel that.

Their voices got closer and I sank deeper into my mind, feeling myself being lightly buffeted by their psyche disruptions now. Four men, each of them twice my size, each lightly intoxicated. They bumbled around in the almost visible ether, throwing out sporadic tentacles and bits of information, tangling up the delicate webs of the patterned universe with their careless strides. I could catch glimpses of their thoughts, but they each came upon me so unexpectedly they unsettled me and I lost them, fleeting away out of reach. What I saw though was violence, gleeful cruelty. I let myself become part of the abandoned, broken furniture protecting me, an empty, quiet, hollow thing. Their unintentional grazes through the mess flowed over me like water over glass and they stomped and laughed away down the street without noticing me.

I took a breath and rose up through the layers of sublights until the world was bright and hard and dirty around me again. Trying not to touch the pissy chair I sheltered beneath I wriggled out and looked up. Zoot was already looking down for me, waiting patiently on the roof still. Sighing, I started looking around for a way up, eventually having to scale most of the wall just toes and fingertips. I stayed low as I made it to the top, and Zoot pranced happily over to an air vent.

“Clever boy.” I was glad the trip up the wall had been worth it. Zoot didn’t always understand the spaces a human body could fit.

Getting the grill off of the vent was too loud. I did it in miniscule, agonising fractions to limit the horrendous creak as I forced the metal from its frame and still Zoot’s ears flattened every time in clear annoyance.

“I know! I’m trying.” I told him irritably. I paused to look up at the sky and settle myself, staring up at the second moon, so bright and beautiful and eerie. I could barely remember what the sky had looked like with only the one, distant moon. Before the Awakening, and the end of civility. I looked away from her and as always the complicated ether patterns and auras were almost visible in my moon-stained eyes. They faded quickly, I’d have to close my eyes and sink back down through the sublights to see them that clearly normally. Zoot was getting impatient, walking in wide circles around the vent. He didn’t care about the mission itself, he fed himself fine from hunting little animals, he just loved the adventure. I smiled at him.

“All right.” I sighed and kept tugging, eventually feeling it loosen enough that I could gently tease it from it’s last bit of hold in silence and lower it to the rooftop with relief.

“Are you going first?” I asked Zoot, seeing as he was already half in and peering down into the dark. He scrambled in without looking back and I closed my eyes to listen to him. My ears heard him crash something metal as he landed, not loud enough to draw attention from anywhere unless there was someone inside. My senses heard him panic, his feline emotions scattering like startled tadpoles through me. I held my breath and waited for him to orient himself, waiting to see if the panic was for a threat or from the noise. My ears heard silence but my senses heard his tension ringing like a bell, fading gently into quiet. I felt us breathe together from across the space as he accepted he was alone in the room, and he resumed his usual friendly arrogance. I opened my eyes and stood, time to follow.

I lowered myself down, landing on an old, cold stove. The source of the clattering had been the mesh at the base of the vent, which now lay awkwardly on the floor.

I hopped down from the counter and went to the front of the store. Every shelf long emptied. I started looking for the trap door instead. I searched room by empty room, lifting rugs, getting slowly more frustrated as I found only solid floors everywhere.

“Zoot, any ideas?” I asked him. He was lying down on a coffee table like an enormously fluffy loaf, being unhelpful.

I sighed and planted my feet, clasping my fingers lightly around the rose gold locket I wore at my throat. I breathed again, and again, slower, lowering my heart rate, my consciousness. I felt the beginning flicker of warm gold in my chest and as always it lifted a small smile into my cheeks. My fingers caressed the heart shape, bumping the bumps of my fingerprints across the tiny engravings, growing the glowing light inside of me until I could feel him, as though he held my hand. See him as though in a dream, or reflected on water. I let him lead me, not even caring where my feet landed as I focussed everything I had on feeling him, believing that he was really there, really here with me again. It felt like sunlight in my chest. Like healing. Like he held me. My fingertips landed against something cold and I opened my eyes and found myself touching a closet door.

I opened it, brushing tears from my eyes, and was faced with the same shelves of receipt paper and pens and memos as I had been last time I’d opened it. More diligently this time, I looked at the shelving and discovered a door handle, subtle, against one side. Unlatching it I found the rest of the closet was a room harbouring some cardboard boxes and the elusive trap door. A massive steel sheet flat to the floor, locked with a large, standard padlock. Heart hammering with excitement I fished my lockpicks from my pack and got started. Zoot, attracted by my happiness, ambled in and watched me with interest as I wrestled with it, then got up and stood beside me eagerly as we heard it unclick. I could feel my own frenetic ambience as it vibrated off of me, and Zoot mewed at me, as he always did when my emotions or disruptions effected him.

With real effort I lifted the door and found metal stairs leading to a basement.

“Ready, Zoot?” I asked him. We moved down together and in my torchlight I discovered Utopia. Cans and cans of food, packets of dry pasta and rice. Scarves and beanies and gloves. Chocolates! Possibly still fresh packets of chips. I filled the room with my own silent exuberance, running hither and thither to touch all my new stuff.

“Zoot! We’re moving in, welcome to our new home kittycat!” I told him. He’d discovered a bag of cat food and was savagely tearing into it with his teeth.

I wrapped my hand again around my locket and closed my eyes.

“Thank you, Lennox.”

Disoriented from rising up the sublights so quickly I felt his presence fade in stages, eventually overridden by a hunger that matched the emptiness left in his wake. I snatched a chocolate from the shelf and ate it ecstatically. I hadn’t tasted processed food in months. I looked around in triumph, this place was a rare find.

I became aware of Zoot’s tension all at once in the way that you do when someone switches dramatically, turning to see him I found him hunkered in on himself, fur electric, terrified, staring into the ether. I knew what that meant, all my excitement and emotion had shaken the almost visible strings in the universal web, they’d be here in moments. There was no where to hide, closing the door would only trap us together. I pulled my daggers from my belt and closed my eyes, desperately trying to calm myself, to sink down to where I could see them coming. I fought myself, pressing the fear down so I could breathe and think. I started to see the auras, faintly and flickering as my focus wavered. Zoot tucked himself between my feet, making himself small, a low growl in his throat.

“Calm down, Zoot.” I whispered to him as I struggled to calm my own mind. I could almost see the patterns. I breathed in long, slow cycles, letting myself drift down.

Zoot could see better than I, his psyche lashed out to my left and I pushed my focus deeper as I turned my attention. Web Reaper, coming at me at sporadic pace. It’s nightmare face threw me as always and the room solidified around me as I lost sight of him. I sobbed once, against my will, then forced myself into calm again, finding the level just in time to see it get within reach with its horrendously long arms, three at the front almost clutching my hair and clothes, five more clutching at strands of matter in the tangles of the web. Shocked again I fell into reality and scrambled backwards, but too late. Before I could find my centre again he cut into my arm with five invisible talons. I screamed at the ether burn, otherworldly toxicity corroding at the blood as it welled. Zoot leapt up and screamed and I felt myself released. I lashed out with my daggers and felt one catch something, and felt the wild flailing of its limbs breaking its own web. We took our moment and ran, the cat a grey streak as he led the way. We’d come back when we were calm and it couldn’t find us again.