Thunder in the night.

They needed the rain; it was far too dry lately, far too dry for being so close to the Fourth.  All those fireworks, all the grasslands outside the city--it made her nervous.  She thought of California and its troubles with fire.  When she was five she had to be taken out of the class whenever the subject of fire safety came up.  Even learning how to prepare for fire terrified her; it meant acknowledging everything she loved could burn away.  She got more of a grip as she grew older, but...

Well, there was a reason she never picked up smoking, and it wasn't fear of lung cancer.

The thunder was getting closer.  She could hear the pounding of rain like frantic footsteps on the roof.  She opened an eye, peered through the inky bedroom to the city-lit night outside her window.

Fire.  Distant.  Plumes of smoke rising from a far building.

No rain.

Something scrambled in front of her window.  Cracks spread through the wall near the window.  It was a man, clamoring down the side of the building, digging into the brick with his bare fingers.  She could hear his ragged breath through the glass.  And he was gone, darting fast as a spider startled by the light.

No rain... and the footsteps were flooding down the stairs.

She had to run.

Stupid mistake, going out the front door of her apartment.  Movement in the dark near the stairs.  A tall man, black-haired, skin gone gray, clothes torn.  He saw her and hissed.  No, it was a snarl, a low snarl born from a hiss, guttural and thick like waste-choked water.  He charged at her, moving oddly, like his body was lagging just behind his head.  She scrambled for safety, tripped almost immediately, slipping on a hard plastic toy some kid left in the hall.  Saved her life; the man careened past her before he could stop, wound up stumbling.  She ran, first on all fours, then pouncing up onto her feet.  The man growled at her as she sped past.  He ran fast, but his reflexes were muddy, unsure.  Plus, he had his rain jacket on, and long pants.  She was in her pajamas, namely a t-shirt and panties.  Less to get in her way.

She heard the screams of a crowd just behind him.  Run.

She wrenched the ladder free, slid down, and she was on the street and--

Where the hell should she go?

Thunder.  Not thunder; gunfire.  Police station was west of here--

She made it two blocks, two lifeless blocks, before the tongue wrapped around her neck, cold and wet and stinking.  It slithered down her body and she pulled and scratched at it and she was rising, ever-so-slowly, up the side of the little convenience store, her back scraping on the cold stone.

The tongue took her to the roof.  She couldn't breathe, and it wasn't just the slender, cold member squeezing against her windpipe.  The slickness was a greasy ichor that sank into her skin like tattoo ink.  Her skin pulsed with pain with every jackhammer heartbeat, a full-body headache.

A man loomed over her, the tongue feeding into his mouth like he'd just puked up a line of intestine.  Green-sick smoke drooled out of his mouth and nose when he breathed.  His face was a nightmare landscape of gray flesh and swollen blisters and tumors.  She was at his feet, on her back, burning, choking, dying, pulling against the pulsing livid tentacle constricting her.

He crawled on top of her, face to face.  He breathed, and she breathed him in.

The black and the green drowned her eyes and she was gone.

* * *

...

She could breathe.

...

Not very well.

...

The smoke-stench filled her nose, her lungs.

...

Was it sewn into her now?  The scent?

Would she die with it?  Live with it?

She wanted to find a perfume shop and snort some Eau de Toilette, or an Earthbound Trading Company and ram some patchouli sticks up her nose.  The tongue-man's stink was unbearable.  Made her want to puke.  Made her feel alive, too, and...

lucid.

Lucid?

* * *

Light was too bright now.  She could feel it like the brush of dagger-points across her skin, just deep enough enough to trigger tickling pain, and that was moonlight, the secondhand stuff.  The streetlights were like fi

no.

No no no no.

No no no no no no no.

Far from the light.  Far from the light.

Go deep, into the w

the womb.

the motherwomb far from fathersky

Speech in her head fracturing splintering shatter star in her head like crystal song burning through static

cannot bear the mass

hearing the voice of her body.  The shine in the innerdark.  Shine was fine like wine.  Shine to be trusted and enjoyed like shine of grease on fresh cooked safetoeat.  On gorge gorge gorge gorge gorge.  On meat.  Cooked meat.  Mom making bacon for Sunday breakfast.  She was hungry... starving, like she'd been in the green and the black for weeks.

The intothedark was stronger than consume.  So she crawled, away from the willnotbenamed.  Into the motherwomb.  The earth.  The subway.  Where there was ink and dark.

* * *

They were here.  The Purifiers.

Countless.

It hadn't taken long to take the city.  The purifiers were too fast, too mighty, too hungry and strange.  The infected must have just hammered into living, broke them into glass fragments of broken bodies and screaming mouths.  All died.  Most came back.

They were angry and hungry.  She could seefeel them.  They were afraid, and they were united in fear.  In absence of the absent, they stood not-quite still, waiting for...

Waiting for...

No name.  No name for That/Them/? yet.

Hungry.

One of them saw her and hobbled towards her.  She watched it slink closer, unsteady on new legs just now starting to click together.  She wanted to puke.  The thing was gray, stiffening, starting to rot.  Its body was bruised where the Purifiers had struck with merciless fist and crunching foot.  It groaned, some attempt at language dying in its throat and spilling out like chewed gorge gorge gorge gorge gorge.

She could smell the Purifier's rot and it made her stomach contort in angry, impatient knots.

She slashed the Purifier.  It broke, split, and she was running again.

But she was used to running.

* * *

She could hear them, even here, in the motherwomb, far from the cannot no no no won't.

There were so may of them, and so many more to come, and they were angry and sick and hungry and everywhere.  And among them were the Proud.  The Preachers calling the flock with torrents of greasy, stinking sermon.  The Playful creeping over the vertical streets of the city, hunting the unchanged.  The Little Mothers and their poison kiss, their fatal lullabies.  The Just.

And her.  Alone.

She cradled her poor throbbing head in her hands.  Her skin was cold and coarse.  She held herself, found she had no warmth to keep in.  She was alone for now, before the Purifiers broke through to try and root out more of the uninitiated.  And then there would be no escape from the hunger or her duty to the Cause.  She would shred and cut and do so alongside the Purifiers without mercy or regard for her bodily cohesion.

She would die in the service of ten thousand hungry, screaming bellies.

Who wouldn't forgive her for crying?

* * *

"Hear that?" Zoey asked.

Bill's light was already off.  Francis topped off his shotgun's payload; seemed pertinent.

They had a plan this time, just in case.  The bulk rested on Louis's shoulders.  He said he was ready for it, but they saw his gun shake even when he wasn't firing it.

Bill was all for the plan, though.  Said it'd build his character.

* * *

In the dark of the motherwomb, it was easy to remember.  She remembered her first boyfriend all the way back in 3rd grade, a torrid romance that lasted all of three days, abandoned when she pledged herself to the lead singer of her favorite boy band, which changed from week to week, but of course she loved them all.  She remembered events no brain comparable to a human's could process, spat out in vague colors and sensations that burst through her body like seizures.  She remembered dying.

Thunder.

She turned from her corner in the dark of the motherwomb and saw.  In the darkness she could see they were alive.  They shone like torches, no oh please noing like boncan't won'ts.

They were shooting.  They'd been stormed by Purifiers that scampered out of nowhere, streaming in thick jets like blood from a severed artery.

The thunder woke her up.  She howled, and there were voices rising in panic as they tore apart the Purifier flow in defiance of her.  She flung herself at them, talons (her fingers were gone, overgrown into something much longer, much sharper; mightier than any living thing, this she knew) at the ready.

One of the four reached for his belt and, before she could jump, before she could cleave through flesh and bone, he threw a bottle at her.  A bottle with an improvised wick.

The sun rose in the subway station.

Briefly.

In the NO NO NO NO NO she broiled alive, and her sobbing became screaming.  Through the haze and burning-alcohol stench she tried to find them.  Her talons eviscerated cold bodies, her body broke apart in plumes.  The thunder, the HURTS IT HURTS IT HURTS, the voices of fear and triumph and anger and cold steel efficiency--they took her apart.

The strength left her legs, the fear in her smothered by the CAN'T RUN CAN'T RUN CAN'T RUN.  She fell, tried to keep upright.  Tried to breathe, and the HUUUUURTS billowed down her throat and the green went to ash and only the black remained.

* * *

Thunder in the night.

Must be fireworks.  Must be the memory of fireworks.  Not too long.  Have to see.

She laid on the grass, the dry grass, and watched the fireworks burst in fathersky.

She named the stars until the names of the stars burned away.