Little nightmares 3: Triple threat

The story of Seven: A real runaway

Chapter 1: The story of seven: A real runaway.
The world as we know it, with its caring community of adults protecting the children and the strong guarding the weak out of common human decency, no longer exists.
Even now, I do not know the exact details of the destructive catastrophe that ended civilization as it once was when each and every day was not yet a constant battle for survival as it was now. At least for those of us they claimed were still too young to understand and cold of being dreams.
Well life would pass me by if I didn't open up my eyes. But as my dear friends when they still lived and we were still fortunate enough to be dashing the same perilous path as one would tell you, I was the most stubborn, foolhardy human being around and nothing was more distasteful to me than the prospect of waiting around to do nothing while I still drew breath and there remained a single spark of life within me.

I had my fill of helplessness and guilt during my younger days. The most tragic of my childhood memories still trouble me even to this day, making me toss and turn entire nights away even in the comfortable bed furnished with proper pillows and warm duvet, actually built for my minute size which I now finally have to myself.
I remember silently making a vow to myself during a time I'd lost track off through the hectic struggles where I and I alone narrowly escaped with my life, that I would no longer run and hide while my pure hearted companions were slowly tortured to death in the most agonizing ways imaginable all in the name of sick and sadistic pleasure from "them".

They. Those things. The abominations. The horrors. The monsters. The mimics. The pretenders. My friends and I had as many insulting names for the towering monsters threatening our very lives as there were stars in the sky before we were driven apart by them and their insatiable greed and bloodlust.
Probably because none of us liked having to refer to those...things by their real name.
Or at least the name the governments of the world bestowed upon the alien invaders prior to the cataclysmic fall of civilization.
They called those demonic ravenous beasts that sought to control what remained of humanity to devour at their leisure, Angels.
Name after some mumbo jumbo in some supposedly sacred scripture, that apparently detailed how this catastrophe was doomed to happen as some sort of divine punishment the all-loving God in his heaven decided we deserved with some nonsense about this being the necessary step towards the divine miracle of something wonderful called "human instrumentality" where everyone came together in perfect harmony and...

Are you laughing yet?
I certainly am. To think that any race no matter how flawed deserved to be subjected to the daily torture we survivors had no choice but to grit our teeth and bear.
Yet people call us kids the crazy ones for thinking such convoluted nonsense the
I still remember how I had to do nothing and watch as Two, Three, Four and Five were nabbed by their giant hands to be unceremoniously used as little more than dainty morsels as they were crushed with one small bite and swallowed with a disgusting belch by the giants that we promised we'd work together to avoid.
Their final ear shattering screams still echo in my bones as I hurriedly dash from one hellish place of nightmare to the next, each shave with the hand of death closer than the previous.

We resisted to the end, but for my friends it was too late. Too late.
Yes. My friends had strange names and yes, we fell out with each other in childish quarrels every now and again. But we were all we had.
So long as we were together, we did not feel totally alone and isolated.

There was a strange sort of comfort in dropping off to rest knowing that at least one of us would stay up to keep watch.
As well as a bizarre sensation in having to pass out each crumb of food we happened across between us. It meant each of us had even less to eat than we otherwise would have going solo.
It also made mealtimes a pleasurable affair for more than just nourishing our frail bodies, but also our otherwise hollow souls, without which we would be little better than the mindless automations we sometimes came across with little better to do than try to brutally murder the first living beings that crossed their path on sight.

Sharing the food that I found and putting a ghost of a smile however brief onto the faces of my motley band, suffused my cold heart with a heavenly warmth words alone could not begin to describe. Seeing the unusually decrepit and skinny Five's smile, as she tucked deftly into the shell of the small crab, I had managed to forage with my last bit of strength one warm dawn by some unnamed beach. It filled me with something more than happiness.
It filled me with determination to not simply live but thrive.

Five...
A frail and sickly yet pretty little thing who somehow managed to keep a constant grin through thick and thin. A contagious grin that I was not in the slightest afraid of catching up and could never get enough of.
Her full-length real name was Go. Go Rei Shizuki, her given name matching herself picked number in our team by no small coincidence. Named after the number of elements thought to make up the entirety of the vast universe. Fire, water, earth, air and void.
A name that implied synergy and inner peace, which suited her well with how she took our predicament in stride with a forgiving attitude and was quick to laugh in spite of her lifelong affliction of near constant hunger, shared by a twin and said by their village doctor to be some manner of a rare genetic disorder not yet documented.

Its effects could of course be staved off with constant feeding, though in these chaotic times when just about every living creature remaining was out to eat us instead, this was easier said than done.
Partly out of a connection deeper than simple friendship and partly out of my inexplicably robust constitution which allowed me to withstand longer periods without sustenance than my fellow children, I was the one most often responsible for giving up my portion of food to keep our costly yet charming companion fighting fit.

The second daughter of a poor couple who had fallen on hard times even in the current ramshackle state for what remained of the corrupted world.
A family that would treasure a crumb as solid gold.
The twin sister to a certain "Six" who she knew about only from rumor after they had been separated at childhood by a similar intrusion by the giants, as the one that claimed the lives of my parents and nearly my own had it not been a certain stroke of luck that I did not know whether to thank or curse even to this day.
The number of days the good book claimed it took God for create the Earth that was once a blissful paradise free of hardship and sins.
It seemed almost fate that Five's former family and mine were united in their kindred spirits, this bond reflected in both the names we as their offspring bore and the uncanny speed at which we became more than simple friends.

It was like we'd known each other from a previous life, like we were vaguely familiar to one another long before we'd met.
Like a brief glimpse of Five brought back a riot of faint flashes that were too faint to be clearly discernable, yet felt too familiar to seem like nothing more than mere dreams.
Even long into our flourishing romance, neither of us knew what to make of this.


"Truly I am blessed to have a pretty girl as strong and sympathetic in my life as you, my dearest Five." I murmured as I nursed the still bleeding gashes on my arms and legs from fighting the exotic seafood meal that did not give itself up without a fierce struggle.
I knew these wounds would likely never full heal without leaving permanent scars on my already deformed and knackered form.
I was also aware that however difficult that pincered beast almost the size of me had been to subdue, it had been a godsend with how rare natural life had become following the so called "impact". The global catastrophe that put the surviving humans in the endless life and death struggle we now found ourselves in.
She begged me to take some crab meat for myself after how nastily the fight had injured me. I declined. "You're the one of us most likely to keel over in starvation any time soon and I will not have that after all we've been through and how good you've been not just to me but to all of us. You need it more than me."

I feigned a façade of toughness as a spasm of pain nearly knocked me off my feet.
"Besides. I'm tough to kill and you know that. There's nothing I wouldn't do for you."

"For all of you. That is" I sincerely added, addressing all the other children who politely sat and watched as Five gained back burst after burst of her usual cheery fastidiousness with each bite.
They too, knew that her poor upbringing even in comparison to the rest of ours, as well as her near stillbirth-conception made her constitution extremely poor and mandated more frequent nourishment for her to even stay alive, let alone anything close to healthy enough to keep track with the rapid pace of our daily race going nowhere.
Aware of the fact that she was already beginning to shiver even in the relative warmth of the soon ending winter of the end of March on this sunny shore, I instinctively stepped forward and placed the navy blanket I had scrounged from the remains of a tailor and had been using as a makeshift jacket till now onto her already convulsing form.

She looked at me and said nothing, but the solitary tear from her usually stony eyes and the quickness in which she was able with the help of the thick cloth to suppress her shakes said more than any words ever could.

Seeing that she was already beginning to let off an uncontrollable yawn of exhaustion, I gently caressed her wavy coal black bob as I gave her the delicate pat that allowed her already heavy lids to fully droop to cover her emerald orbs.
I would bridal carry her the short distance to the makeshift raft made from a wooden door that the others had already prepared.
She needed her rest and she needed it now. I would continue holding her in my arms throughout the row to the next island while uttering the set of prayers I had memorized from my brief years prior to being orphaned as the only son of a humble yet content Shinto priest and priestess who were for a time able to hide with me in a forgotten shrine amid the slippery and snowy slopes of the mighty mountain of Fuji.
We subsisted off of a nearby stream fresh enough to still be populated by fish and a field of rice hardy enough to survive the frigidity of the nigh constant snowstorms

Why the grownups decided eventually to come after us despite us having apparently done nothing to draw attention to ourselves, is a tragic tale that wrenches me open with grief to even start upon it.
It involved myself and a heavy birthright that had chosen me as its successor through no decision of my own nor my parents who depending on your perspective, were either very lucky or very unlucky in not possessing the gifts that allowed me and me alone to slay our brutal attackers thus allowing my sorry hide to singularly be preserved as I knelt over the corpses of mother and father and bawled my heart out for half a day.
Before finally managing through colossal struggle to restrain myself as I took the last of the firewood and incense in our home to raise a respectful funeral pyre for the holy man and woman who bestowed upon me their love, their dedication and their ideals.

Believe me when I say wholeheartedly that it took each and every ounce of willpower, I could muster up to not jump into the fire as it consumed their lifeless husks to liberate their souls for their ascension into the afterlife. Which hopefully would be an idyllic place of peace, if their teachings to me during the seven years I'd been alive up to that point held any grain of truth.
Time and again I still frown upon myself for choosing to find the will to live as I left the still burning flame behind having said my solemn prayers to the mystical powers that be which were said to watch over this forsaken world even in its darkest hour. Only to then be reminded by one brief glance into the faces of "Two", "Three", "Four" and "Five" reminded me that this was my new family and that a family meant a team that kept together no matter what.
All for one and one for all.

The way humanity once chose to do things and in doing so, ensured its prosperity and long life till they too forgot the way.


We felt as if it was worth waking to see another day each night when our strength gave out and we were forced to snuggle down in whatever fairly concealed shelter we had happened to come across.
Lying up against the ruins of a farm one night between the columns of decayed cornstalks our mindless pursuers didn't even bother taking with them when they no doubt raided the place as they did with all others. Hiding out in an abandoned quarry the next.

We and by extension I never stopped travelling even back then. We changed places and destinations so many times that for me to even begin to give you an outline of our journeys or at least the little I remember or care to remember of them would keep us here until we were both old and our voices week and hoarse.

Heh. I say that my friends had strange nicknames to refer to each other by when mine was none other than the number following Five's missing sibling Six, Seven.
Yet once again, the pot calls the kettle black.
One of my most glaring flaws which I've been working tirelessly my whole life long to curb, with limited success.
I did not take the honorific Six out of respect and perhaps more importantly, a faint glimmer of hope that we might one day come across Five's lost sister and experience what might perhaps be the most joyful reunion seen in an age.
I tried telling the group that the position of "Six" was open for the day we were certain to find her. I told Five I believed I could and would find her twin and she swore to believe with me.
What a gullible past me had been back then. How gullible and thoughtlessly inconsiderate giving the love of my life false hope when there was none.

We were named in the order we came together, with the esteemed founding father of our little gang surprisingly not being referred to as "One", but the equally fitting title "Mono".
According to the great forbearer if Two's recollection was to be believed, as the leader he wanted a more interesting, hip and edgy way to be called than simply another number, not that he had anything against numbers.