Epilogue 3.15

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---Em---


     Staring at the mess of blood and guts that litters the forest floor, I don't even gag. Maybe that's a testament to how much I've changed. I'd like to think I haven't but it's been, what, years since the world ended?

     That changed me. Or maybe it's the guilt talking. Guilt that, when I really think about it, I don't miss the old way. Not like I should. I don't care that I'll never see my parents again. I don't care that everybody I knew is either dead or... changed. Like Colby.

     Like me.

     I look at the strixes torn limb from limb, their blood pooling around my feet. Flies swarm the corpses, feasting on the tender flesh. We did this. Desensitization. Or maybe part of me is just sick of at all. Of all the gagging. The nausea. The cold sweats.

     "How do we go back?" I put that thought out into the void, but no one's listening. Melody's sifting through the gore, knee deep in strix blood. Colby's scavenging strix talons, yanking the nails right out of their feet. He probably means to use them as projectiles.

     And Mya's sloshing through a heap of corpse gunk, and then she's looking at me with a pained look on her face. "It's Edgar," she says, her voice wet through her tears and her shaking. Hard to tell whether it's real or an affectation. Back during the zombie apocalypse, after every raid, we'd all have a moment of silence to mourn our fallen comrades. But we weren't mourning. Not really. I'd look into Mya's eyes, into Gail's eyes, into Keigan's eyes, and we'd all be thinking the same thing: thank god it wasn't me.

     So Edgar's dead. The first thought that crosses my mind isn't "poor Edgar." It's "who else?" I take in the scene. Flies biting at my neck. Blood everywhere. Some of it's ours. Some of it's theirs. You can't tell which is which. We all end up the same way.

     "Em?" Mya sniffles. "I think... this was Crawford's." She picks up half of a pointy metallic twig. Dried strix blood is crusted over the metal. "It's his ice pick. He never goes anywhere without it."

     I take another hard look at the carnage. Look for anything recognizable amidst the gore. Try not to breathe through the nose. "Well, he's not here."

     "But what if...?"

     "What if what?" I snap. "What if they ate him, like they did Jun?"

     Her lower lip trembles. She stares at the blood-soaked ground. Doesn't say anything else.

     Colby wades over to me through the muck and rests a hand on my shoulder. "A little compassion, huh?"

     "Compassion?" I scoff. "Tell that to the gods."

     Colby just gives me this wide-eyed look. "You've changed, man."

     "Part of it was a retcon." Courtesy of pseudo-Olivia, but no need to resurrect that old nonsense.

     He raises an eyebrow.

     I shake my head. "It's a long story. To be honest, I'm sick of long stories. I just wish they'd all end." There's a smell in the air. Not a smell, exactly, but that's the only way I know to describe it. It smells like... absence. And in that moment, I know. "Comma's gone."

     Mya frowns. "Gone how?"

     "Wish I knew." Is this what it feels like to be psychic? Cryptic flashes of feeling that amount to absolutely nothing but still insist on being heard? I think about Gail and how her whole life must've been like this. And that was before she got a shikigami crammed into her skull.

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