Continuity Corporations : Chapter 5 - Cataplexy

 

Indeed scaling the fence would be an impossibility. Verity could climb up the wire easy enough, yet the sharp spikes at the top did not seem appealing to be impaled upon. The building was L-shaped, the fence bridging the lower protruding corner of the white-bricked building to a tall tower that it stood perpendicular too. The entire complex was surrounded, yet Verity knew that windows and gutters could act as good quick escapes onto the rooftops of the village. It would be a good place to lay in rest for a while.

She kneeled down and chucked the ice pick through the hole, gesturing for the Girl to crawl in ahead of her. She got to her knees and did so, the frayed wires once again not touching her emaciated form. She clasped a hand over the ice pick and sat, bringing her knees to her chest and looking to Verity's bloodied face. She smiled to the girl. Though her face was pale and her tawny hair bore grey-silver roots, she bore no resemblance to the unnerving silver-haired woman who had leered to her in the complex. Perhaps, when healed and mended, the face of Verity could replace that of her mother's in her mind. Perhaps Verity could be her mother, if not just for a time.

The coldness was biting and the Girl felt it deeply. She looked over to the building, to the doors and windows. All were dark; it seemed that no one was home.

Verity got to her knees and assessed whether or not she could fit through the tiny gap of the fence. It would hurt, she was sure, probably cut her or open the wounds she already had. She made a mental note to get a tetanus shot upon her return to society.

As she went to crawl through the fence, she heard a sound to her right, behind the blind spot of the building's corner. A chiming, rhythmic and mechanical. She froze and it took a moment for her to realise what it was, breath growing shaky in the night. It was the chime of a car's seat-belt alarm, followed by heavy footsteps upon snow. She flinched and went to scramble through the hole, though indeed it was too narrow and cut deep into her skin. She yelped and shuffled out, scrambling to her feet to assess the danger ahead of her.

"Oh my god." She muttered, turning to the Girl as the child got to her feet

"Get back here! You can't go there!" yelled a voice unfamiliar to the child, just beyond sight and hidden by the perpendicular wall of the building. She stumbled backwards.

Three figures came into view – all male, by the looks of their posture and build. One was thin, with a suit and hat, walking with a limp and leaning on a cane. One wore something similar, suit grey and unbuttoned, with the third in a tracksuit and leather jacket. She stumbled away form the fence; the one with the cane turned his head and looked at her.

"Don't-don't hurt her!" Verity yelled, the grey-suited man stepping forward and catching her as she stumbled, dragging her away from the fence and out of the Girl's view. She yelled.

 "Get her!" The man with the cane, voice American and nasal, shouted, as the tracksuit-wearing man leapt up to clamber atop the fence. His skin was a pinkish white in colour, his hair long, blonde and tied behind his head.

"Don't let her get away!" he yelled, his voice stern and sharp. The Girl turned and ran.

The blonde man was scaling the fence with great speed, arms and legs hauling his weight – which admittedly seemed to be minimal – up and across the metal. He hoisted himself over the spikes and vaulted, none of the jagged edges cutting into him as he threw himself over, landing with a roll. The Girl stumbled backwards, ice pick clutched to her chest and ran. She ran to the door, depressing the handle, yet it would not open – standing atop the doorstep, her vision turned to the window at her side. With an arcing motion, she brought the sharp edge of the pick down upon it, shattering the glass as she jumped to claw her way in.

The glass fragments cut into her, yet her hands were already bloody; she scrambled into the room and turned to watch the blonde man following her, his hands in the window frame. His face bore stubble, like the man who had hurt her with the pick. She clutched it and – as he tried to step forward into the room – slashed across his face with the sharpened edge. The cut was deep, form his right ear down across his face, over his lips and down his neck. Blood spat across the window pane and he gave a guttering choke, his face falling sideways into the broken glass of the window frame as the Girl pushed him with the edge of the pick. He fell backwards into the snow and the Girl ran into the room.

The building smelled of dust and appeared utterly derelict, the ground rife with glass and metal and fragments of littered detritus, the walls a mess of cracks and graffiti. It was dark, as dark as the forest, with the dim light of the lamp-post filtering through windows and fissures to create a mosaic of light and shadow. The hallways were lined with lockers, the metal shining as the golden light flowed like amber across their surface. It illuminated the dust in the air, hanging like invisible diamonds that shone with subtle iridescence. 

The Girl was not sure what to do, yet the ice pick offered a meagre hope. Every room she stepped into was abandoned: the hallways with lockers, the wider auditorium and square rooms littered with desks. It bore a vague familiarity to her; it was a school. She ran the ice pick along the wall, clattering against the lockers as she walked and though. Awareness had creeped into her mind and now rested there in a strange bath of emotion: some lockers sealed with padlocks, others empty and ajar. It cluttered her mind, as did several sensations and thoughts. A worry for Verity spurred up frequently, abated by the silence in the abandoned school around her; an emptiness that exacerbated the cold.

The majority of the lockers were empty, or elsewise had nothing of use within them. With the pick she smashed a padlock from one after the other, finding rotten books and ancient backpacks within, some pillaged and others untouched yet useless to her survival.

The classrooms had little within them and the Girl rarely wished to go in them. They were away form the windows that let light in and were dark, and that darkness frightened her in a manner that was hard to pin down. Even as she stood bloodied and wounded, starving and frostbitten, a fear of the dark lingered in her mind like a tumour. She persisted, though, and eventually a locker filled with boons to her survival showed itself. When she opened it, s bag practically fell atop her, behind it a purple parka hung up on a small hook. She took it alongside the folded school uniform in the bag, perhaps a PE kit or a spare that this student once bore. She pulled the clothes over her overalls, the back and right arm of her prisoner's garb torn, and pulled the parka over the uniform, buttoning up the coat and pulling the hood over her head. The change in warmth was almost instant, as was it when she found a pair of ill-fitting shoes creased in the bottom of the bag. It seemed that warmth had been procured, at least for a time.

 Glass shattered; she spun on her heel. Facing her was the door to a classroom, beyond it a window and shifting black shapes. Footsteps, the sound of breaking glass, a silhouette against the door's rectangular window. The Girl stumbled back and ran down the corridor as the handle on the door depressed, too panicked to realise that the door was locked, and too thick to be broken into. She bolted, turning left towards stairs that she leapt up like an animal. One flight then a second passed by her, and her limbs began to ache. She glanced back, expecting to see a dogged pursuer behind her, yet no-one was there and the hallway was silent; her racing heart slowed as did her breathing, as a bitter chill passed her by. It came from the left of her: she looked and saw that the window was shattered, the roof of one of the flat cardboard box houses close by. She looked down: the gutter lined the window and the carboard box house was a mere leap away. Tenderly, she raised a leg onto the gutter and – feeling that it could hold her weight – stepped out atop it.

The ground seemed so far down beneath her. It seemed to physically stretch as she looked down from her perch, like a gargoyle squatting atop a church roof, leering to judge whether or not the leap was within her ability. She held her eyes shut for a moment, the coldness fended off through her coat, and looked ahead to see the flat roof. She jumped.

 The air seemed to race about her and the world fell; her eyes blurred together and the soaring of the wind felt distant, a sleeping fugue that tore itself form her body as she crashed onto the wood of the roofed building. The Girl groaned and got to her feet, the wood creaking in turn beneath her. She looked towards the school, towards the window she had leapt from: it seemed empty, abandoned in entirety, the black car nor its three passengers nor Verity to be found nearby. She glanced to the name of the school. It was written in a language she did not understand. She frowned. Was that Russian? The letters were all lines and edges, utterly unfamiliar to her eyes. If so, then how did Verity know that she spoke English? She looked across the tag of the school, the letters pressed against the building side, as the wood beneath her feet splintered and buckled. Beside the name was an icon; a symbol that seemed to indicate a school mascot. A red fox.

The wood split. The Girl fell into the interior of the cardboard box and an alarm – identical to the mechanical wail of that heard in the complex – began to screech nearby.

There were a litany of buildings, some wooden and seemingly the original structures of the village that Verity had mentioned, others hollow and empty; alike the cardboard box that the Girl now stood within. The ground had been packed with snow that had broken her fall, the building a completely hollow shell that appeared to have been lazily placed just outside the school. A warehouse, perhaps? No-one resided within, nor did any supplies or resources to speak of. The prefabricated structure swayed gently in the wind, the thin wood of its construction creaking as the gale passed through it. At least it was lighter, out here, the lamp-posts shining their amber glows unimpeded.

Eerily similar to the hut that the Girl, Verity and the others had stayed within, the cardboard box bore a doorway yet no door, only an empty rectangular hole that allowed anyone to enter or exit and provided no solace to hide behind. She saw people coming out of other cardboard boxes, as she peered around the corner from her doorway, all of them wearing the puffy vests that the guards from the complex wore. Again, though, their fingers and neck were unprotected. The Girl's stomach growled.

 It seemed these guards were leaving their chambers, posts – whatever they were doing in the cardboard boxes – in response to the alarm that had sounded as she had crashed through the roof of the building she stood within. Yet they were not drawn to her; they were running elsewhere, bringing out small machines from their side and pointing down the road towards the school.

Those machines made popping sounds and the Girl flinched – guns! They were shooting at someone near the school – had Verity escaped her captors?

She watched as a handful of the puffy-vested guards stepped out into the road, aiming and shooting down at something the Girl could not see, her vision affixed on the shooting guards. There was another sound, then, a mechanical churning that emanated from the school's yard and that mixed with a sound alike a hundred metal chain-links snapping. She winced and pulled her hands over her ears, still clutching the ice pick.

A car, the black funeral car that Verity had seen on the road, roared down the bisecting road of the village. The Girl watched as it swerved and plowed into a group of the guard, who tried to dart and run yet were caught in its grill, one having their leg and bent awfully as two more were swept up by it, pinned at its front as it crashed into – and through – the walls of a carboard house. The car seemed unharmed: no holes dotted its side, and the cardboard wood flew from it as it swerved back onto the road. Some guards chased the car, others running back and bolting, as a few lay dead in the wake of its wheels.

She watched as the structure the car had swerved into buckled and waved and crashed into the ground, splinters flying everywhere and pinning two more of the guards to the ground. As the noise finally drowned, the whooping shrill of the siren became prominent once more.

There was one building that, in the entirety of the cacophony that had befallen the village of carboard boxes, had remained utterly barren and unused. The guards had fled from the prefabricated structures of cardboard wood, all bearing some patronage aside from the warehouse that the Girl now lingered within, yet none had came from the brick house opposite and down the street from the school. It seemed to have been one of the original structures in the village, one of the houses of brick and wood that now lay surrounded and drowned by carboard and wire. It seemed easy enough to get into: the windows were broken, around as high from the ground as the school's had been. The Girl poked her head from the doorway, looking sharply down the bisecting road that split the cardboard village in two. The only guards that remained, it seemed, were those dead or crushed. Her heart began to race at a heightened pace once more and, as the siren wailed around her, she darted from the cardboard warehouse and ran forwards, into the street.

No-one saw her, it seemed; the coldness flanked the emptiness and the emptiness, shrouded in amber light, was her friend. She rounded the collapsed structure, stepping over the twisted, gnarled – and evidently, dead – body of a guard, moving away from the carboard structures and towards the region where the sparse houses of bricks and wood lay. She saw her goal. Ducking behind the collapsed structure, it looked both far and near to her; close and unattainably far. She ran, scuttled and made it to the gritty exterior of the house. The windows were shattered; she took another glance around, heart sinking at the sight of a guard nearby. Their back was to her – talking on a radio? They had not spotted her yet she did not want to linger and find out whether or not they would. She clambered onto the broken glass, hands stinging as she clasped the shards, and threw herself into the building. 

The inside of the building was dark and dusty, though warmer than the school or the streets. The floor of this room was wooden, creaking as she stepped and covered in a dusty old rug. There was a table, a cabinet, a few chairs, an armchair. A television set – an old one – and a bookshelf beside it, wracked with old and rotten tomes. This place had probably been abandoned for longer than the Girl had been alive. She trudged through the house, eyeing the patched of darkness where the light of the windows did not penetrate, and looked around her routinely to see whether or not she had been followed. She had not. The siren, still blaring, ceased abruptly: silence enveloped her, marred only through the footfalls that creaked as she wandered atop the ailing wooden floors. Her stomach grumbled. The kitchen was rife with flies, the food rotten to a mouldy liquor. As the fridge door swung open, a sickly-sweet scent filled the room and the Girl wretched and heaved nothingness. She was starving. In the cupboards were packets of rice, tins, old sealed bags of pasta. She couldn't really tell what most of it was, written in an unfamiliar language, yet picked out a tin that bore symbols of food she recognised: pears. There were two tins and she took both, dropping them into her parka pocket as she wandered up the stairs. 

The landing was similarly barren, the bedrooms in a more ruined state. The dividing wall between a bathroom and bedroom – perhaps a young boy's, judging by the decoration – had collapsed, and light filtered through a shattered window. It painted the ruined interior of dust-covered toys and mouldy fabric in the amber colour she stared at in the snow, the tiny bed covered in a thin sheen of snow that had blown in through a window's cracked shell. It looked almost appealing though the Girl was not tired. The windows unnerved her, though. Long shadows danced across the streets, the already unfamiliar sight growing tenebrous and ghoulish, the silence filled with a hundred imaginary sounds. She made a mental note that, from the window of the boy's room, there were other gutters and windowsills; other roofs that could be stepped upon of brick and mortar, that would not give out form under her, and that lead off into the shrouded woods of the taiga.

 It occurred to her that anyone passing through the prefabricated wallows of carboard could look up and see her, and that idea was not one pleasant. She hurried back to the landing.

Above her was a trap-door that lead to what she could only assume was an attic, where there would be no windows to speak of and where she could remain hidden and unbothered for as long as she wanted. It was too high up to reach, though. Try and try as she did, she was simply too small to reach the handle or to poke it ajar with her ice pick. Looking around, another bookshelf stood in the space, again filled with rotten tomes of unknown language. She swiped at them, pulling them off to the ground as the scent of dust and rot rose, and clambered upon the bookshelf frame. Reaching out, one hand clutching atop the bookshelf and her feet supported on the wood, she poked out with the pick, yet now was too far to reach the trap door. The Girl grunted, and looked to the ceiling above her. She thought for a moment, the wheels in her mind turning, and swung the pick up. The hard edge embedded into the ceiling with a hollow thud, a small fissure forming that grew as she tore the tip out from the plaster. She swung again, plaster dust falling to her face as she snorted and winced. With her eyes shut she swung again, this time ducking her head to the bookshelf as a chunk of white plaster fell, shattering upon smashing into the ground and kicking up a tremendous cloud of ashen dust. She looked up – some debris fell down so, yet the hole was big enough now. She reached up and clambered within, pulling herself up and into the attic. It was dark and cold, filled with analogue detritus and unfamiliar shapes, yet was safe from outside intrusion. A large cleft lay in the ceiling, a space where the roof had fissured in half and collapsed into the floor. Light spilled in, as did cold wind, yet all around those few meagre rays were utter and total darkness.

The hollow space of the attic was supported by beams of old timber. Crawling up beside on, she lay her cans of pears on the ground, pawing at the sealed and flat sides before bringing her pick down upon them. She pried open the metal, careful not to slice her already tattered hands, and ravenously consumed the pearlescent flesh within. The pears were peeled and sliced, a yellow-beige colour that seemed slightly translucent in the amber light of the attic, drenched in a sweet syrup that spilled onto the ground as she had pried open the tin. She ate one entirely, lapped up what syrup she could, and similarly devoured the other. Casting the empty husks of metal to a side, her hunger seemed to exacerbate. She needed more; her stomach ached than her back or hands, which – covered in pear juice and syrup – she wiped upon her parka. Little blood came from them. The Girl frowned, and looked to her hands. The cuts seemed to have waned in number, some still present yet none still bleeding. A few were pinkish in form, some mere scars and others having sealed completely. She threw the parka from her back, lifted up the school uniform she had stolen, and felt underneath the tattered overalls. No cuts lay on her back, even beneath the tatters of fabric where the pick had cut against her flesh. Hurriedly, she felt the back of her neck; there was no wound where the silver disc had been, and it seemed that her shaven hair was thicker. She put the parka back on and lay against the beam for a moment, letting herself calm as she clutched the pick with one hand.

Distance exasperated. Sounds dulled. For a moment she was standing on the field with a fox around her shoulders. She was much older, as old as Verity. Her hair was long and wonderful, her body warm even as she wore but a simple dress of green fabric. The sky was bright. The trees protected her.

Her eyes opened.

She was hungry.

It was still dark outside, the streets still empty as she peered through the cracked window of the little boy's room that lay in ruins. It seemed not much time had passed. She slinked down the stairs and into the kitchen once more, gagging at the acrid scent of rot before opening the cupboard door and rifling for the food within. There were a handful of packets and bags and sachets, though nothing of appeal to her, and the other tins did not seem quite as pleasant. Carrots and potatoes and pork. He took the pork out, though was not sure whether or not it would need to be warmed before eating, placing it in her pocket though forgetting quickly as she saw another three tins of pears behind it. She took them all and moved back to her safe haven in the attic. As she stomped up the stairs, a chill passed through the open, rotten door of the boy's bedroom; she heard chatter and footsteps atop the snow beyond its cracked and broken wall. She ran to the bookshelf, not caring to see whether or not it was the guards outside, and pulled herself into the attic.

She smashed open the cans and devoured the pears within, though found that the can of pork was heavily dented, the pig flesh black and reeking of fish. She decided not to eat any of the slathers of meat, hungry though she remained, as she did not know what effect on her body the grime and putrescence would have.

 Through the cleft she could hear the chatter and noise beyond, the footsteps that heightened her paranoia and curiosity. Perhaps against better judgement, a peek over the edge of the cleft revealed what the sounds were: two women dressed in the puffy vests, examining and lifting the cracked detritus of collapsed rubble; the remains of the carboard box the car had smashed into. She looked down to them both. They had no batons at their side, yet large sacks lay around their waist, black boxes attached to some kind of belt that swept across their form. One woman was trying to lift up a chunk of the rubble, large and flat, and it seemed almost alike paper, moving as she prodded and kicked it and easily pushing it away. The other leered in, made a foul facial expression and looked away form the rubble. The ones that were dead beneath it hadn't been crushed, evidently. They had been impaled.

The woman stood back, perhaps disgusted or tired, and swept her vision across the horizon. She looked to the house and locked eyes with the Girl, freezing for a moment before tapping her friend on the shoulder. She looked up, mouth moving and a call being made as the Girl hid behind the lip of the cleft. Bad idea. The shouting heightened, footfalls turning to jogs to a run as the two women approached. She looked out – there was nothing to land upon, not from here. The boy's room – the window! She stood up and looked to the street below, jolting back as – from atop the rubble of the collapsed carboard house – the women launched ribbons of black rope towards her. They were tipped with spikes like the crampon boots of a hiker, not aimed at her but the brick she stood atop, sinking into the stone like blades in flesh. One ribbon came from each of the boxes at the women's sides; they reeled in with a spooling sound an the women leapt, clattering to the stone wall and hauling themselves up as they yelled in a language foreign to the Girl's ears, looking up to her through the cleft with eyes of burning hatred.

She yelled, not a scream or wail of fear but of range and hunger, and held the pick up to the woman who first came towards the cleft, her body leaning through as she tried to grasp for purchase, for something to grab onto to haul herself into the room. 

They reminded her of the bald women who had taken Elise into the concrete bunker. That couldn't happen to her. It simply wouldn't. She yelled and swung the pick with both hands, the woman slinking under it yet failing in her attempted doge of the attack: the pick smashed into her temple, left eye bulging from its socket as the blade sank in, arms falling limp as she let out a wet snorting sound, blood and a jellylike solid draining from her nose and splattering onto the floor of the attic. As she had done with the blonde man, the Girl pushed the woman away with her pick, the ribbons keeping her suspended as her body fell onto her friend, tearing the crampons form the wall as both clattered to the ground, the one that lived shouting and reaching for her weapon. The ribbons fired again, this time through the cleft and embedding into the ceiling above the Girl; she held her pick and stepped back, waiting for the woman to appear with an unseen rage brewing within.

The woman, holding a gun at her side, rose through the cleft, her feet

glancing atop the shrapneled wood as she fired down upon the Girl. She

felt something impact her in the neck and ran ahead, plunging the pick in

the woman's shin as she screamed out in pain and confusion, falling down

into the room. The Girl leaned over her, eyes and mouth wide yet

emotionless, as blood dripped from the wound in the centre of her neck to

the woman beneath her. She yelled something, again in an unknown

language, and scrambled back, stepping to her feet as the Girl rushed

forward.

A solid kick was aimed to kick the Girl down, yet – as if seconds dragged on – she felt the boot pass beside her, smashing the blade down upon her knee and taking the woman to the ground. She ran and screamed, bringing the pick down onto her head and unarmoured neck. Detritus littered the floor, slickened with blood, and the mess that remained was indescribable.

The Girl fled from the attic.

 Some kind of adrenaline was running high inside her, and as she clattered atop the roof of another brick building, she reached up to her neck and felt the wound that sat there. It was oozing blood, a black-red in colour, and she looked back to the open crater of the shattered window. There was nothing there – it was silent. She looked to the streets either side of her, height telescoping into exaggeration. There were guards running beneath her, though none seemed to have spotted her. She clung to the roof and waited. Time passed and, when she stood again, she was alone. A fog had set in over the town and the night remained hanging above. She did not know the time, yet it had not been late when sun had set. It was likely that the night would go on for a while more, as it so often seemed to do.

Night awake in the hut. Day forgotten, in the bunkers of concrete. Day awake – flickering in and out – night forgotten, prodded and poked. Night recalled, amber glow in the snow. Day leering. Silver-haired woman. Day is night? Night is day?

 The Girl leapt onto the roof of another building. The world flashed back for a second.

Concrete bunker. Cold machine. Metal robot. Dreams forgotten. Are they dreams? Nightmares in the forgotten night. Dreams in the flickering day. The island, the trees guarding. Wonderful hair.

She leapt again, dragging the pick along the tiled roof of the buildings. She looked back, and there was distance, now. Many buildings, many jumps. How long had she been running? The window of the fractured room, the boy's room, was but a distant blip. The taiga was before her. She clambered down the roof, jumping form the tile into a garden bed. The bushes and detritus broke her fall, prickly though they were. She stood, slowly, and the silence and cold befell the darkened woodlands ahead. She lingered for a moment and felt her neck. The wound was gone, yet the hunger had grown exponentially. The darkness was frightening, yet she would be fine.

She ran.

The darkness swooped around her, trees growing in slender fingers. Hillsides became barriers, the distant village a golden blip on the horizon.

The hunger gnawed at her mind as the pick offered its sweet condolences.

Verity's smile lingered.

 She ran.

Time passed.

Tree side shapes waned as the darkness fell into gloaming around her, the blackened sky growing grey-blue in tone as the sun threatened to loom over the horizon.

The taiga was behind her, now. The trees lingered, a protection from the puffy vests and guns and concrete. The ground was flat, blanketed in snow, and a river laced around it.

There were sounds of scruffling, something scurrying and panting. Inhuman and meek.

At the centre of the snowy isle was a hole in the ground, modest, as big as the gnawed pits of wire she had crawled through in the night prior. Sleep felt heavy in her eyes, and she crawled in for comfort.

She was so thin that her back did not touch the arch of dirt and snow. Within lay something, the source of the scurrying noise. It was a fox, its wonderful red pelt bloodied and torn. Something had hurt it and it was dying, whimpering, pained. The Girl looked to it and it shuddered, brownish eyes wincing as its body flexed and convulsed. Pained.

 She brought the pick down upon it. Pain ended.

She sliced down its length, offal spilling, and brought her teeth to bear. Bones were discarded, fat consumed, blood licked and muscles torn.

Hungry no more, the Girl wrapped her arms around the pelt, its wonderful red fur whispering comfort to her mind. She closed her eyes.

Time passed.

The Girl slept in her bunker, soundlessly and quietly, and did not notice the rain outside. It pattered in quiet sheets, softening the grass in slick churning waves. Protected, she could not smell the rich iron of blood around her, not from the fox nor her, but from the sky itself. She could not see the ichor that drained into the foxhole that the soil of the earth supped upon with vigour. The blood itself, fertilizing the land; the blood rain from the sky.