If We Survive

Chapter 9

Achilles and I are walking through the woods. 

I don't know why we're here, I don't care. Out, far away, brews a storm, like the summer kind that produce tornados and terrible lightning. But it's far off, only part of the eerie yellow backdorp.

Everything seems dead. 

The grass, the trees, everything. Even the sky.

There's no life to see, aside from birds. There are millions of them, the black kind that sometimes fly over the freeway when there's been roadkill. 

The kind that feed off of dirty, dead things.

They seem to grow in number by the minute, waiting for us to drop. 

But they're getting impatiant. 

All at once, my world darkens with the blackness of a million ravens. Thay all caw and peck at the same time, screaming at me. 

I turn to run, but I'm not fast enough. They come down on me on a decending wave, pecking at my hair and clothes. I try to scream, but I get a mouthful of feathers. As I fall to the ground, with a defaning crash, I see three vauge outlines of people in the distance, walking away from me. 

-

I wake in a cold sweat. 

The dreams have been getting worse lately. Nearly every night, now, I wake up like this. I've fallen off my sofa and on to the cold floor. I pull myself up, wiping my sweaty palms on my shorts. Zack snorts in his sleep, causing me to jump a little bit.

I'm still terrified. 

Terror is something far byond fear, farbyond horror. My life is so full of terror. 

I yank on my large parka over my dark tanktop, going outside. I'm not even sure as to what I'm doing- I just need space to think.

The night is cold- freezing cold. 

What is it, now, December the sixteenth? Seventeenth? About now, I would be getting out of school for winter break, spending afternoons around a fire in our dark living room, reading. 

A silvery tear traces it's way down my cheek. 

Why I am crying? I don't even remember being sad. That world is gone, and it won't ever come back. Not ever.

And somehow, I still haven't accepted it. I tell myself that I'll never watch football on TV again, I'll never play PS3 again, and I'll never see my home again, but I just can't accept it. 

And that hurts.

I'll spend the rest of my life fighting zombies and killing off bandits.

How long will that be, anyway? Will I live to true adulthood? 

I set myself down on a stump thirty yards from the cabin, placing my face in my hands. Every breath I inhale hurts, but it's the good sort of pain. Using pain to deal with pain. It doesn't make since, but it works. 

I glance up at the sky. It must be early in the morning, really early, because the moon is bright overhead, and the stars are... I let out an involintary gasp, filling my lungs with freezing air. I know the sky is really pretty in the mountians without cities and lights around to pullote the veiw, but this is byond anything I've ever seen before. 

I can see the arms of the Milky Way, a huge purpleish clump of stars. 

I think that's the last nail on the coffin. 

I'm so small.

Like it hardly matters that if some little 17-year-old girl on the planet Earth, in  the far reach of the Milky Way galexy is scared of her own world. 

And it doesn't mean a single thing is the scheme of things. 

"Pretty, isn't it."

"HOLY SHIT!" I shout, jumping out of my skin. You know how I said I don't swaer? I lied. 

It's Achilles, lacking his usual smirk. He seems entirely sincre- not something that one generally sees from one mister Achilles Broad.

"What are you doing out here?" I ask. I can see the sky reflected in his dark eyes. He's hansome in his own way- not the way in which the old Cassy would see, but the sort of quiet steringth that only he seems to possess. 

 "I can't sleep, either." He says. There's this sort of intelligence in his look that I never noticed before, something dangorus. 

A lot of things about Achilles scare me. 

"It does look nice." I pull my head back up to the heavens. It's impossible to spy out contallations from here, and I wonder for a moment how the ancheints did it. 

I never really got that, anyway. How the hell do you get a pegasus out of a whole bunch of lines and an irregular polygon? Maybe it was obvous to the idiot who came up with it. 

"Do you have nerve endings?" Achilles asks. He's staring down at my nearly bare legs. 

I blush. 

"Tharepy." I reply, smiling. Possibly the shortest sentance I've ever said. It's amazing what you can do at the end of the world. 

Really, it isn't the end of the world. Life has gone on, since the world ended. There are still humans around, still snarky 17-year-old girls with a thing or two to say, and life will go on.

It's just the sort of thing life does. 

"Oh? I think you should go inside before you get hypothermia, crazy girl." A smile play his lips. It's funny- I hardly ever notice it, but Achilles rarely smiles like that. Like he's actually pleased. He's always annoyed about something, or being sercastic, or something- he reminds me a bit of my brother, really. 

We trudge back inside, just as a few snowflakes begin to drift down. 

The world seems all right, for once. 

And that's kinda funny, because there is nothing in this world that is right.

Or maybe everything is how it should be, and we've just got a screwed up perspective. 

I think I need to get my brain fixed, because this is the reason I could never sleep at night, before. My d-bag of a brain was always keeping me up.

First world problems. 

The house is warm in comparason- it's the one hour a night that we get the heater- so it must be aroud three in the morning. 

"Thanks for standing around outside in the freezing cold with me." I say, curling up into my thick bankets. He gives me a fleeting smile, before turning for the stairs. 

"Sure, Cass," He replies, but I'm already drifting far, far away. 

-

Short chapter! I do apologize for this- most of them will be filler and charicter development until like Chapter 15. But there'll definitely be a lot of Cassy being an ass, and I doubt any of us want to miss that!