Short Stories From Fading Worlds

The Sleepless' Road: Prologue

They'd been walking on the road for eight long hours now, and the group was beginning to tire. The young woodsman had found them and was seeing them eastwards to safety, but she could tell that he wasn't the biggest fan of them being, in his mind, slow.
Every day out here invited death, after all.

There were four of them in their little group excluding the woodsman, survivors of an apocalypse they had all slept through. No one knew how or why everyone had fallen into a deep sleep, but then no one knew much at all anymore.
The world they all knew was lost to shadow and silence. All that remained were scattered survivors, awoken from their long slumber by random chance weeks or even months after the world had simply stopped.
No one shared their names. She wouldn't be surprised if most people had forgotten who they were. Names were for friends, and friends didn't last long anymore. The shadows saw to that.

She'd been a college student before everything collapsed. She'd woken up a week ago like the others and had only survived by pure chance. A shadow had found her and chased her through her old campus all night. Only dawn's early light had saved her.
Then she'd found a few other wakers, and started on the road west until they bumped into the woodsman.

The other survivors, or wakers as she'd found out they'd been nicknamed, were a tired and ill-prepared bunch for this world.
There was another student, like her, though he'd gone to a university further south than she had. Behind him there was an old cobbler and a store clerk from a small town between the two campuses, though neither seemed to know the other before their motley group had coalesced.

After that they'd stayed moving, eventually setting off on the road east when in what was a perhaps naïve hope that civilisation had endured over there.
Turns out, according to the woodsman, they were right.
It was extremely lucky for them that the woodsman had found them. He was a young man, probably a year or two younger than she was, but he knew the lands here like the back of his hand since he'd lived here his whole life. Apparently there was an outpost of sleepless like him beyond the woods, where they could rest and resupply before continuing east. Apparently whilst the east had fallen to sleep as the west had, the shadows had yet to leave the western reaches, which meant that once people in the east woke up life could continue as normal.
There were a lot of things which she had to apply 'apparently' to at the moment.

The young woodsman was a sleepless, a nickname for the few who never fell to sleep as the rest of the world had. Most had fled east from the shadows with whatever they could grab; money, supplies, sleeping relatives, anything that meant something to them was taken east, to safety.
A few remained.
Maybe they were too stubborn to leave their homes. Maybe they hoped the shadows would disappear one day. Maybe they'd lost everything and saw no point in going east.
Maybe abandoning what they'd known all their lives was worse than death.
Whatever their reasons, their actions remained the same.
They held back the shadows. They got out who they could. They were all that remained for the people left in the west.
In that way, she'd said to him half a week ago, they were like heroes.
He'd laughed a very bitter laugh at that, but said nothing.
No-one brought up that topic again. No-one really brought up many topics at all. They were all so on edge that any conversations were terse and clipped.

Except the woodsman. He remained the same as ever, watching as everything devolved and seeing the situation the world had been left in with what she could only think must have been soul-crushing clarity.
He was not exactly terse like they all were. She suspected he'd never been one for small talk anyway.

He didn't have the luxury of pretending things could get better or that there was a place they could truly be safe as the rest of them did. She suspected he'd lost... naybe everything. Maybe not. She didn't exactly know how much he'd lost since the world went quiet. But she suspected it was a lot.
He was young, but he shouldered his family's old hunting rifle with practiced ease, knew every plant in these woods that was safe to forage and the ones that weren't.
He knew the woods and the road that ran through it like the back of his hand, and for that especially they were all grateful. They may have only woke a week ago, but the four of them knew one thing clearly.
The road was life. Without it they'd be stumbling in the dark through the woods, shadows chasing them all the while. The road was life, and he guided them along it.

He'd taken this path many times in his short life, but the last few months had seen him take it half a hundred times, to hear him say it. He wouldn't say what he was looking for out here, only that he was yet to find it.
"Everyone has a reason to travel the road," He'd said once, "and finding wakers is rarely it. We aren't heroes, just people. Just people the world left behind who happen to save others."
No-one had quite known how to respond to that.

He'd been looking for something out here, but had stumbled along them before he could find it. After that he'd dropped his search and started back on the road, the four of them in tow. He'd taught them to light proper fires at night, to always have someone take watch while resting, amongst a dozen other basic survival skills.
It was a safe bet that without him they'd all be dead. They wouldn't have been prepared for the journey east.
For the road was life, as they all knew. But the shadows also knew that, and the shadows were death.

God, she was tired. Looking around it seemed as though her compatriots felt the same. She raised her voice.
"Tired?"
A muttered chorus met her question, the woodsman sighing a few paces in front. He turned to face them.
"If that's the case then we'll stop here for the night then. Get a fire ready but don't light it till sunset, no point wasting fire when its still light out. Sleeping bags around the firepit, I'll try and find something for us to eat so we don't need to eat our rations."
They all nodded and voiced their assent, the student and clerk grumbling discontentedly but still doing as told.
Because the young woodsman was leading them down the road.
And the road was life.