𝐋𝐀𝐌𝐄𝐍𝐓𝐀𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍𝐒

𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐩𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐭𝐡𝐫𝐞𝐞 ✸ terrors on every side

as you summon to a feast day,
so you summoned against me terrors on every side.
In the day of the Lord's anger
no one escaped or survived;
those I cared for and reared
my enemy has destroyed.
- ʟᴀᴍᴇɴᴛᴀᴛɪᴏɴꜱ 2:22

Alex and Cullen watched Spellmeyer leave, silence ballooning between them the further and further Spellmeyer's tiny silhouette got. Alex felt the inexplicable urge to twitch, to jitter his leg, to move something, but something stopped him. A bad feeling, perhaps, or a muscle memory.

Instead he turned to Cullen beside him. They had just met, but Alex liked his quiet thoughtfulness. He could hear the other boy thinking, head churning. It would be useful, he knew that thinkers were the first step before doers, but at this point, thinking would just send them all to nerves.

"Want to explore?" Alex turned to Cullen, offering a smile. He could tell Cullen was nervous, flinching at every creak and hiss the spacecraft made. A goal, a task, would ease the both of them. Alex could feel his own anxiety firing up already.

"Explore," Cullen repeated. "Is that a good idea?"

"There's nobody here," Alex soothed, standing. He offered his hand to Cullen. "C'mon, mate, we'll be fine. Let's go."

Cullen took his hand, pulling himself up. "Not far. We need to stay behind in case Spellmeyer comes back. I don't trust this ship for a moment, no matter how many..."

The silence filled again, heavy and pregnant.

"How empty it is," Cullen finished weakly, staring at the ceiling.

Alex cleared his throat, shifting on his feet. "All right, fine by me. We'll stay in the Fauna bay," he confirmed. Cullen offered him a halfhearted smile. "Left or right?"

Cullen looked this way and that. The left side was the herbivore wing, wafting with the smell of farm animals and hay. A few cows lowed, and a horse nickered from the depths of the hall. It was darkly lit, most of the lights were broken, but in the distance they could see a dim flicker of light. To the right, lit with red emergency lights, was the carnivore wing. This one was silent, scentless.

"Right," Cullen decided.

"Scared of the dark?" Alex joked, picking his way over the rubble of knocked-over shelves and bags of animal foods. Cullen followed with a short laugh.

"No," he rolled his eyes. "But we already know what's down the herbivores' hall. Might as well explore something new."

"True that," Alex leapt down into the carnivore hall, turning to wait for Cullen, who slid down a broken shelf and landed at the bottom.

Alex, who had woken in the herbivore wing, had yet to see the bodies. Cullen knew how bad it was. He had come to consciousness just outside of the Fauna wing, where dead bodies lay, getting thicker and thicker the further he walked into the atrium. That was where Cullen had found Spellmeyer, laying among the dead, right above a cryopod that had sank into dormant mode under the ground.

Alex had been shaken awake by Spellmeyer and Cullen, who found his body resting among the little lambs of the herbivore hall. Cullen had thought to search his body for tools, perhaps a weapon when he saw the uniform, but Spellmeyer had seen Alex's chest lift and sink ever so slightly.

As sharp as Spellmeyer's eye was, he didn't catch the matted hair that shifted in the depths a bloody goat pen.

Alex and Cullen pressed forward, moving carefully between the red floor lights, hands braced out in case something jutted from the ground unexpectedly. Already their shins were covered in bruises from unseen debris or piping.