Anonymous

Interlude

Am I in Thirteen? No, it was destroyed, that's what they told me. There is no Thirteen. Maybe there never was.

I'm in my room- at least, I assume it's my room. The interview dress is gone, replaced with a linen shift. My hair has been brushed and I've been laid on my bed. When I try to sit up, I can't. The room is black and the world is gone. My mind is scrambled.

Linen. I wear it but I am not it. My name is not Theresa Linen. The memory that the sedative triggered is gone, but a word remains on the tip of my tongue. Wren.

A bird. I flew towards the ground as the memory ended, and it erased itself.

There's a low beeping coming from the corner, almost imperceptible to one without hunting ears as mine. Cold seeps into the room, and it concentrates on my wrist. Reality slips away again.

But memories return.

"Mom? Birch?" The campsite is deserted. The fall from the tree knocked the wind out of me, and when Birch never came back I returned home. There was no home to return to.

Birch and I were gone longer than I thought. The hunting trip was only supposed to be a day or two.

"Cliff?" I run towards our hut, or what remains of it. It's scattered across the clearing. Our kettle is wedged into a tree. A scrap of cloth from the curtain is crumpled under my foot. A streak of blood mars the fishing net my cousin was working on.

Then I see the corpse of a beast.

Its awful, twisted body lies crumpled on the ground. Something that might have once been human, or was decades ago. Fresh blood drips off its claws, an arrow in its throat. Poking out from underneath is a single shoe, its owner nowhere to be found.

The beasts usually attacked in packs. They were larger than humans, somewhat dog-like. Except the eyes. We hadn't seen one for months... It was only a matter of time.

Maybe everyone had fled. Or at least tried to. We had a cave that had been designated as a meeting point in case of an emergency, but I had passed it on the way and it was empty.

If they weren't there, then...

Oh, God. No.

I force myself to keep walking, combing through the shredded remains of our campsite. The beasts don't hunt to eat. They hunt to kill.

Cliff's older brother was- is- missing his right hand from an attack when he was younger. Ambushed during a hunt. The rest of the party managed to kill it, and by some rare stroke of luck, there weren't more. We'd seen other groups, most smaller then ours, who had their own encounters. It was always the same story- a scavenging party returned to find the camp decimated, or a group of hunters never returned. No survivors.

They were near impossible to kill. The one dead one in the middle of camp was a rarity. No one knows where they came from. Some say radiation, others say experimentation.

It doesn't matter where they came from. What's important is where they've gone. And whether they'll come back.

I reach the edge of the destruction. That's all there is. Ruins and the forest. Not a person to be found.

Wait, is that Birch's hat? In the bush? I move closer, around the oak.

What I see makes me fall to the ground and vomit.

My twin brother's mangled body is curled up at the base of a tree. If it weren't for the slashes up and down his torso, I could almost picture him sleeping. Dried blood coats his jeans, his converse. And a few feet away, little Ivy- her lavender hoodie that she had begged my mother to make is now crimson. A scrap of netting is twisted around her fingers. Her face is turned away from mine, and I can't bring myself to look.

Cliff is nowhere to be found. He would have wanted to go down fighting, but the beasts kill so quickly. We were supposed to have a life together, a family. It's all gone now.

The few days following are a blank. At some point I gather what I can from the remains of my home. I build a funeral pyre for Birch and Ivy. The others are gone. I walk into the forest and plan to lose myself in it.

That ends when I find the overgrown ruins of a smoking city.