Honey-Comb [A Dead by Daylight Fic]

Chapter 1

Honey McKeever did not feel safe.

Night had crept up on her heels with no moon, no phone, and no remorse. Only shadows and silence.

Of course her walk home hadn't started in such ominous straits. At one point there had been a moon and there had even been music. Loud. Vulgar. "Music." None of which she had downloaded, but kept in twenty-three open YouTube tabs, which absolutely murdered her phone's battery. All in all she got about three songs and a half ad of entertainment out of it before it died and the crushing silence of night beared down upon her.

She blew a raspberry to herself, relishing the brief reprieve of a false company of sound, even if it was her own.

It wasn't the silence that made her uneasy, nor was it the moonless sky, or the way the shadows twisted and grinned at her - no, it was something more primal, a deep seated unease that, without any true reason, had decided that tonight - Honey McKeever was unsafe.

She pushed it to the back of her mind, ignoring the chill that ran up her spine every few minutes the night stared into her.

Home wasn't far.

It wasn't close either, though.

"Not too much further," she assured herself with a confident nod. "If I cut through the MacMillan place I can get home a few minutes earlier," she checked her phone as if by some miracle it had been restored by the sheer magic of not-looking-at-it.

It hadn't.

The MacMillan Estate had been abandoned years before Honey had begun using it as a shortcut; Nothing left but a leaning cole tower of broken bones and fractured brick all knit together by the veins of ivy that crept over its corpse like a hungry parasite. The city had slapped a 'No Trespassing' sign up on the iron gates a few years back, after a couple of kids went and got themselves killed playing around the old place. Dangerous grounds, they had said, unsteady foundation, that's what caused the collapse of the second story floor. The city mourned for weeks.

And then.

It didn't.

No one forgot. The world just moved on without them.

There had been talk for some time that they might demolish the place, put up some kind of strip mall to try and make their town a little less of a shit hole. A little less gloomy. Something the groping, bloody fingers of the past might not reach. But that cost money, and Weeks had an egg carton full of debt. So, MacMillan Estate remained, a skeleton outside its own grave, unwilling to relent its place within this world.

Just as those who had once called it home would too.

Honey had crossed through those haunting grounds many times before, mostly during the day when the broken windows and cable spools were a little less ominous. And mostly with friends, so she never much felt just how terrible it was to be alone.

She squeezed between the rusted out posts, tendrils of fog curling about her ankles like wanting snakes, drawing her inward.

Fall lingered on its breath, a crisp honeysuckle mixed with dirt. The grass had yellowed to a brittle wire, crunching beneath her boots as she started her march through. The place was a swathe of overwhelming darkness that no amount of squinting or wide eyed staring could abate. It was only a matter of time before Honey stumbled over the junk left over by vagrants and delinquents with a quiet "Oop. Shit." To herself.

She kicked at whatever trash had tripped her up, cursing loudly when her foot collided with a much larger hunk of something-dark-and-in-the-way.

KLANG!

"Fu-huck!" She whined, doubling over to grab at her foot, "What the fuck?" She stomped down and groped in the dark, hands falling over the janky metal of a worn out electric generator.

"Huh," she squinted into the darkness, "generators...they must finally be working on this place," she muttered, turning her gaze up to look at the dark bulbs.

The fog breathed about her, rising to her knees in a choking haze.

She kept a hand on the nicked up smooth shell of the generator as she carefully walked around it. Her eyes had finally started to adjust and the shapes of the world separated themselves from the shadows.

It was in that moment, when she picked her head up, that she noticed him standing there on the porch. A silhouette and nothing more.

Honey McKeever did not feel safe.