16

She's silent in the past of their steps. The resonating echoes of religious fundamentalists walk and pray. They bless themselves again and again.

She leans against the giant hyena in the Maranon Mall parking lot. Listens carefully to the transient campers who're moving in boot steps and grunts from carrying heavy rucksacks through the disintegrating top layer of highway. Time's fed watches the world fading underneath the ominous shadow. Night is swallowing the steps of her future.

Vermilion glows upon the opposite horizon. A burning. The city in the past of her steps continues in growing flames. Maybe God sent Gavri'el to burn it all away.

She can hear the campers at fathoms in front, clinging and clanging. Chatting and chanting. They sing old melodies of nursery rhymes and forgotten pop songs. Newly made lyrics in the language of righteous plagiarism. Boring hymns of old, jingling commercials.

"Hear me calling. The Lord's name. He loves me. I kneel and obey. Oh, I. I want to be with God everywhere. Oh, I. I want to be with God everywhere."

They sing like their voices are many little pieces of armour, that together, block out the wilderness surrounding them. More likely they wish to block out the time's fed girl's calls when she decides to wolfishly haunt them. She is the wilderness. They are the movement.

God. They're butchering that song. These idiots. The people of a young earthen God. It's easier to believe that the world is flat.

God is the sightless eyeball blinking in the midnight as if It bares witness to the daylight. God is the ending corrupting the antecedent. God is undead.

Man's purposeful creation deflects responsibility and curiosity. Man is a tradesman who makes the world a property and builds in his own image. For Man, God is the explanation of a loving and certain bigotry. An explanation for death and for bringing death. Man is God.

Man is undead. A face that easily washes away with the tide, with the wine dark flood. Man is a construction of thought and changes like a Möbius strip clock.

The daylight deceases entirely below the horizon and dies like an apple wounded vermin in a home full of hatred. The vermin's death benefits everyone else in such a house. It benefits her.

Time's fed stands and hides her flip flops in her backpack. Begins running soundlessly, barefoot upon the asphalt beside many tacit hyenas, feeling every pebble and smooth stretch of the crumbling highway beneath her callous feet.

Time's fed was waiting for such a sunless reckoning to touch the world, because the night has always held superstitious horror for the religiously insane.

Her and the giant hyena climb over and beyond the barricades. They run through the camp leftovers. The torn and worn through abandoned tents of those lost. They parkour over the opposite barricades and onto a stretch of highway. Following the direction of the campers. The other hyenas pass into the scent depth darkness ahead of them.

She doesn't know why she needs to follow and do what she has in mind. Obsession overtakes compulsion. Was it because they shot a hyena? Maybe. Maybe she enjoys feeding her pack and making the surviving campers feel cursed. Everything is cursed now. Maybe everything always was.

But her pack. They attacked her pack. For nothing. Her new family? Her new family. To somehow make up for the loss of her family? Something has surely fallen within her to reveal something else. Hatred for those she knows she can never trust. Those who seem to her as living without consciousness behind their eyes. Hatred for all of them. She will pierce their flood Ark and drown such narrative in her own metaphorical heat problem.

A slight pain shocks her out of thought. Not a pain she's used to. Her stomach churns and cramps but the pain doesn't register as awful. She knows her ass smile isn't healing anymore, either. It reeks but she can easily bare the stench. She feels the rancid slice like it's somehow always been there and yet it's a recent wound. Wide open and grinning like it could laugh in her face one day.

It occurs to her that the sensation of pain isn't how she's always felt pain. Not really. Not anymore. Pain doesn't render the same epistemology she's known her whole life. It feels sort of good, like the messages between touch and brain have found a new language. The perception of pain has another interpretation.

She scratches her belly and feels like she's on fire but she can't burn. The agony feels good. A serotonin. Her ankle's swollen but she no longer limps. The straining tendons feel more alive than her other ankle.

For her, like for those she hunts, the world is now more physically metaphysical than she's ever known. Her wounds. What might've been. The hyenas accepting her. The unknown thing on the other side of the fence in the savanna exhibit. The dead river of flies. Her mistaken, murderous rage.

And the campers still sing. They sing terribly of the undead God as her pack bares upon them, cackling. The campers raise the volume of their voices and turn on all of their flashlights. Light their torches. Men and women and children.

Rifle fire. Blind shots into the dark.

These people are fucking idiots. How did they survive this long out here? How? They're going to attract another horde with their bellowing and flashing. Do they want to die? They must want to die.

One flashlight breaks from the group at a tiny run and another follows. A woman running after her child. They both scream as the hyenas are upon them in seconds. The crocutas run them down and begin eating the child and mother alive. The time's fed girl witnesses the deaths upon the landscape in the noumenal of the two flashlights. They shine to her left at the fields which are large. She knows the distance of firebreaks and farming end in the tangling of the jungles. The woman's screams become gurgles. A flashlight spins at the foot of a hyena and she witnesses the throat-less, dying woman holding the severed arm of her child. Time's fed swallows her gasps. A crimson snouty hyena smiles back at her.

Time's fed collects the two flashlights and clicks them off. Collects one into her backpack. Keeps the other in her hoodie pouch with the pineapple grenade. The woman and child are both silent as the campers continue singing and wallowing toward their museum Ark.

The group shoots at the darkness with the fire from their guns every so often. Waste bullets.

The hyenas cackle around the campers, moving through the light of the rifle bursts like the ghosts of monsters.