2

A Fairlight CMI pop synthesizer echoes everywhere. In the key of B Mixolydian, from a distant, ancient radio. It fades behind as the chorus hits. Mcvie's soft, reverberating voice whispers until it's only a mumbling apparition in a recollecting memory.

Time's fed.

She runs. Hard to breath. Humid like the air's made of water. Running and pacing upon concrete. Sprinting when the time echoes in her mind about the past of her steps.

She stomps across abandoned cars and manoeuvres through rubble. Jumps the distance of each rocket fissure.  Climbs fire kissed chainlink fences. Crawls through claustrophobic rain tunnels.

Wet black hair sticks to her face. Dripping. Her lower body slicks under tight, pleat black shorts. Sweat souses between her thighs. Behind her dirty, bloody knees. Down her legs. Calves. Cut ankles.

She soaks under her wine dark sport bra and gray athletic tank top, which bear the words, "time is fed," in the colours of a sunrise along her breasts.

Her entire back drenches with the weight of a pink knapsack. Items such as a machete and two 9mm Berrettas. Boxes of ammo. Extra underwear pad the bottom. Items she had left over from her last excursion. She forgot to pack water and food. Ran out of time to remember. Everything happened so fast. The time ate away her usual preparation.

She's dazed and her recollections are foggy. The past twenty four hours are a blur of emotions. Death and vengeance. Loss. She's lost everywhere.

She runs. Her flip flop, bare feet swelter with each echoing clap against cement.

The time's fed girl turns a corner. Runs a pace through a street of sundry parked cars. Notices they're not in bad condition. Thinks about hot wiring. Fairly certain there's no time to try something she's never attempted. The batteries are probably all dead. Now is not the time for ideas.

She mumbles at herself.

"Trust your feet, bitch."

Movement catches her attention. She witnesses a figure meander out of right side alley ahead, like it's sniffling at the world in her direction. She doesn't stop. Wants to kill it. She would've days ago with her people around. Not this time and never again. Her people are gone. The person whom she wanted to be with, everywhere, is gone.

She side steps the naked, dangle-less horror that resembles a conscious-less David Chalmers.

One foot to the far left and she twirls around once. Veers right and back into her running strides. She doesn't look back. Keeps her cardio pace.

Time's fed needs a safe distance from the detonation that's chasing her. A safe extent from her revenge. A debt of vengeance payed for what the people of the high rise did to her mother, father, brother and best friend. Her best friend. Her lover who died at the hands of who everyone thought was a leader of men.

The people who decided the fate of her family are also doomed. Those horrible people who decided that less people would be better. Filthy versus clean. A biblical insanity. When everyone voted to cull or not cull, all of them voted their own lives away without knowing it. Without knowing what she'd do to them.

The cullers decided to spare her at the behest of the leader. Maybe because they valued her useful survival skills. She was considered filthy. That's what they told her when she returned from her scavenge in the city. They thought they were so smart. She played along. Knew their intention. His intention. The piece of shit in charge had an eye on her. An eye for childbearing. He wanted to be inside her. Pop a kid out in the name of his good word. Maybe die in the process. And who would want a child in the middle of this columbarium world? Maybe he just wanted to use her. Fuck her. Gross. Disgusting like his eyes. Lifeless. Menacing. Panoptic. She was terrified of truly looking into his eyes. Witnessing the indifference. Indifferent when he told her about the culling. And when she witnessed him in that moment of his good words, it was like he had no consciousness to experience anything behind his eyes. Like no one was really existing within him.

Fuck him and the people of the high rise. But it doesn't matter anymore. They're all going to die soon.

What might've been a man screams at her as she runs beyond. Her heart pounds at the volume, like it's a hundred pounds of noise. She knows many more of what might've been will follow, but they won't follow for long.

Ravens caw from different perches. Distractions. What might've been a man ghoulishly screams when the ravens shut their beaks. He makes rasping howls of eschatology, like Jesus resurrecting over and over, dragging entrails through church so as to feed on the capitalism of confession.

The ravens caw again and she listens to the flapping of their wings as a conspiracy windbornes away. She'd join if she could.

What might've been a man is not far in the past of her steps. A block. He's faster than most of what might've been and screams yet again in his terse, gorge retching language.

A few streets. She can hear others keck in their horde of cannibal movement. Time's fed listens to a viaticum ingurgitate each other as they walk. They're becoming louder than the sound of her breathing and louder than her flip flop clop. Louder than her thoughts.

Her ears witness those with less sense receptors become easy meals for fresher things. The nearly senseless tend to regurgitate muscle movement at the notice of vibrations. If they still have a jaw, they'll attack. If their concern is like Cain's donkey, not so much. They're usually what's being torn apart and eaten in the centre of a horde.

"Heck. Fuck."

Behind her one word whispers are the twisting nahash bites of thought. She doesn't want to think. She wants to run and think of nothing. Time's fed can't help but think.

Hecate fuckate. Blow up already. Fuck these things. I need water. I forgot soap. A good pair of shoes. These flip flops are almost falling off and the slapping sound is way too noisy. But I'm not going fucking barefoot here. Fuck that. I've got vinyl tape. I'll make sure they stay on, even if I have to wrap the fucking things to my feet.

She notices a human form creep out from behind another approaching alley. Stumbles and attempts to lunge and grasp her ankle as it falls. She twists away without its womanly hand touching her. Doesn't look back to witness anything else about its countenance.

What might've been a man screams behind and in the same moment, the scream seems like an inversion, like the air implodes. And silence. The hairs on her arms raise.

This is it.

A massive earthen thunder clap rattles the street. She smiles and shakes at the nature of the small quake and continues slapping flip flops against concrete.

The sky darkens. Translucently at first. Day slips into false dusk.

Keep running you bitch. Keep on it. Don't stop. The next one might level the city. You stupid bitch. Why didn't you grab shoes? What were you thinking? Rigging that much enhanced nitroglycerin around every support beam in that high rise? What was I thinking? Oh, I know. I was imagining the looks on all their fucking faces right about now. Goddamn it, bitch. Run.

The air sucks backward like inner intuition slowing and retreating. Silence groans like a giant eye watching from the aperture of a hurricane.

The reverse halts and harshly thrusts. Air blows back violently through outer intuition and the earth thunders again.

The sound of a structure disintegrating into rubble blasts bright black powder upon everything. The explosion creaks the city. Ashen concrete dust. Flaming plastic. Melting glass rains as shrapnel into the street.

She turns left and runs up a set of apartment steps. Slams her body through the glass entrance door of a silver metal frame. Falls and cuts her knees and elbows on the shards and quickly stands. Continues running through the apartment hall, upon thin reddish yellow berber. Into the windowless darkness. There's a hint of daylight on the other side, like a train tunnel.

A tan Pinto catches fire at the touch of flying shrapnel remnants of the high rise in the past of her steps. Fumes ignite in the gas tank.

Pressure and heat expands. The Pinto explodes.

She turns a left corner in the hall, toward the emergency exit. A fireball car door crashes past her. The quick flames singe her black hair. It continues to the other side of the hall and smashes through the opposite glass door. The hall is on fire.

She slams through the exit push bar and into a back alley. Three of what might've been are waiting. They're eyeless and noseless and earless. Nothing to fear from them. Runs past their averted attention. Time's fed races out of the alley and back into the smouldering street.

The hall in the past of her steps becomes a fire storm. The whole main floor quickly catches.

Time's fed runs blocks away before noticing the blackening sky and the rising fires of where she was. The pitchfork flames lick at other buildings like pointy autumn demon tongues.

She has to wonder if she'll now be running from a raging inferno as well as what might've been.