Lilith's POV

My watch was boring, needless to say. For almost the first hour, I was tensed up, waiting for Shiny to jump out of a shadow. But after I realized that if he wanted us alive for the next day, he wasn't going to attack us, I relaxed a bit.

I'd begun thinking of Shiny as a 'he', and I had absolutely no idea why. It was definitely better than 'they', though. 'They' was too abstract.

Time seemed like it passed by at a snail's pace. I kept thinking of that one line from the one West Side Story song: "Today, the minutes seem like hours, the hours go so slowly, and still the sky is light..." only I changed the last word to dark, summing up my situation with a line from a Broadway musical. If Shiny was watching, I bet he'd be utterly perplexed as to why I was humming Broadway while sharpening a dagger with a flat chunk of concrete.

I still had my parody stuck in my head when I woke Erica. She sat up quickly and reached a hand to her left, fumbling for a knife. "Whoa," I said, raising my hands in a gesture of surrender. "No need to do that."

Erica stared at me for a second, blinking sleep out of her eyes. Then a look of recognition came across her face. "Oh," she muttered. "You. Morning. Hi." Brushing a strand of tangled, fiery hair out of her face, she stood. "Watch?"

"I'm glad to know that your knowledge of the English language is so expansive. Watch was meh." I waved my right hand vaguely. "I think I heard a coyote somewhere, but it didn't show." Erica nodded slowly, looking like she was going to fall back asleep any second. She held out a hand, and I took it, helping her to her feet. Yawning, Erica stretched, her wings flaring out. I yawned too, not able to help myself. Yawns were contagious.

"We should probably check the traps," Erica suggested, her vocabulary seeming to have returned. We'd set up traps in the woods, which wasn't too far away from our cozy little home, and though we hadn't had too much success with them so far, they had managed to provide us with some good food. We usually caught rabbits with them, which Erica complained loudly about, but like they say - beggars can't be choosers.

About an hour later, we were in the woods. Our traps consisted of holes. Yep, holes. Just like you see in the cartoons. Except ours failed spectacularly 80% of the time. As a result of this, most of our diet consisted of fruit, vegetables, and fish. I'd considered trying to make one of those traps made of rope that pull an animal up into a tree when they step in a circle of rope, but the following reasons detail why I'd decided no:
- I didn't know how to make those traps
- We didn't have any rope
- Knowing us, we'd probably step in the traps ourselves.

So we settled for holes. I mean, they weren't Burmese tiger pits or anything, but they did have the same sort of elements as one. We dug holes big enough for a small animal to be trapped in, crosshatched some sticks at the top, and covered the sticks with leaves. Sometimes we even put sharpened sticks at the bottom of the pit.

We had about 5 traps set up along an old trail. I didn't have the faintest idea if any rabbits actually used it, but we had managed to catch a few, so we must've been doing something right. Today, apparently, was our lucky day - we found a rabbit caught in one of the traps with the wooden stakes at the bottom. After the long process of retrieving the carcass from the trap, and the even longer process of (Erica) gutting it, we were cooking up a five-star breakfast of rabbit over a fire in a little clearing by a bridge, which had fallen into the creek it was built over long ago.

Not to brag, but my cooking skills had really improved since the apocalypse. Well, my cooking skills I actually needed to use to, you know, stay alive. Pro tip: if you ever want to get good at something, put yourself in a situation where you need to do it to survive. It'd been rough trying to figure out how long to cook different things, but after a while, I'd gotten the hang of it. Erica was the one that did most of the gutting and messy stuff. I couldn't stand the sight of blood. Which didn't make sense at all, but I guess bloody games and movies are different from real-life.

Erica leaned back against a stump and yawned as she finished her half of the rabbit. "Still tired?" I asked, a teasing note to my voice. She responded by glaring at me. I shot my most innocent smile back at her. "We should probably head to the train station soon," I suggested, looking up at the sky.

"Yeah. We don't want to be late." Erica stood up, kicking some dirt over the fire to put it out and throwing the charred remains of the rabbit into the woods.

~+~

The train station was surprisingly quiet when we got there. The sun hung high in the sky, though it wasn't quite noon yet. Maybe Shiny was trying to make a statement by arriving right on time. Or maybe he was hiding in the shadows somewhere.

I slung my backpack off my shoulders and plopped it down on a rusted bench. Erica sat down next to it, but I remained standing, the dagger from my boot in my hand. If this was a trap and Shiny was going to jump out at any second, I wanted to be ready to fight. 

Erica was tense, but her weapon wasn't at the ready. Her go-to weapon, a knife, rested at her side, but her hand wasn't wrapped around the grip yet. She looked mildly threatening, but I figured I wasn't on her to-kill list. Unless she was still mad at me for that time I had pushed her into the lake... 

A gentle breeze whispered its way through the station, and I thought I heard a noise somewhere behind me. I looked over my shoulder, but nothing was there. Creepy. Erica seemed to have a similar reaction, though she still looked pretty relaxed. I envied her ability to keep her cool in a situation like this. I was always the scared one. Maybe I could ask Erica for calm lessons if Shiny didn't murder us.

Erica suddenly stood up, gripping her knife. I followed her gaze to a small figure standing a distance away. 

"Hello." The wind carried the figure's greeting towards us. It stepped closer, and I lowered myself into a (not half-bad) fighting stance. The figure held up both arms in surrender. A sleeve slipped down a bit, and the arm underneath glinted as it caught the light.

"It's Shiny," I whispered to Erica. The redhead nodded, relaxing a bit. I followed her lead. 

Shiny was close enough now that I could make out what he was wearing. He was dressed all in black, including a long hooded cloak (which actually looked a bit like a lab coat) and gloves. Where did you even find a cloak in the apocalypse? I wondered. He could've raided a costume store. I had to stop myself from giggling out loud.

Shiny finally reached us and pulled back the hood of his cloak. 

The first thing I noticed was that Shiny was, in fact, a girl. The second thing was probably the fact that she looked about thirteen. But the most striking feature about her was the thin, pale scar that ran across her closed left eye. I realized I was staring, and in an attempt not to be rude, I turned to Erica for her input. Erica shrugged. I opened my mouth to say something, but before I could speak, Shiny cleared her throat. "I'm Shamira. You're probably wondering why I've been following you." So she did have a name.

"Yeah. It's not every day you get a stalker. But I feel special, thanks," I said in my most serious tone of voice. Erica snorted.

Shamira kept going, ignoring me completely. "Have you ever heard of the group known as the Howlers?"

"Can't say I have," Erica replied. I nodded, agreeing with her statement. Shamira looked like she was considering something, but she shook her head and continued.

"The Howlers are a group of Bicentennials who are trying to kill everyone in this city. We don't know why yet, but we do know that they're led by a Bicentennial who calls herself the Midnight Howler."

"Naming a group after yourself is a bit self-important, isn't it?" I said. 

"Oh, I like these two." A cheery voice rang out. I couldn't tell where it was coming from, until a black-haired girl stepped out from behind a pillar. She was taller and obviously older than the other, almost as tall as me. But something about her seemed childish, or playful - nothing like Shiny, who carried herself in a way that suggested she'd been forced to grow up too fast.

I took a moment to think. "Okay. I have a question. Is she your friend?" Shamira nodded. "Follow-up question - how many other people did you bring with you?" She looked at the black-haired girl, who shrugged.

"I just asked if anyone wanted to follow me. I wasn't in charge of who decided to go." She looked around the train station. "Okay, you guys can come out now! If you did come, that is." She muttered the last part. 

Turns out that a few of their friends did follow. Not counting Shiny or the black-haired girl, there were three. There was a small boy, who had brown hair, slightly tan skin, and looked vaguely Spanish. A girl who had light brown hair pulled back in a ponytail, a pair of wolf ears, and a furry tail now stood next to the black-haired girl, using her shoulder as an elbow rest. A bow was slung across her back, and I suspected she knew how to use it. The last present member of Shamira's little gang looked somewhat like me, mutation-wise, though with her blond braid and green eyes, she was easily distinguishable from me. The blonde had large bat wings and a finned black tail, and when she reached out to shake Erica's hand, I noticed her nails seemed almost clawlike.

Erica accepted the handshake. I had settled for a nice wave - Erica was a bit more formal than me. Blondie introduced herself as Sora, and the rest of the group followed. The boy's name was Roderick. I asked if I could call him Derrick, and he shrugged. "Sure." Ellie was the archer. She gave me a friendly grin, and I could see that a few of her teeth had sharpened into fangs. The black-haired one called herself The Agent.

"Okay, so you use an alias. That's cool," I remarked. "But what's your real name?"

"Squeakbox Dreemurr the 18th Lord Helix and Head Mage, 666th Minister of Magic."

"Ignore her." Shamira stepped in, breaking my confused stupor. "The reason I'm here is to make you an offer. I'm the leader of a small group of Bicentennials devoted to taking down the Howlers, and I think you'd be the perfect members. You're resourceful, you clearly know how to survive in this world, and with practice, you'd be able to fight."

Erica and I exchanged glances. For three years we'd been surviving just fine on our own. We'd run into other Bicentennials, though we always made it out alive. If we stayed away from this conflict, it might stay away from us, and we had a better chance of living if we weren't caught up in some gang war. Plus this gang was led by a tween-

"We're in," Erica said.

"Whoa, whoa. Hold up a minute-"

"I said, we're in."

I opened my mouth to make an argument, but something stopped me. As much as I wanted to bail, I knew I couldn't convince Erica to come with me. And you don't really just leave someone behind when you've relied on each other for survival purposes for threeish years. Plus, the whole idea of having a purpose spoke to me. After the apocalypse ended and the post-apocalypse began, I hadn't known what to do with myself. Before 90% of the population of the world died, I had been looking forward to college, to getting my first home, to having a good job. Cheesy, right? But I'd wished for it - everyone had. And then when that was suddenly taken away... well, it was sort of a shock to have nothing to look forward to except surviving the next day. It would be nice to know that I was living, and not just in the sense that I was alive.

Slowly closing my mouth, I nodded. "We're in." Erica grinned.

The Agent gave me a friendly whack on the back, and the corners of Shamira's mouth lifted into a small smile. "It's this way to the base," she said, turning to leave the station. Sora, with a flap of her wings, took off. I guess she was sort of done with hanging around. 

As we left, Erica turned to me. "Thanks for going along with that," she said. 

"No problem." I stuck my hands in the pockets of my jacket. Erica smiled again. "Though, I do want to say one thing."

"What?"

"I am so glad this didn't end in fighting. Because you're heavy, and I was not in the mood for dragging your corpse out of the station."

(Word Count: 2301)

(AHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHA YES IT'S DOOOOOONE *throws confetti* YOU CAN REJOICE NOW! I'm incredibly sorry this took like a few... months? Years? Eternities? I'd usually make up some excuse, but I'm just going to tell you the cold hard truth: I'm a procrastinator. Routinely. With everything going on in my life right now, I tend to get stressed really easily. And when I get stressed, I procrastinate or do something mindless [writing takes a mind]. I can only apologize and hope you'll forgive me. I'll try to procrastinate less and get the next chapter out faster, but... you know. Please be patient with me.)

(I'm going to start doing a word count at the end of the story part of each chapter, so that's what that is.)

(Shadowwisper, how do you like The Agent's real name? Squeakbox is in business XD)

~Lark