Frank and Izzy, short for Isabella, both look like they're barely out of high school. Frank is short and on the chubby side, with full lips and a crooked nose. He could be the little brother who always manages to finish the milk behind your back and put the carton back in the fridge. Isabella is taller than him by a head, slender, with thin lips and wavy black hair. She looks like she could be one of the popular girls in my high school.

But their clothes tell a story: Frank is wearing a grimy black T-shirt and worn blue jeans. They look too big for him. The material looks as if it's been splattered with mud and what looks suspiciously like blood. He has a long-sleeved plaid button up wrapped around him as a makeshift blanket. The back of the garment looks vaguely singed. There are blood splatters on his chucks. Isabella is wearing a faded purple top, faded skinny jeans, and running shoes. There's a gun holster strapped to her leg. One of her shirtsleeves looks like it's been torn off. The denim jacket she used as a blanket also looks vaguely singed.

They both look like survivors.

Jessica goes to wake them up to tell them where we're going. I chose to stay by the door. The bedroom contains a wooden bunk bed shoved against a wall opposite a window whose glass has been covered by old newspapers. Muted light streams in thin golden lines. The headline of one of the newspapers catches my eye: "Congregations declare apocalypse by darkness".

Before I can walk over and get a closer look, Jessica calls my name. It's time to go. I turn my back on Frank and Isabella, and I almost miss their wide eyes watching me leave. Isabella has a hand under her pillow. Frank is clutching his plaid jacket like a lifeline.

What is up with them? As Jessica and I troop down the stairs, I ask her this question.

"We met Frank and Izzy on our way to your Mom's place the first time, all those months ago." So that explains it. Jessica says this over her shoulder before she disappears through a bathroom. She locks the door behind her.

Footsteps echo from the floor above me, but none of them seem to be making their way downstairs. I wouldn't know what to say to them. I don't remember them at all. Strangely enough, I feel like I'm letting them down because of that.

Jessica finishes doing her business, and after my turn, we're walking out the door. The alleyway seems shorter in the light. The alley actually cuts through numerous buildings in differing states of disrepair. We'd left the red gate to our shelter open. The pail I kicked in my run is still there, lying on its side. A thick black gate closes the mouth of the alley. Peaking just behind it is the wooden plank from last night—from before the darkness. There are way too many gates in this narrow alley. Is that why she needed to knock on the plank? To alert someone to open up the gate?

Jessica turns around to lock the door behind us. A thick, messy, red stripe is painted just above the door.

"What's that?" I ask.

"Blood," she replies. There's something familiar about this image: blood over the doors of your houses.

"Lamb's blood?" I ask. Jessica hums in agreement.

"How'd you know?" She asks absently.

"It's in the Bible. Exodus, I think."

"What else do you remember about the Bible?" She starts walking down the alley. I follow.

"This isn't supposed to be the end of the world, for starters." She knocks on the door nearest to the mouth of the alley and calls for someone named Hans to unbolt the gate. There is also a red stripe painted above the door. "Who's Hans?"

"Another survivor. He's mute. Nice guy, nice jawline." A hand reaches out of a window above us and pulls out a bolt from the structure of the gate. The gate swings silently open. "He lost his legs to an explosion in the wet market nearby. He was a jeepney driver."

"So he's just your gatekeeper?" I ask. We exit the alley. The sky is no longer the canvas of the dusk. It is a cloudless blue, the sun a shimmering ball of heat. If the world were as it were, I would've guessed that it was already high noon. I would've still been asleep by that time.

"Yep. In exchange, we bring him food and shit and protect him."

The empty and quiet world still unnerves me. I still expect to see bony children running past us to get to their mothers, or to see men with their shirts pulled back to their shoulders arguing in the shade of a sari-sari store. "Was there ever a Rapture or something like that?"

"Nah," Jessica shrugs. She wouldn't look at me. I remember the newspaper clipping pasted on the window.

"Before we left, I saw a newspaper clipping talking about congregations declaring an apocalypse just like this one. Do you know anything about that?"

Jessica stays quiet, and for a second I think that she doesn't intend to answer. But then she takes a deep breath. "Yeah. The people called them prophets. There was this whole media shit-storm that surrounded them when they first gathered."

"Gathered?"

Jessica looks... hunted. Her eyes fly to the distance we still have to walk. My house is still a street away.

"If you don't want to talk about it, it's fine—" I reassure her, but she cuts me off:

"Stop being so fucking nice!" Her voice carries across the empty street. Her mouth is twisted in an ugly snarl—an ugly-ass snarl that has me raising my metaphorical hackles.

Okay, you know what—

"Okay, you know what? Don't do that!" I snap. "I'm sorry that I have so many questions! But if you don't want to tell me anything, that's fine! Just stop being a little bitch about it, okay?"

"I'm not being a little bitch!"

"Yes, you are!"

"No, I'm not! Fuck off!"

"I fuck off—?"

"We're here!"

She's right. The apartment complex my grandfather (on my mother's side) owns looms above us, painted in shades of blue and gray. Everything looks the same. The gate leading inside is still painted a cherry red. The water pipe nailed to the side of the building is still wrapped in barbed wire because of the one time the CCTV camera caught a man trying to climb it to get to the rooftop. Mom's car is parked in her usual place.

At the same time, I can still feel something wrong. The gate is ajar. The CCTV camera is off. Mom's windshield is busted.

Scrape. Scrape.

Something moves from under her car.

"Jessica." I grab her arm. She must have noticed something off with my tone because she doesn't shake me off as I expected she would. I don't take my eyes off the moving figure under the car. I can see Jessica trace my gaze. Slowly, she pulls me away from the car and back under the sunlight.

Scrape.

"That's a shade." Jessica sounds grim.

"What—what is it doing under there?"

"It must've been outside when the light came back." Jessica edges past the car and into the open gate. I follow her.

"Won't it—?" My breath hitches. What if the shade can hear us?

"Won't it follow us?" I finish in a whisper.

"No," Jessica whispers back. I close the gate behind us. The sound echoes throughout the complex. "They can only stay in shadows as black as they are. Any form of illumination burns them."

Okay. Okay.

My mom's unit is on the second floor, nearest to the landing. Our footsteps echo quietly in the building. When we reach the landing, I feel my breath catch. The screen door my mom had attached had been destroyed: the screen shredded and the metal warped beyond recognition. It's unlocked. The door behind it is wide open. My eyes find the small crucifix nailed to the door. Mom had put it up there when we first got the place. The irony isn't lost on me.

Mom's apartment is dimly lit. The only windows in the dining-room-slash-kitchenette open up to some sort of ventilation shaft, which in turn opens up into the air. What little light streaming in is muted by distance—how far her unit is from the opening.

The muted light illuminates the scene of a struggle. The dish rack is toppled over. The windows are shattered as if someone—something had blasted through them. There are deep gouges on the carpet. Despite the open windows, a familiar salty smell lingers.

Jessica steps in first. She's holding one of those industrial flashlights. Where did that come from? She sweeps the beam around the room once, twice. The long dining table is bare and coated with a film of dust. It's the first time I've ever seen it like that.

There is a trail of blood on the floor. Jessica follows the blood with her flashlight. It leads away from the main room and down the short hall leading to a bedroom that belongs to both Nena and I. The door is ajar. We follow the blood.

There's something stopping the door from opening all the way through. A quick peek reveals that it's upturned dresser. Its contents spilled across the floor in a prickly mismatching field of coins, earrings, and shattered bottles of cologne. There's another window that opens into an open-air ventilation shaft. The sheets on the bunk bed are in tatters. The TV that used to stand on a shelf on the wall across from the bed has tumbled over, crashing onto the plastic office drawers below before sliding to the floor.

There are bones on the floor, messily strewn about. They've been picked clean. Behind the door, there is a small animal skull still miraculously connected to its jaw. Mom owned no other pets besides the cat. Her name was Luna. Her gray fur reminded us of moonlight filtering through city smoke.

Tick. Tick.

Nails tap against wood. It sounds like it's coming from the closet. Jessica shines her flashlight on it, and a muffled thump sounds through the wood. Jessica turns her flashlight off. Tick. Tick.

"Right. You'll only get a glimpse before the shade scurries away into another patch of shadow," Jessica warns me. My mouth has gone dry. "Do you really want to do this?"

I nod and position myself in front of the closet. Jessica gives me her flashlight. She tells me to keep it off until she opens the door.

"One." My palms sweat. I grip the flashlight with two hands.

"Two." My fingers brush over the "on" button.

"Three!" She opens the closet. I turn on the flashlight.

The thing in the closet resembled a human, at least. Horrifically emaciated, the only way I could tell it was a girl was by its long lank hair covering small mounds of flab on its chest that might have once passed for breasts. The only way I could tell that it was my sister was because of the stripe of black on its left shoulder. It's a tattoo.

The lanky hair obscures its face. But when it screeches at the light, its mouth opens wide to reveal rows of blackened teeth. Closer to the light, I can see that the thing had no eyes, no nose. It barely has a face: it seems more like a floating curtain of hair with a mouth hidden underneath, which is attached to a neck. This close to the shade, I can smell rotten eggs and garbage that has been set on fire. Under the beam of the flashlight, its skin had begun to sizzle—fire being ignited just beneath the surface of its skin.

When Jessica had said "scurry", I thought she didn't mean it in the literal sense. But the shade proves me wrong. It makes its way out of the closet on all fours, but it doesn't move in that awkward, uncoordinated way that I envisioned it would, with its top-half loping forwards and its bottom half scrambling to keep up. The shade moves with its body close to the floor, its arms stretched out and feet bent at an awkward angle to keep itself flat on the floor. It scurries away from the light like a roach unearthed.

I don't even realize that I'd been swaying dangerously until Jessica grabs my arm. The flashlight clatters to the floor. She takes my free hand. The pressure of her grip is my only anchor. I feel faint.

"No, no, no, no, no—don't you fucking faint—"

I struggle to breathe. Oxygen clears the spots in my eyes. Jessica looks frustrated and angry, but when she lays a hand on my head, it is gentle.

"Can you walk? We have to leave before the darkness comes back."

It is a colossal effort to move my neck. Much more so is the struggle of taking the first step out of the bedroom. And then another step. Another step. Another step.

We make it back to the shelter just as the earth begins to rumble.

* * *

Terms and Definitions:

Sari-sari store – (English: variety store); a form of convenience store