Chapter Text
Another croak, a silenced gunshot, a thud. The head of the now inert clicker guarding the doors had burst like a rotten cherry upon the dilapidated nougat-toned stone steps, illustrating a path to the ‘X’ building. Great, a fucking chapel. The map your general gave was meant to be accurate – yes, it was littered with 4-year-old coffee mug stains and the edges were worn out after being sentenced to spending the past three days in your clutter of a backpack – but it would’ve specified the location, and more importantly, it wouldn’t be a place of worship to a non-existent deity, right? You let out an exasperated huff, kicking your military-grade boots on the closest rubbles and pebbles surrounding you.
You weren’t paid enough for this shit. Two more months’ rent, maybe, or possibly enough to afford one of the trader’s homegrown pomegranates with enough persuasion. You were only able to bag a peach, which had around another day worth of survival. It had a singular bruise towards the top, emanating a violet decay that would have integrated itself in the flesh of it by now. You often felt like caving in towards it during your two-day journey up to this point, but ended up relenting and cherishing the brush of the velvet skin between your palms and scarred fingertips. This was your only contact, your grand prize for the last errand which involved you and three other amateurs collecting supplies for a community with a population climbing towards the hundreds. You lived there, but you weren’t part of it. Not really. You were the only one who came back from that last trip out of luck, or unluck, but what was worse is that you barely grabbed anything. So, this – this is the last shot – you could tell by the way people looked at you before leaving. The way you’ve been the only newcomer to not get a housemate, patrol partner, friend, lover, or a vessel of trust. It wasn’t like you didn’t try, it’s just that nothing seemed to budge with the others – they were too settled in, too unscathed, and you too wild, too feral. Born lucky under a mean star. Valued on the outskirts when it came to the bludgeonings and conflict, transient when it came to closed spaces with small talk and what you wish the world could be. Placed on the outskirts of the commune first thing, where the recluse and capable are, or the ones with the most doubt placed upon them. Safe, technically; but if push came to shove, you’d be the most convenient sacrificial meat in times of emergency. A human barrier to the precious density of citizens, normal and capable of continuing the world in the centre. Sometimes it hurts, sometimes you yearn, but it’s whatever. After all, why wouldn’t anyone want to get rid of a burden?
So why the fuck has the other group set their drop-off at a chapel, and an abandoned one at that? There seemed to be no lavish display of weaponry, no barbed wire, no shoot-you-on-sight tactics visible on the outside. Just a dark, wooden god-loving entity which had once demanded infinite virtue and hell for those who rebelled against its oblivious attendants – now subdued to ferns, thorns, twists of branches, all kinds of greenery from the top to bottom, that either Mother Gaia or the big man upstairs saw fit for the apocalypse. Every aspect of it: its promises, its structure, now overgrown and under the fate of the dreadful summer.
This summer drove the local crops to extinction, and the same better not have happened to others, or it was you on the line. The golden hour of the new autumn is starting to set in, with the glow finding itself upon the cross stabbed upon the spire, penetrating the stained glass, and its warmth casting you out of your trance. Let’s get this over with. You scrunched up the ruins of the ‘map’ you’d been given, the shittiest one there was, with no regard for paper cuts or whatever uses it could possibly have now. There was no way you were staying in another place of false hope for longer than you needed to, however ironic that may currently be.
With no threat apparent, your hunter rifle, which jammed itself most of the time, lowered into your holster to the side of your tattered backpack. Another look to the left and right, to which there only stood empty remains of uniform garage doors and abandoned local businesses; true middle-class suburbia. All audible is the crisp folding of the leaves under your feet, crunching as you continue up the crumbled stairs with the occasional, red-drenched spots from the clicker. There better not be any more of those fuckers. You could just bide your time, find an outskirt, relish in the bruised peach, sleep it off… unless someone was already in there, waiting.
But there’s no other way out than through – as one of those fancy quotes you heard by some person, academic, or other speaker in the community. You feel almost tempted to knock on the holy spruce doors, but you let that temptation die down. For this is the temple of obedience. The pushing of your hand against one of the scarce spaces on the entry door is what lets the dying light of the sky creep into the previously beloved four walls of God, whilst a creek invades the silence. A second. Two. Ten. Forty-seven. And nothing. Good, no infected. Thank… goodness, not God. Never thank Him.
Remaining on high alert, you shuffle in and immediately tend to closing the chapel’s arched, sacred door as slow as can be to avoid another resonant creek. Noises in this kind of place gave you the creeps anyways. Turning around, it all gets soaked in; various dark hues reflecting their spouts of colour all across the puritanical room in rebellion as the shatters of upheld stained glass are basked in the sun’s last hour; the mudded and grimed out carpet flooring at its various corners; the dull pews still mainly intact apart from the corrosion on the wood, with their kneeling spaces practically in pristine condition despite there being no one left to praise; the hammer beam roof in parallel with the intention of the aisle; to direct you. And what other choice is there? Each step through the aisle brings a new possibility. How many unsuspecting darlings were exchanging gazes seconds before marriage here? Were they happy? Did they satisfy each other? How many of the dead were carried through here when coffins were still a thing? What blasphemy occurred here? Was it forgiven?
But these thoughts shouldn’t and wouldn’t matter, because each row of pews was devoid of anything – no supplies, weaponry, no nothing. Too many back-and-forths and too little of a certainty that you would have got anything from this trip. Are you kidding? Three days’ worth of a journey to come back empty-handed, soon to be empty-gutted? Not even a lil’ mercy from your old pal Jesus to give you a single round of antibiotics or canned food or even water?
Stupid. This was stupid. Stupid to think the other communities would have spared shit, given this summer. Stupid to think you could have been accepted or even fucking seen by people who avoided you like a satanic panic. A wave of vexation takes over, and all you can do is let out a loud groan, let it ricochet off the walls.
You frustratingly rid yourself of your backpack from your shoulders in an ungraceful fashion, what with all the pent-up rage and everything. With a careless toss, the backpack meets with a clash against a seat of the pew, its contents clattering at an obvious volume. You didn’t care, your life span was shortened anyway thanks to you being the one to take on the errand. Another sound echoes throughout the holy palace, knocking you out of your dissociative fit. A click.
A click against two dense metals. A click of a gun. Yet, if it were hunters, they would have had their guns blazing and their death wish made already, if it was infected, they would have scrambled towards you by now, if it was the smugglers from the other communities they would have simply left at this point. Amazing, another waiting game. As you wait and allow the silence to reverberate, you take shelter behind the pew bench. A minute passes – nada. Note to self: your paranoia just might be the death of you before humans, undead or starvation ever would.
A final walk down the aisle, outshining the oratory’s narrow build, and something feels… set. The carpet sinks slightly lower as your combat boots take on the steps to the apse. The cream altar has visible prints from human contact that contrast with the age-old dust sat there for He knows how long, embedded in the apse for all those penitents to feel good about themselves. As you dare to look up, the vault is cleaner than what it should be – like someone wanted to indulge in the painting it was graced within however many centuries ago – depicting a renaissance-style scene of mostly clouds, so probably heaven, lined with blues and greys and whites. However, the main focus are the two central figures, cupid look-alikes, cannibalizing one another. One claws upon the other’s leg as they take a bite of their calf with a gaze nothing short of starved, another savouring themselves in the other’s torn apart kidneys with their eyes closed in seemingly serenity. And you feel seen, too seen.
Though your nose had almost immediately adjusted to the accords of dirt, plastic, and naïvety of the past, it’s when you reach the apse that something new arises, something green – pine. A deep, musky pine which brings your head back down. The type that would keep you staying in the woodlands for as long as you had access to it. It’s here, however faint. Someone was, or is, here. Then why haven’t they shown themselves yet? Thinking back to that stupid inspirational quote again, you continue with nothing to lose. It’s then that a cabinet-looking structure catches you. A confessional. Moulded over, festered in damp and rot, but it’s the only thing that draws you. So, why not? Sure, you weren’t here for a pilgrimage, but if you were bound to the means of death by bringing nothing back, then it would be on your terms. Even if Christ isn’t saving you from yourself, you need an illusion of salvation, and a confessional appears to be the only source of such a reward at this point.
Only a brief moments’ worth of hesitation keeps you from immediately entering, but all the anticipation withers away. There’s no point in worry as a dead woman. Except from the visible deterioration of the exterior – not a result of time, no, from… force? Scratches, or, indents, perhaps. Maybe this whole place of God was damned from the start. Swinging of the door and climbing within the enclosure, it’s a snug fit, a deprivation of oxygen or room to even begin breathing, and the latticed screen barely willing to achieve a clear look at any saviour on the other side – though this would not be that much of a change from before the world now, and there would be no point to look. The scent of a masculine greenery envelopes you, and your breath quickens, it’s too much. But it feels right, and you’re ready to confess, ready to face what a penitent must. The confessional is consistently verbalizing its creaks and shifts of your jagged out jacket, cargo trousers and mess of hairs upon each other in this position – but you decide to fill the nooks and crannies of remaining silence anyway. Kneeled down, face forward, eyes closed, hands parallel and cautiously placed on your knees, deep breaths. This is something you’re foreign to, but there’s no other time than now.
“Forgive me, for I have sinned,” A clearing of your throat. Another string of silence, only filled with your breaths of consolation. “It has been… never since my last confession, so I beg you, give me grace.”
Inhale, exhale. It’s just you. “I feel like…” as you drop your voice down to almost a whisper, “…I’ll never stop my own hunger. It’s like I’ll just feed off of those around me, with nothing to give back.” Silence. Your brows furrow and your face now repulsed with yourself. “I've killed. I know everyone else has, but the difference is they feel for it. They feel happy, or fulfilled, or guilty. Is it so bad that I don’t feel? And is it worse that I need to feel?” Again, no response from the Gods up there.
Your voice retreats to a spoken volume, your face back to a resemblance of a peaceful slumber. “Please forgive me for I only know greed. I want someone, someone to consume. Someone to bite. Someone to lick. Someone to tear out my appetite. I’d devote myself to it, to them. I need it, it’s rooted in me and I can’t take it out, this indulgence. Is it so sinful I want a leech to myself? That I want someone to devour me as I do them? To learn to fuck, properly this time?” The verbalized residue of your rooted insatiability slightly echoes amongst the stall, and this time it feels less isolating. You think that was the last of it, and you take a deep inhale to tend to your internal ache. The need is still there, vibrating to your fingertips, but for what? A final exhale, to which you focus on your own breathing pattern to calm yourself, almost feeling at a tranquil, like you were back to the waves, or in the sun, or back to your peach–
“Yeah?”