How are you? Good? Bad? Something in between?

[CW: descriptions of insects/insect larvae, extreme manifestations of anxiety, and electrocution]

Keep track of Devo. It should be simple, right? Right? You know when he’s watching, surely you would know; you feel his presence like centipedes crawling up and down your spine. The skin on your arms has been rendered red, raw, and bloody, matching the flesh under your fingernails; you could get medical help, but no, what if it’s him there dressing your wounds, asking you questions, so many questions, why always with the questions?! Grinding your teeth, you cover the wounds with scraps of fabric of things you’ve mended; a physical reminder of how useful you are to the Bastion, they can’t get rid of you, they won’t, not yet, not now.

You assume your duties, not that they’ve been assigned to you, but you should do something to help, to contribute; would it even matter if no-one were watching? But someone is watching; every looming shadow, a forced-friendly voice carried by the breeze, his overly sterilised scent. He hasn’t come up to you directly at all, does it know, is this all part of some greater experiment?

You know the hole in the fence needs fixing, but once you start you cannot stop; you’ll be trapped in one place, exposed to attack like a white rabbit on an open plane, with a hunter, its sights trained. What’s more, the tools you need, they’re in the infirmary, a place you avoid like it’s the origin of the plague, but it isn’t the dead you fear. And so you let time tick by, dodging hazards that everyone else walks through like ghosts, hiding like a squirrel for hours amongst the nooks of the Bastion, places you hope you are safe, unseen; The muscle underneath your multicoloured wraps squirms and writhes, like an ant colony under your skin, biting at your flesh to create a palace of rot; or perhaps not ants, perhaps it is the consequence of wriggling maggots, growing fat from gorging themselves.

You try to put it out of your mind,

As you make rounds,

As you sleep,

As you stay awake,

As you shakily guide the needle,

Again, and again and again and again…

Would taking them off just make it worse? Will he smell it like a bloodhound and track you down, emerging from the shadows, from behind a corner, rising up from the ground. But there is a limit, there has to be, everyone has them, how can this be something even worth deliberating? You stand for several seconds? Minutes? Hours? Days? Before finally unbinding one of your arms, a deluge of miniature spiders, black and leggy and moving like liquid pour forth from under the wrap, you shake them off, furiously batting at your arm to be rid of them, ripping more of the ‘bandage’. You begin running, you’re not sure where, maybe if you move fast enough no-one will see; you bounce off the edges of the Bastion like a caged animal, you’re free to leave, but your subconscious is still sane enough not to.

Escaping from your own mind you hear shouting “wave!”, “zombies!”, “here!”.
The hole!

Like a stranger has possessed your body, you bite your tongue and sprint for the hole in the fence. How could you have been so careless? So useless. Curse Devo and curse your fear, you take what you need from the substation, pliers, corrugated metal sheets, the lot.
You notice no black or smeared remnants of insects on your hands and they grip the tools of a long-expired task.

Your eyes are fixated on the hole, as are the eyes of another, a creature from beyond the fence, menacing and rotting, and dripping with a deep red ooze, it is do or die, for everyone. Tick, tick, tick. Time measured in heartbeats.

You both surge for the hole, but only one of you makes it.

You feel the warmth of Eddy’s hands as he pushes you out the way, stealing your metal and taking your place as sacrifice to the dead.

You watch as his arm is clenched by the beast, pulling them further and further through, the metal sheet digging deeper into his side as he tries, if nothing else, to not be pulled all the way through. The shocks of white hair on her scalp become more than metaphorical as it all begins to burn, high voltage convulsions wrack her body.

His screams are like ocean waves in a storm, guttural, turbulent, they eventually die, drowned by their own blood as the infected, bites down, hard, on his neck. There is a sickening crunch, like a chorus of joints popping, as the flailing man falls still. A gunshot swivels your head. You see Loosha behind the barrel of a gun. You look back at the brains of both Eddy and the infected smeared on the ground, a waterfall of red, black, pink, grey.

{[]}