Filcher (1)

First chapter of a hopefully longer series. Set in the grim dark future.

Little twigs brushed and bent against my skin as I ran. The sun arched over me, fingers of light stabbing through a parasol of tree-tops to cast skittering shadows on the ground, but in my head it was all just a blur - like a daydream. I couldn't feel my right arm anymore; my blood had seeped through the cloth and clotted long since. I acknowledged in some remote corner of my mind that I'd been lucky to escape alive, but the horror of my survival would not let me dwell on that for long. And so I kept running.

There was no wind in the forest. I hadn't believed that before, not before I'd been forced to accept it. The others hadn't reacted so well - Tara had laughed it off as if it were a joke, probably thinking it just a coincidence. I knew better. I knew what wrongness smelled like, and this forest stunk of it like a battlefield stunk of corpses.

My arms and legs were a mess of scratches, but I hardly even noticed. I ran ever further, knowing that those things could not be far behind me. Even now, I kept waiting for that creeping chill to settle into my spine, just like I still half-expected a breeze to rise up from the mountains to remind me that this was simply a forest like any other. How could there be air, but no wind? It was unnatural. Just like everything else here.

Tara had been the first to go. Of course she'd felt the same wrongness as I had - you always did in the end. Despite that, she'd held her position. Wanted to fend them off. More fool her, I'd told myself at the time, but maybe that had been the better way to go. The image of one of those dread masks, like metallic skulls, flashed across my eyes again. No, running had been the right choice. The others had stayed behind - even Ludvig. I felt bitter pain stabbing me through the heart at the thought. He'd stabbed me in the back with that one, caught me completely off-guard. Why stay with her? It was a petty thought, of course. A thought that meant I wasn't paying attention to my surroundings.

The air was punched out of my lungs as I felt my boot snagging on a root. I only felt the tiniest moment of panic before the rocky, root-covered earth rushed up to meet my head.

I blinked. The memory of a smiling face beckoned at me to pay attention, but I blinked again - and again - until the image was gone from my mind. I didn't want to remember. The world felt all wrong, as if my sense of direction had been turned upside-down or perhaps on its side. I could distantly feel the soft soil that had cushioned my fall covering my face, and with a start I noted the rock right next to my head. Had I just fallen an inch to the right, I would've-

Suddenly I remembered. I tried to stand up, but my senses were all wrong. I flopped on my side, kicking up soil as a pounding headache threatened to launch me back into unconsciousness. My breath came shallowly through my mouth - something felt wrong with my nose.

"Where am I?" I asked the shadows. My voice sounded so weak.

That was when I seemed to wake up. I remembered my mission, my comrades. They'd sent an entire battalion to search this area. All for just a rumour about the rebels. I'd wondered about that, back then, but Ludvig had told me to zip it just in case. You didn't want to give the wrong impression, lest they reprimand you for insubordination. None of that mattered now, did it? Not when they were all gone. My entire squad, some of them my friends all the way back from the Schola. The pain of their loss washed over me again. Just how many times did I have to relive this for the pain to fade away?

I blinked away the nightmarish images and picked myself up from the ground. My head had cleared enough for me to rise, if on somewhat wobbly feet, and take in my surroundings again. If I had learned anything during my short but colourful career as a lowly Guardswoman, it was that paying attention was often your best weapon.

I resumed my trudge through the woods, too exhausted to keep running. I might as well have been sprinting for hours, the endless adrenaline coursing through my veins being the only thing that had still kept me going. Now, I could only take one step after another and hope against hope that those monsters hadn't made their way past the tunnel entrance yet. I could picture that pale green glow behind the rubble, slowly tearing through stone, or slipping through like ghosts. I'd heard a distant explosion some time ago, which I thought must've been the last of the explosives we'd packed along. There was no telling if that had been enough to collapse the tunnel, or whether or not that would be enough to stop the metallic things in the first place, but it beat the alternatives. All of which involved a flash of green light and eternal silence.

Several hours had passed since I'd knocked my head on the soil. The shadows had deepened and stretched around me until I could barely see in front of me, but I couldn't stop walking. My entire body was trembling, partly from the cold, partly from my wound, partly from the shock. I had lost whatever clarity of mind I'd managed to regain after waking up. Were those shapes I saw in the shadows, or was that just another game my mind had invented to keep itself busy? It felt like torture. Sometimes the shapes looked ghastly familiar, the faces of my friends taunting me from the shadows, and sometimes they looked like my comrades from the rest of the company looking for survivors. It was too much for me. I would've snapped long ago if it wasn't for that nagging thought at the back of my head, keeping me sane with the power of a broken promise. Survive for him.

I blinked my eyes as I suddenly stepped into a bright light. Had I had the strength, I would have raised a hand to shield my eyes from the glare of the lamplight. I knew what this place was. This was a guard post. I remembered long nights sitting in the shade, away from the light so as to not expose ourselves, chatting with Ludvig. We'd talked about this and that really, about inconsequential things, things that made us both happy. I didn't want to remember that, not now. It was too soon. I could weep later, when I had the heart for it, the strength.

But now, all I could do was take a few relieved steps forward, barely managing to stay upright now that I'd reached safety. A guard would already have noticed me. They'd pick me up, safe and sound… I'd pass out, only to wake up in a field tent, surrounded by the familiar rhythm of the military. I'd smile, knowing that at least for now, I was safe.

Which was when my foot stepped on something soft and squishy. That was when the coin dropped. After serving a few months as a guardswoman, you learned to recognize it. It became part of your thinking. The paranoia. And so even before I'd turned my head to look at what was below me, I already knew what I'd find there.

I staggered. I heard something sag; instinctively, I knew that it was the sound of my legs giving way before a weight they no longer had the strength to support. I fell on my knees and got my first good look at the thing I'd stepped on. I'd guessed its nature ever since first stepping on it, but seeing it in the flesh did not raise my spirits in the slightest. I recognized the insignia of a staff sergeant on the man's shoulders. Further on, more corpses littered the ground, some of them not ours. Those corpses did not look military, but they weren't those things either. So… cultists? Rebels? I felt my body sag even more and I tried to use the ground for support, but my arms - much like the rest of my body - had decided that they'd had enough abuse already. My head flopped onto the ground as my arms inevitably gave way before gravity. A voice at the back of my skull screamed for me to stay awake, to fight on and run from the horrors that roamed in the forests, but then a surge of nausea launched me firmly back into unconsciousness.