Surviving Chapter 1

Apologies in advance for the way this is cut up, it wasn't actually written with chapters!

I watch him load the shotgun, hearing the smooth sound of the well-oiled mechanism break the silence that hangs heavy around us. My heart feels like it’s beating too loud in my chest, and I’m worried he’ll hear it, because my brain is swimming with the startling revelation that he’s just given me a few wild minutes ago. My lips are still burning with the scorching kiss he laid on them after we managed to get out of that building alive.
He looks up now, his green eyes locking with mine and I swear he must have heard the way my heart is thundering after all. I’ve known him for almost my entire life, he was once the Boy Next Door in the days before Armageddon, but now we are family, fighting for survival in a world where the Legions of Hell are running riot. Except he’s just gone and torn that all up and left my world reeling, and the way he’s looking at me now isn’t doing anything to help that.
I’m fully aware of the hard stare both of us are getting from the other side of the room, where my younger brother is sitting by the boarded up window. Feeling his eyes on me annoys me for several reasons, but I only lash out with one of them.
“You’re supposed to be watching out of that window, bro,” I hiss in a constrained whisper.
“Right,” he hisses right back, contempt in his tone.
“Cut it out, both of you,” my Boy Next Door turned Big Brother whispers harshly. I bite my tongue, and hope my baby brother bites his tongue too. He barely remembers a time when we weren’t family, so he knows better than I do that our Big Brother is to be obeyed when we are out on a raid together. My baby brother turns his head and looks out of a crack in the wood that boards up the window.
“Cat, check the top floor,” there’s not a single clue in his voice to what he’s thinking, just the usual focused practicality that helps to keep the three of us alive. All the clues are in his eyes though, and I find I have to nod my head quickly and look away. I head towards the door, finger on the trigger of my handgun, eyes darting between the exits presented to me. Everything looks clear, and there’s not a sound to be heard in the house except my own beating heart and his footsteps behind me as he goes to check out the bottom floor.
The first step creaks when I put my weight on it, I hear his intake of breath, but the next step is solid under my doubly careful tread. I move slowly up the stairs, gun ahead of me, senses wide open and alert.
There was a time when I had five, untrained senses. Then this fucking Holy War erupted, and between necessity and the ‘gift’ that was my consolation prize for surviving Day One when my parents didn’t, I ended up with six sharply honed senses. As I creep up those stairs, my ears are picking up every sound within the four walls of the house and much of the village lane beyond that, my eyes are searching every scrap of shadow for anything that might lurk in it, my nose is drawing in every decaying scent in the decrepit mock Tudor mansionnette, my skin tingling with every stirring breath of air, my tongue tasting the rank dampness of the house’s sodden timbers and my sixth sense, the one that lets me feel the presence of evil nearby, is reaching out before me like a blind man’s cane, carefully feeling ahead for anything dark and dangerous. My little brother shares this skill of mine, but his power goes beyond mine, into portentous dreams and the heads of the things we have to share the world with now. It makes him vulnerable, but we always do everything in our power to protect him, just like our Dad did up until he died.
When I say Dad, I don’t mean my real Dad, the one who didn’t survive Day One. I mean Big Brother’s Dad, the one who taught all three of us how to survive, the one who died only a month ago. Shit, I really don’t want to be thinking about Dad just now, I need a clear head and not one that just might well up with crippling guilt any second now.
Reaching the top step, I find myself in a t-shaped corridor, going straight to the front of the house and branching out to my right. My sixth sense sweeps before me, finding nothing except a few creeping Dire Rats that scuttle away from my touch in fear. Damn right they should fear me, I’m known well enough to the other side, as are my brothers, and as was our Dad. We’re Refuge’s most successful raiders, and because of us, humanity stands a fighting chance of surviving in this world. Carefully, meticulously, I check each of the five rooms on this floor of the building, finding nothing except rotting furniture and the detritus of a way of life that finished nearly twenty years ago. There’s no lurkers here, but also no salvage to be had. The whole building is soaked through by the long rains of the storms that boil constantly in the sky above us, so there’s nothing left worth picking up. I creep back down stairs, unsure if I’m ready to face these brothers of mine again quite so soon.
I guess at this point I should introduce us by name. I’m Cat, as you may have noticed. It’s short for Catriona, which was my Grandmother’s name. My little brother is Adair, though in truth he is not so little any more - he’s the tallest of the three of us in fact, even though he is four years younger than me. I try not to feel jealous, even though I did stop growing at 13 myself. My Big Brother, who really isn’t my brother, is Findlay, and he’s two years older than me. Finn lost his mother on Day One. He’s also not actually mentioned Dad since he died, which is bothering me a whole lot more now than it was before he kissed me.
Finn is waiting with Adair in the living room when I get back downstairs, keeping his shotgun in his hands. I manage not to look directly at him when I walk in, although I can feel that he’s looking at me. Adair has his gun trained on the street through a break in the boards on the big windows that dominate this damp and dusty remnant of a room, and from the tension in the air between them, I’d say he’s ignoring Finn pretty pointedly. Finn’s never been good at being ignored. Outside a roll of thunder cracks the sky, and after a heartbeat the bright flash of lightning forces it’s way through every crack in the room.
“Upstairs is clean,” I tell them both, before slumping down with my back to a wall and my gun towards the door I just came through, “Well, it’s clean apart from all the rotten shit,” I add, trying not to think of what I might have been breathing into my lungs in this house. When I get back to Refuge, I’m going straight to the Sisters for purifying. Maybe they can do something about cleaning up the mess inside my head while they are at it.
“Good, we can hole up here until morning then,” Finn replies. My heart sinks, even though I expected this. It’s just not safe enough to make the run for the car while its still night, the village is crawling with Revenants and the Legions have made a base out of the local church. They also know we’re here after we ran into a couple of low level demons trying to figure out a way into the bookshop we came here to raid. The demons are toast, back in Hell burning where they should be, but we got the rest of the Legions in the village all worked up and barely got away from the bookshop with the books we came for and our lives. The mansionnette was the first place we found with wards on the doors and windows, and thankfully it looks like they’ve held.
“We might as well start looking at these books then,” I say with a sigh, needing the distraction. I reach inside my jacket for a torch, but Adair turns and whispers at me from his vantage point at the window.
“No lights, Cat. We’re not that safe.” I get up to look with him out at the street. Revenants are milling slowly about in the rain, but I don’t worry too much about them because one shot to the head can drop them. It’s the flickering shadows in the hedgerows and the things slinking close to the walls that make me worry. Sneaks, shades and creepers, we call them, and they aren’t so easy to kill. With my sixth sense focused, I can feel them searching for us. We will have to sit tight till morning for sure, because at least the daylight, feeble though it is, will send them scuttling for deeper hiding places until nightfall again.
“Damn them,” I curse mildly, feeling resigned to a cold, awkward night of long silences and little sleep. And too much thinking time.
“Adair, Cat, get some sleep if you can, I’ll take the first watch,” Finn tells us quietly, moving to take Adair’s place by the window.
“Any beds upstairs, Sis?” Adair asks me, but I shake my head.
“Nothing that will take your weight anyway,” I say, trying for something closer to normal even though I’m not feeling it. Adair scowls at me and goes to make himself comfortable in a corner of the room. He folds up his long limbs tidily, but it won’t be long before he’s sprawling. I swear he could sleep anywhere. It’s a gift I often wished I had. At least he doesn’t snore.
I tuck myself up with my arms around my knees to keep out the cold and try to get some sleep myself, but it’s no use. Finn isn’t looking at me, but I can feel his presence like a cloud of tangled emotion hanging heavy between us. As I watch Adair melt into sleep, this feeling gets stronger as my brain turns over what happened forensically, trying to figure out what it all means.
See, Finn is certainly no saint when it comes to women. Back at Refuge, he’s been stringing at least half a dozen girls along for years, playing them off each other and avoiding commitments to any of them. Of course it helps that he’s a big hero back there, and it helps that he’s pretty damn good looking with his dark hair, broad shoulders, lean fighter’s body, intense green eyes and that easy nature that rolls out of him when he’s not in the field. I’m going to put my cards on the table here and say I’m far from immune myself, but it’s something I’ve kept buried because he’s family to me. That doesn’t mean I haven’t had bouts of jealousy, but it does mean no-one else knows about it.
I’m not sure exactly how much time passes, but when I look over at Adair and see that he’s sprawled across the floor now, deep asleep, I realise it’s been a fair while. Glancing up at Finn, I see he’s sitting with the shotgun across his lap, still staring hard out onto the street. That tension is still there though, simmering between us. I can feel it as clearly as if my sixth sense was picking it up.
“Finn,” I whisper across the space between us, more nervous than I was back in that damn bookshop surrounded by demons. He glances quickly at Adair’s sprawling form then looks at me.
“Cat?” He replies. I’d say he was being evasive if it wasn’t for what I can see in his eyes. There’s all kinds of nearly every emotion in there, and it’s not sitting well with him. It’s making it hard to feel angry with him. Hard, but not impossible.
“What the hell were you thinking?” I hiss, not wanting to rouse either the Legions in the street nor our sleeping brother. I could really do with not having him hear this discussion.
“I thought you were going to die,” Finn says in response, wincing at the look I can’t help but give him. Well, my, there’s a whole big can of worms right there. I thought I was going to die too, I’d even gone so far as to tell Finn to get Adair out of the place. The fact that he didn’t listen to me didn’t matter when I managed to catch the demon blocking my path off guard and I got away from the bookstore in something close to a miracle. I have never drawn a ward so fucking fast in my whole life. I practically fell into his arms as I came out the front door, but I was running so fast I would have fallen down the steps if he hadn’t caught me.
“So you were pleased to see me then?”
“Hey, it kind of took me by surprise too,” he replies a little testily. Took him by surprise?
“What does that even mean? Were you surprised you kissed me then, or surprised you kissed me at all? I was sure as hell surprised you kissed me!” I want to yell at him and shake him, but instead I have to bark it tightly at him in a savage whisper. He opens his mouth to reply, but Adair stirs in his sleep and he thinks better of it. He signals silently to me that we should leave the room. He crosses to the door and I follow him across the corridor to the dining room. He instantly takes up a position where he can see out onto the street, and I slide in next to him, facing the door and keeping my gun in my hand.
“Well?” I demand. He’s watching the road intently when he answers.
“Sweet Jesus, Cat, don’t tell me you didn’t see that coming?”
I’m stunned to silence and that forces him to look at me, and suddenly I just want to kiss him because he looks so tangled up and vulnerable. That’s not going to help clear up the situation though, and neither is my denying what he’s saying. See, it all goes back to when we were kids, before Armageddon, before we became brother and sister. I think it might even go back to the moment I stumbled my way through the rough hedge between our gardens and found him lying on the grass, at serious target practice with one of those little guns that shoot arrows with sucker pads on the ends. He wasn’t much more than four years old. In typical precocious toddler fashion I had to question this seemingly odd behaviour.
“Why are you shooting that?” I knew what shooting was, I may have seen it on the TV. I don’t think I was entirely sure what shooting was for though.
“Because I want to be a soldier like my Dad,” he replied, staying entirely focused on the target. After a long moment, he fired his dart, and it hit the little red circle in the middle. He exclaimed his delight, but I still didn’t understand.
“Why are you excited?” I think I asked, or words to that effect.
“The little red circle in the middle is hardest to hit. To be a good Soldier, you’ve got to be good at shooting,” he explained patiently. I watched him reload his dart gun and take aim again. After an anxious wait, he fired and narrowly missed the red circle this time.
“Can I be a soldier too?” I asked.
“No you can’t,” he told me, then added, “Girls can’t be Soldiers,”
“Why can’t girls be soldiers?” I demanded to know. No-one had ever said to me there was something I couldn’t do because I was a girl.
“Because war is dirty and your dresses would get ruined,” he told me in all seriousness. I might have been outraged, or merely confused, by this.
“I wouldn’t wear a dress to do a dirty job! Mummy always wears jeans to do dirty jobs,”
“Soldiers don’t wear jeans, they wear uniforms!” Finn told me, practically scandalised. He clearly hadn’t thought this through before though, so I had to point it out to him.
“Then I could wear a uniform too,”
It was around this point in the conversation that my Mum, clad in muddy gardening jeans, came and scooped me up and brought me back into our own garden. When I asked her why girls couldn’t be soldiers I remember what she told me.
“Of course girls can be soldiers, there’s no reason why a girl can’t do anything a boy can do. I just don’t see any reason why anybody would want to be a soldier,”
“The boy next door wants to be a Soldier, his Dad is a soldier,” I told her.
“Then his Dad is a brave man,” she answered me, and I wasn’t really old enough to understand the sad tone in her voice. My Mum had always told me that being brave was good, so in my head the two things clicked together and I decided, for that moment anyway, that I wanted to be a soldier too. Finn’s intense concentration on his target had impressed me too, so it seemed like an admirable thing to aspire to. I was two though, and with the attention span of a flitting butterfly, so I was quickly on to the next big idea. It did set a trend though, that gently propelled me in a tomboyish direction. It was also when I started following Finn around, because he fascinated me with his seemingly alien ways. It wasn’t that I’d led a sheltered existence, it was that I had never really encountered the idea of war before, and Finn was all about trying to be a soldier like his Dad. Everything he was doing required explanation, and he was always happy to give explanations. Eventually he even came round to the idea that girls could be soldiers too. Maybe, in hindsight, it was a good thing, but now that I am a soldier of sorts, I can understand why it made my mother look sad.
By the time Adair was born, Finn had been at school for a couple of years and I had just started at a different school, so we didn’t see each other as much. Then just over a year after Adair was born, Day One came. I shake myself back into the present, hearing Finn say my name. He’s still waiting for my response.
“It’s not that simple, Finn, and you know it fine well or you wouldn’t have waited until you had thought I was going to die,” Oh, I don’t want to see that wounded look on his face, but I can’t just let him twist me up like this. I really have had bouts of jealousy towards the women in his life and that’s a pain I can’t forgive so easily. And that’s barely scratching the surface of my emotional wreckage.
“You told me to leave you to die, I was totally fucking frozen,” he tells me; begging his excuses or pleading his case, I’m not quite sure which, “And then -” he starts to say, but it seems a little bit like words are failing him.
“And then I’m suddenly not dead and you’re so surprised you kiss me,” I finish for him, not entirely convinced.
“Grateful, not surprised, although I surprised myself with how I reacted,”
This is turning into one of those twisty conversations where I can’t quite believe what I’m hearing and he’s trying and failing to explain himself. We have those kinds of conversations a lot, just not about something quite like this.
“Oooookaay,” I say with a sigh. What an awkward conversation to have with someone you’ve known forever and are close to. Why did he have to go and do something so rash like that? I’m still struggling here.
“Damn it! This just isn’t coming out right!” He tells me, reading my frustration easily enough, and finding himself stuck in the middle of his own. My initial anger is simmering down a bit now, seeing just how difficult this is for him makes it impossible to hold on to it. Funny how even the toughest man degenerates into something of a puppy dog when he’s out of his depth with emotions.
“Look, Finn, you can’t just go and do something like that without giving me some kind of explanation. You don’t seriously think that we can gloss over this and go on like it didn’t happen. We are family,” I tell him. Yeah, it doesn’t cover everything I’m feeling here, but it’s a start. And it’s true.
“Oh God. Nobody ever said this stuff was easy,” Finn sighs, closing his eyes. Damn it, we could spend the whole night doing this and get nowhere!
“No, nobody ever did. It’s not like it’s an every day occurrence is it?”
“Cut me some slack, Cat, it’s been a fucking hard day. It’s been a fucking hard month, in fact,” he practically begs me. Please don’t beg Finn, it’s just not you and it makes me just want to put my arms around you now. That’s pretty much what I want to say, but I can’t.
“Yeah, it has been a fucking hard month,” He nearly said it himself, after all, I may as well play the Dad card now, since it’s just waiting to be played, “You wouldn’t have done that if Dad was still alive,”
“If Dad was still alive, he wouldn’t have walked away and let you die,” he says, with conviction.
“He might have if it meant keeping Adair alive. You should have walked away,” I remind him.
“Adair was fine, you warded those demons into the bookshop,” he points out, trying to dodge the truth of the matter, like I knew he would.
“It was pure fucking fluke, Finn, and you know it,”
“Ok, you’re right,” he concedes, “But I just couldn’t walk away, not from you, Cat. It’s been the same since we were kids, I couldn’t bear the thought of losing you,”
“Dad would have been furious with you,” I say, trying desperately to resist the pull of what Finn’s saying.
“Yeah, but Dad’s dead, Cat, and you had no right telling me to leave you to die!"
"Adair's life means more than mine!" I snap back, almost speaking out loud, but catching myself in time.
"Yeah, well Adair wasn't in any danger, and you were!"
"And Adair is standing right here wondering what the hell you two are fighting about now,"
We both look up, no doubt with startled, guilty expressions. Adair didn't see, but he figured something was up pretty much straight away. We fight a lot, Finn and I, and more than ever since Dad died.