The oppressive, sweltering heat lessens to a small degree the more the day shifts into night. Shadows grow from all sides as the dark orange sun sinks beyond the skyline, then further still past the horizon. As it does so, the amber-red skies turn progressively deeper and darker until it's a shade of dried blood.
Can we stop somewhere? thinks Noir. Feel like I'm dying out here.
You emit a sentiment of agreement, too tired to actually say anything in response. Plus your throat feels too dry to speak - you had sunk yourself into deep thought for too long and had forgotten to take enough swigs of your drink.
On realizing this, you take a few gulps of your electrolyte drink, and then a few extra to compensate.
Although the heat has certainly relented to some degree, you can still feel a great deal of it wafting up from the asphalt. The streets have had an entire day to soak it all up, after all. The heat of it practically slaps you across the face.
No longer needing the shade that your hat provides, you hang it behind you once again. This allows you to wipe your brow, which seems soaked with sweat.
Noir is behind your head, as always, and you can feel her panting very lightly. It's clear that she too is overloaded and overheated.
Although neither of you are actually close to dying or anything like that, you still take your exhaustion to be a very bad sign. You started your journey in the afternoon, presumably at a time when it is hottest during the day. But you had also kept to the shade and stayed within gusts of wind.
It was still too much to handle. There's no way you can deal with a full day under the sun. Especially out past the city. Shelter and shade are gonna be few and far between.
Now that you're at the edge of the city, you realize you need to rethink your plan a bit.
All around you are the kinds of buildings one typically finds at the edges of cities - fast food joints, gas stations, bus and taxi depots, a convenience store or two, and a handful of cheap motels. Every single building looks like they have been thoroughly looted, if not partially demolished by crystalline shards.
One of the larger motels seems to have been severed in half - a crystalline shard has torn through it and caused one half of the motel to completely collapse and crumble. You sense a great deal of dead underneath said rubble, but shake off the thought.
There's going to be a whole lot more of that as you travel.
"Best we move at night from now on," you say as you peek inside a busted storefront.
Inside is a fairly basic convenience store, the kind that seems the same no matter what city or town you're in. The same muted colors on the logo plastered above the doors, the same rows of beige metal shelving, the same coolers, cash register, frozen drink dispenser, everything.
You step through the wide, shattered windows cautiously. Its broken glass is strewn all over the ground, and crunch delicately under your hiking boots. There's also a distinct change in heat - it's simply much cooler inside. Makes sense, as the shop is more or less protected from direct sunlight most of the day.
It's still hot enough that you're still bothered by it.
There's a bit of trepidation in the air as you glance around. The last thing you want to do is tread on someone's 'home' and get into some kind of fight. You're really not in the mood or state of mind for one. Thankfully, no-one comes to greet you or ambush you, so you quickly relax your shoulders and your guard.
As you open up your canteen and take another swig of it, Noir hops down from her perch and pads curiously around you.
I'm gonna go try to find dinner, she tells you.
"Wait, have a bit of this first," you reply.
You pour your drink into the canteen's cup cap, and place it on the ground for Noir to drink from. She laps it up greedily, including a second capful. But once she's done with that, she licks her lips then slinks off into the shadows, towards her next meal.
Meanwhile, you pull your poncho off then drape it over a mostly empty shelf. You hope that it'll dry a bit overnight - it's soaked up a bit of your sweat, especially around the neck and chest area. What's worse is your shirt. It's utterly drenched in sweat.
You find yourself peeling it off you, a sensation you find both a little bit gross, and a little bit pleasant. Gross for obvious reasons, but pleasant because you feel a slight draft cool your skin.
You drape your shirt over a different shelf, then wonder if you'll even use it again. It's going to absolutely reek tomorrow, and will be even worse the day after that.
It dawns on you that you didn't quite fully prepare for this trip, and you didn't think through everything. You've always been a victim to your own impulsiveness, and this is just another reminder of that fact.
For example, you're going to stink for a very long time, something you're wholly unprepared for. What few baths and showers you could take in your little settlement are going to become an outright luxury from here on out.
You've also been taking relatively clean clothes for granted - being able to wash and reuse them on a weekly basis is a privilege you're definitely going to miss. The one change of clothing you do have with you isn't going to do a damned thing.
You quickly scout the shelves for some deodorant or soap, but find nothing of the sort. You don't even find a travel toothpaste among the aisles. Thankfully, you do find a four-pack of undershorts and a three-pack of undershirts.
Not even a moment later, you're out of your pants and swapping underwear, to your great relief. You then toss your old pair of undershorts into a corner, glad to be away from its swampiness forever. Your pants seem fine - there's a bit of sweat around the waist, but nothing too bad.
So you put it back on, along with a fresh undershirt.
You then stuff the remainder of clean undergarments into both your bags, marking them as treasures in your mind.
Though you're satisfied with your loot, you're not exactly done with this place. There's still all kinds of nooks and crannies to get into. You certainly wouldn't want to rest until you know everything that's in here now. Who knows if there's some hidden thing in a corner somewhere.
You'd rather it not be some monstrosity.
Still in the process of cooling down, you walk down the aisles casually and glance at whatever contents are left.
The snack and food aisles are most definitely empty. Boxes that were once filled with candy bars or crackers or chewing gum are strewn all over the place. Some have even been partially crushed underfoot, no doubt victims of whatever looters were here before you.
You do scrounge up some older candies near the rear of the bottom shelf, seemingly unmolested by time or happenstance or desire. But you're not exactly ecstatic when you see them. They're not the kind of candy you would have ever bought in your entire life. It'd just be a waste of your time and money.
But you pop one in your mouth anyway.
"Waste not, want not," you tell yourself.
The candy itself is as terrible as you thought it would be. You've had this prediction your entire life, and didn't need psychic powers to come to that conclusion. It's chalky, and crumbles as you bite on them. Whatever flavors they're supposed to have are barely discernible or distinguishable. And this is even with your heightened sense of taste.
Still, you never know if you'll ever come across it ever again, so you may as well try it. The world is gone, so now's the time to enjoy whatever's left of it. Not only that, but someone might want it somewhere down the line. Maybe a collector, or an aficionado, or someone who thinks this tastes good.
Nostalgia is a powerful thing, after all.
So you tuck away the rest of your candies into your backpack, where the rest of your barter goods are.
You take a quick glance over at the frozen drink machine and note that its beverage tanks are completely empty save for grime and mold. Of course you'd love one of those frozen drinks right now, but the power in the city ran out long ago. And whatever actual drink in the thing has long since evaporated, or outright taken.
Still, you can't help but daydream about slurping down that delicious slush.
Your mind turns sour when you glance at the machine next to it, which appears to be some kind of sausage heating device. There are rows of rollers under what's normally a powerful heat lamp. Sausages and hotdogs would typically be on those rollers, slowly cooking under those lamps.
One of those same hotdogs is still on those rollers, though it looks rather shriveled and aged.
The fact that it has no signs of fungus or mold growing on it scares you stiff. Then you realize that no-one has touched it after all this time. So you wisely decide to leave it where it lies. You hope that one day, hundreds of years from now, people will look at it and think of it as some kind of demonic artifact.
Maybe it becomes sentient and gains psionic powers of its own.
A chuckle escapes your lips as you turn your attention to the coolers lining the walls. They share similar fates with each other, with most of their glass panes shattered. None have any power going through them, of course, so all are relatively dark.
Most of the drinks inside have been taken and looted, of course. Anything that's still on the shelves can't be considered drinks at this point. Namely, a few jugs of milk and juice whose contents are more dried mold than rotten fluid.
Otherwise, every cooler is devoid of anything useful or otherwise.
The rest of the shelves are pretty much the same. And anything that has been left behind or overlooked is of no use to you. There are things like engine oil and old rags and torn magazines left over, none of which help you in any way.
No-one's driving anything anytime soon, not while batteries drain this quickly. And certainly no-one has any need for gardening and decorating magazines any longer. Those things don't really exist, not any more.
And anyone who does still garden or decorate has likely long lost their sanity.
A part of you can't help but pick up a couple of those magazines and stuff them into your backpack anyway. You never know if someone's craving them. Even insane people need stuff to take their minds off of things.
Since the shelves are all pretty much empty, you head towards the front counter - aka the frosting to this looter's cupcake. Of course this area has been ransacked heavily as well. The cigarette shelf above the register has been picked completely clean - it's practically spotless.
And of course the register itself has been forced open, with almost all of its contents taken. The only things left in there are scraps of paper, unbanked checks, and random receipts.
The sight of it causes you to laugh uncontrollably.
Money's useless and it's become practically worthless, so whoever stole the register's contents are just carrying around pointless trash.
These days, most everything is done through barter trading. Someone's trash is another's treasure, that sort of thing. Or rather, people trade their personal trash with each other, in hopes of finding treasure. Even if everyone values everything differently.
Then again, material values might not be static, but they shouldn't be. Scarcity isn't the only thing that's important - so's sentimentality. One person's disgusting candy is another person's childhood treasure. Whether that pays off or not in the end… well, you hope it works out. In a way, you suppose everyone that's doing any trading at all is hoping it all works out too.
You get down on your knees to check the space under the counters. There are drawers up top, but they're mostly empty, or have drawer junk in them - snapped rubber bands, paperclips, dust. The usual. You're more interested in the large open spaces beneath the counters and drawers.
Usually, things like extra stock go there. Such as wrapped boxes of snacks, gum, cigarette cartons, and so on. Sometimes, there's a safe just to the side. But of course the spaces have been looted, and even the safe has been ripped open.
Everything's empty.
But you do spot something odd about the drawer just beneath the register. This drawer seems to be taking up more space than the rest, vertically. The difference isn't too obvious, but thankfully you spot it anyway.
So you pull the drawer out all the way and set it aside. There's a thin space beneath it where some stuff has remained hidden all these years. There's a wad of cash, which is all but useless so you ignore it. There's also a dead cellphone and what looks to be an adult magazine folded in two.
You stow away the cellphone - maybe you could do something with it later. And when you grab the adult magazine, you realize that it's got something in between the fold. So you shake the magazine, which causes a large, heavy coin to fall down onto your waiting palm.
You tuck the adult mag into your backpack mindlessly, even as you stare at your newfound coin. Of course the thing is completely worthless, even if it had been made with gold or silver. This just appears to be a regular currency-type coin, but simply wasn't widely used. Probably because it's kind of unwieldy, and is kind of a novelty.
Still, you could find a use for it. Specifically, for practice.
You place the coin down on the counter in front of you, then reach out with barely discernible psionic energies of Control. Your face contorts and your hand twitches as you fumble around with pitiful amounts of power. It takes you three whole seconds to simply lift the coin off the counter with your basic Telekinesis, and then another three excruciating seconds to bring it to your outstretched hand mere centimeters away.
You gasp audibly and exhale hard as you pluck it out of the air. Then you tuck it away in your pockets, relatively happy with the results you've gotten. It wasn't long ago that you couldn't even so much as budge an object.
As long as you keep practicing, you should get better at it. In fact, that's true for all of your powers. As long as you practice all of them, you'll only get better at using them. And they're going to be crucial if you want to survive this journey.
You wake up suddenly, sweating and out of breath. As always, the same nightmare memory has awoken you. And as always, a deep sadness fills you. A longing for your past life lingers, but eventually ebbs away even as the world around you comes back into focus.
You sit up with a slight groan - the hard linoleum floor is hardly comfortable to sleep on. The only padding you have at your disposal is your poncho, and it's thin enough that it barely counts. Thankfully your messenger bag and backpack have some cloth in them, and makes for decent pillows.
You peer up over the counter and outside.
There, red daylight appears to be breaking through the sky. Although you can't see the sun itself, you can see its light just barely striking the buildings across the street.
A part of you wonders if it's dawn - it certainly seems like it could be.
But before you can do anything else, you feel something fuzzy bump up against your arm. You don't have to look down to realize it's Noir greeting you with a playful bunt. As always. The familiar feeling courses through you, and peels away some of that melancholy that your dreams impart onto you.
You pet her in gratitude, to which she responds with a reverberating purr.
You're up early, she projects.
"Yeah, I wanna get ahead a bit today," you reply.
Well, that's different…
"What's that word? Proactive? I wanna be more like that."
Also, I thought you said you wanted to travel at night.
"I do. But I figured we could make it to Grand Mall One before noon, while it's still cool. Could go around looting it, rest up for a few hours (or a few days), then getting a move on once we're set for the long haul."
Hopefully there's gonna be some good eating in there.
Your stomach rumbles lightly at the mention of food. Though Noir's no doubt thinking of vermin to kill, your mind is on more palatable things. Eggs and toast and bacon with a hot cup of coffee or tea, for example. Sadly, you don't have that, and might never have that again.
Instead, you open up your messenger bag and fish out one of your protein bars. You're not exactly salivating as you unwrap it, and you even become slightly irritated to see that its chocolate coating has melted into a gooey mess. Eating it is going to be a messy pain in the ass.
But you chomp it down anyway to help satiate your hunger. You wash it down with a few gulps of your electrolyte drink, which you then offer the remainder to Noir in the cap cup.
She laps it up as you mix up today's batch with the last of your water.
Once you're both done, you pack everything up, put your entire kit back on, and allow Noir to settle herself into her usual spot behind your head. You top everything off with your conical hat before heading back out into the street.
The heat hits you almost immediately, though it's nowhere near as hot as it will likely be later. In fact, you consider it downright cool. At least in comparison to most days, anyway.
Another thing that strikes you is how calm and quiet everything around you seems to be. It dawns on you that it's because you're alone for the first time in a very long time. There's an odd tranquility to the stillness around you, enough for you to question if there's some predator stalking you through the silence.
You shake that feeling away as you walk down the streets. After all, very few things can sneak up on you, seeing as you can sense thoughts and emotions. You can almost always tell when anyone's near, whether or not they're trying to be stealthy.
If anyone's sneaking up on you, they would have to be extraordinarily capable in terms of hiding their surface thoughts and emotions. Honestly, you think that's an impossibility.
The sun rises higher and higher as the two of you travel. Unfortunately, it's turning out to be a relatively cloudless day and the heat rises faster than usual. You find yourself dashing between shadows as a result.
Although the buildings dwindle the further you leave the city, you're greeted by more and more trees, overgrown shrubs, and the like. Although their very tops are practically burnt from the intense heat, the lower sections of their canopies seem rather lush and rich.
You spend as much time in their shade as possible, not just because you find them cooler than anywhere else. Mostly because you simply prefer them to buildings, even if their shadows aren't as encompassing.
You stop and give pause as you catch your breath beside a copse of trees. The ground shudders slightly under your feet, and certainly nowhere near as violently as it would with a stampede. You sweep outward with your Scan instead of your Telepathy. After all, you want to see what's out there, not necessarily talk to it.
You quickly locate a trio of minds a few dozen meters to the southeast, to slight alarm. That's only a block or so away, with only a few buildings between you. When you focus on them, you realize that they're Bone Crags. Their thoughts are still as unreadable as ever, but thankfully you find their emotional wavelengths are still relatable to some degree.
The trio don't seem harried or panicked or even violent, which encapsulates the majority of the emotions you've ever felt from the bugs. Instead, these three seem to be instilled with a sense of curiosity and exploration, with just a dash of apprehension and fear.
You're able to recognize them easily since you're also experiencing the same things. Similar, anyway. You're certainly a bit curious about this new world around you, but you'd say you're more than just a little bit afraid. Out here, you amount to little more than prey.
Still, you all share this desire to know more. And that's enough for you to realize that they're not here to hunt or eat or kill. They're here to search. But seeing as the Crags have a hive mind, you note that they can't possibly be wayward travelers like yourself. Most likely, they're scouts.
Thankfully, they're too far to realize that you're there. Or at least, if they do, they're ignoring you.
Which is fine - there's no need to bother them or cross their paths for any reason. They can do their thing, whatever it is. Just as long as they leave you alone, too.
So you put one foot in front of the other, stealthily, and keep on going. As a result, your trip to the shopping center is rather uneventful. It does take some time - about two or three hours at most. By then, the sun has almost reached its apex in the sky, and the asphalt has become sizzlingly hot.
You practically run across the wreck-strewn parking lot and into the shattered glass entrance of Grand Mall One - the last thing you want to happen to you is to get cooked alive.
The heat lifts significantly once further inside - it's dark and relatively cavernous. Best of all, there seems to be a light breeze that sweeps through it. No doubt its many entrances are all wide open, which allows the wind to travel through and cool it all down.
You quickly duck into the darkest shadows and allow your breath to catch up. As you do so, you observe the mall around you. Or at least, the eastern entrance hall leading to the rest of the shopping center.
Want me to scout out the place? Noir asks you with a thought.
Nah, you reply with your own. We'd best stick together for now, take it slow. Don't know what we'll find in here.
Truth is that Grand Mall One has always scared you a bit. No, that's the wrong word. Intimidated, perhaps. Or irritated. Or whatever is a mix of intimidated and irritated. In any case, this is a place you're only barely familiar with.
Back before everything stopped, at a time when you weren't even in your teens yet, Grand Mall One was the place to be. It had drawn in numerous crowds every single day, just because of how many individual shops it had carried. People came in droves not just from inside the city, but the area surrounding as well. It had even drawn in tourists from the other side of the country. Hell, from the entire world.
Although many people celebrated the shopping center as some great achievement, you have always thought of it as the opposite. To you, it has always been a temple where money was worshiped. And too many mindless worshipers in one place always made you deeply uncomfortable, even worse was being among them physically. So you always avoided the Mall as much as humanly possible.
But now, the place is completely different. It's no longer a celebration of capitalism, no longer a temple for consumers. It's a ruin, perhaps appropriately so.
You feel more amused than annoyed on this visit, that's for sure.
Although it is rather dark thanks to the lack of power, it has plenty of windows up in the ceiling numerous stories up. Ominous red light pierces the shadows in thin strips down the middle, which causes everything inside to be bathed in a shadowy red. A bit like a photographer's darkroom.
The shops around you are in absolute disarray. Their glass fronts are mostly shattered, and the ground is littered with various sizes of broken glass. All kinds of trash and junk is also scattered around, along with upturned benches and tipped garbage bins.
There's signs of large potted plants at some point - circular patches of dirt and whatnot appear regularly down the middle. But someone has taken every single one of them for some reason.
Although you're on the first floor, you can easily see the numerous banners hanging over the walkways on all the floors above you. Each of the banners seem to be celebrating the last holiday that the shopping center was going through.
Not only that, but numerous shop fronts have their own custom signs also celebrating the same holiday. Each seems as though they're supposed to be cute and cheery, but you get no such vibes from them.
—
Black Friday Extravaganza
Open 48 hours straight!
90% Off EVERYTHING
Buy Four, Get More
Shop Until the End
—
They all amuse you to some degree. And also depress you. People actually lived for this moment - to buy more things they didn't need. To spend money they didn't have. Saddened by it all, you force yourself to stop reading the banners and signs altogether.
Instead, you focus your attention on the shelves in the shops. They've certainly been looted as well, but there's still a good amount of stuff left on them. Well, it depends on the shop and what they carry, of course.
There's the kitchen goods store across from you, which looks moderately plundered. Much of their cookware appears to have been taken, though plenty of appliances are still on the shelves. You spot a few things you could take, so you make note of it. You'll definitely want to loot it later.
For now, you've gotta scout out the mall first. Figure out what you've gotta deal with, then get to the scavenging. That sort of thing. After all, you wouldn't want to be knee-deep in valuables and sorting out your inventory, only to fall into some ambush.
You glance at the store next to the kitchen store, which is an upholstery and beddings shop. Wind chimes dangle just inside the broken shop windows, tingling and jingling as the breeze sweeps through them. Not much of it has been looted, which makes sense. There's little need for matching sheets or cute couch pillows or crap like that any longer.
Still, you decide to poke your head in later, just in case you find a small travel pillow or something. That'd be nice, right?
You sneak further into the mall along the shadowy edges and peer into the shops as you go, making mental notes of places to loot. You find the activity genuinely joyful. In fact, you're delighted to discover one of the large mall center maps near the escalators leading up and down. You study it with such great care and detail that you begin to map out your path through the mall.
Your joy spikes again, to a point that you become conscious of it.
You stop for a moment as you realize that you're actually enjoying this moment. It's been so long since you last felt it that you're almost shocked. Not just that you haven't felt it in a while, which is amazing by itself. It's that this is enjoyable at all.
You like the fact that it's the apocalypse, that you can be here without having to deal with anyone. Not a single soul to contend with or talk to or whatever.
Why?
Why do you prefer this kind of emptiness? Why does this kind of decay give you enjoyment?
Your thoughts are shattered when a shrill chittering echoes through the Mall. You crouch down even further out of instinct, even as Noir stirs from behind your head. She hops down off you, then blends into the shadows as well.
You sense her move just ahead of you, her senses alert to everything around you.
As the two of you creep down towards the source of the sound, you carefully reach out with your Scan. And as you get closer, you sense another trio of Crags at the far end of the Western Wing of Grand Mall One. They seem to be agitated about something, though you can't tell what that something is.
You sense waves of alarm emanating from them, as though they're raring for a fight. But that stops suddenly, which throws you for a loop. Agitated bugs never just 'stop' getting agitated.
This shocks you greatly, as it reminds you of the time you had done the same thing to them. You had injected those Crags with your own emotions and diverted their mindless charge. What's happening to these three Crags seems similar.
Someone or something is affecting their state of mind, somehow. If there's someone out there with powers like yours, then you need to find out who they are. Hopefully they're friendly. You draw your pistol and switch off its safety in case they're not.
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GOT IT