The world had stopped breathing.
Aelis walked through it barefoot, her soles blistered and cracked, her skin tight from dehydration. The roads—what was left of them—were ribbons of rust, broken glass, and bones bleached in sunless light. Nothing grew anymore. Even the weeds were gone.
Above, the sky was a permanent bruise. Dead and twitching.
And the wind?
It didn't blow.
It giggled.
High and childlike. A distant, delicate titter that came from nowhere and everywhere at once. Like something was always just out of view, smiling through a curtain of blood and waiting for her to blink.
The cities were carcasses.
She had passed through a town that was nothing but teeth. Thousands of them, embedded into the asphalt like grave markers—canines, molars, some human, some not. One house had a door that screamed when she opened it. Another had a baby crib with something still moving inside.
She hadn't looked.
She hadn't eaten in three days. The last thing she'd found was a bag of jerky sealed in black tar, hanging from a hook inside a man's chest cavity. It had tasted like meat and secrets. Her stomach hadn't stopped whispering since.
The gas station was still there. She saw it up ahead. Bent sideways like it had tried to crawl off the planet and failed.
Its sign read:
HELP ME. I AM IN THE FLOOR.
Aelis stepped inside anyway.
The door moaned wetly, dragging a trail of mucus across her back as it shut itself behind her. The shelves were warped. The candy bars screamed when she stepped on them. A display of sunglasses melted when she looked at it directly.
She moved slowly.
Carefully.
Everything in this world watched.
And then—
A noise.
From the cooler in the back.
Not a growl. Not breathing.
Worse.
A needle being pulled through meat.
She froze.
The cooler door creaked open on its own.
Inside, there was no food. No ice.
Only a man.
Folded in half backward, spine snapped and looped like rope. His eyes were wide open, but his pupils had been stitched shut—threaded together with hair and tiny hands that had been nailed to his cheeks.
And above him—it hung.
Upside down.
Dripping.
The thing had no legs. No arms. Just a bloated torso with dozens of mouths stitched across its belly, each sucking air and sighing in sync. Where a face should've been, there was only a mask—not cloth, but stretched skin, painted with a smile so wide it reached the ears.
And dangling from it?
Hooks.
Hundreds of them, twitching in the air like antennae, each one attached to a floating piece of someone. A jaw. A foot. A finger. An ear with an earring still on it.
It didn't scream.
It exhaled.
And the exhale sounded like her own voice, saying:
"I remember what you taste like."
Aelis ran.
Out the door. Into the nothing.
Down the broken road. Past a school bus filled with bones sharpened into arrows. Past a stop sign that kept spinning even without wind. She didn't stop until her lungs were screaming and her vision was full of shadows that weren't hers.
She dropped to her knees in the middle of the street.
And then—the music started.
Distant. Warped. A warped lullaby playing from an old record player somewhere out of sight.
"🎵Sleep, my little meat, sleep tight and don't you bite…🎵"
She turned slowly.
Behind her, they came.
Dozens.
No feet. Just dragging.
Their bodies were wrapped in skin that wasn't theirs—stitched patchwork cloaks made of screaming. Some had no heads. Some had too many. Their faces hung from their chests, stitched in rows, all grinning with mouths that chewed nothing.
They didn't run.
They glided.
And when the first one touched the pavement, the ground split with a soft squelch—like something under the surface had been waiting.
A hand reached out from the crack.
Long. Pale. Fingerless.
Aelis stood. Blood leaking from her ears. Her thoughts screaming.
There were no survivors.
There were no safe places.
There were only the ones who had not yet been eaten properly.