Roadtrip

by enamis

-Unknown

Our day started with me almost breaking my neck running down the stairs.

I admired the look utter horror upon Carl’s face and the erratic thumping of a suddenly woken Kaja running after me.

All I could bring myself to do was grin, bearing my razor like teeth.

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“I just had the most retardedly brilliant idea ever.”

.

.

.

.

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“Well, I’ll give you one thing… You were right about the retarded part.”

“Shut 'yer mouth and enjoy this.”

“…”

“Lookit how much fun she’s having!”

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I didn’t believe I’d ever actually witness, let alone take part in the physical embodiment of the phrase ‘rolling along’ but here we were. The ‘taka-taka-taka’ of a dozen tiny wheels on the paved sidewalk filled out ears, occasionally broken up by a girlish giggle form Kaja or an annoyed grumble from Carl.

As for me, I was having the time of my fucking life.

Who knew quadrupeds would be god-tier at skateboarding.

I gave the ground another solid kick with my lion leg and took off, wobbling only slightly.

We were going down /Valdemāra/ Street heading towards the Old City, on our way back from the only place in the city I knew of where they sold these sodding things. Kaja was zipping in front of us, her wings held open for balance and the feeling of wind running along them. Mine were still strictly pinned to my sides but I did twitch them slightly open every so often if my balance went a bit off.

Carl, the poor fuck, got the shit end of the stick, as usual. He was sitting on the biggest and most heavyweight board we were able to find and moving by pushing forward with his arms. We had gotten him rollerblading wrist/hand braces from the same brand as my wonderful new fingerless gloves so we didn’t fuck up our hands too bad. (The missing finger still threw me off)

He was the single most hilarious thing I’d seen since I woke up.

Honestly, I wasn’t even sure why.

Didn’t stop me from laughing, though.

He was our pack mule for the moment, a huge camping backpack full of s8r st0ff strapped on and absolutely full. I also had a backpack, though I hesitated to call it that. It was smaller and was more of an ass-pack than a back one via how we had managed to fit it onto me without crushing my wings. My back legs were going through the arm straps and the entire thing awkwardly sat atop my tailbone, my actual tail keeping it from sliding across my crotch. It wasn’t the best but it was functional, especially considering I was one of two that could actually carry anything around since Kaja was such a lightweight.

If I didn’t know any better I would have said the woman was made from glass spun, air filled bones.

“Hey…” I looked to my side to see Carl pull up next to me and match my speed.

“Diana, listen, I never actually asked,”

Oh, anything that started like that was not going to end well.

“Why did it take you an entire month to get here from the wherever you were? Look at us now, three hundred kilometers would have been a breeze for you, right?”

I hesitated.

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

“You’re a griffon and I'm a minotaur. Try me.”

I exhaled and let out a short little laugh.

“Eh, yeah, I just wanted to say that out loud.”

He chuckled and shook his head.

“I…” this was going sound so fucking stupid out loud but… “I woke up a month after everyone had vanished. I-I don’t know how or why, or- all I know is I fell asleep human and woke up like this in a dusty house full of rotten food and overgrown grass.”

I was expecting disbelief but instead, his face turned thoughtful. Very thoughtful.

“And for what it’s worth, I've been trying my best to forget all this weird ass shit and just do whatever.”

…

Okay something was off.

“Why the silence? Do you… do you know anything about this…?”

“Kaja…”

He hesitated.

“Okay, this, this just got seriously freaky because…” Gulp. “At first… at first it was just me. All alone in the entire city, I checked, I genuinely did… When the power went out for good and I crawled out of our complex…”

He shuddered. We had rolled to a stop.

“I can still hear the howling… all those pets trapped inside…”

Ah.

“That’s… when I found the generators. When I tried thinking for the first time in days. I started dragging food from all over the place, stuff and equipment and whatever else.”

“It was a week after the Vanish, I remember because I found an entire box of those garbage 7-Days croissants and I thought ‘Man, I should celebrate surviving the Apocalypse / losing my mind’.”

“Anyway, I was clearing out the cushions in the Park because I didn’t want it to rain on them and that’s when I found her, passed out and drunk out of her mind under a beanbag.”

…

“Can you imagine? I found a drunk, purple, winged horse a week after the entire world had vanished… I'm honestly surprised I didn’t just lose it on the spot.”

“Do you…” I had found my voice again. “Do you think there's some kind of… connection?”

“There has to be.” He looked thoughtful. “I mean, what else do we have going for us?”

Whatever either of us were going to say never happened because that moment we heard the loudest scream since me.

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“CARL! DIA!”
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We froze, locked eyes, and took off running, our skateboards and bags left strewn across the street.

When it came to speed, Carl was a better sprinter while I was a better runner.

All we had to do was follow the sound of barking and growling.

My stomach felt twisty.

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“KAJ!”

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She was just standing there, nervously swishing her tail and pivoting her ears like crazy while Bella was losing her mind at something in front of them. I nearly barreled into the woman before I could come to a stop and Carl nearly plowed us both down.

We all stared at the road.

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“What.

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The.

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FUCK.”

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It was the road leading right onto the /Vanšu/ (<Suspension>) Bridge. Out of the way enough for none of us to ever have ventured to this end of the Center.

The air felt all wrong here. I couldn’t explain it anywhere near accurately if I tried. Like static but taste-able. Not ozone and not sticking a battery on your tongue or even licking a headphone wire. More than the feeling of blood pulsing through you limbs, more than the feeling water sloshing in your stomach, more than your guts churning.

It was something deeper than that.

Something running deep through my core, making my chest feel tight.

It was strong here, stronger than ever, but it didn’t feel overwhelming.

At least for me it was.

Kaja’s slit pupils were like pinpricks, she wasn’t standing still and her wings were spazing at her sides.

Bella was still losing her shit, growling at the ground.

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The ground.

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If I didn’t know any better I would have called it graffiti. It wasn’t exactly uncommon for teenaged shits to cover every corner is their worthless scribbles.

This wasn’t graffiti.

Not even close.

Besides, who would draw circles in the middle of the road after the Rapture?

I don’t think I wanted to know.

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It was circular, and a solid ten meters across. It had an outer rim a good meter thick and the center was empty save for what looked like soot ground into the concrete. It’s what was in the outer rim that gave me pause.

As stupid as it sounded, what little there was legible reminded me of the dragon runes from Skyrim. Strange, pointed hieroglyphs in seemingly random patterns of thick lines and dots and ninety degree angles, most of them utterly ruined.

There were smudges everywhere and large cracks along the ground. The circle wasn’t much of a circle, more like a misshapen blob, like someone had dragged a corpse across a freshly painted street marking.

The wind seemed sharper here and I didn’t like it one bit.

Carl and I both looked over to Kaja but she was gone to the world.

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Simultaneously, it seemed, we decided to book it. I clicked me tongue as loud as I could and got Bella to pay attention to me for just long enough while Carl yanked Kaja off her feet and carried her off like a limp noodle.

We ran.

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Far.

Far.

Far.

Far.

Away.

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The world got quiet.

For a long time I heard our hearts and our breaths and the echo of footsteps.

The feeling of the world shimmering dulled, but did not go away.

The colors were… off…

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We ran. Until we lost our steam somewhere in a park nearby.

The summer sun was pouring through the cracks of the foliage above and the long grass tangled between my fingers. I could hear our breaths, barely over my own as we came to a stop behind some flower bushes, Bella nuzzling herself under my floppy wing.

He laid Kaja down in the grass, on her side because we didn’t really know any better. For a long time we were still.

Eventually, Kaja stirred.

It was the twitching of the ears that happened first.

Eventually her eyelids fluttered and neon golden iris emerged.

“Hey.”

She weakly looked at me with unfocused eyes.

“H-he--hey~” she croaked.

“How are you feeling?” Carl asked. He sounded shaky. Kaja did not answer, only rolled her head to the side, staring through the grass. “Kaj?”

Nothing.

After a long while she moved again.

I observed her clumsily paw at the belt of her skirt until she managed to push something out of a tiny pocket on her hip. It fell to the ground with a slight jangle and she nudged it through the grass towards her face and shifted into more of an upright position. She leaned forward and pressed the tip of her nose to the object while using her hoof to hold it against herself. I realized I could vaguely make out that she was holding a white cross to her nose, the rest, a string of off-brown beads hanging against her leg. A rosary, I think.

It took her a minute or two, muttering under her breath as she moved the little string of beads against her face in different positions. I could tell she was done when she let out the loudest exhale so far and opened her still slightly unfocused eyes, letting the rosary loosely hang from her leg.

“Better?” I softly asked.

She didn’t respond. Rather she turned her head to the other side to where Carl lay sprawled out in the tall grass, no doubt staring at the patch of sky visible through the trees high above. He glanced at the both of us with dead eyes before squeezing them shut and sitting up.

“So anyone mind telling me what the fresh hell just happened?” as he said it we both stared at Kaja. The woman looked between us as if trying to decide something before slumping forward and burying her face in her hooves.

I opened my mouth but Kaja beat me to it.

“The colors.”

“Like…”

She kept struggling for words.

“I could see air in colors.”

“How it move around… ring… circle?”

“And I could smell better too.”

“Like night when I can see far, far, far, only not eyes but everything.”

“I think… I see colors still. We away but I can see little.”

“Here and here. Little colors moving.”

She finally un-buried her face but rather than looking at us she stared right ahead.

“I don’t know what happened. I don’t. Feel like everything go super.”

She fumbled her hooves before awkwardly motioning a sort of vague punch(?), swing (?), uppercut??

“Ya’ know? Super?”

She gave up at some point so we simply sat in silence still processing whateverthefuck.

And clearly, it was a something.

Something that couldn’t have been human.

Something that for some reason made me think had to do with our new selves.

Something else.

A something else.

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We left.
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And we tried our hardest to not think about it.

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At least I did.

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Something isn’t right.

That’s why I'm sitting here in the pitch black of night by the light of my dying lappy in our shared ‘girls’ bedroom while Kaja’s running around in circles outside because she can't sleep and I don’t need to look to feel the unnerving-ness radiating off of all of us.

It is the feeling of cold creeping up the nape of your neck and the shadows seem darker and I think Carl wants to figure out how to lock the glass door.

We left a pillow there because that’s where Bella has decided to spend her days.

I'm glad I sleep on the second floor and I'm glad I'm still an apex predator.

…

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Right...?

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I think I'm scared.

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For reals’ this time.

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o.O.o

Comments

[Krazyfan1]

Brilliant as usual

[Celefin]

Who knew quadrupeds would be god-tier at skateboarding.

This is one of the weirdest and most hilarious images ever.

But damn, this is some chilling stuff. That's a great take on how finding a collapsed portal circle might play out. I like the idea that the remaining magic radiation hotspot could screw with people's heads and I totally hadn't thought about the fact that these markings might be terrifying. Something unknown and powerful went down here and it's probably related to the planet's depopulation. Of course it'll induce fear in many.

Oh, and art improvement. Yay! Looking good.

[Celefin]

Did you just update your cover art or did I miss it when you posted the new chapter? 'Cause it's awesome.

[enamis]

7844587 Aw thanks! Ye' I just finished it last night. Felt nice to finally do something that wasnt my comic. I swear that thing takes up like 80% of my artness at any given time, I don't understand how other people do it.
Still. I got two done chapters qued up as well so no drought for the near future, yay~

[Celefin]

7844883

I got two done chapters qued up