Work Text:
8pm.
The watch on your wrist pips out the minutes. Tiny numbers, tiny moments, tiny life. Tick tock, tick tock.
The lamps flicker and you shudder a little in their buzzing warmth, your palms strangely dry where they grip the shovel. You want the ringing in your ears to stop. You want the sun to rise. You want another mushroom.
ᶜᵃⁿ ʸᵒᵘ ʰᵉᵃʳ ᶦᵗˀ
You peer out through the darkness with bloodied eyes, communist fucking red, pupils dilating and contracting like they don’t know whether to fight or flee. The fingers that aren’t grasping your shovel pick compulsively at your wrist, shredding at the skin where tendrils of mycelia slink, smirking, through your tendons, around your veins, creeping out under the bandages on your hand. Tick tock, tick tock.
9:30pm.
11.
12:30am.
2.
1987, you think. You’re not sure anymore.
You crack your jaw, a wet rip as the gash that splits your face tears further up your cheek, gore pouring down your chin and into your scarf.
Wolfman had laughed at the sight of you, his foul, slathering tongue flicking at his pointed fangs like he would like nothing more than to swallow you whole. What an ugly fucker you are, Comrade.
You hate that slimy, mocking cunt. He’s a hellhound, a freak of nature; a twisted, mutant abomination that should not exist but is lurching its path across the earth regardless, blighting the ground as it walks.
That makes two of us, Meat.
Not that it matters. If this is all that there is, a tiny fragment of a life left strung like a puppet amongst the copses, amidst the corpses, what difference does it make if you are whole or broken?
Build a barricade build a gun build a shelter build a life but what kind of life is it, this man-shaped thing cowering in its house of matches, hat pulled over its eyes to block out the sun, block out the shadow, hide the carved mess of its face from the endless trees that cackle, creaking and mocking.
Rend flesh unto flesh, return to the dust from which you came and erupt again in smoke trails, in putrid rivers of rot. Snap a branch, break a knuckle, fill your throat with bark and your mouth with leaves to muffle your breaths, that evil, devil’s air. She said so, the elephant woman in her house of flowers. She said so. So you know so.
ᶜᵒᵐᵉ ᵇᵃᶜᵏ ᵗᵒ ᵘˢ.
He is gone; the you who kissed his wife every morning and ironed his shirts as he sang along to the radio, who shaved his face with a cutthroat razor and woke each day with Szurek curled up warm on his feet. The you who had an accountant for his taxes and a payment plan for his washing machine, who polished his jackboots to a high shine and covered his nose as he stepped over the beggar in the stairwell. That man hangs his solemn vigil amongst the branches, an empty hazmat suit with a fractured face, his dog tags crushed into the dirt.
This you is between worlds, between time; hand in bloodied hand with Maciek and his stupid fucking flamethrower, running naked and feral into the forest with bare feet and bared teeth. Stalin’s little darling, barbed wire boy; rusted tin soldier with a head made of smoke trails and fingers made of soot. This rotten man in a scarecrow’s clothes, who can grunt and gurgle and hiss, snorting in the filth like a pig, but cannot speak cannot make the words come cannot remember his own name Meat Meat Meat Meat Meat.
Red flashing outside the window, red pooling in the hollow of your throat. You fumble a bandage from your pocket and wrap it around what you can reach on the deformed, inhuman mess of your face. There is charcoal smeared on the inside of your thumb when you lift your hand away; Cain's brand, a scorched reminder, a parting gift from...well.
The Trader lies in a grave dug three feet shallow because you couldn't waste the daylight, his head balanced precariously on his neck. You don't know what killed him. You don't know why he followed you.
Yes, you do.
We need to stick together, brother.
Sunrise after sunrise, he sat his mute vigil in the blood-soaked light of morning. An angel at the mouth of hell, hands outstretched with a holy sacrament of wire and gasoline, blood and charcoal trickling from the stigmata in his palms.
The morning ritual, these two ghostly creatures dancing together in the half-darkness, exchanging palmfuls of bullets and scraps of bread. Mute, mutated, ye silent brethren; nothing but hisses and heavy breaths and half-gestures, words scrawled in charcoal on scraps of paper, on scraps of skin.
Just once, he'd hugged you, his visor musty and cold on your cheek as you sobbed silently into his shoulder. Just once, you'd asked him to come with you, to join you on the Road to Home; rubbing a thumb over the exposed skin of his forearm. He'd only shaken his head.
ᴸᴵᴬᴿ.
Recall the corpse, the fractured body, how you'd longed to climb inside the gaping mess of his rent flesh and slither down into his chest cavity, curl up in the warmth with your head pillowed on his heart and a rib clutched tight in each hand. Instead, you'd torn greying chunks of flesh from his thighs and the softness of his stomach, stuffing them into your pockets, into your mouth. He'd always be with you, this way.
Around here, all the roads lead to nowhere. Stray too far from the path and you'll lose your head.
3:30am.
Tick tock, tick tock.
A smash, then, at the window. Another. And then another.
ᴵᵗ'ˢ ᶜᵒᵐᶦⁿᵍ.
Rotting face, rotting fate, God's greatest fuck-up. You cross yourself, top to bottom, left to right.
A body crashes, hard, against the barricade, through the window, and the creature flops through the broken glass like the great, slathering tongue of the forest itself.
Tick.
The corpse snaps backwards and splits open from scalp to sternum, flesh and sinews tearing with a sickening wet crunch. Its yellow eyes bulging, red blood pours in thick gushes as spiked teeth tear through the tissue, indistinguishable from the splintering ribs. A heart slips to the ground. A lung, another lung.
Tock.
ᴵᵗ'ˢ ʰᵉʳᵉ.
The snap of jaws as the chomper lunges towards you, staggering, and you run, you fucking fool you fucking coward, you run and you run, breaking the door’s barricade with your shovel, Wolfman’s voice echoing in your ears come on Private, come on Princess, one two, one two and your breaths are a death rattle in your lungs but you cannot scream you cannot fight back you cannot scream—
You fall. Slip face down onto the black, wriggling mass of the floorboards, insects and their larvae crawling out of the floor and up your arms, into your sleeves and the neck of your shirt, burrowing into your skin and chewing on the flesh, the fat, the fungus. You writhe onto your back, hands fumbling for your shotgun and the chomper is lurching like some foul, demonic thing and if hell is real then it is here it is here it is now do it do it do it—
You shoot. The shotgun slashes straight through the creature’s chest with a crack, exploding the torso in a firework of viscera. Happy birthday, Mr Gorbachev.
Your chest heaving, your teeth chattering, you pull yourself to your feet. The mycelium chatters and giggles beneath your shaking hands, within them, and you hiss in return, behind your teeth.
What remains of the chomper is splattered across the room, pulp and viscera dripping from the walls in hot wet chunks. The creature split down the middle as though attempting to dodge the bullet, and half of it has caught in the bear trap under the window, a single leg kicking comically at the air.
You think of the Musician, torn in two by the lurching corpses of his parents, an artist in arterial spray. Touch his face, he will not hurt you. Stroke his hair, he will not cry. Brush away his tears with the chunks of human flesh you keep in your pockets and push needles into his eyes just to hear him sing. Remember him, a grotesque Peter Pan dancing in the devil’s Neverland, playing his fiddle as the Darkwood burns.
Remember what you did.
7:15am.
The sun begins to bleed through the treetops, irradiating the landscape like a toxic spill and filling the room with thin, watery streams of blood red. The Three will be here soon, and you will collect fuel and matches, extra fabric for a torch, exchanged for nails and wire and metal scraps. You won't be needing those, where you're going.
Your foot jiggles impatiently as you watch the slow creep of the sunlight across the floorboard. You chew at your fingernails, at your cuticles, peering from the shadows with yellowing eyes. You're a thing that twitches now, constant and unblinking, its limbs curled in like a dying spider. Would your wife recognise you, her handsome prince, her noble hero, grunting through frothing lips like a rabid animal, human gristle in his teeth? She certainly wouldn't love you. Who could?
ᴴᵉᵃʳ ʰᵉʳ.
Perhaps this is your punishment; arrogant, bloodthirsty fucking sadist that you are, stone-faced soldier boy forever fated to the forest. Doomed to root here, to rot here, to toil in this wooden gulag until your bones harden into bark and your skin sprouts with leaves.
ᶜᵃⁿ ʸᵒᵘ ʰᵉᵃʳ ᶦᵗˀ
She'd warned you, that emaciated woman on her throne of fungus; wet rot and tobacco smoke, blinking at you with milky eyes. The forest isn't a place for children, nor old people, she'd said. It's a place for the likes of you.
ᶜᵒᵐᵉ ᵗᵒ ᵐᵉ.
They all warned you, each and every one of them. Abandon hope, all ye who enter here. Abandon your faith, your name, your tongue; shroud yourself in darkness and hold your breath for the trees will swallow you whole.
All roads lead deeper into the woods.
But they were wrong. You know this. Because today, it will all be over. Today, the tree will burn. The Road to Home will reveal itself, and you will come forth and once more see the stars.
Perhaps they will remember you, memorialise your likeness in a hero's statue where the grateful can lay roses at your feet. But will they build you from iron, or from wood?
Will you bleed, my darling, when they cut you open?
ᵀᶦᶜᵏ ᵗᵒᶜᵏ.
ᵀᶦᶜᵏ ᵗᵒᶜᵏ.