Avie Trebold
The haunting of London never failed to amaze Avie, how could it fail to amaze anyone? The empty streets littered with decaying bodies and abandoned cars, to not hear the sound of footsteps along the pavement. No longer the voices of tourists and locals, the beeping of horns, the slamming of brakes, the laughter of children, the weeps of the heart broken, the song of street performers – it was all gone, replaced by an irreversible silence.
A silence which latched onto the city like a littering of ash, here to stay, to smear deep into every crevasse and crack – coating every alleyway and rooftop, and no matter how hard it may rain that ash of silence, that cloud of eerie, the terminal feeling of perpetual loneliness never washed away.
The drip drop of fallen water filtered out that lonely quiet, maybe she wasn’t alone, maybe Mother Nature was there the entire time, holding her hand, snugging her close, stubbing out the fear – as if every drizzle of the London weather was a reminder that she would always have the lady of the natural to accompany her lonesome travels.
Through the shadowed alleys wandered Avie, she moved along the edges of stone walls allowing for the eaves drops that hung to give her partial breaks from the rain, and every door passed she twisted at the knobs. Many of those doors were locked; those that weren’t locked were so littered with the deceased that she continued on her way, she just wasn’t in the mood to deal with the mess.
Combat boots that weren’t hers padded along the narrows, splashing in the puddles. Untied laces dragging along the pavement, and from between thick lips a light whistle came breezing out, humming Moonlight Sonata – if someone was going to survive at least it was someone with the love for the classics.
Over her shoulder rested a roughed up baseball bat, one hand gripping it loosely as it bounced softly with each step she took - the other tucked in the pockets of a leather coat that was probably two sizes too large . A jacket that was not hers to wear.
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Roughly six months ago Avie ran into another survivor, she had been bunking at a nearby church, for which religion she didn’t know, and who fucking cares. That church was littered with the rotting and the freshly murdered.
People and their religion, it was unbelievable the amount of scum that came there to repent their sins before being taking to the greater lands of their fucking god, or given new breath to a body that was not plagued by what Avie began to refer to as the ‘RTD Virus’.
Everyday she did her clean up wearing disposable medical gloves, dragging body after body in the back of the church where a quaint graveyard rested for who knows how many years. She lit those bodies up, sending flames to flicker and whip in the wind releasing that dreadful stench – maybe this attracted more religious creeps, it didn’t matter, most of them were sick and dying, most of them she helped find their way to the pearly gate.
A saint in the eyes of some – a demon in the eyes of others.
With this crowd of ignorant sinners came a man who hadn’t been tainted by the virus; a man named Jose, a man Avie would grow to tolerate, someone to screw to kill the loneliness of the world they were forced to face, a time killer, nothing more nothing less.
Together they lived, survived, until a month ago, fucking Jose got a little too close to a body, he slipped in the maggot infested inards, falling face first into the corpse, surly he was infected, wasn’t he?
Well we all do what we have to do in times such as these – that handy dandy baseball bat found itself playing ball with Jose’s head – she had to put him out of his misery before it was too late – right? Despite his screams, his begging, she had to help him find a softer fate – right?
She took his jacket, his boots, his supply bag, and that was that. She hasn’t thought about Jose since.
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The drip drops of rain ran the length of Avie’s face, following the traces of her bone structure, sliding down the bridge of her nose only to fall from the tip, tumbling down to land somewhere on Jose’s jacket. Long strands of raven black hair clung to her face, plastered in waving wet patterns.
The thunder cracked above and the lightening lit her way for passing seconds, it shook the ground which she strolled upon, it flashed to show the stoic face of a woman lost in thought.
She might as well take cover, dry her clothes, and recount her supplies – but where to stop? Eyes which seemed as black as night whipped from building to building, back door to back door, hands checking knob after knob.
Dews of wet dropping off thick black lashes and every so often that pink dry tongue slipped out, lapping up the moisture that collected around her mouth, breaking a beat in that whistled echoing song.