Nilda Korbachoff's Story

As the phone rang, Stefan paced his living room. His house was pretty much just a living room, a bathroom, a tiny kitchen, and one bedroom. He didn't need much space; He liked having everything right where he needed it. Close. Stefan's stomach grumbled quietly, causing him to inadvertently look to the pile of supplies he had gathered that was sitting complacently on the floor. He had gathered up all the cans and bottled water in his house. He had around 7 bottles and 10 cans of all sorts. Beans, sliced fruit, tuna, etc. Not quite the plethora he had wished for. He had been scraping by on perishable food for the past week. His milk had gone bad shortly after the power went out, along with a lot of his food. He drank from the faucet until it too went out.

His medicine, laptop, a blanket, a flashlight, an old Zippo, a worn canvas backpack he used for school, an extra shirt, a dull pocket knife, and his "Advanced Programming" book also populated the pile. The phone stopped ringing, then a soft, sweet voice spoke to him. Stefan was elated. He immediately stopped pacing as his heart jumped into his throat.

"Hi, this is Mist." She said, in the cute little voice of hers.

Stefan hesitated a few seconds, breathless. Mist? Who? He looked at his phone; Yup, it was Josephine's number. He ignored it, his elation getting the best of him.

"Oh, thank God you're okay! Josephine, Have you heard from the others?" He said, his voice slightly muffled by the rag over his mouth.

A few tense, silent seconds passed. Stefan held his breath. Josephine finally responded. She said "What did you say?"

Stefan bit his lip. She sounded like she was out of it. As if he had called her while she was sleeping and she wasn't quite 'there' yet. And Mist? Who was Mist? Was she talking about the Haze? He tried something else.

"Jo, this is Stefan. Remember me? We used to watch movies at Nilda's house? Basil showed up sometimes too... Were you sleeping? You sound out of it, bud... Have you been outside recently? Do you have a mask? More importantly, are you safe? Is everything okay?"

Stefan rattled off question after question. In retrospect, it was probably annoying, but he was physically shaking with worry. He couldn't stand this place without the help of his friends.

He was shocked to find he had subconsciously strode to his desk and opened the drawer as he spoke. HE had a habit of doing that sometimes. His mind would be so focused on one thing, body would just wander and sometimes take him outside or to the bathroom or he'd take things from the fridge and so on. This time, however, his body recalled a more painful experience to subconsciously act upon. Within the drawer lay a .357 S&W revolver. It held exactly one bullet; no more, no less. His mind was flooded with darkness as some hidden memories resurfaced. He grimaced and pulled the revolver out, clicking the safety on and tossing it to the couch. There was so much darkness attached to that damned gun, but he figured he would carry it for protection. Maybe he could cleanse it of its dark past.

He tapped his foot in anticipation to Josephine's response, a deep frown and furrowed brow cutting through the rest of his features.

Nilda slowly sat up on her couch. Her black hair flowed in front of her face as she rubbed her temples. She had a splitting headache, and she knew why.

"Nana." She called out into the darkness of her house. A young women with short black hair appeared at the end of her couch, giving a smile to Nilda.

"You called?" The women, Nana, replied.

"How many people did you kill yesterday when we went out for supplies?" Nilda asked flatly, looking the women in the eyes. No one but Nilda could see Nana, because Nana wasn't real. She was and image that Nilda's mind created to go along with the voice inside her head. Nana and Nilda, although the same person, are two completely different people and therefor look completely different.

"I didn't kill anybody. But after I was done with them I bet they wish I had killed them." Nana told her proudly with a sadistic smirk on her face.

"Then if you didn't kill anyone, why don't I remember anything?" Nilda said, getting upset. She didn't like when Nana takes over and doesn't let her remember certain things. Nilda doesn't like forgetting things, and with this Haze she couldn't afford not to remember anything, even the smallest of details.

"Oh. Well, you see, we sort of got, well...cut. But don't panic, it was nothing major and I took care of it and it should heal with in a couple of days." Nana said, now appearing next to Nilda, placing a hand on her shoulder.

Nilda could feel the bandages on her left hand now. She didn't know why she couldn't feel them earlier. Maybe because of the headache and her being so tired. She dropped her hands and was looking at them. She examined the white, wrap bandage on her left hand as her right hand slowly rubbed them, making her wince a bit. She could feel a bandaged hand on her right shoulder now and knew that Nana's image had changed to match her injury.

Nilda didn't pay much attention to Nana's bad hand though and looked around the empty house. It was dark, but she knew the area well. The person she had been living with, a family friend of hers, went missing about 5 days ago. She went to go look for them, but it was no use. The Haze was to thick and there were raiders everywhere. She didn't want to risk getting killed.

Nilda slowly got up of the couch and peered through the boards that her family friend hand put up on all the windows. She looked out onto the street and noticed that there was activity going on in the apartment across from the house. She knew that room to be Stefan's. She became worried, and felt the need to go over there. She got dressed in her usual attire and placed on her mask. She grabbed her bag and a couple cans of food and then looked back out onto the streets. No one. She undid all the heavy locks placed on the door, stepped outside into the yellow Haze, locked the heavy locks on the outside, and quickly jogged over to Stefan's

"Stefan are you there? It's me Nilda. Let me in." Nilda said in a hushed voice, and knocked just enough that he would be able to hear her.

After a moment, Basil saw the door open and heard Aleksandrov call through the small opening, "C'mon in quick, Basil!" The man needed no order to stir him to action. He squeezed through the small opening in the door, and past the barricade. He exhaled violently and inhaled in relief, but did not remove the improvised mask. He couldn't be too careful, after all. He saw the Haze slip in as he did, and didn't know how much of it had disseminated into the air yet.

"Well, good to see you're alive, Aleksandrov," he said after a moment. "I'm not entirely sure what we can do. I think if we can get to Kamarov Headquarters, we can-" He stopped abruptly. "Did you hear something?" He eyed the door carefully. "I think someone's here. Let me look." He edged toward the door slowly, then asked sharply, "Is someone there?"

The wholesale club had been a bad idea.

Turned out that, in the face of an apocalypse, there are--in fact--other people who possess some degree of intelligence and common sense, scavengers that (not entirely unlike Roaker himself) believed that the best way to survive was to find the largest caches of preserved food and camp out near those. Places like the wholesale club Roaker had planned to steal food from.

When he'd arrived, climbing in through a back window that had been improperly boarded over, leaving just enough space for a semi-fit journalist in his mid-thirties to crawl through, he'd immediately taken note of the fact that something strange was afoot--namely, that the store's lights were on. Fluorescent bulbs buzzed feebly overhead, providing the entire store with a hazy bluish tint. Jon stood for a second, basked in the seemingly unfamiliar light, realizing it had been weeks, maybe even months, since he'd seen functional fluorescent lights. Wonder turned to bewilderment as he suddenly wondered how they were still working--a question that was quickly solved when he looked to his right and saw a series of car batteries daisy-chained together into the store's power grid via an alternator.

Then he realized who was running it. Five or six armed figures of indeterminate gender appeared out of the corner of his eye, moving towards the grid. Roaker immediately realized he was outnumbered and outgunned and slipped away, down a row of shelves, heading for what may have at one point been the butcher's or the frozen goods section. He slid into a cooler, now serving as a bunkhouse, as the others reached the power grid. Roaker realized he wasn't getting away with any grand old spoils, so he decided to do the next best thing: moving up and down the rows of bunks, Roaker removed any food, water or supplies he could find, which was maybe two tins of tuna and a half-empty bottle of vodka, and a map of the city apparently edited for the destruction the post-Haze chaos had wrought, and split.

He was near the front door when he heard shouting from above him, followed by the sound of cans being rattled. Roaker kept moving calmly, carefully, towards the front doors, when a volley of shots rang out. 'Yeah, they found me,' he thought to himself, throwing his body through the front doors and scrabbling through the broken glass and twisted chicken wire that formed an outer barrier, angry shouting in Russian and the occasional warning shot hot on his trail.

Roaker didn't know how long he ran, but he was sure by this point he was lost. The buildings all looked the same, now; residentials, but not familiar ones. Worse, he could tell by the fact that his breathing was becoming more labored that his filter was running low. He would have to stop soon.

As luck would have it, he didn't wander much farther down the block before he was greeted by human voices. He stood at the far end of the block, crouched in a doorway, looking at a small group being ushered into a building about four doors away. And parked out front--was that a running car? How the hell was that possible? The Dust was capable of choking out even the sturdiest air filters in a matter of seconds.

Speaking of filters...

Roaker let out a sigh. He didn't have a choice now: he had to get indoors and change his filter, and figure out a way back to the hotel. It was either that or he was going to die out here in the cloud, his lungs ripped apart by the tiny Dust particles that even now were beginning to infiltrate his mask.

He slipped out of the doorway and raised his hands high above his head, moving towards the door. Once he was nearly at the doorstep, he let out a yell, his voice hoarse with disuse:

"Hey! My filter's almost down, I need to change out! Let me in!"