Piping Chapter II Howl

The thing about the workers was that they were utterly selfless. Nobody recollects the exact point in this apocalyptic civilization when individual personalities came to be utterly sacrificed at the altar of more practical day to day survival,on a scorched earth devoid of sunlight or water. We can speculate that this was very much like the pilling of the dirt, a monument of standing up to assured extinction. Free will as a concept fades into inconsequentiality when you may live no more than a day.

What happens when you are a collective, a single cell in a multitude of cells obeying nerve impulses and chemical triggers.The body lives even if the cells building the body die every moment and are unceremoniously and silently replaced.

When the time came nothing, no one told Meg what to do. Three winters and the queen had produced twelve fresh workers including the not-good-enoughs. There were around forty but the numbers were plummeting.The workers had to venture out further and sometimes,they would not come back. Even if they did make it back, it was only a matter of time as they shriveled progressively, hunched over, bleeding through every orifice, have their throats swell up like a potato growing between the skin and the esophagus. The other workers at that point stop wasting any precious food and salvage whatever that can be salvaged; hair being a good source of rope for instance.The sick worker, barely alive but beyond salvation even, gets entombed by the radioactive ash floating in the air. The place left behind is to be filled by someone younger, perhaps physically stronger once last longer in the outside.

Meg waited.She had felt it. Workers feel without touching, talk without moving lips and know what they know. She had felt but like the aforementioned collective. She had felt her coexistence among the pantalets, felt each heartbeat of her womb sisters, she had felt that there was something about the blue eyed twins that they never had and hence they must be protected. She had felt that the drones would be something only the queen would have and her alone. She had felt the death of older workers, unwanted workers, and old drones shooed outside during the winter. She had felt everything what Sky had felt.After the nursery, Meg with herstunted brain had made her own world revolve around Sky. She never had a front cortex big enough to form sentences from heard words. She had felt others like her, at the nursery glancing at the virgin queens chambers some noticing only the right and others only the left.

Meg had felt everything collectively. The dying workers that won’t make it and the new they have to keep on living. So when it was time she got up.A youngling, another partial anencephalic, was cranking the Geiger. She, Jeff who had been around 9 or maybe 10 winters hadn’t bled and probably never would, simply fill in the blank space left by Meg leaving. Meg got up and moved towards Sky in her bed of collected mattresses. She was beautiful yes she was.Meg and any other worker wouldn’t need a mirror to know what they looked like. Sprawled, she never slept on her side or curled up from the cold, framed with shimmering black hair, reflecting the dancing flames of the fireplace.High cheek bones, a straight nose. She would be a queen some day and we all will survive. Meg picked up a small strand from a broken brush tied it around her little finger and without a second glance walked out of the room. The cold hit her immediately with a slashing brutality which she felt to her bone.She had left the good clean Geigerwith Jeff. She felt absolute cold without any benefit of a fire or walls for the first time in her life. She had never left the side of Sky, never. Other workers had fed her and bathed her and cleaned her like Sky. She felt it new but the being of the she knew about it all. She need not be told what cold, hunger, radiation was she knew it all.She  had always known.

She steadied herself, as if going through her daily routine. She made her way down to a worker dying ever so slowly in the yard. Meg had felt this workers death. The yard is the one place the creators of the pile could call their own. Their stockpile of provisions.  Where they ate and slept, lived and died. Workers never talk much, they can’t, their bodies are not capable of such feats. However, they do not need to. Their shared gestalt awareness takes over for what was lost to the poisons. It is just like how Meg found Abra. The vacuum she had to fill. Whatever that space used to be it was now fallen. Eyes whitened over. Her skin stretched tight over her fragile skull. Teeth bared in a big smile. Ear to ear.Rotting teeth in a yellow gum. Her gaze held nothing. Bleeding from her eyes she was not yet dead. Meg knew her fingers twitched like the last feeble moves of a windup toy. Her rapidly declining pulse. Her lungs like deflated balloons slowly losing out. All this Meg knew, that she was the vacuum meant for Meg to inherit. She accepted the rusted old Geiger, the patchworked over coat, the large leather mask she checked for the activated carbon in the screwcap tin can, what of it was left. Activated carbon. Bone char made by roasting the bones of fallen workers in a black fire and then hacking away with a hammer. Meg felt the long talon of fingers collapse from the clench. Abra closed her eyes. Someone was salvaging her hair, it came off in bloody clumps that caught on the shears. Meg closed her eyes; she looked less subhuman that way. She cleaned Abras face, felt her skin. Paper thin and coarse.Abra. That’s who she was. Nearly naked without her gear.Silently bequeathed to Meg, the vestments of the office that was now hers.A shrunken dried corpse. It was as if she was no more than the shed parchment skin of a long gone reptile or hollow shell of a spiders meal, all sucked dry. Sad, the other worker and Meg carried her. Meg held the shoulders, Sad the legs. They went out of the pile. It was dark and the mounted lamps above head didn’t help much. They swung Abras husk twice and then let go. Abras husk rose in the Air then descended, crashed down a slope, a broken puppet with the strings cut. They felt Abra crash. they felt the last of her breath pass through her still smiling teeth. She slipped down the slide into a steel silo to rot. To be used as manure later, her bones to become the part of their pile. The walls? Some tools maybe? mostly burnt in a black smoking flame to create bone char.

Meg and Sad paused on their way out of pile that day. White ash flakes of the radioactive fallout fell like a steady snowfall. They took out their Geigers. The newly acquired old machine didn’t feel unfamiliar to Meg, despite its clearly inferior quality to that in the young and present queens chambers. Nor the mask with the glass port holes or the leather rubber plastic patchwork coat boots and gloves. It was as if Meg had just entered a shell bereft of Abra. She might even have been Abra body and soul. Workers without the benefit of the gear were something translucent just a small light shriveled, crumpled skin and bones to be blown away in the wind. Maybe just like Abra had, not too many winters ago. The workers were all there. Scavenging under fallen billboards and hulking ruins of cars and suchike. Anything that shielded from the ambient radiation all around. Plastic sheets hung over make shift farms under wherever there was a little shielded space. Weak sunlight entering through the small port holes let in enough UV they could try grow something inside or near enough to the pile. Water was still scavenged from deep wells, from outside. The manure salvo couldn’t be inside because it smelt poisonous and made it harder to shield the queens from contamination. Food had to be grown outside checked for radioactive contamination and only the best taken inside the pile. The best of the best fed to the Queens. Meg felt a pang. She will probably never see Sky again.

She didn’t linger long. Being outside was like being submerged in water. The air was cold and viscous. The outside was a malignant malicious entity which had somehow, maybe with the destruction of its green avatar, gained or seemed to have gained some form of malevolent consciousness. That consciousness as respect to the last of the humans wished and promised it only one thing. Death.  Death was everywhere in the radioactive environment and the Geiger’s protection, for all the cranking was no more psychological than real. Being outside of the pile meant one thing and one thing only. Death. It was simple. Even with all that cranking most workers won’t make it long.  The steady wind retards your every move. Meg had never been outside and she never had worked out but she didn’t need any training. As if Abra had never left. Meg was Abra now. Meg knew what Abra knew. Nothing changed in Meg-Abras routine. She and Sad pushed through the debris. The wind had been picking up with time. Storms and cyclones were common. Sad and Meg-Abra instinctively quickened their paces. They did turns pulling up the water from a narrow manhole shielded by a plastic tent. Sad cranked the Geiger and Meg carried the old iron pails it was tougher but Meg managed through the winds which had begun to howl.

The farm was under the fallen billboard, arched over from one end while the other end held on barely. The Steel sheet had holes all over but was largely intact ,the lettering and pictures were all dulled and gone only those two words stood defiant. The arch was large enough to cover a large patch for potatoes. The workers created a bed of clean dirt and kept the radiation off. Sad and Meg-Abra quickly started digging the soils by the side and watering. The wind was getting higher. Sad kept on winding the Geiger. Meg-Abra kept on her pace. She had seen the words Sky and Air and like all the workers she didn’t know how to read but she knew what the symbols spelt it anyways.

She felt a joy in the letters “s k y”. The wind was picking up. The bill board, held in place by a rusted iron beam and a few reinforcements, was beginnig to shake. Sad had started to look up more frequently while still winding the Geiger. Meg-Abra quickened her already exhausting pace. She was small, deformed and under clothes twice her own weight. She knew the weather was getting worse and she had to water the plants and get back.

Sad had briefly stopped. Meg-Abra didn’t say anything. the bent over billboard was already shaking like dead leaf. the wind howled at gale speed and they still had to make it back. Meg and Sad stepped up and instinctively grabbed the nearest hand hold. The galewind shrieked in and nearly wretched them from their hold and blew them away. There was ice and ash everywhere. The Geiger counter blinked red.

A anchored steel line reached all the way to the pile. Meg-Abra held on to it with desperate strength. She felt the rubber leather glove slip and immediately angled the line and jerked hard. She was safe. She tried to drag herself through to the pile. She felt  the collective replace all her mental faculties mostly acting from long learned instinct.

It was as if responding to a faraway remote control directing her every move. She crawled hunched nearly on all four. By now she was mostly blind mostly guided by her instinct and collective. All her cognitive abilities had been replaced by the collective. she didn’t think, she could not but needed not to anyway. She crawled through the muck with the storm over her head tightly clenched on the line. She or Sad neednt crank the Geigers anymore. With this much ash and snow the fallout, and its radiation, was falling all over them in Skyloads. They trudged on. She felt a small glimmer of hope. A warm fire. The line was not easy to hold on and not to mention the bulky crushing gear weight.

Then she heard it.  she instinctively turned to Sad. She was behind her she couldn’t see Sad’s eyes but she felt her startled nervousness. The wind was loud enough but there was a new sound cutting through the chaos. The high pitched cry of a baby. Meg turned almost tried to stand up and run but decided against. She would have been blown away like a straw twig in that momentary dissonance of grief. Meg-Abra hunched over and started crawling forward. She was feeling even through all that chaos that something else was in the outside. Something that stood naked, against all that the outside could ever throw at it and still survive. That this something was after her.

The collective conscience like a flickering, oscillating, needle of a shaking compass pointed out the way, there was nothing in the memories to help her face this something. There have been cases of workers being lost to the weather but nothing had chased them in all the collected memories. The workers everywhere felt the terror in both Meg and Sad. The workers had fought off a invasion from something deformed before. There was no storm to take care of that time however. Moreover that memory felt different to Meg. This thing was fast like nothing before, was able to withstand the gale wind and was running in the debris. The invader last time was a deformed hulk of an animal with a slimy crawl and nothing like operating legs. The crying, shrieking, wailing madness was closing in on them.

She felt a tug in the line from behind the jerk almost pulled her back she crawled up neatly to prevent being pulled back. She had to claw on the line to hold herself down. She heard a scream. The follow up jerk almost tore her from the ground and threw her into the air. She let go of the line and collapsed to the ground on all fours. The last pull was so strong as if she had been an animal caught in a trap line hoisted into the air and immediately reeled in. She struggled through the rough gravel of broken concrete. She felt her tears as they fogged up her already stretched vision. The times when they had disposed of not-good-enough babies. She had gone through the entire ordeal as Sky and Air had. The collective had reigned supreme. She had to live by the day however. A faint wisp of dying ember still remained enlightened in her conscious as she fought against inevitability. She had to survive this moment. she had to end this day not disposed of into charcoal or manure silo. she had to be alive. Sky will be the Queen and she will be there when she becomes the queen the new life womb of the entire pile. She felt the warmth of the fires of potato’s rising. of Sky with her luxurious cascading hair. She will make it. She pulled herself mentally. the ground slipped underneath her rubber leather gloves. She slithered in the muck. She still found her handhold slathered in the muck and she inhaled deeply until she at least could still be hunched but on her two legs. She dared not raise any more the high pitched cry was still there in a constant she would make it. She ignored the ever increasing volume of the crying. She felt twigs and branches break under heavy weight grinding over them. How can this be happing the steady “Waaaaaaaa……..”.The babies were dead and nothing could create this noise. It was not real she must be hearing things. Radiation was causing this. The collective remembered having heard entire range of noises while in throes of red lamp sickness. If only she could move faster. the crunches were moving faster the stride was not quick but deliberates enough to be able to cover the gap fast. It will not get her. Meg bit her lip to focus away. She would survive this.

She felt the pressure. she shrieked. it was so strong it almost tore her from the ground. The last thing all the other workers felt was her fingers clutching at the glove prying it off and having a glimpse of a black hair tied to the small stub of middle finger. They felt her sigh and then there was nothing. The workers felt the vacuum of Sad and Meg who once were. 

Piping :Chapter One

Piping

i

It all started at the end, or you can say the ending of the known world. The day after tomorrow had happened. The world had died. The world that had been green and blue. There remained only a grey ashen corpse, oozing slime from new and old orifices. There remained the dark viscous black sea and the ashen land of ruins. Man’s avarice had finally filled the skies with more dark viscous smoke than clouds and finally, forever blocked out the sun. Something had survived,just like fungus on a corpse feeding off the decay. This new world was all about not getting ended. No one knew when the infertility disease had started, was it the nukes, the sea, a punishment from the gods.Choose whatever reason you want, it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters.Only the next day and then the next day.

The laws came up eventually.Just like finding that small patch of dirt not radioactive, at least not enough.Piling dirt upon dirt. The law was simple like pilling dirt on dirt until you had a pile to live on. Finding grains that didn’t push the Geiger counter too much  . Building Grain by grain, pile by pile as you rot away, in the end it would survive you bequeathed to who came after. The small patch where they could keep the one thing that kept humanity alive. It didn’t matter that scourging in the wild for anything, dirt, water, food without the small Geiger’s counter, which ran on small hand cranked motors with small pilot lights going red instead of the normal green, had its costs. The workers barely survived a few winter’s once they started to forage outside. During winter foraging became impossible.The only way was to huddle together, stay awake or conscious and keep The Queen, the one last reproducing female alive and well until summer. The males who could be expected to impregnate the queen started working as soon as she was ready.Life goes on one day at a time. The babies were nursed.After all workers are to be supplemented.The Queen is nourished for where are the babies going to come from.Lastly the drones or how else is the Queen going to be impregnated. However her babies are not getting healthier enough to be worth anything the workers are not going to last till a few more winters and then. Here everything lives by the day.

What if the Queen died ?Nothing stays long on this earth.There were tests on the babies to see if they bled. If they bled they are fed more, cared after more diligently.Should the Queen die, they were to be the next. The Queen at present was one in such a long series of winters that it was thought that the cycle will cease. Still the hive fed fed the queen and the virgins the best they could.

There were three who had bled now, two twins born with blue eyes and a younger. They were kept in three rooms side by side by the nursery groomed and cleaned every day. It took up many workers to build the nurseries.

The drones were all the same. They are born they are fed better as they have to be kept healthy and nourished so that they can keep impregnating the Queen. When they start to mature they start fighting. There doesn’t need to be a Why? It’s just another rule. They start getting taller or bigger and they start to fight. The last standing over all the cowering others is taken to the queen’s chamber to mate. If he tires then there’s the runner up.There was only once an exception to this monotonous near codified and accepted as rule continuity.

There was a strange drone once that had not gone by the normal route. Thisdrone that had impregnated the queen with the virgin Queens had blue eyes and was like no other drone. Nobody remembers it coming or going from the drone place. He bypassed the Process. He broke in through the roof of the pile without a noise, without waking any of the workers underneath huddled around a small fire. There were no fights, no challenges, no waiting. He just simply walked into the queen’s chamber and as suddenly and silently he had come he left. That was the end of the winter the terrible time when there was no food, no water at least not enough. The world froze over and the only way to remain awake from a sleep inducing numbness was to form a communal ball and wait it out. Everybody tried to conserve the little heat available and not sleep for to sleep meant to freeze over. It was these half asleep half-awake workers of that time had seen him. They had starved through the four terrible months and they couldn’t move well. He enlarged circular portal at the top of the central hall, the vent for smoke from the central fire, jumped in to land on all fours and looked once in the direction of the shivering, gaunt, starved, mostly dead wide eyed pile with his blue eyes lit up with the first faint summer sun streaming from the enlarged vent and turned to the Queens chamber. He wore a tunic of some sort tied at the waist with a rope nobody remembered anything more. He went in and after some time came out jumped up and reached the edges of the jagged portal pulled himself up .All this had happened before the first worker could stand up the workers in the Queens chamber remembered that the Queen was awake when he came in and she didn’t resist but for once willingly gave in .The Queen went into pregnancy in a period the best drone could not keep up and the next likeliest were all still toddling. There was also the fact that male offspring’s were rare. At any time the pile had never had more than three to five. The harsh winters had seen them starve to death also when the youngest was fed and the elders just kept hungry if they got too demanding they would simply be thrown out. The Queen had to be saved. Then there was the fact that sometimes the drones would go into a stroke while at it, dying when their heart exploded in their chest. So they were childless between winters also. It was a bad omen because then it would mean that there will be less infants growing into viable workers by the time necessary. There will be hardships when the numbers dwindled and there was nothing to replace them. The workers would have believed in divine virgin conception, but the Queen went on and on about the strong thin creature of sinewy muscles and long legs. A God. The workers were not smart. Most didn’t have enough of a brain to think things over. The collective conscious did it for them. The collective conscious, a commune of partial minds needed to survive. The collective conscious also glossed over many things. Then again, as long as backup of workforces arrived, no one’s complaining. The workers would have fought to keep him had they knew about the twins. It had been eons since one has seen a child without the swollen throat, scales over skins, deformed body parts. The girls were flawless, small nymphs with all human features in a world which has moved on over humanity.

The workers were not sure what to do exactly, the collective conscience dismissedthis to a new sort of mutation. The workers are not really much for thinking anything. The babes with working limbs, heard and saw fine, no swelling in the larynx and any scales or disproportionate heads would not be thrown away.Another law.

The babies were allowed milk because most thought they would be worthy workers and then like magic and in god knows how long there was blood in the cot when the girls were nine winters old. There was a unanimous sigh of relief.The babies were more worth with time and the queen might not last. The collective conscious soon realized   that the man with the blue eyes had to be found. However there was the problem.The original workers who had probably seen the man were no more, taken from the hive by the summer work or winter cold. There were just hand-me-down stories.Everybody noticed that the twins were not growing tumors or any new limbs. Like with all stories which pass from mouth to mouth through a generation off workers who normally don’t last more than a few winters the stories grew disproportionate. Soon it was apparent that the men could not possibly have wings of gold or carry pots of food. The general opinion was that he had blue eyes just like the twins and he was one who at least didn’t stay on the pile. Scouting workers were sent off looking for him immediately. Problem was the scouts never came back with success. Mostly they never came back at all.

There were two virgin queens for the Queen who was not getting any better. The pile will be alive for a few more winters.

The best workers, young ones with little deformations, were chosen to work in the twin’s cell. The twins were fed, clothed and cleaned. They were groomed continuously.They were kept in adjacent cells and allowed to go out for a few minutes but only when all outside workers have left and only the workers attending the twins the Queen and the nursery are left. However it was never for long and they were always dragged back.

Until they were nine, they were just crawling, gurgling, vomiting mass in a pod of other crawling gurgling and vomiting mass. However children develop their alliances, their congenialities even before they develop cognitive language. Then they were plucked out not realizing why. The twins were allowed the rare luxury of the company a few of the nursery mates. The healthiest of the baby workers deemed too good to be wasted in the outside was allotted to the task.

They were named Air and Sky.The collective concious thought it would be the best to name them after the giant billboard that shielded something of a patch that from time to time yielded a few tomatoes or potatoes.There was a picture of something that flew on the badly burnt billboard. The paint remained in cracks and blobs and the only letters still legible was Air and Sky. Nobody could read, the People were forgetting words especially the workers with their deformed brains from continuous exposure and birth defects. They knew it said Air and Sky and that’s what they had ever known.

The virgin twins were never brought before the queen. That was the thing that had been reduced to a baby machine for over as long as one can remember. Mothering unending continuous stream of individuals had done things to her. The only thing that kept the workers from replacing her was the collective conscious deciding that the twins and the new unnamed one were too young to breed.

The twins never saw her but could hear her and she frightened them.Their chambers were near her, only to conserve the warmth and minimize the unexposed workers contact with those exposed.

They cringed in the corners; holding on to whatever there was to hold.She got worse on days. Those were the days when the pains of the labor or being forcibly impregnated got to her. They were begging to scratch at the walls.Normaly they won’t be stopped from doing what they won’t but as soon as they dig anything the workers repaired` double quick like a two minute hole disappearing in one. They could do anything they want in plain sight but it would change little or the change desperately erased. They had to be patient and wait. The walls were dirt.The same dirt which won’t cause the dreaded red lamp .A mixture of clay, feces and anything that can solidify to form a support. The clay was kept in its place by salvaged sticks, metal rods and bones. Workers kept the pile in place even with their own bones. Then there were the few Bricks or stones when they were lucky. The material for the walls, the things to burn, food had to be gathered from the outside. Venturing outside into the radioactive waste land had its consequences. Where you crank the Geiger counter after five steps and then you on the next crank the dreaded small red lamp, the red eye illuminates. You run cranking until your palm bites into old iron drawing blood your foot struggles through sludge, and filth. You pray that you don’t faint from the vomiting out of your entrails,feel the vertigo as if the world goes into an spin and you drop to the ground .If you  don’t pass out from the imploding pain in your cranium as if something expanding out you can feel the other pains in your joints in your lungs. The full spectrum of numbing pain shrivels you up and then you die of a combination of shock, dehydration and blood loss.That’s how the workers die slowly engulfed by the floating mist of radiation, the small powdery flakes of radiation, the rain of radiation etc.So bricks,rocks, things to burn, anything and everything is rare and hence priceless.

The twins could whisper through a small dent their nursery mates had still not detected and repaired immediately. It was not easy but the workers and their nurserymates fastidiously cleaned groomed and fed them. Their friends had turned silent gradually.They had talked little before, with their flat heads, but now they didn’t even squeak.

They were there, they did their thing and disappeared there was the undertone nobody said anything but you felt it. There were reasons if you stay out you don’t return alone the radiation catches on to you even without  the  small plastic octagonal eye blinking  suddenly from green to red. Its everywhere it just keeps on accumulating. The workers had to keep it off the queens and the twins.

There were normally someone constantly cranking a Geiger but she will fall asleep. The twins would wait and then get at rapidly scratching at the dent or where it was being repaired. They could hear each other’s play stories. Imaginary stories of the queen, of their nursery mates, the once collapsed snoring in a corner. There was not much light from the small fire place in the corner and their small nimble fingers could never dig far. They couldn’t see each other and that remained a great mystery how do they look like, what the Queen looks like and most importantly how does the outside looks like.

“Outside no good no go outside”

Sky’s worker was an anencephalic though not completely only some portions gone. She was a nursery mate.She couldn’t think, see only partially and was only good at cranking the Geiger. Her tongue slurred when overwhelmed with words and she preferred to bite down on her lips and stare.

She cleaned and groomed Sky religiously and without being asked to, just like everybody. Everybody did what they had to.It was like the endlessly played rule the loop that kept everything in place at least the pile if not its inhabitants. She was kept progressively detached from the foraging workers and kept alive on whatever Sky didn’t finish.She understood little but knew what was to be known. Thing radiated like touch, fear, ecstasy within the workers without anyone speaking a word. The anencephalic had only a four fifth of a brain but she knew the outside was bad without being there.

“but why?”Sky persisted

“Outside kill”

“wats kill?”

“kill no eat …… no move….cold…hard”

She was dripping tears now. Sky gave up not convinced. Meg was red in the eye cranking as if possessed and was ready to pass out. Sky would wait.

“Did she tell you anything?”

Air was hardly audible whispering through a finger hole.

“No she never speaks I think she can’t”

The queen was terrible lately they will hear crashes fights of things thrown about.They never saw her but her poltergeist malevolence of the immense hate somehow communicated through and seeped into everyone, the twins included.

“Why is she always like this?”

Air conjunctures “Maybe she is in pain”

“Fed better than all and in pain”

“You never know”

If that was all the twins would have been content food and pampering.Denied nothing in the world but the outside, whose effects were plain to see. There were babies without arms or legsor deemed to be not worth the food that is to be spent on them. The rule took over by a day they were left out outside. Problem is such worthlessness is born with a noise and that can be heard a while before radiation silences it. The noise can be heard a constant high pitched scream over the snow and trees and debris. a banshee scream in pain and anguish. The twins tried to get together by trying to dissolve into the wall that separated them.

“Hate it, make it stop “the workers at times like this would go deaf and loose any comprehension abilities. Move about like automation programmed to clean, groom and feed. Impervious to the ear wrenching yellemanating from the outside. Even Meg, she didn’t even flinch or express any signs of any response. She rocked to and fro continuously winding the Geiger.The small fish head, dressed in tatters to keep of the cold with two outsized fish eyes placed almost an inch apart. Her missized hands piston pushed cycling the paddle causing the dynamo to going wheee…….in a constant annoying drone. Other than a small green light diminishing and brightening in tandem with the piston hands cycling speed, there was no toy popping out at the end of a long spring like Sky remembered a relic from antiquity she had. It was enormously clear even in the skull splitting banshee torture. There was nothing to complain about.Thankfully the sound broke in rhythm and progressively was punctuated with coughs, the coughs kept growing progressively difficult to register and in the end other than some noise of trying to creep through debris scrapping with baby hands.At intervals there’s nothing.That too disappeared as if it had never been there.

For some time Sky had been clutching silently the arm of Meg who kept winding the Geiger without exhibiting any change throughout the whole episode. She didn’t repeat anything about how the outside kills. Sky waited until she heard the familiar scratching in the walls. Meg despite her collective conscience of responsibility never betrayed Sky. Was Air having an ally in a worker maybe? Just minor discount of prison guards, they could talk but not break the walls any attempt will be eradicated. This was a little something Meg allowed after all in leaving by a day a few years and workers had passed.

Sky almost run why would Meg not talk a little more she had Air though, don’t she understand she hated the yell but then she hates this not yell worse.

“Its you Sky, thanks…let’s not ever go outside” Air was swallowing she felt her hiccup trying to hold the sentences together.