Moonflower: Chapter Three

The Stranger

08/14/24

   A gasp seized in Jacob’s throat, sending him lurching up and out of the weight of the ruins burying his body. He panicked as his breath caught up to his starved lungs and he clutched at anything and everything around him in a frightened rush of confusion and terror. 

   “Let go of me!”

   He felt two hands connect with his shoulder as the woman who had rescued him shoved him away angrily, stumbling as she emerged from the pile of wreckage that engulfed them and coughing hard in the cloud of dust.

   Jacob couldn’t stop hyperventilating as he frantically searched the dark foreign environment. The room began to spin and he struggled to gasp for air through the deluge of adrenaline, his heart pounding in his ears like a sledgehammer. His eyes squeezed closed as his desperate inhales began coming faster and faster.

   “It didn't get pulled down here,” the flat tone of the unfamiliar stranger reassured him through his panicked haze. His eyes blinked open and watched fearfully as she stood up with a cautious confidence, brushing her hands together and wiping them on her pants. “…I don't think.”

   “Ah, ah…” he closed his eyes again, taking a string of sharp deep breaths.

   Fucking calm down…

   After a minute, his head had cleared enough for him to lean back in the rocks and hold his aching right leg to ease it. Fuck. He had to bite his lip so the throbbing waves of pain would not overwhelm him. It hurt bad.

   In an instant the shadows around them were illuminated in white light. He squinted up at her, the flashlight in her hand finally giving him a good look at his unlikely rescuer.

   The unbothered young woman appeared to be around his age. She was a fawn brown tan and stood no less than a foot shorter than him, with a little mole up by the corner of her nose and sporting a rather intense expression on her slim, round face. It looked as if her bangs had long grown out from serving as actual bangs, the uncut jet black hair now framing her cheeks and jaw while the rest of her long locks were pulled up into a tight bun that easily came undone at her hand. Her clothes were hanging loose on her lean figure. Jacob guessed they were a man’s clothes, the jeans held tight with a big belt and a huge, heavy, deep green jacket drooping past her waist. Strangely, it looked as if her tank top hadn't been through the hell that his prison uniform had. No obvious wear or tear spots. Sure, she was layered in gray dust from the fall, but even so it was obvious from the undamaged clothing that she hadn't been on her own for long. Those rich almond eyes were the only bright thing on her—and now they were staring him down from the tile floor in front of him with an unreadable look.

   Her voice was sharp and her words well annunciated, the sound of them somehow both sort of reassuring and a little scary. 

   “What's your name?”

   Her voice was calm but he still cleared his throat nervously before answering.

   “Jacob.”

   “Diana.”

   She wrenched her great backpack from the rubble and held a firm hand out to him.

   “C’mon.”

   What other choice did he have?

   He whimpered, wincing hard as she lifted him to his feet with one tug. It was curious—the young woman seemed to act rather uninterested in him as she helped him up, despite risking everything to rescue him from the monster above. She glanced away as she swung the backpack onto her other shoulder and took in their surroundings with the light. The beam caught specks of debris as it illuminated the disintegrating mall around them, the neon sign that once welcomed throngs of shoppers to the Downtown Dawson Mega Mall now dark and cracked, hanging by a thread from the fractured ceiling. Cobwebs decorated the bones of decayed corpses strewn across the threshold below.

   “Well this is… horrible.” She angled the light down and squinted at the silhouettes of half-decomposed skeletons. “Hm. My mom always thought a mall would be a good place to hide—didn't work out so well for these guys, did it?”

   Jacob wasn't looking or listening. It was all he could do to manage standing, every muscle in his jaw clenched to the point of snapping, gritting his teeth from the dull pain and weakness from hunger. He wavered and almost toppled over and she had to pull him closer to keep him steady.

   “Here… don't underestimate that thing's hunger,” the assertive woman encouraged as she lifted his arm over her shoulder. “We should move before it finds a way down here.”

   He was barely conscious of where they went next. Holding Jacob up by his side, she propped up his stumbling frame by leaning him against herself and maintaining a death grip around his narrow waist. His foot dragged behind him uselessly as the stranger hauled him over rubble and broken pavement, up numerous flights of stairs, around countless pillars, and over the dead grass wilting away between the crumbling tiles. He only caught glimpses of his surroundings through the bouncing beam of her dim flashlight between deep, involuntary cringes.

   They ended up in some kind of long enclosed room, her steady words echoing in the space as she carefully lowered him to the dusty floor.

   “Let's take a look at you.”

   The matter-of-fact nature she had been approaching him with was a touch gentler now. She set him down on the hard ground, finding it easy enough to tear open the already-shredded leg of his gray pants.

   “Ahh,” he squirmed at her sudden touch. “C-careful!”

   “You have to hold still!”

   They both peered down, cringing at the mutilated sight the flashlight illuminated before them.

   The skin was chapped and dark with bruising. The deep gash itself looked raw and was a sickening reddish purple color, the flesh torn horribly all the way down, yellow and green pus dotting the ugly wound. It ran from just above his knee to nearly his ankle, and its ache was worryingly light for its grotesque condition. You could just spy the white of the bone under it all, and it was not hard for them both to guess that it was definitely broken.

   “Oh, that looks bad.”

   He anxiously glanced up at her for help. “What’re you gonna do?”

   “Me?” The woman shrugged blankly. “Nothing, I'm not a doctor.”

   Oh great.

   “Shit.”

   “I’ve got some alcohol we could use but it’s definitely already infected.”

   She pulled her hair back, wrinkling her button nose as she examined the pus with a disgusted interest. His stomach was going queasy from staring at it so he quickly distracted himself by hunting through her pack and downing the old beer in one go. The liquid burned in his throat but it didn't matter. At last he had something after the endless parched days, a sweet release from one of the many pains crippling his body at that moment.

   “I mean, that was for the gaping wound in your leg, but please. Help yourself.”

   Her amused sarcasm did not dissuade him. He shook the empty bottle over his open mouth as the woman remained crouched beside the crippled inmate.

   “How long were you trapped there?” The tone of her voice seemed more curious than before, her big brown eyes full and discerning.

   Jacob cleared his throat, running a hand through his filthy blond hair and recoiling at the horrible memory, stuttering in the dark. He would have to guess when resetting his watch later. “I-I dunno… four days, maybe five?”

   “Holy hell…” She stood, looking off thoughtfully like she could see through the walls protecting them. “And how long have you been in this nightmare of a city?”

   Jacob froze. Holy shit, she didn't know who he was, did she? It was so obvious now. He thought the hidden figure might have seen him when he had taken the shot from the prison roof, but there was no way anyone would rescue the man that had gotten another survivor killed right in front of them. To her, he must be just another scavenger, someone searching like she was, and in dire need of some help. You could just make out the shape of the intimidating pocket knife she had used to cut him loose through her thick jacket as she shifted on her hip. Jacob cowered inside at the sight but was able to maintain his collected exterior. He studied the deep saturated color in her distracted eyes as he thought fast on how to make it out of this conversation alive. By the time she turned that steel gaze back to him, he knew what he was going to say.

   “I've been in hidin’ out here on my own since the beginnin’,” he lied, keeping his expression as serious as possible. “I was at the wrong place at the wrong time when the creature got me pinned out there.”

   She looked away again.

   “Huh.”

   The woman must have bought it because next thing he knew she had opened up the bag again, her back still to him. 

   “Catch!”

   He jumped as something heavy thumped into his lap. “Ow!”

   “I said catch.”

   At first he only scowled at her, but after picking it up to read the label, his eyes shot back in stunned disbelief.

   “Go ahead, you must be starving.” She casually crunched down on a stale chip and nodded to the ravioli can clutched in his hand with an optimistic smile. “It's all yours, cowboy.”

   Jacob hesitated. A whole can?

   His rescuer raised an eyebrow and laughed easily as his stomach grumbled with hunger. “I just saved your life, dude, I'm not gonna fricking poison you.”

   She wasn't afraid of him, but he was certainly afraid of her. He shrunk away slightly and examined the canned meal in the darkness. Despite the layer of rust, the lid was still tightly secured like it had come fresh from the factory. It felt too good to be true… far too good to be true. At first Jacob was almost too suspicious to take it, but his stomach was beginning to feel like it was eating through itself—as if it was a trapped creature gnawing off its own paw. He was left with no choice but to trust her now.

   The slop was cold and wet, and any other day would be considered unpleasant, but Jacob yanked the tab off in a flash, devouring the preserved food like it was a meal with a Michelin star. His brain warned him to question this stranger's wholesome gift but it couldn’t compete with the aching cry of hunger. With his tongue tracing the inside edge of the can, he shook it above his mouth just like the beer, desperate for every last morsel inside.

   There was a swish and the darkness was illuminated further by a tiny electric lantern in her hand. The flashlight hung at her side, and he considered it would be smart to conserve its power. A solar panel the size of a key fob lay beside the lantern, no doubt charged during the day for these cold nights. As far as survivors went, she was pretty well prepared—a concept that set off warning alarms in his mind. Where could she have possibly come from to still have such good gear this late in the game?

   The strange woman sat down with a little sigh, brushing off the floor around her and dropping the large pack full of food at her back.

   “Well, we better get some shut-eye,” she said offhandedly, surprising him with her candor. “You'll need your strength if we're ever going to make it out of here alive.”

   We?

   Not a second later she had plopped down and rolled over on her side, using the stuffed bag as a cushion for her head. Jacob watched her still form for a few minutes before realizing she had actually meant it. Was she really asleep right now?

   He observed her shoulders slowly rise and fall in the light of the dim lamp and felt a twinge of hesitation in his chest. She wouldn't be sleeping so soundly if she knew who he was. He bit his lip as he realized that it was no longer who he was, but who he had been. Jacob had been abandoned. Even with Andre gone and the secret of his hidden betrayal dying with that sadistic man, Goliath had not sent out a search party for him after days in the rubble. He had been left there to be fed to the beast, cold and alone, like he was little more than another nameless tally mark on the looming cafeteria wall—like he was nothing.

   Jacob looked over to the woman at his side and watched her with suspicious hesitation. She was lying peacefully, her back to him, the lumps of precious cans protruding slightly from inside the bag surrounded strands of her dark hair. Was she really asleep, or was she waiting for him to drop his guard?

   No, she had said it herself. Why would a complete stranger pull him out of the wreckage only to put him down just an hour later? It didn't make any sense—but then again, neither did her rescue. Jacob couldn't fathom why anyone would take such a foolish risk as that. His dead weight would not be an asset to her survival, and he had no visible supplies or skills that would cue her in on his value to her. What was her goal here?

   This woman was an enigma, something he couldn't wrap his weary mind around—at least not at this hour. He sighed as the truth of his situation sunk in. It didn't matter if he trusted her or not—his complete exhaustion left him no choice on his next move.

   Jacob dropped stiffly to the freezing floor and lodged his arm under his head to act as a pillow. The shabby prison garb was a heavy material, so at least he had something to keep him warm. He cringed at the irony of it. How silly was it to complain about anything when not an hour earlier he had feared his heart wouldn't beat another minute? His eyes stayed locked on the stranger's back as he realized that he would have to fight to keep it that way. This was a temporary calm, one he could not trust. There was no going back now, but in that moment, all he could do was watch her breathe through fluttering eyelids as a deep exhausted sleep finally overtook him.