It was blind; dark; nothing but the faint rustle of leaves, the unmistakeable scatter of feet raking through them, that had drawn her from the pseudo-comfort of her tent, an arm nudged into the rib of Captain America himself and her own son, Björn, with the distinct order to go wake the others.
The darkness was a mask—it was suffocating enough, staring at the folds of canvas above her, let alone when ѕ ᴛ ʀ ᴀ ɴ ɢ ᴇ ʀ ѕ trudged through land so clearly marked their own. But it made it difficult to fight, to squint into the blackness and make out a face; a feature; anything to define them as any more than the mindless scum that all cities teemed with.
But usually, the stench came before the sight. There was no mistaking it when death lingered in its stead, grinning with rotting teeth, nitrogenous and nefarious, with mindless lurches: desperate, defiant, incoherence gushing from their lips with every lunge.
Dead men and their grapples were parried with sleek steel, carved and sharpened, the bite of an axe resting on shined, splinterless wood and now kissed and smothered with inklings of red, of life—but that wasn’t life. Those things weren’t alive; they would simply be put back into the ground and left for the gods to decide their fate.
Darting, with lithe fingers grasped tightly around the hilt of the axe she’d salvaged from the cracked sternum of a heavy-chested walker, a strong thwack of steel into the neck of one, and the skull of another, breaths became ʟᴀʙоᴜʀᴇᴅ, heavy and wheezing through her chest. There was a single moment of calm—euphoric, when adrenaline coaxed ferocity from her veins, draining it and trickling it over the axe’s bloodied hilt. It was a moment she’d seek Steve out of the haze, struggle through the chaos, striking a final blow to the one skulking behind his back.