#nvc:start

[beverlymcneil-blog]

LOCATION: Kaluga Oblast, Russia WHEN: Present, or recent past OPEN

The True Pathers kept to themselves, and often Beverly was grateful for that: a family, kept small and close, to make up for the family she’d never see again, now that what was once only a day away by plane might as well have been on another planet. But sometimes the enormity of what was still out there overwhelmed her: so many people, so much suffering. It was more than one person could comprehend.

Like everyone else, they didn’t have much to give away. Needed every bite of food they could get, every small scrap of something that could contribute to their survival. But, awhile removed from their current base and towards the end of a scavenging trip that had lasted the better part of two weeks, she’d gathered more than she could easily carry back.

And so, a gift: a can of fish left in the center of the entryway of the tallest, sturdiest building still standing in the small town she’d spent the morning picking over. Around the can, a shock of red yarn run through with other colors, all of them worn and faded but still brighter than anything surrounding it. A hat, once made around small campfires the past few nights, using up some of the materials she’d scavenged along the way.

It was a skill picked up what felt like a lifetime ago, trying to keep her hands busy and her nerves calm in hospital waiting rooms, when life seemed like nothing but doctor’s appointments and waiting for things to get worse. A hobby, but an idle one, something she’d never predicted would became as useful as it has. But Beverly already had a hat on her own head, as did those she called family back at the True Pathers’ base. The things she made now, she mostly made to trade, but she would part with one now, who knew who was out there now who needed one, who might find it days or weeks from now. 

Or now, as the door creaked slightly on its hinges behind her. The village had seemed empty when she had found it, as had the others she’d passed through on this trip, but there were always other people out there. Looking, searching, surviving. “Oh,” she said, putting a smile on over her surprise. “You can have that. I left it for whoever would find it first. Looks like it’s you.” 

[colonelstonewall-blog]

location: near the Oka River, outside Oryol, Russia time: present or recent past ( o p e n )

He was on his way back from a brief trip out, with a bag full of assorted scavenged items he thought he or another member of the Days might be able to salvage into something useful. The benefit to stopping, setting up makeshift base even for a bit, was that it gave them all a chance to actually take care of things that had to be overlooked while travelling. They could think about small luxuries; and little trips like this, to map out the area without real threat, were something he was grateful for. Even if on this particular outing he had found a whole lot of nothing, he still appreciated the time spent on his own, as rare as it felt ever since the end of days.

Or he had been, until he heard the distinct sound of leaves rustling, someone nearby, further from the bank of the river. It wasn’t even a surprise to turn around and see a figure crouched down near the brush. It might’ve been a bit more of one when he took a few steps forward and realized there was more rustling, faint as it was, off to the side of the unsuspecting figure. Not even serving in a war gave him flashblacks like this one did. He’d been in this situation before, and lately he’d been grappling with the thought that maybe what he did last time had been the wrong choice. Maybe it would’ve been better to walk away, not to waste anymore bullets, and to do away with any potential for the same thing to happen all over again.

The last thing anyone needed was another Russian messiah; he was done playing God.

Yet there he was. Maybe he’d gotten too soft, being around such morality daily; or maybe he had never gotten ride of it in the first place. Very slowly Stonewall pulled his beretta out of the weathered holster, as he mouthed, “Don’t move,” before putting one finger over his lips in what he hoped was the universal sign for shut the fuck up or you’re in trouble.

It wasn’t any real worry, if it was one or two, mostly just a small inconvenience and a potential waste of bullets, but there was the matter of starting a fire to kill the things, even shooting in the first place to disable. A gunshot that was going to be loud. A fire that might end up attracting other problems he hadn’t been planning on encountering. And maybe there was still a bit of the thrill of things when he pulled his gun out, the same one he had been gifted when he ranked to Colonel all those years ago. Maybe, no matter how much he hated holding the power of life and death in his hands, he liked knowing that he was doing his duty, in a way; duty to a different god, now, but duty nonetheless.

He was aiming low, from the sound of it the thing wasn’t going to be on its feet, and he could feel his heart pumping in his ears, watching, waiting. A few more seconds of rustling, though, and out of the brush came nothing more than a too-small fox with half an extra tail growing from its side. If there was a small part of him that was disappointed, he tried to push that aside in favor of relief.

“Well, fuck me gently,” he breathed, half laugh in his voice, as he relaxed his stance. He still didn’t put the gun away, on the chance that the stranger he had nearly turned into another messiah was the real threat he had been facing, rather than the two-tailed fox. 

[daryavolkov]

location: a small town on the Russia/Ukraine border time: dawn, about seven months ago      ( @theghostnikita )

The sun would have been coming up, if anyone still believed there was a sun capable of rising behind the thick clouds of heavy white ash that had become their sky. The gradual lightening of the landscape around them was the only augury of the coming daylight, the chromatic gradience of the clouds from black to gray to almost-white. In another hour or so, Xenia or someone else would rest a hand on their shoulder and tell them to get some sleep, their watch over for a few hours, the next in the rotation of scouts. But for the moment, they had been lulled into a dulled complacency by the whistle of the wind through the scaffolding of the barn the Days had holed up in on their way north. 

A hole in the worn thatched roof provided a lookout point from one end of the barn, towards the road ahead and the land around it, while piles of mildewed hay made a soft enough bed for those resting. It wasn’t the kind of location Darya liked for the Days to stay in. Remote, out in the open, too low to the ground for comfort. They were more likely to be ambushed here than they were in a town, where people were too afraid of hidden walkers to search collapsing buildings, where a higher vantage point and their small collection of sniper rifles gave them the advantage over anyone seeking anything but good will. 

Someone was patrolling the area outside, of course, keeping an eye on the wooded area around them, the approaches Darya couldn’t see from this angle. They’d been listening for a whistle, a sign from the other scout that there was movement nearby. They hadn’t heard anything, not for hours, not even the rustle of footsteps in the thick, untended grass. Nothing but the wind.

Until-- just now, just there, the snap of a twig outside, and they sat up with a start, barely remembering to keep their movements languid and gentle so as not to make a sound themself. And there it was: a figure, in the distance, keeping close to the tree line, moving like a ghost through the dwindling shadow. Not one of theirs, that much was apparent. 

They moved, slowly, carefully, into a crouch, their head peeking over the edge of the hole in the roof to get a clearer view of the person outside, trying to evaluate if that person knew they were here, if that person meant any harm, or if they were only passing through, a chance brush with another survivor oblivious to their existence at all. 

[ofliliu-blog]

Location: Somewhere Outside the Ukraine Time: A year ago, roughly; midday.

She never could tell if it was the fault of nuclear winter or just the general climate of the Ukraine that left everything coated in a layer of snow and grime; perhaps it was still the falling ash from the skies that seemed almost set ablaze when everything had gone so south that was now filling their lungs every day, and yet she stood beneath the icy waft and seemed almost at peace, and for whatever reason, completely concealed.

Generally she favoured darker colours, but both the climate and terrain of her current position lent themselves to lighter colours: greys and whites now wrapped around her body, a tighter layer beneath, followed by a looser cover, followed by furs. She looked like a slight form of bear as she trudges through the snow, her dark hair hidden far beneath the ushanka that rested along her crown, and she stalked through the snow with little tread, careful to only step where people had been before.

The crumbling buildings around her looked like teeth in a broken woman’s mouth, all different colours and shapes and sad as they peeked through the destruction that surrounded them, but the city felt dead as well, not a breath rustling the streets as she looked about for a proper place to bunker down for the night.

She could rely on the kindness of strangers, right? It was rarely true, and generally you had to hope to find a place before someone else did and set up a perimeter so you could keep it to yourselves. Thieves and vagabonds were the lifeblood of the world gone wrong, and though she had more than enough experience to make even the most burly man cry, she didn’t seek a fight that night, and instead sought food and shelter.

A sudden snap through the air brought her down to bear in the snow, her eyes barely visible among the ichor that crowded the streets with the snow and the filth; was it human or was it something else? She didn’t care. Until they stepped into view and she could see, she considered them an enemy regardless of their life.

Loath as she was to draw attention to her position, her fingers gently rustled beneath the snow and deeper, the gloves keeping her from freezing through but doing little for her ability to actually feel the texture, and grabbed a rock. Her wrist gently flicked deep beneath the snow to not disturb her own hiding spot and send the rock skidding across to clack against a sidewalk nearby.

If what were there were dead, it would move immediately towards the idea of a moving meal, if it were not..? It’d be cautious, and so too would she. The dead were easier to deal with than the living; people frowned upon killing the living.

[jakubzietek]

title not bad by apocalypse standards location a small farmhouse, east belarus date 2000 when present warnings mentions of starvation, war horrors, violence with @maksvoloshyn

One month. That was how long he’d been alone.

Kuba blew at the lines he’d carved into the door frame. Once upon a time children might have measured their heights here, had fought over who was growing more, who was getting bigger and stronger. If anything Kuba felt as if he were shrinking, his long limbs curling in on themselves, until he was some kind of mangled insect, more vertebrae than meat. Feather-light bones. 

On cue, his stomach rumbled. Kuba absent-mindedly rubbed it. He couldn’t feel his bones through his layers of shirts, scrounged jumpers, and his trusty parka, but he could imagine what he might look like. At school they had been learning about death camps. The photos quelled their ordinarily raucous class into a somber, uncomfortable silence. More stretched skin and elastic sinew than any of them could even imagine. Even the butcher’s boy, Aron, could only compare them to the skinless rabbits hung up in his father’s shop. After school Kuba had teased him about the analogy. He couldn’t remember why. Because he’d been an arsehole, probably. The memory made him smile once, briefly. He rubbed his thumb over the carvings and stepped away.

Tracks criss-crossing the dusty floorboards. Scuffles where he’d retied his shoelaces; or slumped, bored, on the floor; or tried once to build a fire in the middle of the room instead of in the fireplace. That had been a mistake. Kuba stuffed his hands in the pockets of his parka and surveyed the space. The upstairs farmhouse was less safe than the bottom floor: that was something the militia had drilled into him. Never go above ground, his commander told them, stolen tobacco lingered with sour breath, stay where you can make a stand; where you can fight.

Where you can run, Kuba added silently. 

But ashen wind whistled through the cracks of the bottom floor doors; and in the three nights he forced himself to sleep down there, in a cupboard by the stairs, he’d dreamed of the house bearing over him, an enormous weight readying for the crush. No, better up here, with the stripped bedrooms and the sink with the dripping tap. Someone before him had taken anything of value until only the battered furniture remained. The bedframes were brass, and therefore were unable to be burned, but Kuba had managed to rip the panels off the wardrobes and side-tables, and had a small stack of wood by the fireplace in the upstairs master bedroom, which was where he now stood. 

He never bothered with inventories. Food came and went. But when his stomach cramped again, Kuba felt his jaw tighten. He took mental note of what he had left. A plastic supermarket bag, wrapped twice around a kitchen knife. A nest of blankets on the double bed where he slept like an animal. A black backpack with a couple of tins of food. A wheel of cheese. A dented water canister given to him by the militia. Kuba adjusted the piece of fabric he used in lieu of a gas mask and exhaled wearily.

You know what you have to do, murmured a voice in the back of his head. Town isn’t too far.

Kuba ran his tongue over furry teeth. He automatically moved over to the windows, which were not bordered up but did have privacy shutters that banged when the wind got bad. From the second floor the fields looked empty. Nice, even, in that dry post-nuclear way he had come to know intimately after endless patrols and scouting missions. Long faded yellow grass waved in the persistent cool breeze, and grey silt washed over the scene like ink in water. Clouds pressed against the steel-grey sky. Way off in the distance he could see the boundary fence. The post-box. On the other side of the house was the barn, the outhouse, and a smoke shed. All empty. All safe.

I could go tomorrow, Kuba thought guiltily. It looks like it might rain. I could just stay here. Where it was warm(ish), safe(ish), and - best of all - there was no chance of being followed by bandits, or held up at gunpoint, or robbed, or raped, or any of the countless things that had happened to him since the world ate itself whole. He thought then of the tins of food in his bag. He might even have peaches left.

Peaches and a small fire. Kuba made a considering face to himself. Not bad, by apocalypse standards.

[emiliyalebedeva]

location: Roshcha, Russia time: present or recent past [@rosalesernesto]

Seventy-one percent of the Earth was covered in water. Of that a good sixty-five percent of the water must have become contaminated during the wars, polluted, unsafe to drink. Before the world had fallen, Emiliya had taken for granted just how much she appreciated water – how much she appreciated lounging in the bath after a stressful day on photo shoots or stomping down runways. She took for granted just how easy it was to grab a glass of water whenever she wanted without having to worry about where it came from.

               Now though? Now water had become more valuable than gold. It was one of the primary sources of survival; a necessity that had become next to impossible to come across without suffering the wrath of other survivors along the way. That was why Emiliya was rummaging through whatever houses remained standing in the small town, hoping to come across anything that could be of use to her – bottled water, weapons, goods that she could use to trade. She’d take anything at this point to give her a chance to survive another day.

               A sigh fell from dry lips as she left yet another empty house. It, like all the others she’d rummaged through, had been picked clean – the vultures having already descended upon them and ripping apart the decent meat, leaving behind only bare bones that were good for nothing. Rubbing the tiredness from her eyes, Emiliya set her sights on a house towards the end of the road. It looked mostly untouched from what she could tell, the windows remained intact, the door was still on its hinges and the paves were lined in a thin layer of untouched ash.

               Taking in a deep breath, she started towards the house, a hand resting on the end of the chain that was draped across her shoulders. Though it seemed clear she wouldn’t take any chances, for all she knew somebody could have made camp in there and just not left for days – maybe even weeks. As she pushed open the door, Emiliya winced as a loud screech echoed through both the empty house and down the desolate street behind her. Poking her head through the door, Emiliya nodded as the coast looked clear.

               Moving further into the house, the brunette checked each room as she went, muttering to herself as each was revealed to be clear of intruders. Finding herself in the kitchen at the back of the house – fairly recently renovated before the wars, from what she could gather – she allowed herself to relax slightly, her hand dropping from the end of her chain as she once again started her routine of rummaging through cupboards for whatever hidden goods may be left there.

               Only a few minutes had passed before Emiliya was jolted out of her scavenging. She could hear the soft pitter-patter of feet on the hard wooden floor of the hallway. Pulling herself away from the cupboard she was searching, she threw herself back against the wall, hand firmly gripping her chain ready to face whoever had just entered the house. It wasn’t a walker, that much she was certain of – the footfalls were far too delicate and seemed to have a purpose that the undead lacked.

[a-rko]

LOCATION: straddling the Polish-Belarusian border, deep in the Białowieża forest WHEN: at least two weeks prior, at any point in the past few months WITH: open

It was another one of those cold, stillborn days. The sky refused to brighten, and even the trees seemed to huddle closer and shiver.

Sinking to the forest floor, Arko crossed her legs lotus-style and placed Iskra flat across her lap. The Doc Martens were already standing off to the side, their leather tongues lolling and their laces unknotted; next to them, her rucksack slouched to the ground, half-empty. She’d gotten desperately low on food. Starvation was a grotesque look on anyone, but on someone so small it was even more pitiful; beneath the optical illusion of her enormous jacket, her stomach had started to cave in towards the spine. Like there was a sinkhole yawning beneath the skin.

 Brow creasing finely, Arko pulled off two layers of socks, then set to work unwrapping the bandages on her feet - padding, to keep the men’s size shoes from falling right off as she walked. She folded the dirty gauze and placed it neatly next to the boots. Then she lowered her hands, like a pilgrim praying at a road shrine, softly onto the sheath of the katana. Her eyes fell shut.

Somewhere in the forest, she could hear the river moving, talking to itself in its own slow language.

When she meditated, she could sit like this for hours: eyes slitted, breath coming shallow, her face slack and utterly lineless. She almost looked like she could be sleeping, if not for the rigidity of her spine and the way her hands rested on her sword with the slightest suggestion of a grip. She was something unmoving, unfeeling. A body without a tenant. The hunger pains were growing distant now; the cold air winnowed around her, but it was a bone-deep chill she no longer felt. Arko tunneled into herself, burrowing deeper, excavating the quiet, immense spaces that made up the caverns of her heart -  places that echoed back her own loneliness like footsteps, places where no word had ever entered.

Leave it behind, punker. 

Slowly, she emptied out. Erased every face, every unspoken name, every experience her body had ever collected. She discarded all the days before this one; whittled down the hours and minutes till she was only left with the passing seconds. No past, no future. Barely even a present. The gulf between her and the world widened, and she drifted off further and further, a little ice floe in the middle of a black Arctic sea.

Leave it behind. Nothing unclean can stay.

It wasn’t obvious what gave the intruder away, but something did; beneath the twitching eyelids, her pupils briefly pulled in to the size of pinpricks, then spread again when her eyes cracked. Arko took in the sight of the stranger with no alarm, only a serene, slow-blinking clarity. Her hands remained motionless on the sheath of her sword; she simply stared back, waiting for the stranger to determine this interaction for the both of them- to reach for her boots, or her bag, or pull out a weapon of their own. 

[ottofalken-blog]

LOCATION: abandoned warehouse somewhere in north Belarus TIME: mid afternoon, 2 months prior { @emiliyalebedeva }

Rust had a smell. Otto hadn’t realised until everything began to corrode around them. One brick at a time society crumbled; one tree at a time it died. When metal erodes, is gnawed at by the damp and its body diminishes, what’s left lingers bitterly on the air. Not even a shadow of the material that drove the human race remains as it becomes a smell that’s heavy as you inhale, weighing you down from the bottom of your lungs. People used go to the countryside to get away from the smell of industry and the polluted oxygen, but now it drifts in the breeze amongst that of rotting flesh.

               Otto inhaled through the fabric that wrapped around the lower half of his face. Air filtered through the mucky threads and with it came that smell. Maybe it was due to his senses not being clogged up by a busy world that demanded attention, but Otto noticed more now. He took in his surroundings; he could see the details in front of his face. The smell came from the metal walls that encased him. He was in a warehouse. The walls had holes in, were dented or bent back. Dubious stains decorated them.

               Although Otto couldn’t stop his gaze from landing on those sticky stains, he dragged it away and moved onward. He was there to loot and salvage anything he could, not stand wondering who was smeared on the wall and what their story was. So many stories were left untold, why should that person be any different?

               It was a risk, entering a big building like that on your own —there was no telling who or what might be lurking inside — but if you were as hungry as Otto was, you wouldn’t care either.  He was busy creeping down a corridor when he heard a clatter up ahead as though something had been knocked onto the floor. It echoed around the warehouse for so long that Otto questioned if it had actually happened more than once.

               He froze. His muscles tightened with anxiety. Adrenaline instantly pumped into his veins. Things don’t just fall on their own. Shuffling in the distance. The sounds of an animal scrabbling at the floor.

               Normally Otto would turn and run, he wouldn’t endanger himself by going towards a commotion, but there was the possibility what this could be the perfect distraction for him. His weight shifted from foot to foot as he considered the pros and cons. He clutched his metal piping and headed towards the noise to scout it out. He moved near silently, a complete juxtaposition to the raucous resonating from the end of the corridor that opened up, the ceiling doubling in height.