The closet was nothing she hadn't seen before.
She had found it while on-task from the Tower, tucked away in a shadowed corner of a small, dingy apartment, and she'd come back. She'd stepped over bloodstains and cracked objects and other signs of violence, boots crunching on debris. Had walked past the evening-lit window and its broken glass, which gave way to a shattered vista of the infected city.
She'd reached the closet in no time at all, and now here she was. Standing in the still and quiet, staring into its thrown-open emptiness.
The doors were thin. All of the closet was. Battered, feeble wood that barely looked able to hold together by itself, let alone take the punishment of the plagued world. It looked lonely in the room, huddled in the dark. Sad, almost. Her eyes kept moving.
From a thin metal railing hung a small row of clothes. It was mostly flimsy jackets and bland trousers, made cheap and stored away jumbled. A few moth-eaten shirts and nightgowns. She didn't envy the former occupant, even less so for what remained of him stuck to the end of her pipe wrench. She had forced her way in. Some of the hung clothes were undersized. She did her best to put it from her mind.
Her gaze traveled slowly down in the silence, to the back wall where the clothes didn't reach. There were markings here, white chalk in sharp relief against the dusty brown wood. Scruffy little pictures, drawn on the backboard. Despite the situation, she felt the need to study them carefully, scouring her restless eyes over every grain of wood and line of chalk.
They were crude and childlike, not much to look at. A lopsided drawing of a plane and its smiling pilot. It reminded her of the nightly airdrops, and desperate, sweaty outings. There were cartoonish stars and a curvy moon, drawn big. She didn't see stars like that in the sky anymore. The Harran of today was choked with ash and smoke, and now they glimmered weakly behind torn clouds. She couldn't remember the last time she'd seen a full moon.
The last drawings were figures. Innocent doodles of twisted people, mouths wide and howling. One was lying down with a little boxy sword sticking out of it, sprinkling lines everywhere. The other was standing up, more lines spraying out of its arm. It was unnerving to look at; she'd run into plenty of the dead up close. But something about seeing them as scribbles made her clutch her wrench a little tighter, turned her knuckles a little whiter. It wasn't right. It felt so wrong.
She was also finding it harder to ignore the way the pictures ridged here and there. Small claw-marks raked the wood and chalk, where fingers had dug at it in a frenzy. Some of it had come off, leaving outlines broken in places. The smell of gore had filled the room as the evening ticked on, leaving her feeling trapped and disturbed. She had been avoiding looking at the bottom of the closet.
She glanced at the propped-up head of a teddy bear with a stained blotchy little face, and the top of the teardrop-shaped lamp lighting it up. She didn't dare go lower than that. The bear's somber expression was bleak in the glow of the lamp, beady eyes staring into nothing. She wanted the lamp to flicker and dance, but it only cast a constant low light in stillness.
Her ears tensed for any distraction, anything at all, but the room was deathly silent. Outside it had not reached nightfall, but deep shadows had started to creep across the room from the falling sun, clutching at her like fingers. It was the evening lull, and time for her to get moving if she wanted to make it back in one piece. She thought anxiously of walking away right now, fear already churning inside her, mouth dry with the taste of rot.
But she knew she couldn't avert her eyes any longer. She had come here for a reason; it was time to face it. She swallowed heavily, took a deep breath, and let her eyes drop to the small and mangled body at the bottom of the closet.
She saw the remains of the child. She saw with fresh eyes, unlike everything else in the closet she'd looked at over and over. It felt like a sledge to the gut, and her weakening body shuddered around the horrible urge to vomit. Her eyes strayed as far as they could without looking away. Blood and handprints caked the closet floor and walls, evidence of a struggle. The body itself was sprawled and twisted, missing chunks and exposing unmentionable carnage. She met the glassy eyes of a surprised, gaping face, and her own twisted up in unfamiliar grief. She was hardened by the savagery of the new Harran, but knew now she still had a heart left to be broken.
Too late.
She was too late. She hitched, forced herself to turn away from the grisly sight, and drew a sharp breath. It made her eyes sting and her jaw tremble. She clenched her face hard in an effort to fight back both, painfully suppressing horror and dread, and the guilt of still being alive and breathing in this broken empty room where someone so small had died. Her brain struggled to wipe the sight from memory, and her chest tore in two all over again as it surged straight back in.
The face crept up in her mind, soft and young and innocent and dead. She trembled, trying to take comfort in the knowledge that the child was set free from such a cruel world, even as her stomach betrayed her and forcibly emptied itself onto the bloodied floorboards. Bleary eyes flickered down, registering the caved-in skull of the feral dead she'd wrenched on the way in. Fresh wreckage scattered by their struggle; ruined tables and smashed portraits. She saw red drenching the zombie's teeth, and had to look away.
Dizziness set in, and then passed slowly. She tensed and un-tensed every muscle she could think of. Repeated one thought in the wounded chasm of her head, and glared through the shattered glass at the vanishing sun. The first howls of the night went up in the distance.
She had been too late this time. But she wouldn't ever be again.