The man is dead. His body lies unmoving and cold, lingering heat only in the embers of his clothing. One of his legs is crushed under a beam, but the rest of his corpse is cradled in a pocket of air under the debris.
His eyes are open to a shadow leaning over him. It has no form and no name and it crawls into his lungs like a worm into an apple. He doesn't feel it, can't feel it through dead nerves and decaying flesh.
It is there, though; it curls along his ribs like a favoured pet. It stretches until it runs through everything, every cell and every atom. Like a drum it beats until sluggish blood flows and petrified flesh warms.
The man is dead, but the dead don't always leave. There is no pain, there is no life, but he is dead, not gone. Not that far from him he can feel another dead man stirring. The two of them lie, almost side by side, separated by steel and wood and plaster. Two hearts, one beat. Two lives, both dead.
The man can't hear, can't see, can't remember who he is. All those things are for the living. But he thinks he might know who his neighbor is. There's a seed of hate, of envy, of want, that curls itself in his gut at the thought of this other decaying corpse besides him. It is, really, the only thing he is sure of.
When the shadow has done all it can for his still-cold body, it turns it to smoke. Even then the wreckage is almost airtight, and as he pauses to test for an opening he brings himself closer to this other dead man. He knows him. Viscerally. Knows him better than he knows himself, for he knows nothing else.
And although the hate threatens to burn him up like the explosion couldn't, he can't imagine leaving him behind. Can't imagine dying in the night without this man at his side. Can't imagine, if he is honest, dying from anything but this man. Intangible fingers grasp a slowly warming arm and pull.
Into smoke-choked air and still burning debris they land. The man coughs, sputters, feels the broken bits of his lungs bubble up from his lips. The other man is unresponsive, pale and rigor mortis quiet. Dead, but not.
Already the burns and the cuts are slowly healing. The man's own dark skin tingles faintly as once-dead nerves kindle back into life. He blinks slowly and pulls his burden onto his shoulder, stumbling a few feet before the shadow props him up. There's an animal instinct that's telling him to run, to hide someplace small and warm and safe, to lick his wounds and scream through the pain of being not dead.
Not alive maybe, but not dead.
The shadow tugs at his hair and he follows, shambling steps and slow inky smoke trails. Every step his body heals, every step the pain comes back. Once, he drops his fellow corpse so that he can shove his hands in his mouth, teeth at the numbness of his fingers. When the sensations become too much, when he looks behind him and still sees the smoking ruins, he drops to his knees and screams.
The shadow carries them away.
—
He does not remember. That is the thing that eats at him when his eyes finally open to the rough wall of a dark cave. He does not remember, does not see, though his heart now beats and his breath now rises. There's a vague shape next to him, huddled into corner of the cave wall. Shivering, choking, scratching at dark arms.
He blinks away the dust in his eyes and tries sitting up, to do—something. His body creaks, his joints pop, the pain just under his skin blooms into an all consuming thing, and now he is the one shivering, choking.
The wetness of his eyes does nothing to parch the searing pain that radiates out from them, and he realises, with a jolt of clarity he feels for nothing else, that the darkness of the cave is not just from the setting sun.
"Close y'r eyes," a voice mutters close by, and he can just make out a dark and scarred hand reaching for his face. His head is tipped back and a light, dim to his eyes but searing all the same, is kicked farther away. The surroundings become even darker, more vague, but the pain in his head lessens all the same.
"What—" he mumbles, still confused. The hand on his head squeezes for a second, and he almost thinks to struggle, but it releases almost as fast and the vague shadow of a man retreats.
"They're burnt, taking you a while to heal," the voice continues, fainter. There's the sound of something hitting rock, metallic ringing clear through the small area. He can smell smoke, and something acidic, but it's far away and meaningless to him. Everything seems meaningless, really.
"Who…?" He lets his body sag back into the rock underneath and continues to blink blearily up, tears flowing freely as his body tries to expel something that won't leave him easily.
There's silence for a while, enough that he worries for a second that he's been left alone, in this dimly lit cave with no idea what happened or who he is.
"No clue," the gruff voice says, from a corner he can only vaguely make out. "Some idiot went and blew up wherever we were before. Got nothing but the scraps left behind."
The shadow inches closer, and he tries to focus burning eyes on it. A vague silhouette of a man, inked in with shades of grey, scowls at him.
"Wasn't me," he coughs out, some vague feeling in his gut twisting at the expression on the other man's face. Something in him wants to reach out and smooth the twisted look away.
"Know that for sure, do you?"
He pauses, takes a breath through restricted lungs and tries to ignore the warning bells in his mind.
"..no," he mutters. He knows nothing after all, not even his name. He doesn't, he think, know enough to be emotional about that fact. The figure moves closer, a hand prodding at his side ungently, ignoring his flinch.
"You have broken ribs. I need to go out and get food, stay here." The shadow moves away, and he forces himself from reaching out to cling. He wants to say no, wants to demand not to be left alone, but some scrap of pride forces his limbs still and his mouth quiet.
"Here, I hope you remember how to use this," the shadow says before leaving, dropping something at his side. He scrambles to pick it up as the man literally disappears into the shadows, fingers skittering along burnt metal and familiar ridges.
It's a rifle.
—
It had been three days before the man opened his eyes. Three days where the shadow looked over the healing figure and tried to figure out who he — they — were. Of going out and scouting the surroundings, of wandering into the local town, still reeling from the explosion, to find painkillers and water.
Of carefully picking through the wreckage of the blast, under cover of darkness and away from the prying eyes of the hundreds of milling onlookers. Finding guns, familiar ones, still smoking. Finding broken picture frames and twisted data chips. Old clothing, only protected from the heat and the explosion by the heavy metal lockers they were kept in.
The clothing feels familiar, feels right. But something in him shies away from wearing the heavy material. Something besides the nagging feeling that he needs to stay under the radar.
Now he slips between alleys clad in soft civilian clothes, grey cotton and black jean. Hooded still, but inconspicuously. He walks hurriedly between the few pedestrians still on the street, keeping his face from the corners where metal glints.
Finally he arrives at the rundown mom and pop corner store that he'd noticed earlier, big enough to have a decent selection of high-calorie food, but small enough to not have much in the way of cameras or scanners.
He shuffles into the store with his shoulders half-hunched before he forces them down, turning his face away from the bored cashier at the front. Instant noodles, peanut butter, energy bars and soda bottles, as much bread as he thinks possible to get away with, dried fruit packets. Candy, lots and lots of sugar and salt and most importantly, calories. It takes him five minutes to find enough food to feed what he hazily remembers as two horrendously large appetites and brings his bounty to the teenager. He gets a suspicious glance and a shocked eye twitch when he dumps most of it on the scanning table, the rest overflowing like spilt intestines to the neighbouring display.
"Uh," the pimpled face cashier mumbles in his direction, but subsides under the force of his glare quickly enough. The man realises he doesn't know if he even knows the local language, having mostly ignored the type on the various posters and food items because of the migraine pulsing behind his eyes. He's not sure he would have been able to read them even if they were written in his native tongue.
He ignores the slightly quaking kid and watches the tally rise as item after item is scanned, counting the money in his pockets silently. Most of it is stolen, or reclaimed from the wreckage, and some of it still has blood stains splattered across.
He doesn't think the kid will tell.
Some part of him wants to reach under his hoodie and snap out the reclaimed sawed off shotgun he found next to where he first woke up, shoot until red burst bright across his retina. Shoot to protect his still healing face, his unknown identity, his unstable safety. Shoot just to shoot.
He pushes the urge down and hands over the correct amount of money instead.