Flies buzzed around the small apartment, as they always have. Her mother used to try everything to get rid of a measly few. She said that it wasn't going to get any better with all the corpses piling in their building and the street. Then she would say that it would all get better soon, to just keep working. Everything would turn up eventually.
Her mother used to try very hard to hide her fear and anger with thinly veiled optimism. Even after the Watch began pulling corpses from the nearby buildings, boarding up their windows and doors; spraying big, red, nasty letters her father told her said "condemned."
Blood had not yet stopped trickling from the corners of her eyes, and she had not felt her fever go down in a day. The Watch had stopped letting her family leave their room days before they died — they could no longer scavenge for food, clean water, or Sokolov's elixir. That barricade was the only thing keeping a swarm from moving on to another building — of course, the Watch made a point to ignore her cries for help as she listened to hammers banging nails into place.
The scraping of tiny nails against metal and squeaking grew louder everyday despite the cloth scraps her parents stuffed into vents to keep them away. They must be starving too. There was nothing but the dust on the empty crib and her family's corpses laid and tucked neatly into bed on the other side of the room.
She laid her head against a thin pillow, shutting her eyes as she thought about if she was going to wake up in the morning.
There was movement. From the corner of her eye.
Terrified, the girl kept her face away from the window, shutting her eyes tight as she tried to ignore it, her heart racing as the being began knocking at her window. It was bearable at first, but soon the knocking became loud and aggressive, so harsh that the girl thought that the thin glass would break.
She turned towards the window after a moment, only to find the same silence there just was, and an empty window with no signs of even disturbed dust.
Slowly, someone's head arose just over the window sill, just enough their eyes could see into the room. A pale, bald head two small, beady eyes peered at her, a skeletal hand reaching back up to begin knocking on the window pane again. The girl finally stood, approaching the window to see the skeletal being, floating several stories up, with a long, dirt caked skirt billowing below them.
This was the first person she had encountered in days after her family died of the plague, what she was surely dying from now.
She was saved. All she had to do was follow the Knocker. The window creaked as it was slowly opened, the being backing away to make space for the girl to join it.
All it took was one step out. She shut her eyes, carefully putting one foot after another, and before she knew it, she was falling. Her visitor was no where in sight as she collided with the pavement.