A Chattering of Silence

Predawn's light speared the dreary haze of night in purple-pink hues, breaking the cloud coverage and lifting the fog. It twinkled and shed auroras off the twisted broken metal of the propeller aircraft. Jagged teeth of glass from busted windows cast off the sun in a baleful glow. The door to the cockpit hung to the side by a single hinge stretched as if it were a torture gummy bear.

I cast my eyes around. Craggy, blocky blackness scarcely outlined the edge of the woods. Small clouds escaped my nose, the spring melting the last vestiges of winter's grip. California, right? Many people were under the impression that California was always sunny and never too cold, however, there were certain regions that got pretty chilly. And this year the temperature hit an all-time low for this area.

'Course in a tragic way it made sense. Before the collapse, I'd been working on an environmental science degree. It went hand in hand with my current job. Working as a fire watcher meant understanding the change in the environment and the weather. I even did a bit of astrobiology. Part of what I did was log information collected from the area. But I didn't need a degree to understand what was happening in our world. Just good'ol fifth grade science. Or was that fourth grade?

Earth had been too hot. Even if aliens hadn't come along, humans had already been on a path to destruction of our own making. But aliens did arrive and ushered in a cataclysmic change... for humans. For every creature on this planet. The sudden rapid decline in pollutants brought about a weather snap.

Moral of the story. Don't mess with Mother.

Before all outside contact ceased, I'd heard LA had been overrun. And everything north of Fresno was razed. Whole cities wiped off the map in a desperate attempt to destroy the swarm. Xenomorphs. They'd named the bastards. Spindly black horrors with voracious appetites.

Absently, I touched the scars on my forearm. Smoothing the familiar pitted texture beneath my fingertips.

Was everyone dead? Surely not. Otherwise, the predatory aliens would've pushed their territories out here instead of remaining in the city. Meaning food was still plentiful enough that they hadn't need to move on.

Won't last forever though.

Metalic scrabbling brought my attention back to the plane. Out of the shadows of the cockpit, the glint of fang leered. A grey wolf emerged, his muzzle lightly dusted brownish reddish.

My shoulders sagged in a mix of relief and disappointment. "No survivors, huh?"

The wolf licked his lips, then used his paw to wipe at the flaky dried bits of blood. Gotrek jumped out of the cockpit, circled me once, then sat beside me.

I lowered the rifle in my hands, clicking the safety on automatically before approaching the downed craft. Inside, I found the pilot, well, what was left of him. Or maybe they had been a she? Hard to tell. What was left was to flyblown to tell. The smell was putrid but I forced myself to breathe through my nose so I wouldn't get a mouthful of the flies buzzing around.

I took a closer look at the remains. The pilot's seat belt had nearly decapitated him or her, the skin bloodless, bloated, and slick from decomp and weirdly wedged between the seat and the shell of the cockpit. The lower half of the body had been ravaged by scavengers. All that remained below the knees was a pair of eye-searing yellow rubber rainboots with gnawed bits of tibia and fibula sticking out.

Odd that the scavengers had left so much flesh in the boots. Or maybe they just had a better sense of taste than the pilot.

I chuckled at the macabre joke as I searched around for a minute. No sign of a passenger. If there was, they were lost and probably hurt. Or dead, likely. I would check the surrounding area before I left just in case.

Slipping between the chairs, I checked the small cargo hold. A single piece of luggage lay spilled open. The clothing labels helped me determine that whoever had been the pilot had at least identified as male. The jeans were too big for me, but I would definitely hold onto the zombie pinup girl shirt.

Oddly, I did find an electric razor. And a tube of LuvNuts soothing cream. Priorities, I guess. Can't have chapped nuts.

What no Speed Stick?

I picked up another article of clothing and immediately dropped it to snatch up the SATphone peeking out from under a pair of Jockeys. SATphones typically had speed dial numbers pre-set, so I started at one and worked my way through.

"Hello! Hello!" I yelled. Maybe someone would hear my voice before the ringer if I wailed a bit.

"The number you have dialed is no longer in service. Please hang-"

Click.

I got the same error until I tried the 7 on the pad. It rang. And it rang. And it continued to ring until I realized if anyone had been alive on the other end, they would've picked up. Or maybe they were in the John. I tried twice more before giving up and sliding the SATphone and its charger into my pack.

With a bit more searching I did find a first aid kit that was fully stocked. Some extra MREs, a lighter, a rain jacket, a worn paperback, and a small cache of guns. I was not a gun enthusiast. I'd seen a lot of death and destruction caused by people's incessant need for owning unnecessary firepower.

Not much here.

I would've given my left tit for a Twinkie. But even without survivors or junk food, there'd been a few good finds. So the hike had been worth it after all. And I wasn't about to look a gift horse in the mouth.

Night of the Crabs by Guy Smith fit perfectly in my back pocket. I left the guns.

A horror fic in the middle of nowhere? Now that was an epic score. The pieces of fiction I'd brought with me when I took the job had been read and re-read so many times the pages were as thin as dustless moth wings. All I'd had to read for months now was statistical data and the subtitles of Korean drama. Coffee Prince was my fav. I'd watched so much of it recently that the subtitles weren't always necessary.

I stood, knees popping from the prolonged crouch. It was a three-day trek back to the watch tower. With everything of pertinent use neatly stuffed into my pack, I hopped out of the plane. Gotrek hadn't moved, a silent grey and white specter watching me as I ducked beneath a collapsed wing. It was a minor miracle that the fuel tanks, and integral part of the plane, hadn't ruptured.

For a minute, I considered siphoning some of the aviation fuel. Once upon a time, the dumbass teen version of myself tried something similar, using a couple of trash bags and duct tape. That's when I learned, the very very hard way and the nearly explosive way that fuel can eat through certain plastics and I'd been trailing it for half a mile before another dumbass happen to flick a cigarette out of his truck in passing...

Lesson learned. No pseudo gas bladder.

Not wanting a repeat of history, I left the possibly valuable fuel behind. A person in this situation could hardly be choosy about potential supplies, but I decided I'd rather be smart this time around, better than potentially toasty.

Gotrek met my eyes, I silently gestured towards the woods and the wolf understood to head up the search. I doubted anyone walked away from the crash but maybe we'd get lucky and rescue Keanu Reeves. John Wick, Keanu. Not Bill & Tedd.

Cha. Right.

Hey, after sixteen months with no contact from the outside world, a girl could dream.

Isolation wasn't really a problem for me. I took up the fire watch position fully aware how very alone I would be. Just the way I like it. But I wasn't a freaking ice woman. I'd had a few ties that I made sure to keep tight. There'd been Divya, my sister's girlfriend, she and I were constantly trying new things- stupid things. Jason, who worked the same rotation as me when I'd worked at the 105 Station. And of course, there was Lynn.

I loved my sister. We'd only talked maybe once a month when she'd been alive, but the calls lasted hours. We'd get all our catching up done in a single afternoon and be good for a while. But when she went on expeditions, she always reached out more. Probably because I was the only one who could understand her while under the influence of vomit-inducing nerd enthusiasm.

I missed it. Missed her machine gun style of speech when she was excited. I missed her.

Gotrek huffed, pausing to sniff at something. He circled and sat. Staring at me.

There hadn't been anyone else on that plane.

I clucked my tongue and nodded in the direction of home. Gotrek didn't follow. He outpaced me and led the way. Under normal circumstances, I wouldn't've allowed myself to get so close to a wild animal. We were trained not to intervene with the local wildlife. Not unless human negligence or stupidity was at fault.

Gotrek hadn't a pack when I found him. For three nights I heard his cries and for three nights there was no return call. Highly unusual. By the fourth night, I couldn't take it, so I went in search of his pack the following morning. I found the den where his mother had given birth to him, as well as the scavenged remains of two other pups.

A mother wolf separates herself from the pack for a short time to give birth. I figured she must've been attacked by another predator and Gotrek simply got lost. Two weeks later I found the pack and reunited Gotrek with his mother. A small pack, only five in total at the time. And I thought that was the end of it.

It wasn't.

A few days later Vera, Gotrek's mother and alpha female of the pack, started approaching the tower. Soon the others followed. We'd formed a tentative trust. But Gotrek did more than observe, he began tracking me when I'd leave. Sheltered beneath the tower until I emerged. He accompanied me everywhere until we'd built a strong enough bond that we could hunt together.

Gotrek and I hoofed it back home. Stopping only to rest. Eager to be back in our own territory.

A midnight blue sea shimmered with the cold light of thousands of stars. Beneath them, towering shadows speared the sky, the wind their choreographer. The lofty spruces weren't as monstrous as the Sequoias further North, but they were no less awe-inspiring. Especially on nights of the new moon when all the light that remains are the icy specks of stars.

Fire belched and dry wood cracked thunderously in the intense heat. I absently swept the ground around the pit, kicking away the forest litterfall.

I sat by the fire. My back may have ached with weariness but my mind was still in motion. Racing. I retrieved the SATphone from my bag and stared at it. Turning it in my hands. Were SAT communications still up? One number I tried previously did ring. Another SATphone, maybe?

Does it matter? No one answered anyway.

On a whim, I tried Divya's number.

"The number you have dialed is-"

"-no longer in service. Yeah, I know." I tossed the useless plastic brick aside, huffing and puffing like a four-year-old. I kicked dirt for good measure.

"What?" I aimed my irritation at Gotrek. Who else was gonna hear my tantrum? Gotrek sat silently. Just another shadow in the night. Only his eyes pierced the dark, a flash of shocking orange before he subsumed seamlessly into the woods.

"Cha! You could've at least been my shoulder to cry on!" I shouted after him.

There was no response.

"Butthole," I muttered. "See if I share my next rabbit with you."

Folding my arms with an indignant harrumph, I roughly dropped myself to the dirt and forced myself to lie down and shut my eyes.

Go to sleep. Go to sleep. Go to sleep!

Has that ever worked?

Distantly a coyote crooned. Little creatures scampered and skittered. The rhythmic ebb and flow of the night's chorus gave me something else to focus on. I started recognizing individual calls and absently matched them to the narrators of the dark.

Coyote.

Racoon.

Frog.

Another coyote.

A heaviness swept over me. Sleep working its way through my muscles to root me into the earth.

At some point, I drifted, though I was only aware I'd done so because abruptly, I startled. Eyes drinking in the light of shedding sparks from the last whisper of the fire. Something was nagging at me and it took me a foggy few seconds to figure out what.

Silence.

Some species hide from predators. Panick movement. A quick toss of foliage underfoot. Others warn their kin and made noise to try to drive off a predator. But this was just utter stillness. Nothing moved. Nothing breathed.

What could do that? What could completely hold sway over an entire forest?

Nothing.

I quietly sat up and wedged myself against a tree and slipped the carbine into my lap. Eventually, the orange-red warmth of the cinders died. Glowing after images of embers burned in my retinas but slowly they too were consumed by the blackness. Cold settled in my gut. And at the same time, a ripple of anticipation lifted the hairs all over my body. It was going to be a long night...


A/N: I finally had a day to myself guys! I haven't been able to bang out a chapter in a single day in years! Anyway, I'm starting to enjoy writing again. Considering my long absence, I hope that joy is reflected in my work. I'll edit later if I need to. Had to just post or I likely would've lost the chance to all week. Thanks for reading!

angel897: Thank you, angel! You are such a constant. I appreciate it :)

Kaijucifer: Lmao. No werewolves this time, but hopefully I can write Odd as a kickass heroine anyway ;) I'm also working on the next chapter of Where the Forest Meets the Stars. I can't promise anything soon but I am trying. :)

NeverNeverLady: I breathed a sigh of relief reading that. I felt a little frazzled writing that prologue. I had the idea for this story for a while and finally just wrote it and tossed up the post. Much like this chapter... After taking such a long break from writing, I had a hard time deciding if it was a good opener.