Chapter Text
Snow crunched rhythmically under the ill-fitting boots of Nikolai Gogol, as he followed the coastline road to his right. He listened to the whistling of the wind; calm, thus far; searching intently for noise of any threats, animal or human.
Although as it was, Nikolai had seen no one alive since before the storm brought his plane down a few long days ago. Miraculously, he had made it out with only a handful of cuts and bruises, a lot less of his luggage than would have been preferred, and the notion that some replacement clothes would be in order.
The same could not have been said for the pilot.
Nikolai had never seen a dead body before. Quite frankly, he had been sure he never would see one, as was the general expectation for normal, everyday people. It felt as though he should have had a more climactic reaction, seeing the pilot crushed and crumpled against the plane's dashboard, but all Nikolai had felt was a slow, sinking dread as he realised he was now alone, followed swiftly by relief that at least that hadn't been him.
After clambering out of the plane, with some difficulty owing to the contorted metal of the plane body leaving his passenger door stuck, until kicked out with enough force, Nikolai had taken whatever was salvageable and of use in the wreckage, and headed off. Where, he hadn't known. He didn't even know where in the world they had crashed, as it certainly wasn't his destination. Yet he had moved on, driven by the then realistic hope of finding someone to help him.
He glanced down at the note he fiddled with in his right hand. Written near illegibly in blood over the words of a church's hymnal; "Beware the monsters who look just like you."
Nikolai still moved on, driven by his will to survive and get through, rather than give in and fade away as he was sure the hopeless were meant to do in any such situation.
As he walked steadily on, Nikolai pondered the chance that the note was some offhanded prank. He had found it in a ruined church along the way that he'd briefly stayed in, after all; a prime location for some haunting note to juxtapose the welcoming nature religions usually presented. Forgetting himself, the man wondered what Dostoy would have had to say about it.
Even his thoughts seemed to go silent. For a long moment, he quietly processed the sounds around him. Wind in the trees up to his right that would have bit at his nose and cheeks if not for the scarf he had stolen from the pilot's case, the soft thuds of his shoes, now against the concrete of the road, occasionally broken by thicker settled snow atop the grey and painted yellow surface. There was a blue car askew on the road ahead of him, and Nikolai had the vague idea to check whether or not it's keys had been left inside, and whether it would run. Perhaps he could come back to it if he really didn't find anywhere with somewhere just... living a regular life here, despite the apocalyptic atmosphere.
Would he ever see Dostoy again?
Nikolai knew he should have shook the thought off until he was certain that there was something amiss in this place. It shouldn't have been left to fester in his head, prompting anticipatory grief for the loss of even the smaller details of how his life had been until just days before. The sweet taste of the frosting on a shared cake, a pair of gentle, reserved smiles, the soft noise of the keys of a piano being pressed. Had that sound ever meant anything to anyone as much as it did to him?
A nearby howl, too close for any hint of comfort, led Nikolai to try the doors of that blue car with bated breath, rather than to simply trudge past it as originally intended. He didn't know much about wolves, and how they behaved around humans, but that certainly didn't mean now was the time to find out. To his luck, the first door Nikolai tried opened with ease, and he quickly threw in his bag and settled himself into the drivers seat before slamming the door tightly shut behind him. A saving grace, however it did further dwindle his beliefs that surely, everything here was a semblance of okay. Who in their right mind would just leave their car, in the middle of a road, unlocked and ripe for the potential taking? A glance and a quick root through the passenger side glove box told Nikolai that, at least, the owners had had some sense to not leave their keys in here, but for anyone who knew how to hotwire one, this car was as good as gold.
Coincidentally, Nikolai had once done so before; though he carried nothing with him he could use to even remove the steering column cover, so that option was off the table.
He would watch out the windows and wait for a while, no longer than thirty minutes, then push on.
Nikolai had no point of reference for how long he had fallen asleep for, unable to see the position of the sun owing to the now cloudy and dim sky. Snow fell slowly and softly in the world outside his window, and Nikolai saw or heard no wolves, or any other animal for that matter. He felt in his pocket for his phone, trying it to see the time even though he already knew from the days before that it was now nothing more than a cracked dead weight.
It still seemed to be day, at least. Snow in the night had proven near impossible for Nikolai to see through.
Repocketing his phone, Nikolai gathered his bag and opened the door beside him. It had become much too cold in the car for him to stay in there over the likely coming night. Hoping to find a building of more substantial shelter was certainly playing dangerously with his luck, and for a moment he hesitated, brow slightly furrowed as he studied the road ahead of him, weighing up the risks and benefits of a continued venture. With the snowfall, however light, it was hard to see into the distance in any semblance of detail; though it still seemed easy enough to follow the road itself. If things turned in the way of misfortune, Nikolai always had some matches and tinder, picked up and gathered on his way, so a fire wouldn't be out of the question.
With a little more consideration, Nikolai soon concluded that now was as good a time as any. He didn't have much left to eat with him, and it was better to try to move closer to where he could perhaps find something rather than staying static and risking the weather worsening into the night.
So he set off; a faster pace now than before his unscheduled slumber, in the direction he hoped so greatly would yield results. He teetered once more between awareness of his surroundings, and the quiet contemplation of his lonesome thoughts. Many of them were growing anxieties, and this time Nikolai endeavoured to dismiss, rather than entertain them. The rest had left him with a calmer mind, one that held a clear resolve to make it back to Dostoy safely, no matter how long he took or how currently fruitless such a goal seemed; and he had no room for doubts.
Steadily, the sky continued to darken, and Nikolai squinted through the limited visibility to try and pick up on anything new in the distance, beyond the road and the trees. A few more cars littered the road ahead, blocking most of the width of the concrete, though by now it would have been a struggle to discern which colors they were. Beyond the blockage, nothing yet.
Nikolai pulled his jacket tighter around himself, though it did nothing against the uneasy chill settling within him as he navigated his way through the cars. All he had left held for hope of finding some normal little town where someone would help him was implausible, optimistic reasoning. For his entire time spent here already, he hadn't seen a single person, only ghosts of an abandoned past, and vague hints of an existence afterwards. The thought was beginning to genuinely unsettle him, and with it as he pressed further on and became able to make out a small house in the distance, he wasn't sure how he was to react. Shelter and food, likely. A confirmation that he really would be going through all this alone, likely. The two cancelled each other out, and Nikolai's feelings conflicted over relief and dread.
Yet there was nowhere else to go.
The distant house, from what Nikolai could see through the dusk light and falling snow, was a small two story, with a fenced off back garden containing some type of metal framing. Compared to the church Nikolai had stopped in a few days ago, the house was in a much better condition. Perhaps that church had been long abandoned by the time something had clearly gone wrong here, accounting for it's dilapidated state.
It seemed like Nikolai would have to trek a little off the road to reach it, but given he now had a clear destination in his sight, it didn't seem too daunting a requirement.
By the time Nikolai reached the front door of the abode, the snow had picked up enough that combined with the night sky, he could barely see a few feet in front of his face. A miracle, truly, that his decision to leave the car had turned out alright what with the little room for error it had left for him.
He gave this entire situation the benefit of the doubt, and knocked.
Perhaps it was the wind past his ears and biting at his raised hand, but Nikolai pictured that to anyone inside, his arrival would sound more akin to a scene from a horror story. A growing storm outside, yet someone still banged on the door to be let in.
A moments grace was given before Nikolai grew too cold and impatient to wait any longer. He tried the handle, flinching at the frozen metal on his skin. A mental note to find some gloves somewhere, then.
The door wasn't locked, though only opened a crack before it was met with some resistance. A chain lock? Nikolai couldn't see one cutting through the open gap. Was someone pushing the door back his way on the other side?
Beware the monsters who look just like you.
Shit. Whoever it was wasn't going to let him in, were they?
"I'm not here to hurt you." Nikolai stated awkwardly, his voice both feeling and sounding strange in his throat after not speaking for three days. "Please, I need help, my plane crashed and I don't know whe-"
The door budged slightly forward, feeling more like something had been placed in front of it to discourage would-be intruders, than someone actively stood preventing his entry. Definitely not a chain lock at this point, otherwise Nikolai was certainly in need of a re-evaluation of confidence in his own strength.
With an inkling of guilt that the man offhandedly discarded, he pushed his entire strength against the door, until he felt something give before he stumbled inside.
Inside was eerily quiet, beyond the sound of the wind through the door still open behind him. Nikolai found himself in a kitchen, one that already seemed to have been thoroughly ransacked. Some cupboard doors had even been torn from their hinges and lay haphazardly on the floor; by a family packing in desperation to leave? By those dubbed 'monsters' he should be afraid of? Not so distantly, he hoped at least something had been left. Nikolai would count himself no stranger to going without, but with a situation such at this, that weakening pain of hunger would be nothing if not unideal. Later, he could check later. Once he was sure here was definitely safe.
Nikolai turned on his heel to face the door, moving to close it and keep the house from getting too cold. He noticed there was in fact a chain lock on the door, unbroken; and as the latch clicked shut, Nikolai was about to slide the lock into place too, when something fell against his foot.
Nikolai had only ever seen one dead body before.
Nikolai felt bile rising in his throat as he stared at the dead face below him. A woman, not young but not old, though his ability to guess correctly guess her age was greatly diminished by her empty, dead state. Her skin was pallid beyond the crimson dried blood trailing from the bullet wound in her forehead, and her eyes devoid of any light. There hadn't been someone trying to keep him out, after all. She had died against the door, and he had been pushing her out of the way.
He backed up ever so slightly, gently shuffling his foot from under her head to let it rest against the wooden floor instead. He swallowed the acid in his throat, cringing at it's burn, unable to tear his eyes away from her. Some other, undescribed emotion clouded his thoughts, one that he couldn't name even if he tried. A sinking feeling in his stomach, but not on account of feeling sorry for this woman's loss of life, instead some sorrow he couldn't place.
She had been killed.
The thought refreshed Nikolai's mind, and he was finally able to push his feelings away and give the room a quick scan. A small kitchen diner, not spacious by any means, perhaps once considered cosy by the family who had lived here. Its dining table held six cushioned chairs, and there were still a few dishes left unwashed atop it. Aside from himself, though, the room was empty. He hoped the same would hold for the rest of the house, yet just in case of anything; or, well, more likely anyone unexpected, Nikolai decided on a quick root through the kitchen drawers to find some kind of cooking knife to take with him.
Now armed, as insurance against any intruder left inside, Nikolai continued further into the house, through the door opposite the front door. It was already pushed open, and he could see the shadowy outlines of living room furniture through the doorway. It had most certainly by now turned to night, and the light coming through the windows was only that of the moon glowing dimly through the falling snow. Curiously, Nikolai tried the kitchen light switch, though it proved to be of no avail. Either the weather outside had knocked out the power, or there hadn't been any in the first place. Not that it mattered, really; despite how indifferent Nikolai had found his thoughts to have become about the body in the kitchen, he still wouldn't want to stay here too long for shelter. A practicality, actually. He wouldn't want to get sick by staying around a dead body for too long.
Having given himself a moment to allow his eyes to adjust a little more to the darkness, Nikolai stepped into the living room. Like the kitchen, it wasn't too spacious. A three-seater couch was pushed against the wall to his right, facing a smaller scale TV set atop a coffee table. Next to the couch, in the furthest right corner of the room, was another door, closed. Opposite were the stairs, quarter turn, and on Nikolai's left was a little alcove, where the stairs met the landing above, with a door to another room and one presumably to a cupboard under the stairs.
No one dead. No one else alive.
Nikolai spent a little longer checking the adjacent rooms. A sort of storage room, he supposed, behind the door by the couch. It had led further on to the back garden, though given the weather Nikolai had simply put the chain latch on and abstained from looking outside. The door to his left, by the stairs, had led to a bathroom, with nothing out of the ordinary beyond the fact that it had definitely been searched and stolen from; as had the storage room. However, the door that seemed to lead to an under the stairs cabinet was locked from the outside. Odd, Nikolai had thought, but at least it meant there would be no one hiding in there who would try to hurt him.
Remaining to be searched were the rooms upstairs, then Nikolai would finally be able to rest. His feet were now starting to ache, and while part of him longed to sit in the living room and rest for a few hours, he didn't wish to risk being attacked by anyone also potentially squatting there. It didn't seem to far of a stretch, after all. Considering the... fresher state of the body in the kitchen, she could have been killed even as soon as a mere day ago, and Nikolai didn't particularly want to be letting his guard down whilst potentially under the same roof as the one who had killed her.
Certain steps on the stairs creaked as Nikolai ascended, their volume amplified in comparison to the relative silence of the house. Each creak made him wince lightly and halt, but no response to his noise ever came. Yet still, the hand clutching the knife he had picked up didn't relax just yet.
The landing served as a cornered walkway overlooking the living room, with nothing inherently special about it beyond that. At the corner, there was an end table, a vase of wilting lilies atop it. In front of Nikolai was a door, decorated in children's drawings, that looked distinctly eerie in their new lighting and context. To his left and down the hall was another door, and to his right, past the corner, led to the last room.
The kid's room could wait. Ideally, until morning, when more light spilled through the windows, but to do so would make this entire house search pointless.
A quick search behind the door to his left showed nothing beyond what seemed like a teens bedroom, with two beds on each side in a pitiful attempt to define personal spaces. For one, you had to cross right through the middle of someone's space to get to your own bed, if you were on the other end. Nikolai was glad he had never had siblings.
Through the door on the right, a bedroom as uneventful as the last. Parent's bedroom, likely, characterised by the double bed in the middle of the room. Each side of the bed had it's own small, bedside table, with a lamp atop and various personal effects. On the leftmost one stood a picture frame, and against any reason of necessity, Nikolai picked it up.
Within the frame was one of those cheesy, awkward family photos. One of those professionally done ones, parents stood at the back, and kids stood in a line in front. He couldn't help the slight grimace growing on his face. Family photos of that nature had always rubbed him the wrong way. A reduction of love and personality for a show of orderly perfection.
Unconsciously, it was easy for Nikolai to pick out the woman he had seen dead downstairs. A mother, stood behind her five children, beside her presumed husband. Her photographed self didn't differ a great amount from how he had seen her in the kitchen, beyond the obvious. To say her expression was as void of emotion as a dead person's wouldn't have been a metaphor.
The photo steadily made Nikolai more uncomfortable, so he placed it back on the table, photo side down.
As he had done in the last room, Nikolai knelt down to quickly check the space under the bed. The whole motion felt a little silly, as if he were a child playing hide and seek; but it was better for him to be safe than sorry. Finding nothing, Nikolai began to get back to his feet, before he noticed something small, next to the leg of the bed.
Nikolai leaned forward to reach for it, his fingers closing around the unmistakeable jagged edges of a key.
What was this, a mystery novel?
Nikolai returned to his feet and walked over to the window, to get as much light as he could to give the key a proper look.
For a key, it was strangely small, and looked incredibly flimsy. Threaded through the hole at the top was a piece of old, fraying string, tying it to a red plastic keytag.
"Q." Nikolai mumbled, reading from the paper slip in the tag. Q? Some strange labelling system. Was it for the locked door downstairs? If it was, did he even want to unlock the cupboard whose key had been hidden? He pondered the thought for a moment.
Yeah, probably. It would certainly satiate his curiosity.
With one last room to go, Nikolai simply pocketed the key and stepped back out into the hallway.
The drawings stuck up on the last door weren't actually eerie in their nature, of course, though Nikolai had seen plenty a horror film framing childish themes and details as such. To say he was scared, beyond inklings of fear he had already held beforehand, would be a gross overstatement. Unsettled was probably better.
Nikolai pushed open the door to presumably the last bedroom.
He didn't know what he had expected.
His attention was immediately drawn away from anything about the room itself by the five bodies strewn throughout the room. A man. Four kids of various ages. They all had the same bullet wound in their forehead that the woman downstairs had sported.
No, Nikolai didn't have to do this. This room was clearly, other than him, devoid of life. He didn't need to stay, inadvertently commit those five dead pairs of eyes, blood on blankets and walls where it shouldn't have been, to his memory. These people meant nothing to him. He didn't need to piece together some butchered assumption of how they had all died. It wasn't his job to remember them.
They were dead. He was not. That was all it really boiled down to.
Nikolai spared no glances to any other part of the room, and pulled the door shut tight behind him on his exit. He wanted nothing more to remember that room by, lest it be harder for him to forget.
With the clock on the living room wall, Nikolai had this time been able to count how long he had rested for. Given the benefit of the doubt that it was running with no flaws, he had set himself up on the couch at one in the morning. after salvaging any remaining food from the raided kitchen cabinets. A few beaten up tins shoved to the back of a cupboard were all he had been able to procure, but better than nothing. He had found a pair of bulky gardening gloves in the storage room, and worn them to move the body away from the front door, so he wouldn't have to deal with it when he left. He had left the gloves with it, beside the dining table.
When he had eaten a pitiful meal of tinned peaches and water, checked the locks on both doors again, and finally settled him down enough to sleep, it had been somewhere close to two.
It was eleven now.
Nikolai picked at a dwindling packet of biscuits he had found elsewhere for breakfast. Light now spilled in through the windows, and now that he could see clearly, he noticed just how astoundingly normal the house seemed. It was a strange feeling, to wake up in the house of a family he didn't know. How easy it would be to discount the most grim findings of last night's search, expect the three youngest of those kids from the picture to come clumsily barelling down the stairs in play, to walk into the kitchen and find one of their parents cooking dinner, for him to be privy to a family he deserved no part in.
His backpack lay against the leg of the coffee table, and he reached over to grab it. He needed to find anything here that he wanted to take with him, and leave. Standing up, Nikolai slung the bag onto his shoulders, and checked his pants pockets for anything he didn't need.
From his left, he pulled out the note written in blood. Without giving its words another glance, he crumpled it in his fist and dropped it to the rug he stood on. After what he had seen, what people here were clearly capable of, he didn't need any note reminding him to be careful.
In his right, he was distracted from anything else by the tagged key he had found in one of the bedrooms. He pulled it from his pocket curiously, recounting that he hadn't yet tried it in the locked door yet. Owing to the sunlight, he now knew the tag had definitely said Q, which still proved to be odd to him.
Ideally the family would have been one of those prepper types. Maybe under the stairs hid a bounty or non-perishable food, bottles of water, medicine and the like. He couldn't imagine it being something dangerous, not in a family home.
Wondering would get him nowhere.
Key in hand, Nikolai walked over to the last unopened door, and tried the key against the door. To his luck, it fit, and the lock clicked open as he twisted the key.
"Last bets, I suppose." Nikolai mumbled to himself, before pulling open the door.
Inside was not Nikolai's hopes of a supply stash. Inside was not any of Nikolai's unattended to guesses. Inside sat a child, cross legged on the floor, holding some sort of plush doll tightly in their arms. Their clothes, a jumper under dark denim dungarees, looked tatty and ill-fitting in the way desperate hand-me-downs often would. Through the fringe of their messy, uncut black hair, they stared up at Nikolai, expression as dead and unchanging as the others he had found in the house until now.
Yet they blinked owlishly at him with eyes somehow still full of life.
The fifth child. There had only been four in the bedroom.
A silence, confused on Nikolai's part at least, sat between them, until the child clambered to their feet, still holding onto their doll, and pointed to the door beside him.
"Bathroom." They stated, before shuffling past Nikolai and through into the room they had pointed to, leaving Nikolai stood alone and confused at the entryway of the now empty cupboard.