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Chapter Text

There were many different things running through my mind as I weaved around the human traffic. The first was getting home; school had been exhausting, and I had zero desire to stay within the jam-packed infestation of human bodies for longer than I had to. As such, my legs were moving as fast as possible, eyes set on the door as I jumped from one person to the next.

              The bus was a patient and steady reminder of home. Glass tints glared down at me like eyes, and I maneuvered myself up and through its doors. A different, colder world; sterile, with hints of past sweat-stained backs against the seats, and the ever-present emergency exits. I sat down beside one of the red bars, and set myself to the usual task; staring out of the window.

              Very little of the things around me would be considered, to any extent, as remarkable. As thus, as the rest of the students piled on and the high-pitched squeal of the brakes belied our sudden movement, I was left privy to the dull and fantastical ache of boredom. I had no one here.

              Sights streamed by, the sights of as uninteresting and bland of a place as Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. Perhaps it might seem of some fascination, if you didn’t live here. Yet if you spent more than a couple of days here, you’d slowly realize just how little there was. Once, there’d been a skating rink, down near one of the many suburban populations; it hadn’t lasted long, although it had been an arcade for a while. Slowly, over time, however, the place bled away anything that could truly be considered fun. What you were left with was the daunting suburban stretches; neighborhoods, vast wastelands, ecological dead zones. Worst still, if you managed to find your parents deciding to move into one of these miserable places; as a teenager, there was very little to do, and very little to accomplish.

              When the bus came to a rolling stop, vision came back to me. It was one of those small things; losing track of the world around me came naturally. Shouldering my backpack, I shuffled out with the few others from my neighborhood, and walked down the sun-blighted concrete, before finding myself over at the house. Like every other house, it stood as a monument to industrialized architecture. With a sigh, I grabbed my key and walked inside.

              Lights were off; heavy and unreal shadows made themselves known, filling the space of corners before descending out in waves of null. I walked through the immaterial, and flipped the kitchen light on. My bag went forgotten on one of the tables as I walked over to the fridge. Bottled water; a slightly-clear and less hot head.

              Still disgruntled, I made myself remember my bag, and pulled out my homework. The idea of working on it so soon after school left a heavy-lidded sort of dread in the back of my chest, but I found a pencil, and rifled through my Algebra 2 assignment. Algebra had never been my strongest subject; Geometry had, comparatively, been an even worst subject though, so I couldn’t complain.

              I went through three different assignments before the door pulled open. Looking out through the window, I was rather surprised to find that evening had decided to make itself known. The glow cast through the curtains was now an orange and beautiful haze.

              “You eat today?”

              Blinking, I pulled back to the present, “No…I don’t think so,”

              “How does pizza sound?”

              I looked over at my mom, nurse garbs bright and blue. Her hair was already grey, somehow, cut short against the sides of her face, yet reaching towards the bottom of her neck in the back. Somehow, with the dark circles growing like vicious shadows under her eyes, she managed to look less tired than I did.

              “It sounds alright,”

              “Are you actually going to eat it this time?”

              I suppressed a sigh, “Yeah… Yeah I’ll try,”

              After the pizza arrived, I grabbed two slices and moved to my room. Pools of grease sat within each curved piece of pepperoni, and I tried to imagine the beings that would live in such a thing, if the world were covered in it. Small weird mermaid-people whose skin absorbed the excess fat; maybe the fat layered over their own bodies, leaving them as squirming worms. I took a bite, ruining the imagined ecosystem in one fell swoop.

              Eventually, I grabbed my phone. The time had, at some point, teleported from seven to ten. As I ate my pizza, I scrolled through YouTube, silently praying for something interesting to appear before me. By the time the pizza was gone, I hadn’t clicked on anything. Turning my phone off, I went to the bathroom to wash my hands, then laid back down.

              Sleep didn’t come easy, and I found myself staring towards the Popcorn ceiling. If you imagined hard enough, for long enough, you might be able to think that the images therein resembled a prophecy. Maybe that eye was meant to represent a Watcher, some divine thing waiting to whisk you away to a life that actually mattered.

              When my eyes strained and hurt from trying to keep them open, I twisted on to my side. There was nothing here to save me. Maybe if I had the energy, I might be able to cry tonight.

              Instead, I fell asleep.

              And woke up on the dirt.

              My brow furrowed as a familiar pain riveted through my back.

              Groaning, I twisted over; that was around the point I heard a soft, “Moo,” My eyes shot open, and I stared directly at the cow, which stared ambivalently back.

              Brown, with white spots on its fur. Furthermore, grass directly below me. Increasing from that decimal of observation, a tree which loosed a leaf to gently land upon my cheek. Slowly, incrementally, I pulled myself up. My mind whirred, reeling as I tried to comprehend all of the things around me.

              My room was gone; I held that revelation as I stared towards the veritable forest surrounding me. Trees cascaded deep and high into the morning sky, and mildew left a steady but comforting chill to the morning. Slowly, I forced myself to take another step into the wilderness.

              A bunny hopped by me, stopping only momentarily to munch upon a leaf before continuing with its run. The cow was still staring at me.

              “Okay,” I whispered, grappling with the situation, “Okay, okay, okay,” I walked past the cow, and towards the start of a hill; if this was anything more than the most surreal dream I’d ever had, then I’d want a vantage point, at the least.

              I knew very little about survival; one of the only real things I knew was that you were supposed to boil the water. Or, failing that, you got water from the rain. Now, how you went about getting rain water, or even how you went about actually gathering the water from a spring; I couldn’t tell you. As I walked up the hill, I considered the merit of leaves. There were a lot of them about, and they made the most sense. Failing that, I was wearing a shirt; a large piece of cloth that could be used for such an effort.

              When I got to the top of the hill, I found myself with more questions than answers. There wasn’t a shred of civilization; not even a road. I considered climbing one of the trees, and when I found that I couldn’t find a reason not to, I set about the effort. Getting to what I could consider to be the safest point to access, I stared emptily towards the distance.

              Cliff-faces were an ordinary thing; that wasn’t the surprising thing about the structure I found myself staring at. The surprising thing about the structure itself, was that I was rather certain cliffs weren’t supposed to float. From what little I could make out, water lapped in waves below the cliff, and the thing was moving.

              I fell off of the tree in a heap. Pain flared through my leg as I hit the ground and tumbled. Gasping, I righted myself and stared back towards the horizon. I couldn’t see the floating island from below. Previously, I’d entertained the idea that I was dreaming; but how was I feeling pain inside of a dream?

              The leg I’d landed on twinged as I put my weight on it, and I considered silently. I was lucky I hadn’t broken a bone, really; if this was real, and I’d broken something, I was all but screwed. Adjusting my shirt and brushing off my jeans, I looked over at the tree.

              Even if this wasn’t real, I had no other option but to entertain the idea that it was. If this happened to be some sort of psychotic break, then chances are I was already in a hospital, protected entirely from harming myself. But if it was real, then I needed to gather the necessary components of survival.

              Still, I found myself studying the tree. There was a thing you could do with trees, something I’d read in a book once. It wouldn’t help in the long term, but I couldn’t think about the long term until I had enough space for comfort. Either way, I turned back towards the large issue; water. I needed to gather water, which meant I had to figure out how I was supposed to gather water. But further than that, I needed to start a fire, which meant… What?

              Before we’d moved into the suburbs, I’d watched my uncles start a fire once. He’d used stones, set them around a small clearing, and then he’d gotten sticks, plus a few large logs. Made sense to start there. I moved towards the beach sitting just before the floating island, and set about gathering rocks.

              The air here was calm, fresh. Waves lapped against the shore in a steady rhythm, and even the floating island looked beautiful. Trees stretched just beyond its own reach, leaves whistling and rustling. When I stared for long enough, I was certain I could see what looked like a wild pig up there. Watching the pig move closer to the edge of its cliff made my stomach growl, and reminded me of the problem at hand. I looked back towards my work.

              They’d given me some sort of information about the stones I needed to gather, back then. I’d really wanted to help, and had practically begged them to let me gather stones for them. Something about the weight, or maybe size; the memory was far too blurry, as I had to have been five at the time. At the moment, I focused on quantity rather than quality; if I had enough of them, surely I’d mitigate potential disaster? That was the hope, at least.

              After that, and digging a pit for the rocks, which I was pretty certain I was supposed to do, I started gathering logs. The forest was full of them; dead logs, some hollowed out by bugs that fled as soon as I lifted one up. Others were surprisingly dry, as if they were seconds away from setting on fire themselves. That gave me hope, and I gathered the sticks with more energy.

              When I had everything assembled, I had a large circle with sticks and logs, and no fire. Considering it a job well done, I set about trying to light the logs. From what I’d seen of movies, the people there usually grabbed a long thin stick and twirled it as fast as they could over the largest log. I did that, and the stick snapped in-half.

              After that, I tried multiple things. I got another stone, a thicker stick, and struck the stone against the stick. A few efforts with that got sparks, and some smoke, but nothing that turned into a flame. Eventually I found a particularly reedy stick, which actually produced smoke against one of the logs, but when I tried to blow on it, all I got was a slightly charred log.

              More than slightly frustrated with the endeavor, I stepped back from the work, and leaned against my tree. How was I supposed to do anything if I couldn’t even start a fire? Survival hinged upon the creation of the flame; that was one of the things that I knew. If I couldn’t start a flame, then I couldn’t eat, if I couldn’t eat, then I’d die. Or, alternatively, I wouldn’t be able to boil water, and I’d die even faster.

              Giving myself a moment to calm down, I went back over to the logs and considered the problem. How was a flame supposed to start? We’d learned about it back in elementary school, and then again in middle school; what were the necessary components to the flame? Heat, fuel, oxygen. I had the heat, according to the smoke I was getting. Fuel was the log itself, which charred instead of burning. Which meant my log was lacking in oxygen. Furthermore, I did have a secondary method, one which did produce sparks when I used it. My only issue, maybe, was that I wasn’t holding it close enough.

              I started again, and very quickly found success. When an ember produced, the wind smothered it, but that only invigorated me. I tried again, this time shielding the second small kindling, and lightly blew on it for a few minutes. Finally, my flame shot into the open air. I grinned, stepping back as the fire grew steadily larger.

              With that done, and one of my largest problems solved, I could consider the larger issues of water and food.

              Food might be the easier of the two problems, and I considered how I’d go about solving it. First and foremost was the cow; the rather large creature that was still following me around. He stood on the other side of the firelight, and moo’ed softly over at me. I stared towards him as he stared towards me, and rather quickly realized that I would not be able to kill her.

              The next probable solution was berries; at least for the short-term. Long-term I’d have to go out and hunt; but that also meant learning how to create tools, which I had a feeling was going to be a rather long road. I found a bush with some berries rather easily, deeper into the forest I had appeared in. Of course, that supplied a larger issue; if the berries were poisonous, this is where I’d die.

              I chuckled lightly as I stared down at the vaguely red-thing. The only reason I existed was due to the fact that my ancient ancestors had won that bet; or maybe they’d fed the berries to different animals first to figure out how they reacted to them before trying them themselves. Which, now that I’d considered it, that seemed like a significantly more logical course of action than gambling on my own life. Or, alternatively, I could hide on a tree and wait to see which sort of berries the animals around me frequented.

              Having a course of action, I climbed up the nearest tree and hid myself the best that I could. Luckily, it only took around an hour of waiting before a wild chicken wandered around. Slightly fascinated, I watched the chicken walk over to one of the bushes, one with purple berries, pluck a few, and then walk off.

              Jumping down, arms and legs feeling quite stiff, I rushed down to the bush, and plucked out as many of the berries as I could. Having my food secure, I walked back over to my tree, and now-dying flame. The berries themselves didn’t taste good; they were functional, filled semi-quickly, but did not taste pleasant.

              With evening falling over the horizon, I walked down to the beach. The floating island was now further upon the horizon, sitting above a small sand bar. Orange had overtaken the sky beyond the island, and the air was slowly rustling through my clothes.

              Gently sighing, I walked back into the forest, and towards my fire. It took a few leaves to build it back up, but once the flame was grown, I laid myself down beside the flame. Exhaustion begged to take hold, until I heard it. A singular, solitary groan. Blearily, I rubbed at my eyes, and sat myself back up.

              In the distance, through the shadows of the trees, I saw him. A decaying body, dried and clotted blood on the side of its face. Despite the skin being a sickly pale, the thing was still moving, still stumbling blindly against the environment around it.

              Slowly, carefully, more creatures began to appear. Most I only vaguely saw the hints of; strange shadows that flew from beyond the trees, some clanking thing that I could only hear, and the obsidian thing that flickered through my sight for mere seconds before disappearing again. As could be expected, I didn’t get any sleep that night.

Chapter Text

When morning came, I watched the zombie burn. One second, it was standing atop the hill, the next it was set alight. Smoldering smoke grew from the flesh of the monster; it groaned louder, practically screaming. Carefully, I tried to get closer, watching as it collapsed against the dirt.

              It left behind a singular remnant of itself, and something other. I moved carefully around the other and studied the rotten flesh. It looked more like beef jerky than I’d expected, but I didn’t dare to smell it. I couldn’t think of anything to do with the dead flesh, and decided to just leave it against the dirt, before turning to study something that my mind refused to accurately describe.

              They looked innocuous; yet they were floating in the air and slowly meandering through the air. I could practically feel the whirring that came off of them, and each second spent close seemed to bend my mind towards the desire to grab them. Eventually, I got close enough, and one of them slammed directly into my chest. Something happened, but I couldn’t feel anything definitive. Eventually, I let myself absorb the other two, studying them as they faded through the air. Again, something, but ultimately nothing.

              Finding the entire situation to be rather bizarre, I went back to the campfire, and tried to figure out how I was supposed to prepare water for myself. The first idea I had went dismissed immediately; attempting to hollow out a rock would take days, and would likely end in me dying of dehydration before I ever got it done. The second also wasn’t smart; leaves weren’t large enough, and if people had combined them to such effects in the past, it was clear I wouldn’t be able to figure that out fast enough either.

              I looked over at my tree. People had done this in the past, in the same sort of situation I’d found myself in. Which meant they had very little options; again, much the same as myself. Yet, somehow, they had figured out how to do what I needed to. They’d done this with the materials they had on-hand, not by preparing long-term solutions. I was thinking on a timescale that was far too large for what I had with me at the moment.

              All of that was coupled with a large question; could bark bend? Tearing off a portion of the tree, I tried to bend it with just my hands; it snapped in-half, because of course it did. I stared towards the shattered remnant of bark, and then down at my dead flame. Heat. Heat expands things; you learn that in seventh grade. I moved over the flame, and started the effort to spark it back up. Finding that that didn’t work, I removed the coals from last night, got new wood, new bramble, and a few leaves, then tried again.

              With a working flame, I took the small broken fragment of bark, and moved it over the flame. The experiment proved successful; the small piece of bark managed to bend. Grinning, I ran back over to the tree and slowly worked a large piece off of the tree. A little bit of effort, and I was back at the flame, slowly trying to bend it into a bowl. When I managed to get the majority of the shape right, I found myself faced with another problem; it wouldn’t stay in the shape I needed of it.

              Placing my bent piece of bark against the tree, I considered the new problem. It needed something to keep it in-shape when I managed to form the bowl; which meant supports, sticks. A thick-ish stick stuck at the right angle should, hopefully, hold it in the right position.

              Figuring out how to get the sticks inside of the bark, and then how to get them to stay the way I wanted them to took about five different pieces of bark before I finally got it right. When that was done, I had a functioning bowl. Running back down to the beach, I sloshed some water back into the bowl, and walked carefully back to the fire. Slowly, I held the bowl above the flame. Rather quickly, I learned that that was not going to boil the water, and would likely only burn my hands.

              Noon had long since passed, and I was working tirelessly through my own fatigue as I looked down at my bowl. I’d worked as hard as I possibly could to get to this point, but now my mind was running blanks. How was I supposed to boil the water if I couldn’t put the water above the flame? Promising myself that I’d consider the question seriously in a minute, I leaned my head against the hard-dirt and soft grass.

              Startled, my eyes shot open. Evening had passed, and the last of the sky was a deep purple; something was groaning off to my left. Shooting up, I stared over at my flame. The light had cascaded until there was barely anything other than the embers. In-front of me stood one of the zombies. Its eyes were the only part clear to me; the rest was decayed and mashed flesh, as if it were slowly dripping off of its body. Desperately, I grabbed at my dying flame. Hissing, I used the coals and launched them at the zombie.

              “RAAAAH,” I shouted, watching the burning coals scatter across the thing’s face.

              A groan escaped its mouth, but otherwise it didn’t react, still stumbling blindly forwards. I looked around desperately, eyes finding my bowl, upon which a few of the coals had landed; the water was dark and clotted, yet somehow had been brought to a light boil. Pulling that information aside, I grabbed the lightly-boiling water and threw the bowl as hard as I could at the zombie.

              When not even that managed to deter the thing, I reached back towards the flame, but not for the coals; instead, my hands wrapped around a lightly burning stick. Rushing forwards, I aimed straight towards the thing’s eye and pushed as hard as I could. The stick snapped as it broke through one of the thing’s eyes, and the claws of the monster raked violently across my chest.

              Stumbling backwards, bleeding with a nail trapped against my chest, I kicked towards the creature’s stomach. The thing stumbled backwards, giving me enough time to grab another, slightly thicker stick, and push that down towards its brain. With one last garbled growl, the thing collapsed in a heap.

              I ignored the green things that flew out of its back, and stumbled back over to my fire. I grabbed a few more sticks and leaves, before collapsing beside the fire. Sleep hit me like a bag of bricks.

              Waking up was slow and steady; pain emanated from my chest and hand, and a headache was slowly forming behind my eyes. Lightheaded and with a mouth that felt like the Sahara Desert, I pushed myself onto my feet. Idly, I looked down at the fingernail still-trapped in my chest, I wrenched the thing out. Blood poured along my stomach anew, and I tore my shirt off.

              With limbs further exhausted from the night before, I went about building the fire again, and grabbed a new piece of bark. The process of creating the bowl was easier now, and at least I knew how to boil the water; only, I wasn’t going to use the coals. I walked down to the beach, grabbed a few rocks, gathered water, and went back to the flame. The bowl stayed beside the flame, and when the rocks were done, I used two long sticks to carefully pick them up and toss them into the water. Whilst that boiled, I walked back to the bushes. Either I’d crushed the grapes in my fight against the zombie, or I had rolled over them in my sleep; didn’t particularly matter, I needed more.

              When I got back, the water had stopped boiling. Sticking a finger in experimentally, I confirmed that it had cooled enough to drink, and took the rocks out with the sticks. It was still rather warm, and tasted horrid; but drinking it immediately made me feel better. I practically collapsed into a congealed pool of warmth against the tree after; until, of course, my hand reminded me of my predicament.

              Red blisters grew across the surface in a ragged line. I’d dealt with burns like this before; particularly when one of my cousins had dared me to put my hand on a still-burning stove. None of my burns had ever been this large though, and even bending the palm sent a burst of pain jolting through my entire hand.

              Deciding that I probably needed to clean it, I went back to the beach with my bowl, gathered more water, and set it to burn. As that burned, I tore apart my shirt, trying my best to create thin ribbons of fabric. Most of them were rather frayed, threads bursting off in scattered directions, but it worked for my intention.

              When I was certain that the water had cooled down enough, I braced myself, and shoved my burned hand under it. Perhaps not the best clean, alcohol or even soap would’ve done better; but for what I had, it functioned. With that done, I wrapped it up in the frayed fabric, making sure to tie the top as best as I could, and then stared down at my chest. Luckily, the wound wasn’t that deep, and most of it had already scabbed.

              With most of those concerns taken care of, I considered the larger issue. There were zombies; but not just zombies, there were monsters here. I couldn’t fight something like that. I’d gotten extremely lucky against the zombie, and I did not expect that sort of luck to last. Which meant, more than anything else, I needed shelter.

              I knew, at least somewhat vaguely, about mud-huts and other such alternatives to housing; but even those took time. And time was something I had very little of. There were plentiful resources around me, but the majority of those took the sort of skills that I did not, as of this moment, possess.

              The tree itself seemed like the best option I had. Some of the low-hanging branches would get me out of the reach of the zombies if they got closer. I could set up more campfires too; place them around the perimeter of the tree to discourage any potential monster. That would incur other issues, however; smoke being the primary of them. I’d be sitting in the specific direction most of the smoke would travel, up. Yet my options were limited; if I didn’t set up the fires, I’d be a sitting duck for whatever creatures prowled the night.

              Eventually, I decided to experiment with it with the time that I had. I moved around the perimeter, as far from my tree on the hill as I could, yet close enough that the fire might still have some effect. I managed to set up around five of them, spaced out far enough that the smoke didn’t have too horrid of an effect.

              With my shelter figured out, a source of food planned out, and water assured, I had the time to think. I hadn’t really stopped to consider anything that was going on. Logically, I understood that there were zombies, I also understood that zombies weren’t supposed to exist, and were generally designed to be scary, but ultimately, a fun fiction concept. On a larger scale, I hadn’t gotten the time to think about what it might mean if they did exist.

              I was on some foreign planet; that had been obvious from the moment I’d seen the floating island. But the revelation hadn’t really stuck until I saw the decayed flesh stumbling forwards through the firelight. This was a foreign planet, seemingly untouched by civilization, but with monsters that resembled dead human beings. Furthermore, there were other things here, things I’d only heard, or caught glimpses of in the dead of that first night.

              Trying to grapple with all of that left a deep pit of uncertainty in the middle of my stomach. Why had I ended up here? I’d read Isekai stories in the past, sure; but usually those people were chosen for something. I had been brought here, seemingly at random; waking up on the forest floor in nothing but the clothes on my back. It didn’t make sense. I wasn’t a survivalist, and every stumbling step had been worked through with a thousand pieces of guesswork; I’d learned to boil water on accident, and if I hadn’t decided to watch what specific berries an animal took, I likely would’ve died via accidental poisoning. I hadn’t been chosen for this. No one would’ve chosen me for this.

              “moo,”

              I blinked, looking back over the cow. Somehow, it hadn’t really left. Through three days, it had stayed. I moved over, experimentally reaching towards the head of the cow. When I encountered no resistance, I moved my hand gently along its fur. This entire thing would be rather amusing if it turned out I’d been chosen by the cow; some bizarre confluence of randomly assigned power, and a cow who had likely seen multiple zombies in its life, and assigned the existence of me in some random moment.

              Chuckling to myself, I moved my hand over to its ear, scratching lightly, “Moo,” The cow said.

              The cow eventually went back to its sacred duty of grazing the earth, and I turned back towards my shelter. There was nothing left to do for the moment, so I turned back to the larger implication of zombies. If zombies existed, it stood to reason that there was a chance for human settlements. Unless humanity had died out, there’d be stragglers who’d created villages, or towns; some place with a safety network. However, attempting to find any of these settlements would hold within them a large amount of risk; the further I traveled, the further away I went from an easy access to water, or a shelter with easy firelight, or even familiar bushes with berries I knew were safe to eat.

              That had never stopped humans before, of course; we’d spent an entire portion of our lineage as hunter gatherers, going from one spot to the next in an everlasting wander. Furthermore, the zombie I’d witnessed had only really gone around the speed of a casual stroll; if I really needed to, I could outrun it. I didn’t want to make any hasty decisions, however.

              After a moment’s consideration, I decided to take a stroll, and walked back to one of my semi-favorite places. The island was still in the air, rather close now, and casting shadows against the waves below. I stared up at it in awe, before moving closer to the water itself, getting deep enough for the waves to lap up against my knees.

              There was something else upon the island now, I noticed. A darker shadow, body lanky and tall; it was thin enough you could see the ribs poking from its flesh, body curving into unnaturally long legs. Its head was devoid of a mouth, and purple eyes stared intently towards some spot beyond me. When those eyes moved towards mine, I almost instinctively glanced away. Something deeper than pure emotion gurgled in my chest, and I stared intently towards the lapping waves.

              Eventually, the feeling subsided, and I let out a gentle breath. I was fine, everything was fine. Shakily, I leaned down in the water, and stared towards the fish moving there. Anytime I moved, they darted off, but eventually they’d start to swim closer again. Their scales were bright orange, with spines of almost pure yellow waving gently against the water. They were beautiful; not quite in a breathtaking way, but more in an entirely ordinary way, something I found myself valuing as I tried to center my thoughts away from the thing upon the island.

              When my thoughts centered, and my chest stopped hammering, I looked down at the fish again. Trying to stay as still as possible, I lurched towards one of the fish. One of my fingers graced against it, but it was gone in seconds. Sighing, I fell backwards in the water.

              It was cool and nice, and I briefly considered laying on my back and floating out to sea.

              Eventually, I went back home, set the fires back to blazing, went to sleep, and moved on in the morning.