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Crossroads shudders underneath its own weight. Grey vapours from the smokestacks from the layers below spiral into the air, mixing with the tell-tale smell of diffuse: rotten eggs, ashy gunpowder, and sharp, rusted metal, a type of smell that slithers under your skin, and scratches at your eyes until they’re itchy and raw.
It’s the wet season starting this day. When it starts, and very rarely it does, the world blurs together, like a watercolour dream left out in the rain. The colours all blend together; the shadows thicker, the light fat and oozing, the buildings stretching and curve into vaunted, terrifying shapes. A trick of the light, and in the darkness, even the doors start to bulge, bowing inwards, boiling and cracking around the hinges.
It was always a mistake to believe Crossroads wasn’t alive.
“I can’t believe,” I started, hiding underneath the cracked hanging roof of the house, a fresh wound of the city like any other. “That you want to visit a haunted house. Of all times.”
To his credit, Sword didn’t take the bait. He just smiled and huddled towards me. “Actually Rocket, it’s a haunted apartment,” he said.
“Don’t correct me,” I said instinctively. And then, after a moment. “Hard to imagine this sort of bravery from a guy who believes aliens were real.”
“Aliens are real, Rocket. I saw one the other day.” Sword says. “And I’m still sure they abducted Medkit.”
I sigh. “We know what happened to Medkit-”
“Aliens.”
“-and I’m pretty sure he just ran out of Crossroads like everyone else.”
“That’s anticlimactic,” he says with a huff. “So, I’m choosing not to believe it.”
I frown but I don’t push it. “Better than this,” I say without thinking.
Sword’s lip curls. “Better than this.”
A silence descended. It would almost be awkward if it wasn’t so familiar. It takes a glance to my side to know there’s something occupying Sword’s thoughts: the way in which he curls around himself in a protective shell. I wait patiently for him to open up.
“I wish the weather was better today.” Sword says, quietly.
“Same.”
“I wish it didn’t have to be today.”
“Yeah,” I respond, equally as quiet.
“And I wish I spoke to you more.” Sword shuffles. “I’m sorry. I think it would have changed everything.”
I had nothing to say.
With a sleepwalker’s haze, Sword rests his head on my shoulder. I watch him through clouded eyes, his shape burning into my memory. It’s not the only time he’s done this, and if luck would have it, it would be the last. His armour bunches up against his thin waist, and the sharp metal digs into my sides but I sit there, waiting. An inevitability sits in my heart. There’s only so much I could give.
It was his choice to spend today like this, not that I really had any complaints. A younger me might blanch at what I’m doing – this twisted, alien form of giving up – he wouldn’t know what it means to surrender to what comes next. But I’m older now. More experienced. It’s better to not have suffered than to suffer at all.
I can see him in my mind. Young, angry, feral. He’s smudged in my imagination, so far distanced from me that he no longer registers as a person to me. I can see him standing there, back against the house. My mind wanders as much as I force it to heel, and there’s another figure – the black of my mind cracking open to even greater chasms – stock, large, and imposing. Zuka-
“I don’t think we fed Zuka,” I say, abruptly.
Sword blinks at me slowly.
“Did we feed Zuka?” I ask again.
“I told you.” He looks at me, firm but not disappointed. “Like seven times. Seven times.”
“Hey,” I say.
“And yeah, I fed him,” he says, haughty but quiet. More confident than he’s ever been for a while. “Even cleaned up his room. It was starting to smell.”
I pivot. “The neighbours will look after him, I bet.”
Sword says nothing.
“They owe us for the gear anyway. That was a whole lifetime of free warranty. Freeriding idiots.” I frown, realising Sword hasn’t responded. “Sword?”
When he doesn’t reply, I turn to face him.
His eyes are trained on something in the distance. I turn to look, and I see them, the figures in the fog, twice our height and glistening in charcoal, inchoate colours. I watch them for a moment, shambling there, movements so lifeless it’s as though each of their crackling bones were pulled on strings. In the dark, they dance. A tarantellasmic jaunt, back and forth, in mockery of the living.
We spent a moment or two, watching them through the haze, all the while their figures distort into something unnerving and unrecognizable, a slimy elongated black thing that shimmered across the mist. It will be a while for the fog to clear up, and we do not have long. But still, we stared and waited, and they did not move.
I turn to look at Sword again before my mind can stop me. He’s transfixed. The wind wraps around his neck like a chain, and his expression is inscrutable.
“I think we should go,” I say, resolved.
The mechanisms of my eyes, choked with sleep, struggled to adjust to the darkness of my room. I stayed there, lying on my bed, staring into the stained ceiling, my breathing heaving in and out in ragged staccato. At the end of the day, I had to come back home. What was the point otherwise?
I’ve always had to deal with a phantom sensation before my prosthetic. It was a funny thing. For so long, I kept trying to balance myself on limbs that weren’t there. Sword and Zuka would always laugh at me, and I’d always take it in stride. How morbid it really was: my leg, these vast networks of bones, sinew, tendons and blood, all desperately pretending that it was still alive.
After a while, my brain tuned it out. Just another dream that would fade into the back of my mind. White noise that came and went, like microscopic background radiation that hid itself in the starry sky, until eventually I stopped registering it at all. The end of the story, I hoped.
I only wish I knew it could apply to people, before it all happened. A figure in the corner of my periphery, wanting to be acknowledged.
There was no one around when we broke into the apartment complex. It’d be more surprising to find any squatters or stragglers here, tucked away in the territories of the fog.
“Wow,” Sword said, taking a long deep breath. “Fruity.”
The armour was the first thing that Sword and I noticed. Different from the usual smell of bitter, snatched almonds that I had glimpsed upon several months ago: cleaner, brighter, sinister, a sunless white. It struck me, smashing open the barred windows and tearing away these bodies of rubble, strewn about like corpses, how alien this sensation felt. The stench of the lower layers had a way of lingering on your clothes that wouldn’t ebb out no matter how much I scrubbed.
How much I missed it, even now.
Outside, the sky was a frozen sea, cooled and cracked like glass, wrenched apart with long, nimble fingers. From the brim of my hoodie, I observe the wreckages of what buildings remained.
Sword raises an eyebrow at me in my periphery. I’ve been staring out the window for too long.
“Looks like shit,” I mumble, flushing red. “Let’s move on.”
To his credit, he takes it in stride. “You think everything looks like ‘shit’.”
“Crossroads always looks like a dump. You should’ve got with the program sooner.”
Sword huffs at me and walks off into the distance, far into the mist. I watch his figure disappear, mind blank, before doggedly climbing up the stairs to find him. I pass several broken rooms and splintering walls, all pockmarked with graffiti. There’s a sign here, tagged across an intersection: WHAT COMES NEXT? And another: WE ARE STILL HERE. And a final one, this time, tucked in the corner, one that I brushed against with my hand, TOGETHER.
I see Sword, in the corner, near the highest floor of the building, crouched over a pair of wilted flowers, dashed carelessly against the floor.
“There you are,” I groan, breathing deeply. “Can’t just run off like that. Especially since the elevators have stopped working.”
Sword flashes me a smile and rubs his eyes blearily. “Who’s going to stop me? You, with your lame prosthetic?”
“There’s nothing lame about my prosthetic. You take it back.”
“The lameness comes from you, dude. It’s genetic.” Sword grinned. “You should be glad you’re adopted.”
“You’re a real comedian.” I say, rolling my eyes. My gaze flickers on the greyed flowers. “Why are you huddled over some flowers?”
Sword doesn’t answer. He just pokes the shrubs on the floor with his sword.
“Dunno,” he says.
A thought comes to me. He must be feeling nostalgic. “Didn’t you have like a bunch of plants in your apartment?” I scratch my chin absentmindedly. “Don’t think your robbers watered it since you’ve left.”
“Don’t need to rub it in.”
“I’m not rubbing it in, lighten up. It’s your dad’s fault anyway for bringing flowers to your room in this layer anyway. It’s like having a neon sign saying, ‘Hey, I’m rich! Come rob me!’” Sword’s dad was a quiet, hooded man. Quite thin and bony, dressed in a garishly green overcoat. I had doubted he survived the early days, but Sword was convinced otherwise. “You think we’ll see him up there?”
“What, the robbers?”
“No, your dad, dumbass.”
Sword gave a half-hearted shrug. “Probably not. Sisyphus wouldn’t let him.”
“The bird?” I ask, even though I knew the answer.
“It’s actually a crow-”
“Crows are birds,” I interject.
“-and no, I guess. Don’t think people want him up there, ha.”
I raise an eyebrow. “What did he do? Cult stuff?”
“Something like that.”
“Must’ve been a real kind of guy.” I say, leaning against the wall, hands behind my head. I waited for a response, but Sword still kept himself crouched over the flowers, his back to me, remarkably bare without his cape. I couldn’t see the expression on his face, and I reached for his shoulder without even realising it.
Before I could touch him, he stands up again, the abruptness of it making me stumble back.
“We should go. Can’t be much longer now.” he says again, quiet. I swallowed back a lump in my throat.
“Yeah?” I say, hefting the backpack over my shoulder. “Sure.”
It took a minute of travelling for him to speak again.
“It wasn’t a flower,” Sword says, hands in his pockets, a few metres ahead of me, stopping against a broken and exposed wall. The concrete was shattered so smoothly, a sliver of sunlight shot through.
I looked at him with glassy, clouded eyes. “What?”
“It was a succulent.”
“I don’t really know the difference,” I say, furrowing my eyebrows. “My bad.”
“I know. He knew.” Sword says, lips pressed against each other into thin line. “I don’t expect you to know everything.”
Sword looks away. For a second, I arch forwards, trying to scour any meanings in his ashen face. But the moment passes, and he turns and walks away.
I could draw the metaphors in my mind before I had even registered it. The distance between us, stretching, arching into a long, winding road. It struck me that I’ve seen it before: a brand, or a birthmark, a recurring motif. How long have I spent paying attention to the space between us? These minute, tender interactions that make up what we are: a head on my shoulder, a hand in the darkness, a smile. All the while I could feel his presence slip from me day by day: there physically but gone thereafter. A frail thing that cried out in the night but was too weak for anyone to truly hear.
The lumps in my throat hardened. I swallowed them down all the same, feeling sick to my stomach, before following him.
I feel it now: that desperate longing to feel, clawing out of my throat in red, bloody streaks. I won’t survive much longer: not like this, exhausting my energy, running from my home, from the basement, wherever my legs would take me. There was far too little for me to care for.
There was a house, a street, a road and finally a river. One of the artificial ones, with a water system that recycles itself somewhere buried in the land, constructed decades ago to provide these lower layers even an inch of the decadence the top had provided. I spotted my reflection in my mad dash, and it took me a moment to realise that I too have stopped.
For a second there, I had thought I saw a second presence.
Some part of my brain told me that this was a dream. Even if the cool air felt so real. I had thought, naively perhaps, that maybe I had dreamt the last couple of months up, that it was all fake, that my legs weren’t turning to wood, that I’ll wake up in the middle of Zuka’s shop again, half-drunk off a waking nightmare, passed out in the middle of a busy shift, and sooner or later this’ll be one of those fitful dreams: those moments that you believe mean everything to you, that you’ll surely remember when you wake, but amount to nothing at all.
But I opened my eyes, and there was nothing. Just the quiet air, and my own reflection, staring back at me.
I turned around, bunched my coat together, and headed home.
“This apartment doesn’t look very haunted,” Sword says, creeping into the room. “It just looks like an apartment.”
I give him a half-hearted shove, and he falls in, yelping all the way inside, smothering himself in a thin blanket of dust and grime, getting all tangled up in the loose carpets and rags that made the entrance.
“What gives?” Sword says, standing up and brushing himself off. His clothes are smothered in a grey soot, and for a second, he gives me the impression of a sad clown.
I folded my arms, struggling not to laugh. “Just get in already, Sword. You were taking way too long.”
He grumbled under his breath, muttering about aliens and monsters, but I pay it no mind. I’m already all over him, plucking the dust out of his clothes, shaking the grime off his gauntlets, fretting over him like a concerned parent. The image is not lost on me, and I flush red again when I catch myself.
Sword pushes my hands away. “Jeez,” he says, with a tone that’s caught between a serious register and a laugh. “Keep your hands to yourself.”
“My bad,” I say.
The stillness of this place felt different now: more akin to something liminal, passing, rather an enclosed fist. We must’ve been so high up in the ground, here at the highest floor of the apartment complex. I could see it in Sword’s expression: whether it was the finality of it all, or just the air around him, his movements felt looser, lighter. No matter how much it unsettled me, it was time.
It was, as Sword had said, an ordinary apartment. Some bookshelves here and there, loose rugged mats that laid tossed on the floor. A window with blinds shuttered shut, that once I pulled, exploded in a plume of dust that sent me coughing. Something that was lived in, once. It reminded me of the days that had passed before all of this: playing video games on my battered consoles, helping Zuka out with his shop, tweaking gears and sneaking out into those Phights at the cover of darkness. I never realised how important it all ever was. The meaninglessness of the days-to-days that became the point.
The daylight had faded now. The only light that came in was from the window, where moonlight crept in. I clicked the light-switch, half expectant, and it flickered on briefly before shutting off.
“I think we’re high enough now.” I say, unbuttoning my coat, feeling the cool fresh leather under my feet. “What did we have to do?”
“For the ghost or for what comes after?”
“Both,” I shrug, picking at my fingernails. “I guess. Whatever you want to start with first.”
“What do you think this ghost might like?” Sword says. He turned to look at the bookshelf and flicked through what was there. “Romance, cookbooks, programming textbooks.” His face made a grimace. “This section is just filled with joke books. We could try that, I guess.”
“Let’s not.” That’s hardly an appropriate atmosphere.
I gently nudge Sword out of the way. If I want to indulge him a little, I might as well play along. I hadn’t expected much, but I saw something tucked between the books: maroon, card-like in texture, and not as thick as a cover. I pull it out and I’m surprised to find what looks to be a vinyl cover.
“Oh!” Sword says, mildly excited.
“You know what this is?” I say, opening it. There’s a record inside, hardly scratched.
“Nope!”
“It’s a vinyl player,” I say patiently, “Didn’t think people still had those after everyone went online. Plays music and stuff.” Zuka, in a rare stint of liveliness, had always kept one of these players buried in the back of his closet.
Sword looks at me blank before registering. “Oh, wait. I saw something, actually – in the drawers. Looked like it wanted, um, something like that.”
“Shit, really?” I say, feeling a thrum of excitement under my skin. “Then lead the way.”
Sword dove under the bed in the corner and pulled out the record player. He unlatched it, and I fumbled for a cord to connect it to an outlet. It takes a bit of time for me to latch the record on without scratching it, and a second more to adjust the stylus accurately. When I switch it on, the music started, tinny and fuzzy, low and jazzy.
“I like this,” Sword says, sitting on the bed. His head bobs up and down to the music.
I watch him for a second, unsure of what to do: if I wanted to sit down, if I wanted to shut it off and wait. But something strikes me, and I offer my hand out.
He looks at me quizzically. “What?”
“I’ve got an idea,” I say, unsure.
His gaze darts between my professed arm, and my flushed gaze. “I can’t dance,” he says. “Trust me. I’ve tried.”
“I can’t dance either, but I’d like to try.” And after a thought. “And besides, I think it might bring the ghost out.”
Sword laughs and grabs my hand.
It starts off slow and awkward: I struggle to place one foot over the other in fear of knocking him over, but Sword takes it as energetically as he usually had, pulling on my waist, my coat collar, my arms. I realise then that he wasn’t lying when he said he had no idea how to dance: all he’s doing now is manoeuvring my arms like a puppet. A crippled, half-drunk waltz.
“Slower,” I say, feverish, laughing, swaying.
He laughs. “Can I be honest with you, Rocket?”
“Anything,” I say desperately.
“I don’t really think there was a ghost here at all. I just wanted an excuse to be together.”
I feel his lightning pulse in the veins of his arms, his shaky smile as indication that I’m not doing this all wrong. Our fingertips feel energetic, electric, and I fall into his arms as much as he pulls onto mine. The music picks up, quicker, louder, and he giggles into my neck. My feet scuff against the rugged floor, and taken back his weight, I am pushed back into the bookshelf. Something falls, but we pay it no mind. I bring my lips to his ear, ensnaring myself into my heartbeat. I open my mouth and-
Zuka stared at me as I entered the basement. His food, sour with mould, was untouched. The chains were still bound to his limbs: one on his neck, both on his arms, and two more to his bare feet, clanged with both mud and blood from his last breakout attempt. His body was still swelled up and torn.
I shivered at his dead eyes.
“The boy,” he said, solemn. “Your friend.”
“Zuka-”
“I’m not asking to be let out.” His face softened, however imperceptibly, and I get the impression of the man he used to be. “I thought you two were going together.”
It wasn’t my dad anymore. It had long ceased to be anything resembling humanity, even it was getting close. Still, I swallowed and looked away and found the courage to speak up.
“He’s gone.”
“You killed him.”
“Not killed, dad,” and we both flinch at that word as though I uttered a curse out into being. “Just gone.”
There’s a silence for a moment, and then a thundering roar. He pushes his arms against the chains, muscles bulging, the metal screaming, and for a second, I fear that they have broken entirely. But the weights Sword put on seemed to hold, and he slumps down, exhausted.
“You will always be alone,” ‘Zuka’ said, finally.
“-I don’t want you to go,” I cry into his neck, pulling him tighter, a chorus of feelings I’ve long since buried erupting out. “I really don’t. I don’t know why it took me so long to realise. It’s not our time: we don’t deserve to get taken. I still have so much to do around here – we can find other survivors, we can cure Zuka, we can even find your dad.” My breath hitches, and the music stops. Sword doesn’t reply. “The days will pass. It will all get better. I don’t want to be a different person. I don’t want you to be a different person. I don’t know what’s next, and I can’t handle two more losses.”
Sword doesn’t reply.
“I should’ve been there, I know. I should’ve. But we’ve survived this far, and I…” my voice comes out scratchy now. “I don’t want to place our fate in something that I don’t believe in.”
“So please stay. Stay with me. Please. Unless you’re absolutely sure that this is what you want to do.”
Sword gently unlatches me from him. He puts both arms on my shoulders and looks into my eyes. His expression is unreadable.
“We’re high enough, now.”
My feverish rant pauses and drowns in my throat. I look at him again, wide-eyed, as all hope from my face fades.
“Sword-”
“You were a great friend. I’ll see you on the other side.”
The fog blasts through the window in an instant. It rocks through my body, convulsing, flooding my world with an unbearable light. I feel my limbs stretch and burn, and elongate, but it doesn’t keep, and I soon drift into unconsciousness.
When I wake up, I’m on the bed, gently coaxed under covers. The only thing that’s changed is a shattered wall, the debris splintering everywhere, as something remorseless and grotesque from the sky had barged in and plucked my friend from the world.
Lying on the floor of the room where Sword got taken, a memory comes to me. I laughed when I remembered it.
I heard a rumour, that week, passed down from TV broadcast to the surviving camps until it managed to trickle down to me. I saw Sword, who had seen my message, wandering into the store.
“I found something on the news. We have to do it.”
“Is that the way you greet someone you haven’t seen for several weeks?” Sword asked, rubbing his eyes and unlatching his mask. “Jeez, Rocket. Not even a text? Not even one text?”
“It doesn’t matter.” I slam my hands onto the desk. “There’s an out.”
Sword looked at me dubiously. “Okay.”
“A rapture this weekend. Looking for anyone who is at a high spot in Crossroads.”
Recognition dawned on his face, before being swapped with dismay. “…I was going to visit a haunted apartment that day.”
“C’mon, really?” I groan. “Don’t wuss out now.”
Sword huffed. “Besides, I’d like to see you bring Zuka up all those flights of stairs.”
“I’ve already made arrangements with him with the neighbours next door.” I shake my head feverishly. “I’ve already made my plans. Consulted with some of the other inphernals all the way in the Thieves Den. This might be it, Sword.”
“Do you even know what it’ll be like on the other side? If it’ll be worse?”
“It can’t be worse than this.”
Sword looked at me, his eyebrows furrowed.
“Zuka wasn’t your fault.”
“I know,” I said, ignoring him. “I know.”
“It wasn’t your fault he got taken. But you don’t have to…”
I grab his hand, feeling the callouses. “Please,” I said, again, subdued.
He sighed. “Are you sure?”
“I’ve been surer of anything in my life."
Sword looked away. “Then fine. We have one week to get everything sorted.”