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Stars were eternal, no matter the state of the world beneath, they twinkled in the night sky and offered a moment of tranquillity to all those willing to admire them.
Freya Grimes knew that better than anybody. They'd been her main source of solace since she was capable of comprehending their existence. When she was an infant, her father would spend hours at night circling their backyard with her in his arms, wide-eyed with her neck craned skyward. He'd learned that it soothed her by accident, but the second her cries ceased, taking her outside to ward off a sore throat and sleepless nights was a no-brainer.
Now, she was fifteen; still wide-eyed with her neck craned skyward, but not in her father's arms ── that had been made impossible when he took a bullet in the line of duty, and subsequently died alongside anything bearing semblance to a functioning society.
Death was no longer the end.
And Freya would've taken a great amount of comfort from that statement two months ago, but now . . . Death had been painted idyllically by the malevolent forces steering the world. It was actually a preference now.
It was a sickness ── a fatal, inconceivable virus ── that sent the globe spinning counterclockwise. Set it off balance. Uprooted its order and planted chaos in its place.
If you died, in any way, you'd fall victim to something much worse than any hell imaginable; insatiable hunger for human flesh, and no memory of the soul your body had once carried within it. You became a shell. A puppet on invisible strings that acted without thought, roamed the earth on autopilot with a single goal irradiating the brain.
Total destruction.
A soft sniffle pulled Freya from her thoughts. She blinked ferociously and looked to her left for the source of the noise.
Carl. Her twelve-year-old brother, and perhaps the only friend she would ever have now that all hope of the future once anticipated had been debunked.
She could barely see him under the dark canvas of sky above. A single slither of moonlight cut diagonally across his face, illuminating a lone blue eye, his button nose and the downturned corner of his thin lips.
Carl didn't smile much anymore. Freya couldn't recall the last time she'd glimpsed his pearly whites ── though, she understood the necessity for their absence. Every sliver of joy she'd felt since her father's death was revealed to her had tightened the indestructible knot of guilt in her chest.
