Eighteen Weeks After: A Short Story

Part VIII

"Kael!" the scream ruptured from my chest and tore through my throat as I stumbled to my feet and staggered towards the busted doors, "Kael!"

My eyes frantically combed the wreckage splayed across the street, the persistent blanket of rain draping a sheet over the city that dramatically hindered my line of sight. The storm was like a veil, and I shouted his name again over the relentless downpour and thunder that clapped overhead, praying for all that was left that I would see him running up the street towards the building.

But I didn't.

I was all too aware of the futility of my cries over the incessant hammering of the rains, but my chest was drowned in a panic so overbearing that it ate at my sanity and dissolved the voice of reason that roared at me to turn away.

I had made it. I was in the town. I was one short step away from what I had so desperately sought for the eighteen long weeks that had passed since the world was swallowed by disaster. I was safe. I should have seized all that I had in that moment – the food, the city, the shelter – I should have held onto every last bit of it.

But I couldn't.

My stomach clenched in a tight fist of fear, a sick roil of terror crawling further and further up my neck with each and every passing second that went by without spotting his approaching form. I couldn't stand there. I couldn't wait any longer. I couldn't leave him out there.

And so I ran.

Maybe I hadn't thought it through; maybe I was being impulsive. Maybe I had completely and utterly lost my mind. Whatever it was, it had me bursting from the secure boundaries of my wall of refuge and rushing into the hurt and terror of the storm that raged beyond.

"Kael!"

The pain was worse this time. The downpour spit fire into the raw skin that lay defenseless against the raging rains, but I didn't dare stop. I was running on a sea of adrenaline, nothing but a rush of panic, the surge of alarm and shock of my wounds like morphine to my agony. I could hardly see; hardly think. All I knew is that my legs were spinning beneath me and the flood was pelting down from above and his name kept ripping through my throat as I dodged my way through the wreckage of the streets.

I kept running. Through the deserted cars and the fallen buildings and the seared debris, I kept running. I didn't stop. I was immune to the pain – to the way my lungs combusted and my muscles melted and my skin ignited in fever as I floated further and further away from reality. My breath wasn't my own. The thumps of the heart that thrashed wildly in my chest and the voice that shrieked helplessly into the ashes and ruins of the city: none of it was mine.

"Kael!"

I couldn't see and I couldn't hear through the madness of the hurricane of sheer horror. The water that filled the fallen streets mixed with the ashes of the lives that had burnt in this town months ago, swirling like a black pool of death at my feet and splashing up my legs as I sprinted in the direction of the alleyway from which we had run. It was like I was racing on thin air, and suddenly I didn't feel the thudding impact that shot up my legs with every stride, or the incessant drumming of the torrent that beat down on me from the skies.

I was drifting further and further away from the world in front of me.

And that was when I heard it.

"Lorei!"

His voice breached the barricade that had begun to rise around me, jolting me back to reality with a sudden rush of hope.

"Kael?" I stopped in my tracks. "Kael!"

"Here!"

My eyes frantically scoured the rubble around me, my heart jumping into my throat and lodging it tight with a surge of desperation. I fought to see through the heavy sheet of pouring rain, my pulse growing increasingly rapid and a heated stream of hysteria filling my breaths more and more with each passing second. I could hardly decipher the objects of my surroundings through the storm, and I struggled to distinguish the outline of an overturned bus and the skeleton of a charred vehicle, begging to spot the boy who called my name.