Jade stops by the corpse, peers at the face, wiggles her fingers at the gaping holes in his chest and stomach.
Bec sniffs at intestines and Rose pretends not to notice.
“Jade,” he says, and the air wavers in front of him, shimmers.
Her foot is on his head, and now she’s pressing those heels into him, there’s a wet sound and a crack and a squelch and she’s standing in brains and the crushed skull of her next door neighbour.
“It’s not real,” Dave says.
“It’s not real.”
(two)
His dad hasn’t been home in weeks.
Or has it been months?
All he knows is the world’s gone mad, they’re hunting humans and hunting others and they’re all drowning in heat and Jade crushes skulls and it’s summer like it’s never been before.
“Let’s go to California,” Dave says, and Jade throws a can of soup at him.
“It’s warm there.”
(three)
They’re all dead, just as dead as Washington and New York and Australia and the rest of the screwed up world, and they surf and steal food and smoke and drink and have the teenage summer everyone dreams of.
He wakes up one day in the middle of a tangle of limbs, all dusky brown and honeyed pale and white, and wonders when everything got so perfect.
It takes the end of the world to satisfy.
(four)
Jade gets sick, and they feed her to Bec.
She’s back the next day, and everything is an LSD dream.
(five)
Everything is false.
“Nothing is real,” he says, and he means it.
“It’s all a lie.”
“It’s not real.”
(six)
They find one after three months, a shambling corpse, rotting but dry, tongue falling out of it’s head.
Their first live one.
She used to be pretty, he thinks, and Dave cracks it’s femur with a baseball bat.
“Kill it,” Jade commands.
“Show it how to hurt.”
Rose is the one who grabs a fistful of hair and peels the last bit of skin clinging to it’s face off
And then he's there with a brick and she has no ribs now, how did that happen?
Dave steps on her spine and grinds her face into the curb, face tightening at the snap of her jaw breaking and the sight of the brow-black-red blood that spills.
It smells, and he waits for night.
(seven)
She slides onto him with a moan, and her twin is kissing her hard from behind John.
