Part 1.

One, two... three morsels of bread dropped into the fishtank.
My hand was still numb, my all the strands of my hair broken, whitened from the stress. My clothes still smelled like those stinky concrete ruins and the scent of the pure horror. I was tired and my soul was worn, I couldn't feel almost anything, but this feeling was hidden deep inside my heart and every bit of my flesh. I could still feel it when the air transformed into my weak breaths.

I don't know how many years we spent there. Nor even where and how. Our minds slowly lost all their humanity in order to stay alive, to survive, to be able to take one more step and see just one more moment of something we didn't want to. My memories are like shards of the windows behind a sublime altar. Four painted, stained thin layer of glass, and probably millions, millions of fallen glasses.
There was that day. We had a party. Listened to music, enjoy drinking and dancing, some of us sleeping, and the others were chatting. Chatting in an intense cloud of smoke, which put us to sleep, fallen electricity which muted our music thus our voices slowly, but not the voices from the street -screeching, yelling, cars and their wheels rushing, the break screaming- which prevented us from closing our eyes, however tired we were. I was going to home with a friend of mine. I still remember her saying, that "may tomorrow be an interesting day for you." Of course it'd had been. Sitting into the car of my best friend and visiting the capital together - just perfect.
When I woke up, the air was gray and dull. Powder and dust covered everything. Out from the nothing.The friend of mine who was going to accompany me home wasn't there. I've been sleeping under the bed, but she was lying right next to me on the open floor, and then I haven't seen her. I waited for some noise to raise. A yawn of rested fatigue, a sigh escaping from a sweet, evanescent dream, an unconscious kick into something on the floor. Something. It was one thousand of years I spent there. Until I cautiously crawled out and realized how alone I was. Even on the street. Just my best friend has been staring surprised at their small red car, just standing there like the driver had disappeared. And one child, who has bitten my hand. And sucked all my energy in some wicked way. I hit his head with an iron pipe and smashed that innocent face to the complete distortion without any thought. Those teeth was though clutching into my tendons and veins and I felt I'm going to completely loose myself. She helped me. She helped me, like every other time. Like it were some task got in maths class or a recipe I don't understand.
Technically, to be honest, nothing has changed.

We had two big luck: First, they never attacked in your sleep, but sometimes our dreams were so vivid and so lifelike, they might have been haunting our dream-souls as well. Second, they didn't like closed, small places. A big setback was, that fellow people did, and they could be sometimes one hundred times more cruel and merciless than the apparitions. I wish I could count how many people died because of my hands doing, after got hurled out from a left-behind wardrobe or a big hole on the ground grabbed by my hair. Or how many people's death did I witness, but since time was dead, I can't guess it anymore, even though numbers had been running around in my mind all the... time.
We didn't know, where we are, how was the people, stepping on these grounds titled once, how was the code of our words called. We didn't know the directions we were pointing into, the river, or what's on the other side of it apart from opportunities of a little safety. When new buildings popped up on the horizon, they wasn't town or villages anymore. They were closed places, they were the chance of meeting new ones and how many of them. Our routes couldn't be identified by the locations we reached. Our way was avoidance.
But at least we weren't alone.

There was a girl, we didn't understand a word which she said, but she didn't tell too much anyways. Despite this, she kept up with us, and we didn't mind it the least. First, because why would we mind her following us, second, she had a shotgun and bullets from somewhere, which had some use in scaring others away, if anything. Because we didn't understand her and she didn't understand us, we called her on every name what came to our mind, even on casual words like "Nonsense", for obvious reasons. Sometimes we wondered if she had even remembered what her name once was, because, despite these word-problems, she could just point at herself and tell her name with a big emphasis on it, but she didn't even try. So in one day she could be anything from "Octavia" to "Cheyenne" to "Alexis", but somehow she always knew when we were talking to or about her, so it was okay, I guess. And we have met others whose words made no sense for us the least, surprisingly many times. (There was also a boy who could only name animals and on some pretty childish way, so even though he was older than us and male, his name was just "Kitty" among us. I don't remember his real name. It wasn't like ours, but I have a feeling that it was even casual. There was also a woman and some others.) We met each other near a field, some of the most dangerous places, wanted to hang herself on a tree. I was sitting under a big bush and watching. To gain courage from her to do soon the same. Her face was covered all over with these ash-covered gray wounds and scratches, I haven't met this kind of injury before, but I couldn't care less, or list at least two people who would have. She threw the rope onto the strongest branch of the dry, dead tree -even this was covered with ashes and dust- and then she jumped. Bruised her skin, hit her back but it's not even her business anymore - or it's what I thought back then. Coughing, terrible, terrible coughing, it could even tear apart the fog and this piercing yet still dull light easier than anything. My heart skipped a beat as her dying voice hit my ears. I had jumped up, like she had jumped down, and cut her rope. Her neck was bleeding. She still has the scar. But at least it was real blood and real scar. She wore it somehow with pride.

"Don't jump!" I told to our another companion. I guess it might have been at the beginning of this whole madness. She was murmuring and even in spite of the fact that three floor separated us, I've seen that this ash was pouring down from her mouth like it were water or blood, flying away with that empty breeze which was piercing us all the time. But now, that this brownish, obnoxious dust hit my face it touched me again. "Please don't jump!" Just please don't jump. Yeah, we probably met her first, and then we even know we followed some way on which once many autos rushed like they were drops of blood towards the heart. She was my friend, after all. Yes, she was my friend, and she was my friend even when she fell and cut through the dust and sickness of the air. And it was my friend's bones whose cracking I've heard and her blood's splat. And my breath died for my friend. But she... stood up. We didn't know how, but she stood up. I raised the iron pipe. Her eyes were empty but soon got clearer and clearer and that grayish pollen disappeared from the garden of her gaze, slowly, but forever. We didn't know what kind of being caused her what, which forced her to spill her own blood and play this quick and short symphony on her skeleton. Whatever was it - we had to avoid it. And go. And hide. We have been always hiding in some meaning after all. I took a look at the drip of blood she left behind, but there was nothing, just tired brown splotches, in the shape of a scythe and feathers. And dust. Small rocks and countless shards, bigger or smaller have been falling at us from the decaying buildings, electricity composed songs with the cables they got free from. Sometimes it was like that you could have even heard the rust eating the metal and the concrete turning into sand, which flew with the howling, soulless breeze on withering fields of memories. It was like a desolate sonnet.

A sonnet we danced with as it got us more and more. It was devouring. Wandering and wandering.