Leftover Apocalypse

My earliest memory is of being cold and hungry in the woods when I was five years old. It's a cherished memory for me - not because of how miserable I was of course, but because of how the memory ends. There I was, naked and dirty and miserable, and I saw my mom come running towards me through the trees. She was crying, and smiling, and reaching out to me. She was just so happy to see me.

A year later she left me in those same woods and drove off without me, which is a way less pleasant memory. We had a complicated relationship. But that first memory, that wasn't complicated at all. I felt bad, she came to make me feel better. I was lost and alone, she held me and took me home. I guess it's no surprise my brain replayed that scene as I got all delirious under a tree.

It had been, what? Twenty minutes? Something like that, probably even less though it was hard to say how long that douchebag was rifling through my memories. Certainly the fight itself had happened really quickly. So yeah, maybe twenty minutes before I'd been in a nice warm wagon learning about magic and ready to have a cool adventure in a new world. And just like that, attacked by monsters and assholes and left to bleed out or freeze to death on the side of the road.

I felt pretty good about the fight I'd put up, though, and there was some slight consolation to dying in another dimension - surely not many people could say they'd done that, it was like if you sign up for a mission to Mars or something and don't make it back to Earth. Dying on Mars is cooler than living on Earth is anyway, so you've kinda won. That didn't make me feel much better but you have to take what you can get when you've been stabbed.

I closed my eyes. I was pretty sure I'd stopped the bleeding, at least on the outside, but with the cold it wouldn't matter. I could hear, as if from a great distance, something crunching snow as it came closer. One of the bearbat things? Some soldiers? I couldn't even bring myself to care. And then something huge slammed down right in front of me. I cracked my eyes open and saw nothing but a wall of wooly brown fur as it tipped towards me and enveloped me.

It sighed, and sort of snuggled in - smooshing me against the tree and the rock wall. It smelled like wet dog. It was almost completely blocking the light and was nearly smothering me, but as my body pushed past the outer layer of fur I could feel this thing was super warm so it seemed like a minor upgrade. I could feel a leather harness, which finally clued me in to what was going on - I might have realized it sooner if I hadn't been on the brink of death. "You're the bantha guy, aren't you? Couldn't decide where to go, huh? Jesus, that's good timing. Good boy. Or girl. Whatever. I'm going to name you Mr. Snuffleupagus, okay?"

After maybe forty-five minutes I was feeling a little more alert and a lot warmer, but was getting nervous because I'd managed to essentially glue my hand to my side with my own blood and was worried that if I moved it I'd break the seal and bleed out. I was also uncertain how much actual damage had been done internally - surely getting stabbed would cut important stuff on the inside and not just conveniently stop at the skin, right? Did your internal organs have nerves? Would you be able to feel if your intestines or whatever had been perforated? What organs were even in that spot? Using my free hand, I grabbed Snuffy's harness and hauled myself up so I could look for something to use as a bandage.

I was extremely woozy. I didn't think I had lost all that much blood, but clearly it had been enough. Plus I'd been living off of broth for days. Snuffy chose that moment to stand, probably assuming I was going to lead him somewhere. I kept him close to the rock wall so that he would act as a wind break and keep me from freezing right away, and headed down the path. I figured by now the soldiers would have flown off, and I was hoping to find Hugh. It was tempting to go back the other way and try to make it to the hospital, but I didn't really think I would make it - before the attack I'd been napping for who knows how long, and even before that we'd covered a fair amount of ground.

When we reached the scene of the fight, Snuffy had to be slowly coaxed along. There were two dead segozertze, the one I had stabbed and another whose head looked like it had been twisted all the way around. There was also a wing that didn't seem to belong to either of them. I tried to picture Hugh ripping a bear's arm off but even with magic that seemed insane. Three soldiers were laid on the side of the road, and they'd been stripped of some equipment. I didn't see weapons, armor, or boots. Likewise, the batbear with the unscrewed head was missing its saddle, but the other still had one - probably because it was totally crushed underneath it.

I retrieved my heavy fur coat and managed to get it mostly on without taking my hand from my side, then reached under the upside-down monster to pull at the saddle. There had been something on the back, some supplies. Maybe something was left. After a moment I realized that in my condition it just wasn't happening, so I decided to bite the bullet and check the soldiers. Big dead monsters were okay, in fact the deadness of them was something of a relief. But dead humans... I'd never touched a dead person before and I certainly hadn't gone through their pockets.

I had to remind myself that they were obviously evil and were actively trying to kill me. Also that they may have even succeeded in killing me, since I was in bad shape and stranded in the middle of nowhere. They didn't have a lot. I wasn't planning on taking their clothes, and they didn't have any weapons. Each was clutching a little triangular bit of bright yellow metal - not gold, more like anodized aluminum. I left those, as they seemed like they were either meant to identify them somehow or were a funeral rites thing.

One had a necklace that the looters must have missed, just a simple leather cord with a blue crystal hanging from it. That was it. After a moment I had an idea and pulled their belts off - not an easy task when you're trying to keep one hand very still against your side. The belts were decent quality, nice thick leather with buckles a lot like the ones I was used to. I strung them together with some difficulty, very pleased with my increasing skill at only using one hand, and then looped one end around the ruined saddle and the other around part of Snuffy's harness.

Convincing Snuffy to pull was easy, because he didn't really want to be too close to those things anyway. The belt chain held just long enough to pull the saddle free, then popped apart in the middle. I felt extremely smart. Sure enough there was a huge saddlebag-like thing so I dragged it closer to Snuffy, got him to sit down, and snuggled in close to warm up while I searched my loot. I was a little surprised they'd taken the boots and weapons but left all this, although with half their mounts dead they were probably running out of room and this had been... pretty inaccessible.

I had a bedroll, two canteens, a bag with some jerky and super dense granola bar looking things, a thick cloak, a big bundle of canvas that I suspected was a tent, a little box filled with some miscellaneous clutter like candles and thread, a bundle that looked like cooking supplies, and a first aid kit. Jackpot on that, at least. In addition to this, the saddle sliding out had also revealed the knife I'd lost under there.

The first aid kit wasn't up to my standards. There were bandages, and three little jars of different colored goops, and what I was pretty sure was a kit to make a splint. The kit had a symbol I read as 'sandetzae' on it which I was sure meant 'healing', but there weren't any instructions for the jars. Anyway, I couldn't put it off any longer.

Convincing Snuffy to stay down, I went over to the corpse pile and cut off the legs from one guy's pants to use as rags. Getting all of my things positioned, I slid down to sit with Snuffy again and got one of my rags wet so I could lift my shirt the rest of the way up and gently clean around the wound to get my other hand free. The water, of course, was absolutely freezing. Still, it stayed liquid and managed to do the trick - when I pulled my hand off it was still bleeding but didn't start gushing like I'd feared, and the cut looked smaller than I'd been expecting - in retrospect if it had been as big as I was imagining I would have been dead.

Once the worst of the blood was wiped away from the sides and I could tell where the cut started and ended, I decided to experiment with the jars. Each had a single symbol which looked like the right language but meant nothing to me. I knew I could read words and presumably numbers - the yellow triangle things the dead guys were holding all had a symbol that I knew meant 108 - but either the jars were labeled something like "A, B, C" and the bracelet didn't cover the alphabet, or the symbols were too obscure to get translated. I cleaned off a smaller cut I'd gotten while being crushed, and poked at it deliberately until it started bleeding again. Time to experiment.

The green goop tingled a little, but had no other noticeable effect. The black goop burned like a son of a bitch and sealed the cut shut with a gray scab after seeming to boil my blood. It was absolute agony. And then the brown goop made the skin it touched numb. So that was maybe the wrong order. I decided all three were probably needed, and that the right order had to be green, brown, black. I took a deep breath and went to work. The green goop seemed to dissolve the crusted-on blood which was cool, but caused me to start bleeding more. I quickly smeared the brown on, and then before I could change my mind slapped the black stuff on and pinched the skin together as best I could.

My hand was totally numb from scooping the brown goop out in such a clumsy way, and worse it seemed I had missed a spot on my wound because I felt like I was being stabbed all over again, this time with a hot poker. But then it was over. And I felt way, way better. I was still worried about internal damage, but I decided to be optimistic. After dozing off accidentally for a bit in the armpit of my trunkless mammoth, I hauled myself up and managed to strap the saddlebags to Snuffy. I got my coat situated, threw the cloak on for good measure since it had a hood, and got onto Snuffy's back.

How long had I been asleep? I had no way of knowing. My sense for the passage of time had gotten all messed up by the terror of my impending death, and it was overcast so I couldn't even try estimating based on the position of the sun. I kept wanting to check my phone to see the time - the idea of not having a cell phone ever again was going to take a while to adjust to. I checked my wound, feeling certain I had pulled it open while getting onto Snuffy, but it seemed okay. Just a big gnarly gray scar like I had sealed it with some sort of caulk.

We reached the bottom of the cliff without further incident. Snuffy, left to his own devices, seemed to want to follow whatever the most obvious road was and while I would have much rather had some tree cover in case the bat things returned he wasn't easy to steer. I insisted on it once it started to get dark, however, and dragged him a good two hundred feet into the woods before making camp. I'd eaten a surprising amount of the rations already, and downed all of the water. I spent some time stuffing the cleanest-looking snow I could find into the canteens and then basically shoving them into Snuffy's armpit to melt, and then made camp - by which I mean I draped the tent over Snuffy and crawled underneath since I couldn't figure out how to make it stand up.

I slept okay there, having gotten used to the smell, but eventually I woke up needing to pee. I stumbled through the dark woods looking for a good spot to go, my bruised or broken ribs radiating pain as I imagined all the monsters that were surely lurking in every pool of shadows. Quickly finding a log I could perch on while cursing the cold, I took care of business and then stood to head back and realized I was all turned around.

Every freezing gust of wind rustled branches that my imagination turned into bat-bear things out of the corner of my eyes. I was looking for my own footprints that I knew must be right there, but without any kind of flashlight I was pretty useless. And then I heard something. It was less a single noise and more the quiet murmuring of lots of noises blurring together. I carefully crept up to the top of a hill, and not far away at the bottom there were rows of tents just like the one I'd failed to set up - along with more gigantic bat monsters. I pulled back into the shadows and watched until I saw the patrol circling around - they didn't seem to be watching too carefully.

My eyes skimmed over the tents, trying to guess at the numbers - there were fifteen normal tents, and I could see boots sticking out of both ends of one of the closer ones. So thirty people, at least. Realistically a few more, though it was possible some of the tents only had one person. Six were sitting around a campfire, two were standing guard at a larger tent, and six were split between two patrols.

Not that it really mattered; anything more than maybe two people would be enough to kill me even if I got lucky again. The only one I really wanted to find was that tracker guy, since he said he'd be looking for me. Would he have his own, larger tent? He seemed like he was important. I also wanted to keep an eye out for General Telen since he seemed terrifying.

Instead I found Hugh. He was sneaking towards the camp from the far side for some reason, popping out of the shadows just after the patrol passed his location. It took me a moment to realize what he was doing - he almost certainly was trying to rescue me. And if I yelled to let him know I wasn't captured, we'd both be dead. Great.