Tails of the Apocalypse

Ghost Light ^{by Steven Savile}

They told us we didn’t need to be afraid of the Russians anymore. They told us that they were our friends. What that meant was that we neutralized each other. Mutually assured destruction. That’s not the same as friendship.

We weren’t meant to worry when they annexed the Ukraine, they said. That was just reclaiming what was already theirs. Most of the Crimea was still Russian in their hearts, if not their passports. That’s what they told us. They made excuses when the missiles first launched into Syria, a scorched-earth policy meant to burn the land and ISIS with it. Or IS or ISIL or whatever we called the terrorists back then.

Most of us just believed what we were told. The Russians were the greatest threat we’d ever faced. They were the scourge of the East. They were the root of all Evil—capital E evil, not the small stuff—but we weren’t meant to worry because our friends were on the case. Their missiles and bombs and guns would cleanse the world, and we’d line the streets and cheer when our boys came home from the front as heroes.

That’s what they told us.

Pity is, it was all a pack of lies.

I don’t remember when it all started to unravel. Maybe there wasn’t a single defining moment. We like to think of things in neat terms. We look for a tipping point, an Archduke Ferdinand moment, but sometimes life—and especially death—just aren’t that clean.

I’m part of an older generation. We were brought up knowing our enemies were big things with little names: diseases like AIDS and HIV, superflus and flesh-eating bacteria. We knew we were destroying the world with our CFCs and polluting it by burning fossil fuels. But we were selfish. We wanted to drive our Escalades and our muscle cars and didn’t give a crap about our carbon footprint. We were here, this was our world, our one life, and we’d damn well live it the way we wanted to.

And then the Russians changed everything.

It was hard to believe that some craggy-faced vodka drinker could actually do it—lean forward and press the button. But he did. It probably wasn’t how I imagine it. The end of the world seldom is.

I like to imagine him knowing exactly what he was doing, lining up some ridiculously expensive Cohiba cigar and a bottle of Stoli, a well-thumbed copy of Das Kapital beside them, the holy trinity for a Russian patriot. I can imagine him clipping off the end of the cigar and sucking in the smoke, puff-puff-puff, followed by a long exhalation as smoke rings drifted up in front of his face. Then he washes the taste out of his mouth with one last, perfect shot of vodka and turns to a passage in the good book that brings him comfort. Because it’s a big thing, ending the world. The act needs a certain resigned serenity to it, a certain ritual. I don’t want to think about power brokers in a nuclear bunker arguing about times to detonation, viable targets, and strategic strikes. I guess I want to believe it was a better world back then.

I know it isn’t a better world now.

I was one of the lucky few. Or the unlucky few, depending upon your perspective. I was airborne on a 747 flying from Munich to London. Going home. Only, it turned out, there was no home to go to. We watched the clouds rise like fungus from the earth, the nuclear winds battering the hull, forcing the pilot to rise higher. The shockwaves came again and again like tidal surges. Of the 418 passengers, 197 didn’t want to land. They argued it would be better to fly until the fuel ran out and hope the plane came down in the ocean because that was a fast death. That way we’d not have to watch what had happened to the world. Two hundred and twenty-one people refused to give up hope. Two hundred and twenty-one people damned everyone on Flight BA949.

We didn’t land at Heathrow like we were supposed to. The pilot took us north, banking up towards the Highlands of Scotland. We didn’t understand why he did that at first, but the Scots built their roads to function as emergency runways. So we could land on a remote strip well out of any city, away from the radiation and the sickness that threatened. We didn’t think about stuff like altitude and the cold or how tough it would be to scavenge food when our new world was frozen. We just wanted to hide from the worst of the destruction.

Of course, we’d have to go into the cities eventually. We had a full roster of passengers, some with brilliant minds, others not so sharp. There were engineers, musicians, teachers, salesmen, you name it—the entire spectrum of knowledge was represented, thousands of years at the best schools in the world amassed between us. And no one could agree how long we’d have to wait before it’d be safe to venture into what had been civilization.

As we went into that first night, it was hard to believe that the sun would still rise the next day. But it did.

Some of us didn’t make it through the first week. We’d lost fourteen people by the end of the first month. I think it was the reality of life in a post-nuclear world that killed them. All the things we’d taken for granted, those precious status symbols we’d paid over-the-top prices for because they had a glowing apple for a logo, our cell phones and laptops, all were suddenly worthless. Our social network was reduced to the faces around us. The only tweets were from the birds in the trees. The only music we made ourselves, though we didn’t have much to sing about. It was hard to believe that it was all gone; not just generations of learning, but entire civilizations’ worth of understanding. Lost to the world.

We focused on shelter at first. Gutting the hulk of the plane to make sleeping bays. We each had a blanket, which wasn’t nearly enough to see us through winter. I didn’t have many friends in the group. I’d been on the flight alone. My family was back home in Epsom, a little town just south of London. We’d lived up on the Downs in a little cluster of two hundred houses called Langley Vale. I say we; I mean my wife, Em, and our best friend, Buster, a soft-coated Irish Wheaten Terrier we’d nicknamed The Terrorist. He was nine months old when the vodka-swiller pushed the button. Buster had barely started living. I thought about trying to walk home, but six hundred miles in the fallout might as well have been six thousand.

I wasn’t sure it would even be possible.

I thought about heading to the east coast of Scotland and trying to steal a boat. The water would’ve kept me away from the worst of the radiation. But I never took that course because deep down part of me knew Epsom was only seventeen miles from London. The blast radius of a one megaton nuke was about six miles.

The Tsar Bomba, the new Russian nuke, was a hundred megaton bomb. It had a fireball radius alone of two miles, meaning there was no City of London left. The radiation circle was nearly five miles wide with an expected 90 percent mortality rate from radiation sickness in just the first month or so. The air-blast radius came in two tiers. Within eight miles of detonation, the winds were forceful enough to tear down huge concrete-and-steel structures, rendering the devastation absolute. Up to twenty-one miles from the heart of the explosion, the nuclear winds were still damaging enough to demolish most buildings. As far as fifty miles away, people would experience third-degree burns to all exposed skin. Flammable material, like clothes, would burn away. It would have been like hell on Earth.

And that was the real reason I wasn’t thinking about trying to go home. I could only pray Em and Buster hadn’t suffered.

That was an odd thing, too. Suddenly I was thinking about religion, but I wasn’t religious. I’d always been a non-believer. A lot of the survivors, though, were born again in the wake of the world’s end. They kissed the ground and thought about everything in terms of prayer and miracles.

People were getting superstitious, too.

That happens when you’re reduced to firelight. It takes you back to a more primitive existence, and with it come primitive fears. We’ve never really grown out of them as a species. They’re still there, all of those old caveman fears we thought we’d left in the Stone Age. They’re hardcoded in our DNA, just waiting for disaster to reawaken them.

It didn’t take long before the first of the survivors started seeing things in the moonlight, shapes circling around the ruined plane. Out there. Watching. They rarely came close enough for us to get a good description, and everyone seemed to see something slightly different. Different sizes, different shapes, coloration, but one thing everyone agreed on—the phantoms moved on all fours. Piecing their different stories together, it sounded like everyone was describing their own version of a pack of stray animals, some dogs, maybe wolves, some more exotic; there was even a horse among the sightings. I didn’t think they had wolves in Scotland, but I didn’t want to stake my life on it.

What I didn’t tell anyone was that I’d seen something out there, too. A shape. Low. Golden fur matted with ash and dust and dirt. Nosing around in the undergrowth. It never came closer than maybe five hundred feet from the crashed plane, but that was close enough for me to recognize what it was.

A ghost light.

I kept what I saw to myself, but some people in the group must have worked out that everyone was seeing something similar flickering out there in the darkness of night.

Those dogs were a curse.

To see them was to know you were dead, even if death hadn’t caught up with your body yet.

It was only a matter of time.

I wasn’t ready to go. Nothing was going to make me give up my grip on this life until I was ready. I hadn’t survived a nuclear holocaust to give over my fate to phantom hounds. I’d leave, but on my terms. Though I had no idea what those terms actually were.

I started to look for a purpose, beyond the obvious, in living. I wondered if it might not be worth going on a pilgrimage, trying to find some of the old relics, maybe venturing over the water into Europe, try to find the Spear of Longinus or the Shroud of Turin, some kind of holy artifact that survivors could rally behind. Was that my hope I was looking for? Maybe the mainland hadn’t been hit as badly as Britain? That was something to cling on to, wasn’t it? The notion that old enmities had made us a target, but that somewhere out there, life was almost normal.

I thought about the old legends, about Glastonbury Tor and ley lines and the legends of Arthur, the Once and Future King, who was supposed to return in the hour of our greatest need. If ever there was a time for him to show up, this was it, wasn’t it? I thought about Saint Patrick charming the snakes out of Ireland and the old forest gods that predated modern faith. Herne the Hunter, Puck, and Robin Goodfellow. I thought about our warrior queen, Boadicea, and our Lionhearts and bravehearts and broken hearts. The landscape, sour now, reminded me of the burned monasteries and kings buried in carparks.

Surely, in all of this ruin, there must be some sort of symbol, something that could be used as a beacon to shine its light in our dark time?

Yusef, an old IT programmer with no useful skills in this broken new world, was the first to volunteer to become one of my Grail Knights. Hejdur and Heldur, two brothers from Iceland, offered their strength—and with both of them close to six-five and built like the proverbial brick shithouses, they had plenty of that to offer—and Priya, a mother of three from New York who’d lost everything just like me, completed the circle. Five of us from the original 418 survivors broke camp and set off south, walking out of the mountains into the nuclear winter.

I don’t remember the first time we noticed the shadow moving through the trees, but it was Yusef who saw it. He pointed through a gap in the skeletal limbs toward a deeper darkness he claimed was back there, but I couldn’t see it. Neither could the others. We believed him, though. It was one of two things: a dog, hungry, driven out of the shadows to follow us and find food, one that none of us could seem to get a fix on. Or Yusef’s days were marked.

I almost told him, but almost is a big word. I couldn’t. Not when it came right down to it. Telling someone you think they’re going to die because they’ve seen a ghost dog… well if it isn’t exactly bugfuck crazy, it certainly isn’t normal conversation, put it that way.

And if it wasn’t a ghost, then it was a flesh-and-blood animal, and it was only a matter of time before it became desperate enough to attack.

We were in the heart of its territory.

We made camp that night, huddled around the few sticks we’d managed to scavenge, warming our hands. We didn’t talk much at all. No matter how much life we managed to stir into the flames, they didn’t give off any real heat. I was shivering despite being layered up in several skintight tee shirts beneath my heavy-duty four-seasons fleece. I should have been sweating. But I just didn’t sweat anymore.

He saw it again. I know he did. But he didn’t say anything. That was the first real hint he knew what was going on. He was a smart guy, Yusef. When no one else was looking, he tugged down the collar of his shirt and I saw the blisters. He was sick.

The dog had come for him, come to shepherd him into a better death.

Again, I thought about the golden shadow shape that had dogged my footsteps since the plane; my own ghost light.

I wished he’d fought it. I wished he’d realized it didn’t have to end this way, that there had to be hope, there had to be miracles in this ruined land.

His answer was to tell me there were 23,000 nuclear warheads in existence. That was it. His version of a miracle. I didn’t grasp what he meant until we reached Arthur’s Seat and what had been Edinburgh Castle.

Twenty-three thousand warheads.

How many of them had been launched? Not just one or even a handful. When the Russians launched theirs, had we retaliated with Tridents and the Americans with their bombs, filling the sky with that long-promised mutual end? We had no way of knowing, of course. There weren’t secret factions out there with shielded computers and secret networks clued in to news broadcasts on hidden television stations. There was nothing. We hadn’t seen a soul since leaving the wreck. That alone scared me more than all the other things we had seen added together.

Edinburgh had been razed. Several walls had survived intact, the shadows of collapsed landmarks charred onto them as a reminder of the city that had been lost. The wind was the worst. It churned up the ash, making devils to blow down Princess Street. It stung my eyes.

I wept. And not just because of the dust.

There was no weakness in tears, no matter what I might have thought when I was a kid trying to learn to be a man.

We went down towards the River Leith, though in my mind I was calling it the Lethe, which made it feel like an entirely different river we had to cross. The Queen’s ship was down there. Or had been. The metal had buckled and warped under the incredible heat. Now the thing in the water was unrecognizable.

Staring, fixated at the hulk, I heard something.

Birds.

A huge murder of crows. Thousands upon thousands of them came banking and arching down the slope from the ruined city to ride the thermals out over the water. They cast a shadow across the world that might—if we truly were Grail Knights—have been a dragon. It wasn’t until the first of them fell out of the sky that I began to see the sickness in the flock. The surge of hope I’d felt at finally seeing some sign of life in the land died with them as one by one the birds fell, splashing down into the estuary.

It took an hour for the last of the circling birds to fall.

An hour of us watching them die.

I hated my eyes.

There was nothing there for us. We needed to move on. To hope that it was different in Newcastle or York or Leeds. We needed to believe that somewhere had survived. But with every passing mile, it became more obvious that no place had.

On the third morning out of Edinburgh, Yusef left us.

We’d slept around the campfire that night, taking refuge in an old Roman hillfort in the borderlands. When we woke, he wasn’t there. I stood in the doorway calling his name. My voice echoed across the Northumberland moors. Purple heathers stretched as far as the eye could see. Midges swarmed around us, but where a few weeks ago they would have fed on our blood, they left us alone now.

I saw the dog in the heather, playing. It raced in circles, chasing some invisible prey, each circle faster and tighter than the one before. I could have watched him play for hours. The way his tail was up and his gait changed to a prance as he finally tired was so familiar.

When the brothers emerged from the hillfort, I thought about pointing him out, but realized I didn’t want them to tell me they couldn’t see him.

Instead, I told them that Yusef was gone.

They didn’t say anything.

Maybe he’d walked off in the night to die alone so we wouldn’t have to worry about his body? What would we have done? Buried him? Built a cairn of stones over his corpse or left him to feed the animals? I realized we hadn’t discussed what we wanted to happen to us when we died. There were four of us left. We weren’t alone in this. Our deaths would require a certain measure of practicality from those who survived. We should agree on these kinds of things going in, shouldn’t we? It would save any arguments if someone wanted to be laid out for the birds or someone else wanted to be cut up into steaks to feed the rest of us.

I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been hungry.

Properly hungry.

I should have been ravenous.

But I wasn’t.

I remember a story, the Lambton Worm. I’d grown up with it. A local legend. I could only remember the first few lines of the poem, but I knew its lair was supposed to be around here somewhere.

The legend went that a local lad had skipped church to go fishing but hooked the devil rather than a fish. But thinking Old Toby a mere lamprey-like worm, the lad tossed it down a well and forgot all about it. As penance for his rebellious youth, the lad joined the Crusaders and went off to the Holy Land while the worm grew and grew down that well, until it grew so big, it could wrap itself seven times around the base of Worm Hill. The worm would snatch local children, growing fat on them, you see. With armor and sword magically blessed by a witch—the blessing itself heavily weighted with a curse—the lad’s promised his armor will protect him and his sword slay the worm. But after the worm is dead, the witch requires the lad to kill the first living thing he sees to pay the blood price and seal his pact with her. He slew the worm in a raging river, then looked up at the riverbank to see his beloved dog barking, full of excitement at its master’s return. The lad couldn’t kill his dog, and in breaking the pact brought a curse down on his family that saw nine generations of his descendants doomed—his son drowned at sea, his grandson killed at the Battle of Marston Moor, his great-grandson slain in the Battle of Wakefield, his great-great-grandson trampled under the hooves of his horse, and so on.

We were a day’s walk from Worm Hill.

The dragon-slaying sword was supposedly sealed away in the monument built atop the hill.

Was that the kind of truly British relic that could unite the people?

The story of the Lambton Worm was a variant of the Saint George tale, with the worm replacing the dragon. There was no more British a legend than that of George and the Dragon. Could the sword under the hill be Ascalon, the saint’s fabled sword?

The chance, however remote, that it might be gave me something to focus on as we walked. Part of me truly believed we needed a miracle to return life to a dead land. No matter how remote the possibility that Ascalon actually existed might be. I wasn’t thinking rationally. I knew that.

I told the others what I had in mind.

They followed me to the monument.

Before we disappeared inside the cavern at the foot of the hill, Priya let slip that she’d seen a stray trailing us for the last hour. Neither of the brothers had seen it, and I didn’t dare admit that I’d been seeing my own dog for the last month or so, or that he was watching us even now from a spot up by the Athenian structure that guarded over the top of the hill. There was so much destruction over the last hundred miles we’d traveled, it was amazing to think the ancient monument was still standing.

We lost Priya in the darkness.

Four of us walked into that cave, but only three of us emerged.

There was no sword in the stone waiting for me to find it.

We crawled about inside the cavern, reaching out blindly to feel our way along the walls in the claustrophobic darkness that smothered us. The air was old in there. Stale. It didn’t taste like the air outside, which in turn didn’t taste like the air I’d grown up breathing. The air now carried the dust of our lost world. Every lungful inhaled was another little bit of our loves that we’d lost drawn into us. That almost made the hell of it all bearable. But again with that word, almost.

I don’t know what happened. There was no fight. No screams. But with no light, we were fumbling around in there, trying to feel our way towards a prize we could never hope to find. It was a stupid way to go about it, I know that now. It wasn’t as if the sword would just be lying on an altar down there, waiting to be drawn up. I had tried to sell myself a lie that there was something Excaliburish about the whole thing, and that by raising the sword, people might start to believe that our greatest hero had found his way back and that we would prevail, we would batter back the darkness and find a way to rebuild. But even I didn’t buy the lie I was selling anymore.

I followed the golden blur of my ghost light out into the fading twilight. The Celts used to call it the time between times. It was one of the two hours of the day when magic was possible.

I guess the only magic here was that I was still alive.

I’m sure the brothers felt the same way, but like their Scandinavian stereotype, they weren’t very talkative. At least not with me. I think the fact that we’d lost Yusef and Priya weighed on them. But they didn’t argue when I said we had to move on.

We weren’t going to find a holy cup or a gleaming sword or any other sort of relic. I had come to accept that. I didn’t want to believe it, but I accepted it. We were still three hundred miles from the Downs, where I’d made my home with Em and Buster. I wanted to think that a lot could happen over three hundred miles. But as each mile passed beneath our trudging feet with more of the same dust and decay to show for it, how much could really change over that distance?

Heldur was the next to admit he’d seen something, but he was much more precise in his description of it. It wasn’t an animal. It was a sallow-skinned naked man, feral, his face blistered and raw, clumps of hair fallen out to reveal suppurating sores and puss seeping from his scalp.

I wasn’t sure if he was Heldur’s ghost, or if the feral man was the first survivor we’d found.

I’m not sure which possibility was worse.

Hejdur woke us in the middle of the night to say he’d heard something and crept out to investigate because he was sure he’d seen the same feral man lurking close to our makeshift camp. That gave me the creeps, but to be blunt, better some feral enemy come at us tooth and claw than the grimmest reaper turn out to be an irradiated corpse skittering across the blasted landscape. That was the stuff of nightmares right there. If he was real, we could put him out of his misery.

That’s how I’d started thinking; the first man we’d encountered, and I was picturing ways to end his life. I didn’t understand what was happening to me.

When Hejdur returned without finding the man, the brothers decided they were going after him.

I didn’t follow them.

I needed to get my head around the fact that I was seeing monsters where there were—at worst—desperate, dying men. I didn’t like what the long walk was turning me into.

It wasn’t until I’d been walking for an hour in the opposite direction that I realized I had no intention of heading back to the camp. I was going home. Alone.

Only I wasn’t alone, was I?

I was following my own golden ghost light south toward home.

It didn’t take more than twenty miles for him to make himself known again. This time as we walked, he kept looking back over his shoulder, as if to make sure I was still following.

His tail whipped back and forth, always happy, just the way I remembered him. The closer we came to home, the more familiar my ghost light became.

He’d found a stick.

It might as well have been the canine equivalent of Ascalon or Excalibur or whatever other name that fabled sword went by the way he strutted with it in his mouth. So proud. There was a wonderful nobility about the way he watched over me as he led me home. There was no judgment for my having not been there when he and Em had needed me the most.

I wept as I walked, a single track of tears trailing down my dirt-smeared cheek. I was sure I was losing my mind, driven mad by the solitude, twisted by the grief until I’d finally broken.

I thought of all of the other animals the survivors had seen around the wreckage. A few had seen wild horses, flocks of sparrows, owls in the trees, crows, dogs like Buster; there was even a hart.

They were all soul guides, psychopomps.

Their role in every culture was the same: to shepherd the soul into the Afterlife.

But I wasn’t ready to go.

Not yet.

I wanted to go home first.

We reached the crater that had been London. All that remained was mud and silt and broken stone buried under a cloud of ash. Long shadows were burned into the ground by the heat from the nuclear blasts. Twisted wrecks of cars and buses resembled nothing more than struts of old meccano. I reached down to stroke Buster, needing to feel the familiar comfort of his soft fur beneath my fingers.

He hadn’t barked once in three hundred miles.

He looked up at me expectantly.

Once upon a time I would have dipped my hand into my pocket for some sort of treat when we walked through the woods. We were denied those simple pleasures now. But we were together, and that was miracle enough to this non-believer.

At last, a miracle in a broken, blasted land.

We were a day from home.

I hunkered down beside my best friend, ruffling my fingers through his fur, and said I only wanted one day, just one more.

He looked at me with pity in his eyes and understanding.

I wished I could read his mind.

“Penny for them,” I said, as he inclined his head, looking at me.

He answered by licking the ash off my fingertips.

I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten—or what that last meal had been. Fish, maybe?

That felt like something I ought to remember.

We walked through what remained of the capital. Everywhere I turned there were ghosts. They offered their own mournful laments carried away by the wind.

I saw lovers holding hands.

I saw an old man on the corner smiling at the ghost of the woman who’d been his wife for sixty years.

I saw kids on the corner kicking a football against a wall that wasn’t there.

I saw an elderly woman weighed down by carrier bags overflowing with groceries she’d never eat.

I saw a boy pushing a bike and girls skipping rope.

I saw all these signs of life, normality, but none of them saw me.

They all had that same glazed expression on their faces, locked in their shared moment of death. They were just the last lingering memories of life the city clung to. They weren’t real.

Neither were the buildings.

They were just more memories. That explained how streets led into the wrong streets, missing out huge sections of the city as we walked, each step one step closer to home.

We shared one last night under the stars, Buster and I.

There was fire in the sky as the night remembered the death of the world.

It wasn’t beautiful.

There was no beauty left in the world.

Buster was anxious. He wanted to be on the move. He didn’t like the rumbling thunder off in the distance. The sound—or maybe it was the change in barometric pressure—made him uncomfortable. I hated that I couldn’t soothe him. So instead of sleep, we walked on.

We arrived on the Downs at sunrise.

The other hour when magic was in the air.

Langley Vale was in a dip in the rolling hills. What that meant was that the two hundred houses were saved from the worst of the nuclear wind. Seventeen miles and some from ground zero meant that some of the houses that had once traded hands for upwards of half a million pounds still stood. The old school with its prefab guts had blown away. There wasn’t even a shadow where it had stood.

Buster whined as I stood there, looking at the raw wound in the land where it’d been, remembering my first kiss that had happened in that old building. He wanted to move on. He was in a hurry to get home.

We entered Grosvenor Road at the top of the village. The old street sign was buckled, half the letters blistered and bubbled away from the metal.

Buster was half-jumping with every step now, so close to the bungalow where we all lived.

The long tarmac drive hadn’t been repaired in the thirty years since I’d first walked up it. Weeds grew wild, coming up through the cracks. The old sycamore was split, half its trunk torn open and in the grips of mold, while behind it the three oaks were gone, their roots ripped up. Bricks and broken mortar gathered around the fallen trees. Bar one wall, they were all that remained of my home.

This wasn’t the homecoming I’d promised myself.

I walked through the rubble, my faithful friend at my side.

Along with all the horror stories of after, they never tell you about the flash burn that follows the rolling out of the nuclear wind. It’s like a photograph imprinted on the wall in a perfect silhouette. Em was there. So was Buster. I could see her crouched down beside him. Holding him.

I wondered if he’d been frightened.

I couldn’t bear that thought.

I knew my wife. As terrified as she was, her thoughts would have been for Buster. I could hear her now murmuring: Shhhh, shhhh, it’ll be all right, it’ll be all right…

I wasn’t a Grail Knight, I knew.

I wasn’t any sort of hero who might unify the survivors after the bombs.

I was just a guy called Steve, desperate to go home to a life that was over.

I hunkered down beside Buster, within touching distance of the ash shadow burned into the last wall of my home, and let him lick my face.

He had done his duty.

He had been my guide.

I was ready to admit the truth: that I had never walked away from that wreckage. That everything, the weeks and months that followed in that endless aching journey to get here, was my soul coming to terms with the truth.

I saw movement in the shadow as Em’s blackened outline slowly rose.

I saw her hand reach out.

Buster left my side, walking into the shadow beside her.

They were my life.

And now that it was over, they could be my forever after.

I was ready.

I could go now.

I walked towards them, my shadow joining with theirs on the wall.