10:REMINISCENT_MADNESS

Adelaide had left Anane's home with another demon dead in her crusade, and only a few more days left before she inevitably gave out and died on the side of the road. She was only met with troubles, as repayment for the death she left behind her.

Some of the magnets within the black box relay had come loose. And they'd fallen inside of it, knocking other things out of place with their pull, like a domino chain. So after that, she was stuck fiddling with it. Desperately trying to make it function again, even though it was utterly pointless. She knew nothing about these devices or how to fix them. She'd never worked on anything of the sort and they drove her mad.

She fiddled with a copper wire, attempting to force it gently back into the place the magnet had pulled it out from. She wasn't entirely sure whether she was connecting the right things. Nothing was labelled on the internals. But she was hopeful. She was so, so hopeful. That someday he'd come through the relay again and all would be well. That the situation would just blow over.

However, it did not work out that way. She was unskilled with that aspect of machinery and when she attempted to activate it, a connection would not form. So she was once again left poking at it, desperately trying to fix it.

Her efforts remained futile for hours. The relay remained stubbornly unresponsive, as she attempted to place each of its inner workings back to where they belonged. With each failed attempt to coax it back to life, her chest ached a little more. Her distended heart grew only angrier with her for not being able to complete the task.

When she did manage to fix it, there was no time for celebration. All she could do was set herself on the path to once again travel these endless roads, and travelling had only become more difficult. The blast's effects were clearer here than they were anywhere before. The road was almost completely trashed. All the asphalt had been ripped up from the ground, before being tossed around or pushed deep back into the earth. Some of it had simply been eviscerated, turned into unrecognizable lumps.

There was basically no sign of humans now, as she went further into the blast zone. The fragments of people that might've existed stood out no more than anything else in the broken buildings. Everything simply looked like a burnt mash of debris. Whether that was for better or worse, Adelaide couldn't really say.

These people were just a bit outside the zone around Ground Zero to suffer instant deaths. Though they wouldn't have survived long, either. There just wasn't any chance of surviving something so awful. Because who was going to help you if a building crushed you? Who was going to save you from the worst of the blast damage? The first responders? How would they help you, when all the hospitals would be blown to pieces too? What would the screeching of a police siren help with? There was no arresting stray atoms.

Adelaide looked out over the world as she walked.

There had, at some point, been two very rich, old men, who decided they didn't quite like each other very much. And unfortunately, between those rich, old men, were people just smart enough to make weapons. People swayed by the promise of work or payment for projects they were far more interested in. People willing to overlook why their passion projects were getting money, so long as they were.

Even more unfortunately, between those rich, old men, were people stupid enough to die for their causes and words. People who believed strongly enough in the importance of moving a line on a border a handful of grid spaces that they would die for it in droves.

So there was the ideal formula: People smart enough to make the weapons were held by those stupid enough to believe that there was a purpose to them. Perhaps, some of the 'smart ones' had even been stupid enough themselves. Even for the intelligent, it was easier to believe in the greatness of a country than in the hope of a self found meaning. After all, a country was a grand, illustrious, ultimately meaningless thing. What could be greater to die for than a thing which could only be defined by simply not being whatever was on the other side of its border?

After that, there were all the people in between, who handled the tough busy work. A tired, broken people, who either had the choice to do as they were told, helping build up an arsenal to end the world– or die without anything in their stomachs, hated by everyone around them as traitors. Everyone was pushed to have families, so that they would be guilted away from letting themselves stop things. How could anyone let their family suffer the label? How could anyone leave a sister, the sister of a traitor. A wife, the wife of a traitor. A mother left behind in a cold world as the womb from which an evil seed grew.

The leftover wives of the men who went off to die would be like Jisako. Helpless and reliant in so many ways because there were no other options. Not many options. The Adelaides of the world existed and suffered by some ugly luck. Women who weren't meant to exist and were only able to continue existing by the mercy of men around them. Men who thought themselves more open to change and chance than they really were. Somewhere in that entire circus, the bombs would be dropped, and millions would be killed, over something or other about how to move money around or what colour a flag ought to be. If not those problems, then something equally arbitrary.

Adelaide almost had to applaud it. It was a system so simple under the surface, despite how much it sounded like some child's attempt at a rube goldberg machine. Every roadblock was handled by one smaller one, all compounding together to create a great wall. That great wall seemed to be another great thing. The fabled great filter, and they had clearly not passed it. She had no idea whether humanity would actually survive very long in those ships in the sky– and by the weight of her own nihilism, she honestly wasn't sure why they would.

In her mind, all there was to look forward to was the day every last ship ran out of air, and the suffocating people's bodies were brought crashing down to Earth. New meteors to wipe out the world of new forming dinosaurs.

Adelaide tried to spot for anything moving in the debris, but everything was still. Every last thing, dead. There were no birds or rats or flies to fill the air and make anything at all seem worth looking at.

Adealaide hated it. She hated this stationary world. It was as though God had grabbed the emergency brake, but some broken gears were still spinning. As if he couldn't do the job properly. The winds weren't blowing, there wasn't anything falling around her. Not even ash. In this braked world, everything was painfully still and stiff.

So the silence seemed to stretch on endlessly. The only sound in this silent landscape– well, it could only come from Adelaide herself, yet again. She'd had that small break with Anane, but she'd once again returned to this world. The world of quiet where the only thing that wasn't silent was her. The world outside Anane's delusion where only she could scream, and now she had quite soon realized she didn't really like being able to hear herself so well.

The thing which she had slowly realized, past that, was that her own thoughts were like alcohol. Brilliantly intoxicating, easy to lose herself in, and undeniably as poisonous. She had attempted to lose herself in memories and fantasies again, but they had all soured even in her mind. They then bled out, into waking nightmares which left her horribly on guard, yet ever so distracted.

She saw shadows that made her run, looking behind her, desperate they not catch her. The shadows would simply vanish, but rubble would shift underfoot and send her tumbling. Other times, she would see the glint of Jisako. That would always make her stop just to stare. The staring would always lead to something surprising her. A demon, or a conduit, jumping out of the dark to attack her. She was off her game, if she'd ever been on it in the first place.

Her own thoughts were wild and unyielding in their power– and she was someone who still quite feared fear.

If Adelaide surrendered herself too much to her own thoughts: she would think herself into a stupor. Like a day drinker left with a bottle, the temptations were far too strong for her to pretend she didn't notice. Adelaide had realized, now all too late, how often she was a complete slave to her desires. Especially those of her mind, because the mind knew how to convince itself. Her mind could trick her into doing anything, with the right coaxing. It could find some thread. Emotional or logical or simply a single thought, ringing into nothing, and it could make her willing to die for it. Just like the soldiers and armies which had allowed bombs to fall across the earth.

She attempted to silence her fantasies, which left her having to contend with her own mind as she walked. And there really was nothing much to do other than lose herself in some dialogue with her own deteriorating brain, so the temptation to simply let her dreams return was constant. Especially as the landscape was set on allowing itself to simply decay, leaving it simply unable to provide any stimulation.

Adelaide stepped cautiously over some strange puddles, full of fluids she couldn't tell the origin of. Everything smelled foul here. Burnt flesh and sewage which had spilled out when there were no humans left to preserve them. There was trash and some other non discriminant stuff in burnt lumps collected around the area. Adelaide didn't look too closely at any of it. Mainly, because she was too busy trying to figure out whether the figure shambling around in a semi-human manner was Rainmaker, or some demon in the distance.

She didn't have the energy left to chase, so she lowered herself to the ground. She shambled along– like the holiest of all beasts, the spider, which had protected the crypt of the hanging man, she was sure. Though unlike that beast, she lacked at least six of the limbs she needed. So it was more of an injured cat straggle across the ground than a proper heroic spider scramble.

Adelaide watched the creature moving– and she couldn't hide her disappointment at the fact the creature was just a demon, and not the young exorcist she'd run into a handful of times on the route. She prepared her cross, which she barely had the strength to hold.

She moved behind the creature, and pounced on it, covering its mouth with her hand, driving her cross into its neck. It was hard to stand– her spine was getting weaker. It was getting harder to keep a grip on the demon. Her skin was beginning to slough off when she got too rough with it.

Still, Adelaide was able to disable these demons. And she was running out of time, she knew. She needed to speed up her journey. If she didn't make it to Ground Zero in…a handful of days, she was going to be too weak to do anything even if she got there. Though, more likely, she would die somewhere en route.

With a struggling breath, Adelaide sighed with relief when the demon in her arms turned to dust.

#

Forrest still had nothing to say. The briefcase had become nothing more than needless weight, but Adelaide kept holding onto it. The hope was getting thinner with each passing day, but she couldn't hide that a part of her was desperate to believe that there would be so much luck. That he would simply come back one day. Despite her behaviour, despite her words, despite her need to die. That he would just accept that was how it was, and that it was okay. That he could just come back to speaking with her, as though the fight had never happened. The goal was entirely unrealistic, of course, but she was eager for it to somehow be achieved.

Despite her hopes, of course, no response ever came. The briefcase never sparked back to life. She never managed to totally fix it. The stupid thing just made her back hurt, and made her fingers more sore. Having to carry the damn thing, which weighed her down for basically nothing more than the vague hope he might come back. At some point, Adelaide began treating carrying the weight as like wearing penance chains. Though it was a lot more bizarre.

At least, the one similarity was that whether you wore penance chains or carried a penance briefcase, you were still just waiting for some response from a higher power. Adelaide used that thought to entertain herself as she kept walking. Walking had turned into a surprisingly mind numbing activity, even in the apocalypse. At some point, she realized she had simply come to terms with the idea this was her reality.

That was almost frightening in and of itself: that she could just accept this as the new normal. But by this point, nothing should've been surprising anymore. She lowered her head, continuing on– and ignoring the flashes of Jisako she thought she saw looming over her or hanging near corners. She knew it was like chasing the rabbit– but she was not Alice, and there was no Wonderland waiting for her. It had been bombed away. And she was too old to fit in the rabbit hole now anyway.

Adelaide was pulled out of her rather gloomy mind by the sound of footsteps– practiced, human footsteps. Not those of a human puppet being pushed around by the whims of some irritated demon. Adelaide whipped around to find who the steps belonged to with a violent excitement and fervour.

She was all too relieved when she finally saw Rainmaker, a human face, and, beyond that, a familiar one. Adelaide smiled at him when she saw it. Her teeth had become weak, and one piece chipped away from the small motion of peeling her lips back into a smile. Rainmaker nodded to her in acknowledgement. "Adelaide," he called, in a voice no louder than a whisper.

Adelaide smiled at him regardless. They couldn't be too loud now– there were most certainly too many demons everywhere. "It's so nice to see you again."

He didn't look entirely like he'd understood what she'd said, and for a moment, Adelaide wondered if she'd perhaps just made a mistake and spoken to a demon with his features. She was thankfully mistaken about that, because the recognition eventually came over his face. The radiation had given Rainmaker a bit of a foggy mind– and he was stuck perpetually wondering whether he was awake or not. In her estimation, there was no more waking. Nightmares and dreams had merged with the irradiated world, given form into demons and waking dreams alike.

It was quite often that Rainmaker was not 'present' anymore, because lethargy required rest and he'd slept at least several times along the road in the vain hopes he'd get his mind in sorts, though it hadn't done anything for him. Beyond that, his fight with Solko had left him taking several rather violent hits to a head that wasn't attached very well to begin with.

Rainmaker nodded slowly. The woman in front of him, he was fairly sure he recognized to some extent. Though it took several minutes for him to finally place down that the features weren't of the fifth grade maths teacher who'd been caught sneaking dogs in and out of the building. Or was it drugs? Possibly, most probably, it was actually drugs.

Either way, Adelaide was not the dog-dealing-maths-wheeling teacher, she was Adelaide. Though he couldn't quite recall what she'd said, he gurgled out an awkward, "nice to see you."

Adelaide almost laughed at the sheer absurdity of it. Making small talk had seemingly survived the apocalypse. "Why are you here?" she asked.

"Need to go through here."

"To Ground Zero?"

"I'm not going to be grounding Zero," he said. "I'm not his dad." He waved his hand around, as though belligerent she would accuse him of fathering a child low enough to be considered no more than a 'Zero'. He pouted at her, as well, as though to emphasize how he too was only a child, and could not care for one.

Adelaide only sighed at his childlike behaviour. "Right, right of course. So, where are you going?"

"Somewhere uh… Probably Hell." Rainmaker struggled to think of where he was actually going. He assumed it must've been somewhere nearby, and definitely somewhere incredibly dismal. Adelaide stared for a moment, attempting to find where the dent from hitting his head must have been. He must have scrambled his brain at some point. He waggled around, as though trying to hide the state of his head from her.

She backed away somewhat, for a moment, just to see if he would surge forward. She reached under her tie, and flashed the cross toward him, just to see if he might wither away and prove himself to be a demon. He didn't, which only served to confuse her more. She had no experience in the fields of brain health, so she assumed he must've been at some point driven mad by the deluge of horrors and the broken shell of a man was just the product of it. She even puffed her chest up a bit, at the thought she had braved these horrors so well.

Unfortunately for her pride, she soon saw the part of his head that had the dried blood on it and eventually figured the bruises all over his face. Remnants from when Solko had turned his face into a fine paste. Those were probably related to his behaviour. Adelaide also soon reasoned that being double his age likely made it much less impressive.

"Your head's cracked." She leaned closer, attempting to look at it. Adelaide had little to no medical knowhow, but she at least wanted to see how bad the damage actually was. It seemed Rainmaker was intent on not getting her help. He swatted her away at every opportunity.

"Humpty would be proud then," he replied, deliriously. "We should keep going, right? To… To punish Zero," he said. "There's so much that Zero needs to pay for. That– that horrible demon asshole," he said, clearly far out of anything that could conceivably be considered his right mind. Or even his wrong mind. There was no mind involved at all, just the barest ability to connect words and a body with barely any fuel in it.

Adelaide had taken a few days to rest in Anane's lie and it had done her some good to sleep in a bed– even if it were a lie– and to be off the road for a few days. Evidently Rainmaker had not had that luxury– and something indeed must've happened as a result of him being on that road constantly. Though, last Adelaide had seen him, he had a working car, and he was travelling in it. She had no idea why he had taken the same amount of time to reach her compared to her– who'd been off resting.

"I think you need a seat," she said, gently at first. Though when his expression became one of visible annoyance, she added on more forcefully, "you look like hell had your head, sit down, I need to look at you."

He hissed at her like a cat, before jumping into a sprint.

Adelaide hadn't assumed she was particularly attached to the strange boy she kept running into on her route– but she'd realized that any human face in the end was clearly worth chasing after. And if not that, then it was that any face was worth chasing when you had no others to look at or hear from. Forrest was gone, and Jisako's ghost would never be warm enough to come close.

Another thing she hadn't assumed was that a boy with that much brain damage could run so fast. Especially through mounds of rubble. However, the bastard was fast. In the blink of an eye, he had nearly zoomed off out of her field of view.

She had sprinted after him, but there was a difference of at least twenty three years between them, and though they were both most certainly damaged, Rainmaker was most definitely reaping the reward of being born much later. He was a damn bullet, and Adelaide was not. Though she was certainly better off than many women her age, the chase wasn't any easy one.

Rainmaker dipped through broken buildings and vaulted over obstacles, paying no mind to how bruised up or ripped open he got. Then, when Adelaide did finally manage to grab hold of him, he was still wriggling around like a worm, and attempting to pull away from her grip on his collar. She'd had no energy to help him walk so was dragging him on the debris laden ground, like a mindless drunk.

He wriggled until he'd nearly choked himself out with his own collar. There was a leg of the journey where he would not stop screaming. At first it was profanity, but quickly devolved into nothing more than indistinguishable noise. There were some things that Adelaide thought might have been about her mother thrown in there with the strangled goat noises– although she couldn't quite understand it.

Then he calmed down and grumpily allowed himself to be dragged through the area. Though he did try his hardest to make himself as heavy as possible, Adelaide was able to drag him along. He let out a whine as he was dragged over the crumbling ground. "Not comfy," he complained.

"Well this isn't a taxi service."

"Let me speak to your manager," he attempted to growl, however his voice shot into an odd falsetto. He flailed his arms, like a drugged toddler. Adelaide's grip on his collar did not falter.

Her fingers ached as she attempted to pull him along. Her arm protested, and the pain ran up to her shoulder. Pain always radiated. Radiation. Radiated pain. Adelaide shut her eyes, cursing every failing system in her body. All the gears which refused to work were the target of her endless ire. She was sick of his body which seemed to detest her continued existence. A body which seemed to want to halt its own function.

Rainmaker let out another cry, and Adelaide settled herself in, resigned to the fate of dragging him along.

Rampant unchecked radiation had left the air sour, so Adelaide had scrunched up her nose rather sharply, while trying to breathe far less. Which did her no good, as the weight of the man she was dragging along and the briefcase were both weighing on her. Part of her was tempted to just drop the thing.

But the other part of Adelaide, the same one that had compelled her to wait for Jisako, as though she'd come back, refused to let go. And that part of her– that fear of letting things go, it always won. No matter how bad its arguments were, when speaking in her ailed mind, it sounded the most logical. It always won. It was a bit like she imagined the devil must've been. Slippery and sneaky and so clever in the worst of ways.

It had now decided to extend its reach over this Rainmaker boy.

Adelaide hoisted him into the remnants of a building which seemed relatively solid. Buildings weren't much good at comforting from the elements now, and often they fell with loud crashes after a little while, but they made for good hiding places.

Rainmaker, still clearly irritable, had curled in on himself, and sat pouting like a child. Adelaide watched him carefully, thinking. There had at one time been a point where Adelaide and Jisako did attempt to adopt. Though the government agent had taken one look at the two women, and kicked them both out without so much as a request for a name.

Jisako had mentioned wanting a son. She'd imagined he'd be able to do all the things neither of them could and not be bound to the same rules as the both of them were. Adelaide admittedly found it somewhat asinine, though she'd said nothing at the time. Jisako had asked if they could adopt a number of times. Most of the time, when the discussion arose, Adelaide would feign being distracted by something else or that she was simply too tired to be having the conversation.

Of course, the cruellest part was that Adelaide had no qualms about children. She was not extremely fond of them, but they didn't bother her to the point of wanting to never have any. She had considered a family life before. She was only being spiteful as a punishment for her wife. A punishment for what? Jisako existing at all, of course. It didn't matter what she did, Adelaide always found some fault in it.

Adelaide had never much liked the children Jisako had pointed at as being akin to what she found cute or desirable. But that was mainly because they would be like her. Quiet, meek, and lonely. Another thing which Adelaide did not like, was just how much a particular thought was popping to mind now that Rainmaker was sitting with her. He did indeed look a great deal like a child she and Jisako could've once taken in, all grown up.

But there had never been a child, and there would never be a grown up one.

Adelaide stopped for a bit, as she arrived in a slightly clearer area, where the debris was smaller and softer. She forced Rainmaker to sit still, holding his collar so that he could not run off again. He tried a few times at first, but there was no getting away from her. Eventually he sat himself down with a pout, realizing there was truly no escape.

"I want water."

"I don't have any. Indulge yourself by eating the snow," Adelaide answered.

"The snow's poisonous."

"That's fine. So is the air."

"Well the snow's on the ground, and the ground is dirty."

Rainmaker flopped onto his back. He flailed around again, but he didn't attempt to run off, even when Adelaide lost her grip on his collar. "You suck!"

"Yeah, sure, sure. Dear me, you're an absolute child."

"I wish I was still a kid," he replied, before growing silent.

Adelaide sat in the quiet for a while. When she felt ready enough to walk, she grabbed his collar again, and continued on. Rainmaker soon returned to the same childish flailing, with the same profanity. Until of course, he grew silent once again, because there was no point in wasting the energy.

Adelaide looked at the cross hanging from Rainmaker's neck. It was more ornate than hers, though it was also made of wood. Not something that could survive a strong beating. Hers was metal, and she used it to kill people. His wooden one looked like it would splinter at the slightest touch. Like blowing on it would turn it to dust.

She wondered for a moment whether he worshipped the hanging man. Was he waiting for acceptance and forgiveness from the man represented by the lowercase T? Adelaide finally decided to point toward it. "Do you worship him?" she asked.

"Don't most people?"

"Don't know much about him, to be honest. Just know demons are scared of him."

"Jesus Christ, Adelaide."

"Yes, that's his name, and that's my name. It seems your mind is clearing up a bit." She spoke slowly, and with an upturned pitch, in the hopes being gentle would soothe him. A bit like attempting to coddle a child. Though Adelaide was as clueless in that regard as she was in theology.

"No. Jesus Christ, Adelaide. How are you an exorcist like this?"

"Well it's a long story but it involves paying off several public officials, a monkey, and an orange. But you're not old enough for that story."

"What do you mean not old enough? I'm a grown man!"

"No, trust me. You will never be old enough. Not for the horrors." In truth, it was a multiple choice exam run by a disinterested priest at which she'd cheated. The exam was decades ago and she could not recall its details. She enjoyed messing with both him and Forrest. Besides, Adelaide of course knew full well how boring simple answers like those were. So she gave him a runaround and flashed him a smile. Rainmaker, wise enough to give up when the woman's story began to sound like she already didn't want to tell it, opted against further inquiry. He simply allowed himself to believe in a fantastical world where one could become an exorcist through bribes and monkeys.

"I was born to a churchgoing family. Then I read a lot of pulp. And exorcisms and demons were all over the pages. So now I'm here, a real flesh and bone exorcist." He didn't uncurl himself, and in fact pressed his face into his knees, even as she dragged him along.

She came to a stop. His stomach growled, and to Adelaide, he looked almost like a hairless kitten. Lacking entirely in the natural cuteness that would've made that sort of creature something you wanted to protect, but no less helpless. No less desperate for you to help it and silently mewing.

Adelaide had fed a couple strays– when she was young and single and assumed no one would ever keep company in her bed. Back when she'd once considered proposing to Forrest just for the sake of having someone to share her days with. She'd never gone through with that. And looking back on it, she couldn't imagine doing it in the first place. To lie and use someone just to fill the hole. It would've been cruel. Then again, she had of course done that to Jisako, in a way.

At least this wasn't like those days. For one: there was no food to give, even if she decided the hairless cat needed some. And two, she too was going hungry, so she too needed someone to feed her. However, there would be no greater benefactor for the two of them. There would not be some giant hairless monkey so much more their size coming to feed them and pet them. She sighed. "I wish there was food here," she commented dryly.

Rainmaker chuckled humourlessly in reply.

"Why are you on Earth, then? Why didn't you take a ship, run off to the orbitals?" Adelaide asked.

"Same as you. Business on Earth."

"At Ground Zero?"

"...Yes." His answer was sheepish– and he'd already had a rather insubstantial presence to begin with. By this point, Adelaide had to wonder if he was just trying to desperately fade out of reality or something. She had expected to have a million questions come to mind. To have questions and a desire to poke at his privacy until he gave all his secrets away under a battery of mental anguish.

But no such desire arose. She barely even cared why he was down there.

Instead, she decided to ask an unrelated question. "Was it always your wanting to be an exorcist, then?"

"No. I'd thought I'd want to be a soldier at first. But when I brought up the topic my family said that soldiers don't do much more than stand around and hope nobody decides to drop a nuke."

"Well, they were right."

"I can tell," he snipped, face screwing up at her words. "Well then, we're talking about dreams and hopes and all that now so why don't you spill some of your own to me? Some of the things you thought were possible before everyone decided to ruin it all."

"I wanted nothing more than to be a dancer," Adelaide lied. Honestly, at first she wanted to be no more true to him than the devil was to his marks. But she soon realized there wouldn't be much point in secrets or privacy when they were at the end of the world and she was going to be dead in a few days. "Or perhaps a mechanic. Or a housewife. Truth be told, I didn't have a dream. I had minor interests and ambitions, and then I realized being an exorcist was a job I could land for myself in a quick way– since I had one demon kill as an experience under my belt."

"You killed a demon as a normal person?"

"I hit it with my car. Nothing survives a heavy old bug flying at it a hundred kilometres per hour. Went splat over the pavement, and I thought they were going to cart me off to some cell." The words spilled out rather easily, and more spilled the longer she was left to speak. She'd realized now, too late, that she wanted to be remembered by someone. Commiserated and recalled and discussed without it being some miserable affair, like a friend talking about you when they had decided they'd had enough of you. But it was a bit pointless, because obviously this boy wasn't going to live much longer than she was. She was talking into the wind, expecting it to continue her story.

Unaware of her secret desires, the boy laughed. Rainmaker was absolutely tickled pink by the story. His laughter was strained and wheezy, but he could not bring himself to stop laughing. In fact, it sounded less like a laugh, and more like the last dying breaths of an old man reaching out to ask his daughter to bring him one more cigarette before he passed on.

Once again, Adelaide felt he must've been like a hairless cat. Because he'd outgrown that phase of being cute, and he was too young to be handsome, but he had all the same behaviours. Some small thing that inherently had you want to protect it, despite how strange it might've looked compared to any other breed. A small thing that was weaker than its peers, too, because of what it lacked. The same thing which it lacked, of course, leading to its lacking cuteness, as well, which made it easy to hesitate in offering aid. I should've called him a Bambino, she decided. It would've suited him more.

Rainmaker finally got his laughter under control. "Okay, okay– and… Oh, so– so they gave you the record for killing the demon anyway? Even though you were just running at it with your car? How did the police not take you in for hitting what looked like a person?"

"It's hard to tell something was a person when it's already turned to ash, I'd bet. Someone had spilled some sacred water on the tires of mine, maybe," she replied, dryly. Some people were of the assumption demons must've been affected only by holy things– but that only went as far as trying to kill them permanently. When it came to getting them back into hell, you could use just about anything you wanted. Adelaide had long decided she wanted to use nothing but her hands and the cross.

Not for a practical reason. More so because that was how she'd been taught to do it by her mentor, and she was too lazy to learn the process of making a gun helpful for dealing with demons. So she'd never bothered. She'd been too shy to carry a sword around, because it was such an impossible to hide yet obviously out of place item, and people of the public would have certainly questioned it. So she'd settled for just using her cross. She'd at one point attempted to sharpen it so it would be more like a blade, but she'd quickly realized that it dulled too quickly. The legs of the hanging man were for hanging, not for stabbing.

Adelaide had also been told it was sacrilege, but she'd heard just about everything be called that same word. That or heresy. She had to wonder if people were making it up. Because, she reasoned, no one was going to worship a ninny so afraid of knees he demanded everyone cover them, before asking to be hung by an audience. She underestimated people.

"Anyway, I heard Solko mention something about radios when she was talking to you. Seemed awfully familiar with you before," Adelaide said, suddenly. "What was all that about?"

"Something stupid. I modified a radio to make it pick up super far away stations, and then I got in trouble, because I accidentally picked up a military frequency or two," he said. "The whole thing was their fault, not mine. She'd come for me after that."

"You like radios?"

"My father ran a clock shop. It gets boring tinkering with the same little bits and hearing the same little tidbits of info all the time," he said. "Then when I was working on fixing radio towers, there was nothing else to do but screw with something radio. AM, FM– it's all about the same stuff they play, really. Could be six countries over and it's the same nonsense in another language," he said. "I've extended the reach of a radio I used to own so far that it was catching things from other countries. I had to stop… I got in a lot of trouble for that, too. Apparently you need a radio operator licence to stretch the range of a radio."

"Your mind's cleared up the most talking about radios." Adelaide smiled faintly. "You would've liked Forrest. He liked radios too."

"Solko's coworker?"

"I suppose," she said, with a chuckle. "I know nothing about radios, though, forgive me."

"I forgive you," he answered, almost sounding serious. Rainmaker licked his dirty and chapped lips, though there was so little water in him that his tongue barely left any dampness on them. "You were married?" he asked. "To that woman– Jisako?" He leaned a little closer, and raised his head. Though he opted to look at anything but her.

"Yes, I was. She was the greatest of all women."

"You must've loved her a lot."

"I indeed did."

"What was she like?" Rainmaker asked, in the same juvenile way a boy might ask his father about a mother that died in childbirth. He had that same odd vocal fry children did, and a sort of mousey look about him. "Was she nice?"

"She could be. She was mostly quiet– the sort of woman who kept to herself mainly, to her wife second, and to most others, not at all."

"Did you think she was forgiving?"

"I hope to find out. But I won't know until I'm dead."

#

Mankind could never imagine something existing without an end to it. Maybe it was a reflection of mortality– after all, that which could not exist forever could sparsely comprehend that which could even scrape eternity. In the human existence, everything had to be mortal. Otherwise, it could not be understood.

An empire must fall, a god must die, a love must end, a rapture must come, an extinction must claim all mankind, legacies must crumble to ash in the blowing wind, and the universe must eventually die. The vast expanses of time could only be understood in three phases by the human mind. Creation, the middling, and the finality. No matter what other times, those times were the skeleton upon which all the rest of human understanding stood. The middling was where everything happened, but it was the least romantic of them all, so it was little spoken of. People were always worried about finality.

She had grown up hearing complaints of social decay her whole life. In more recent years, she had heard talk of sinks which would lead to behavioural issues and something about homosexual rats her entire life. She pitied the poor handymen, who must have had a terrible trouble explaining that there was no relation between sink styles and sexuality.

She had listened to speakers go on and on about how the behaviour of the people was turning to no more than social deviancy, which would slowly destroy all mankind. A speech repeated a thousand times, on every street corner, radio show, and film. Sometimes it felt as though people were cheering for it. Begging for the decay of mankind to come and destroy everything. Begging for a punishment for all those they did not approve of being alive. People had even tried.

Adelaide's world was just about at its end now. Not in the literal sense. There were still nations out there which had yet to be bombed and which were standing gingerly, preparing ways to fight against the radiation poisoning that would come through wind and water. Adelaide however, was about to die in a much more literal way. Chunks of her skin had slipped off in the night while she attempted to rest, and she'd once again split off from Rainmaker. She was fairly certain she'd run into him again, but she wanted to just get some distance either way.

When he was close by, she understood that his presence contributed to the 'middling'. It trapped her near the end of the middle, and only reminded her further of the inevitable end. Besides, she felt it was better to stay lonely. If she wanted to redeem herself through death, it would've been best to make sure the circumstances leading to the death were less pleasant. Things gone as miserable as possible.

She had a theory about the world, a fourth stage all people understood. Slotted between the middling and the finality. Dying. The slow decay while still technically breathing. That was what she considered to be her stage in life. Her marriage had failed spectacularly. Her only remaining friend was long gone. The only companion she had was a boy too young for her to invest in. Her body was crumbling. She wasn't yet dead, but she was dying. And at this edge of her life, her head was simply full of maggots.

Adelaide had to admit to herself that she had run from Rainmaker on purpose. To not have to invest more into him. To not have to care for him, when there was some part of her desperate to. Some part of her that wanted to treat him as the son Jisako had always wanted to have. The son Jisako would never be able to have because of Adelaide herself.

She had been legging it so long and so far that she didn't recognize the language the few leftover signs were written in, and could barely understand the ghosts which haunted the areas around. The words as written were in a similar looking alphabet to her own, but nothing looked sensical, and when the ghosts spoke, they did so in a cadence that sounded nothing like one she had ever known. The demons she killed spoke in some foreign tongue she didn't quite recognize. It wasn't as if they couldn't speak hers, but they had given themselves to conduits who only knew their own.

The most human of all pains, hunger had gotten to her. Her stomach growled, much like Rainmaker's had earlier. Nothing had stopped her from drinking the poisoned water. Nothing stopped her from breathing the poisoned air at all. Nothing stopped her from wearing the same clothes, catching the debris and bits of radiation through her journey. But food, there was little left. Rotted or consumed a long time ago by people who had died before her. She had been at least a little reverent of food. When at Anane's, she'd searched for well sealed cans. When on the road, she'd simply not eaten at all, rather than eat anything poisonous.

But it was becoming unsustainable. She couldn't make the rest of her journey and do what she came to do on an empty stomach. Adelaide was troubled by this for a good chunk of the way, even as she stepped through debris, and even when she had the misfortune of finding the remnants of what she assumed was once a baby.

So it must've been some massive wonder she found a twisted tree, with arms full of fruit, in a land otherwise full only of dead things. It rose from the earth like a pillar of the sky. She was so small under its ashen umbrella.

Adelaide lowered herself to the ground, grabbing for the fruit and stuffing it without thinking in her mouth. She fit herself against the trunk. It felt almost engineered for her, with a hollow just wide enough that she sank into its shape, curling herself to fit even closer. She pressed close to the tree. In summer, as a child, she had hidden under the shade of trees when hiding away from home. She had grasped for fruit when it was available, and cursed when it was not.

As a woman, she reached up desperately for the poison fruit of a tree that fed from the radioactive ground. She didn't pay worries of radiation sickness much mind. After all, she too was the fruit of a poison tree. Perhaps it would understand its kin. She lowered her head against the bark of the tree, dragging the scent of lumber and radiation into herself through slow breaths. It was the first pleasant one she'd had in days. She had no idea how this sort of tree formed, but she breathed it in. She ached to make it one with herself. However, breaths were simply not enough.

She then focused herself on swallowing down the body and the seeds. The thing was lumpy, malformed. Barely, it worked to house the food– and in nature, so full with seeds, there was little in the way of the right sweetness, really. But she pushed the seeds down her throat, biting and crunching. They wouldn't be able to breed anyway. The fruit wasn't exactly sweet, but it wasn't entirely bitter. It was edible.

She inhaled them. Down her desperate gullet. She'd never wanted so badly to stay alive. At the very edge of her being, as the last of her became little more than a cancerous lump. That was when she finally understood the thing which she had denied herself so many times.

Self preservation.

Still, Forrest was gone by this point. He had tried everything, and she had stubbornly denied it. She had chosen that she would die here, on this planet. What point was there now in insisting she wanted another chance? Surely it would have been rather the social faux pas to request help now after denying it a million times? Surely it would have been laughable, to say she wanted to live now.

Adelaide, slowly, slipping her eyes closed, tightened her hand further around the fruit. In the haze of its sweetness, she debated what her life could've been.

She'd forbidden herself knowledge of what the ships were like, in the event it might've tempted her. But there was no way to reach them now. Any survivor seeking ship would likely never take her now, and they had been thin in the first place. Mostly intended to grab onto those who were well off enough to be in shelters. Those who offered trades more skilled than her blind faith exorcisms. They would never want her on those ships now that Forrest was not advocating for her.

So she dreamed. Of starships like the ones she'd seen on TV shows. Endless, monotonous corridors staring into a great deep expanse in which there was only progress. Men and women devoted only to the idea of furthering what mankind was.

She ground the rinds between her teeth, revelling in the image of her own quarters on a starship. Another life, less dogged and depressed than this one. Less filled with sickness and daydreams. She could imagine, in fact, Forrest. Would he have laughed at her? If she'd showed up to the gate twenty minutes before departure, hurrying on board? Would his final transmission have been less tragic? Well, of course, if she thought about that, there would never have been a final transmission. They would never have had to use transmissions at all. They'd be close enough together to speak most days, just as they had in their youth.

She swallowed down those thoughts. The pulp went with it. She was awash with a heavy guilt. She had wanted to savour it more. Instinct had made her a wild animal, grabbing and filling, as though her stomach were some gas tank. She had wasted that entire fruit. Eaten it with far too much haste. Other thoughts still came to mind. No more pleasant than the last.

If she were aboard a ship, she would be an entirely useless person. There would be no demons, as far as she could imagine. In Adleaide's mind, the ships must have been quite sterile. Even if there were fear and paranoia, there would be no need for exorcists. Or, if there were somehow a need, the ships would be so small that their takeover would happen so very quickly. That in mere moments, the demons would simply take over the tiny area and destroy all the people.

It also occurred to her, outside of demons, those ships would be shoddy. And many of them would come crashing back down to Earth, passengers haplessly screaming for their lives. Or at least, that was her image as far as she understood it. She wasn't a space scientist. She didn't really understand what the orbitals were doing. But she could imagine ships losing air or going cold. The human imagination was rather well suited to doomsday scenarios.

Life preservers turning to tombs.

The low hanging fruits ran out eventually, and she was left sitting there, face and fingers sticky. She laughed to herself. She'd done this to herself another time once, hadn't she? When she'd been a child? At least, she'd hoped she had. Childhood seemed like a time intended to become a mess. She wasn't sure how much Sepheline would've allowed that. Those memories of early childhood which most people insisted they cherished, were too faint to actually recall for Adelaide personally, but she'd seen images so many times.

Pale, giggly children, grinning wide with the juice of a watermelon or a peach all over their faces, dripping down their chins, down to their necks, soaking into bibs. Bibs made with scrap fabrics and covered in cutesy patterns meticulously embroidered in by women who had so much love in their hearts.

Like Jisako had so much love in her heart. She would absolutely have been the sort of woman to sit for hours, darning and embroidering socks for her children. She also must have been the type of mother to dote. Adelaide was not. She didn't see children as deserving of special love and care, but Jisako would've been all over the idea. She seemed the type of mother to be embarrassingly kind. The mother all their child's friends wished they could have as their own mother.

One who was kind, and gentle. One who always made time for her children. The sort of mother who would be remembered for being the best of the best, but be given no reward because motherhood was such an expected thing despite good ones being so rare.

Jisako should've been the type of woman whose reward after a long life would be a nice tombstone, with a golden inscription about her glory. If Adelaide lived longer than her, there would be no stopping until Jisako got those things. Perhaps a golden mausoleum too. It was something she would have deserved.

The man she'd gotten into a relationship with after Adelaide killed her because she had gotten pregnant. There were always signs something was off about the pair of them, but no one suspected there would be murder. When Adelaide had seen Jisako in the distance, she was usually hunched and small.

It seemed she'd never found anyone who truly loved and respected her.

Perhaps if she'd left when the warning bells rang and the two of them had managed to reunite, Adelaide could've helped raise the child. The three of them could have been a family.

Would the baby have been a boy or a girl?

If it were a son, Adelaide could imagine Jisako wearing a face of relief. A boy born free, never having to deal with the trifles they did. Jisako would've let it play outside late, probably, and always had dinner ready, warm, for whenever it came home. If it was a girl, Adelaide could imagine Jisako keeping it inside. Teaching it skills more in the realm of the traditional. The sorts of things that a girl was expected to know.

Adelaide couldn't imagine how she'd treat it either way. But if she could be her own ideal for once, surely, she'd have been kind and loving for once? Treating it with the respect that anything related to Jisako should have been lathered with. Jisako deserved everything. Needed it. Adelaide had failed to provide anything of significance once, but she wouldn't fail again at something so valuable if she were given a chance to care for that child.

Perhaps she could've taken that child outside. Walked it through the world. Shown it the secrets of everything around it. She could've shown it how to deal with demons and how to stay safe in the face of cults. Or perhaps taken it around the world using her work as an excuse. Bringing it along and showing it so many things it was interested in.

Perhaps she could've shown it to Forrest, too. She wondered how he would respond to seeing a child from the two of them? She could imagine he would be awkward around it. Perhaps he would have a propensity for scaring it. If it was a boy, perhaps he would've been a 'cool older role model' to it. Though she imagined if it was a girl he would've just been a scary and uncomfortable presence.

Boys loved toy soldiers and real soldiers of course were a close second. Adelaide hadn't seen that with little girls. Then again, even for a son, he would probably have been a little frightening. He wasn't exactly a cuddly presence, after all.

She wondered what the child would be interested in. What toys it would want to play with. Or if it would take less interest in toys and more in some random passion, like an instrument. If it wanted to play an instrument, Adelaide could imagine just letting it pursue the dream, without judgement. On the other hand, she could imagine Jisako being rather more hesitant, and gently suggesting that it pursue fallbacks as well.

Would the child have played any sports? Adelaide could imagine Jisako looking rather out of place among the types of mothers who were prone to arguing with referees over points. She could recall walking past those sorts of games in which she was not allowed to participate, in which the parents were always arguing with the referees in some way.

Adelaide smiled faintly. With every decade, memories of the ones prior became more faint. And childhood… Childhood, by her age, was often more a series of dull flashes, with no sense of true order or grounding in any era except "a time that felt so much better". Though ironically, Adelaide was fairly certain that part of her childhood was spent in the aftermath of a rather wretched war. Not that she could recall that first one quite properly, but there was a terrible air about every adult when she was growing up.

Sepheline had once walked through a mass of poppies and scoffed. "Weeping won't bring anybody back."

"Who are they weeping for?"

"It doesn't matter. You'll never know the people they're crying over."

Sepheline had never liked the idea that Adelaide might pity or care for something outside of the two of them, so she made sure to stomp on the idea as much as she possibly could. She hated Adelaide, but she also hated the idea of Adelaide not focusing in on her. Surely, if she'd ever met Jisako, she'd have blown a gasket. She could never handle someone so empathetic and sweet as Jisako.

Sepheline had always been strange in regards to discussion of war. She had of course not seen it as anything positive, but there was a… strange behaviour in how she acted, still. She was terse in ways about that old war, that she was not about anything else. There must have been something squirming behind her eyes– maggots that refused to allow her to see that the world had changed in ways she did not like. Adelaide could not know what happened during it, only that it had taken something away from her. Perhaps Sepheline would have been nicer if there was not a war.

Perhaps the reason Addelaide had turned out so similar to Sepheline in the matters of her wife was because of the war she had lived through. One which had broken out when she was a teen. Or perhaps not. It was brutal, but now, when she was older, any war seemed like it was nothing compared to whichever one had destroyed the Earth with bombs and left everything awash with a brush of nihilism.

For Adelaide, her childhood was so vague, she wasn't entirely sure if she'd been born, or if she'd spawned at some point at fifteen and continued from there. Much of her childhood was spent being an adult. She had been the fruit of a woman so rotten, her brains and heart must have been infested with maggots. That was the only way Adelaide could find to think of it.

Adelaide sucked in another breath, sharper this time. She stared up at the sky, in which clouds were forming. The wind was going to pick up soon. The living should have been utterly terrified of the wind. It carried the radiation out into the world, without thought or apology. Adelaide didn't really have it in her to care about it. The flash of self preservation from a moment earlier had almost completely burned out, as quick as it had consumed her before.

She turned her eyes toward the wind, and pressed her back closer to the hard wood of the tree. Forrest had at one point suggested that the reason she wanted to stay on the Earth was some guilt for not being a good enough child. But Adelaide didn't consider that true. She'd been a perfectly fine child. She'd failed far more as an adult. As a child, she'd been… Medium. Completely average, just born to a wretch. Though, of course, considering her own mother a wretch was probably unkind. A ridiculous thing to believe in. After all, children were intended to honour their parents without any sense of self until they were old enough to leave the house and never speak to their parents again.

It occurred to her that this early death by radiation poisoning was still longer than she'd ever expected to live. Longer than Forrest had predicted she'd survive in the wastes, and longer than she'd predicted the totality of her existence to be. Longer than anyone had ever given credit to her as a runaway. Longer than she had ever hoped for when she was moving between girls' homes and streets. Longer than any of the women who worked on street corners had ever said she'd last. Though even with thoughts that should have been a spiteful victory, her mood soured quickly.

After all, she'd failed every life step beyond bare survival.

She had been cruel to her wife. Screaming and shouting and cold shoulders. Then she'd been left handling the remains. The horrible news of being left for a cruel man. A murder. It was her own doing. Even if that man had dealt the killing blow, had taken the shots that killed her, it was Adelaide's fault Jisako was ever with him to begin with.

At times even within their marriage, Adelaide considered watching Jisako living so silently to herself was like watching something which could not have been alive. It was the best way to explain the way that woman fell into non-existence so young, and why no one else who might have known her outside of Adelaide had cared enough to attend the burial. She must've been dead, alive. To all who had known her, they had neglected her until she was no more than a shell, and so there was no life lost to mourn, for she had lost it over the course of a dozen arguments. It really was all Adelaide's fault.

Perhaps some of the maggots from her mother had infiltrated her own soul. At some point when Adelaide had kissed her mother goodbye for the last time, they must have crawled through her lips. Hiding behind teeth, sneaking into her throat, proliferating in her lungs. Poisoning every word she dared speak with their brutalistic stench. She shuddered, her hands faltering.

It just made sense.

Those writhing maggots had been the reason Adelaide never called out to Jisako when she saw her in the distance. Those same maggots had pushed Forrest away. Though she had at one point reasoned he wouldn't have stayed on Earth anyway, he perhaps wouldn't have left so soon if she'd been kinder. Less obsessive.

"Selfish," Adelaide chided herself, voice lonely in the gentle wind. Forrest would've died too. In fact, the maggots might have proliferated within him as well. She soon realized the small relief contained in the fact he'd not been here to see her decay. How could she have looked him in the eye if he saw only maggots behind hers? How could she face him and be cruel to him yet expect him to stay?

Worse, what if it spread? If the maggots had spread within him, how would she ever face herself? He was rude, and lacking in many things, but he was caring, wasn't he? What would it have said if she spread the maggots to him? Jisako had never had them spread to her. Adelaide had to suppose that was because Jisako was special in her glory, in a way which Forrest never could be. She had heard them in his tone, just a bit. Not enough to drive him completely to the same depths of selfishness and hate as Adelaide, but enough to make him more dreary. More irritable. Less kind.

It was her fault. The maggots had crawled into him after a lifetime of dealing with her. He'd only been able to keep them out because of a different kind of strength to Jisako. Adelaide had exhausted him. She had taken the energy away from him and created an opening for her own ill to seep into him when it never should have. She had made the whole world ill for her own sake. She must have been like the vector through which the sickness her family carried would spread.

As she thought about that, her mind grew fuzzy, and all words lost their meanings in a deep haze. The winds grew stronger. They forced themselves against her face, shoving themselves down into her throat, and she was soon choking on it. The winds had pushed her mind out into a sea of nothing more than haze.

The fruit of the poisoned tree leaned against its trunk, lying with it.