4:BRAVEST_OF_ALL_MANKIND

"It's a bit lonely here, I must admit. I ran into some car trouble a bit ago. An issue with a wheel. Not sure what I ought to do about it, though, Snakeman." Adelaide spoke slowly, emphasizing every consonant so that even when distorted by the relay, she would be comprehensible.

"Well, I'm sure there's some abandoned car you could pull a wheel off from."

"There are, but the majority of the cars on the roads aren't abandoned yet. I've seen people in them."

"Are you sure those people are even alive?"

"Some of them are. I notice... A good chunk, at the least. I've yet to reach so deep in hell that the only thing I can find are the dead."

"You'll get there soon enough," Forrest replied. "There won't be many people left soon. If you had sense, you'd have just run off and sealed yourself in a bunker for a few days at least. To wait out some of the fallout" His voice through the radio rang with a sense of dread and hollowness- despite the joking in his attitude. She almost wanted to say something, but she didn't bother. Adelaide liked Forrest. He was a dear friend and a source of much great amusement and comfort over many days but he was also a man of uniform. And men in uniform lived purely by hierarchy. Superior above subordinate, man above woman, parent above child, the works. She could not mouth off to him.

Even as she laid in the midst of a wasteland field, crops all dead or singed away by bombs, soaking in the radiation, the habit of silence continued. For the sake of his comfort, Adelaide held her tongue. In front of someone who she cared for, all her words were cowardice. She rolled onto her side, eyeing the stalks- all tilted and broken by her crawling into their space. The winds sent them moving back and forth, like a metronome. Adelaide buried her face in her palm. "If I had sense... I wonder how life would've gone for us both if I had sense. Or us all three."

"Jisako on your mind again?"

"It'd be criminal if she wasn't," she answered. Forrest became rather quiet after that. It surprised her with it's sheer suddenness. Adelaide chuckled without humour. "In another time, she'd have made a great queen."

From how Adelaide understood it: at one point in time, there must've been someone who was very good at being in charge. Someone who all the rest must have rallied around. Then, everyone in the vicinity must have come to the unfortunate assumption that this goodness at being in charge was genetic. After this failed several times, they created great crowds who would make the decisions. But the great crowds were tribal. And someone would rise to lead the crowds- easiest being to point at another tribe and say 'look at their badness'.

But in the case of Jisako, Adelaide was sure that she inherited all goodness in all things. It just made a simple sort of sense to believe, because she was a fool in love, who believed Jisako was perfect in every way. When the body had gone cold, Adelaide had erased all traces of it ever existing in her mind.

"I don't think she would have. I think she'd have been a normal woman. And that you're just someone who'd aggrandize her and write poems and make pretty paintings that leave historians thinking she was more than she ever was because of your obsession."

"Then she'd have gotten as she deserved."

"She was just a woman, like you are now."

"A woman, and my bride."

"You sound like a love struck teenager. And clearly, if she married you, her decision making wasn't that good."

"I must've been a lovestruck kid at one time," Adelaide declared. "Do you even know what it's like to love someone, Forrest?"

"I can't say I do. Not in the way you love Jisako. Really it just sounds like nonsense to me."

"Maybe you'll learn someday."

"I won't. And I'll be thankful for that."

Adelaide stared at her car, still on the roadside. She'd have to fix it later. Part of her was tempted to abandon it entirely- but that wasn't viable yet. Her destination was certainly too far to reach by foot, even if she knew the roads by heart. She could navigate the whole route blindfolded, but it was a long route, and she couldn't walk forever. "Forrest, do you think I could've changed when she was alive? Could've been more- more willing to attend to her needs? Paid more attention to her and listened more to her?"

Forrest did not answer. Not for quite some time. He hemmed and hawed over on the other side of the line, attempting to figure an answer he didn't think would offend Adelaide. There wasn't one, so he declared, "The past is past. And speaking of which- I gotta go."

"Farewell then. Good night."

The transmission audio buzzed into silence, and the device died down as well. It was a black box of some sort. With a speaker and some microphone somewhere. It was big, bulky, and hard to lug around everywhere, but it was the only reliable way to communicate between Earth and the orbital ships. The transmission delay was of course a nuisance, but still, it had a monopoly on methods of instantaneous communication.

Adelaide sat up, breathing slowly as the last remaining lights on the machine all died out. She stared at it. It reminded her somewhat of a radio. She needed to load it back into the car. There was no communicating with Forrest otherwise. And in some selfish way, she didn't want to stop speaking to him, either. Regardless of the tension born of their disconnect.

She sat there for a while, before finally heading back, and throwing open her trunk. The trouble was minor- and Forrest wasn't wrong, it would be easy enough to deal with. She'd just been procrastinating on it earlier. She didn't want to go looking around poking for cars to rob, but it was about time to start.

There were a number that littered the road. Some with people inside, others abandoned to the elements as their owners fled or died, and some had become coffins. This far out, there shouldn't have been enough radiation to kill someone so quickly, but some were too terrified of living in a world that was collapsing. So they left it of their own accord. They were quicker than Adelaide could bring herself to be. She was almost jealous they were capable and she was not.

There was no order to the way the cars covered the road. They were scrambled all over, much like the houses of the town before had been. There were no police keeping order. People stopped their cars wherever they could. Sometimes on grass patches, sometimes mid road. There had been some crashes earlier on, but now there weren't enough people actually driving anywhere to worry much about it.

Adelaide walked between cars- scoping them out with a fine eye. The important thing was to find one similar in make to her own. Not for practical reasons. Adelaide loathed the thought of change. Especially change to the car in which she and Jisako had met. She didn't want its wheels to look too different, or its height to be ever so slightly changed by a tire being ever so slightly taller than the original.

In the corner of her eye, a wisp of silver wandered through the cars, as though itself searching. Jisako... Again... Is her soul really so unable to be content and to rest? Adelaide wondered. In some small sense, she'd been hopeful that Jisako would appreciate death in some way. That her mind filled with dark thoughts could have some rest when it arrived in a place where those thoughts could no longer be made manifest. A world in which the worst outcome had already occurred, which could therefore not become any worse.

But Jisako was wandering the Earth, not far behind. Adelaide opened her mouth. She almost called out to Jisako. However, no words came. She could not bring herself to say anything of value to the woman wandering through the wasteland. Despite what she had asked Forrest- it seemed she had yet to even be capable of such change now, nevermind ever behaving better in the past. Jisako didn't say anything to her, either, but that was forgivable. Jisako had always been so quiet, Adelaide didn't expect her to speak now, when her vocal chords were buried by the side of a river.

The two wives, living and dead, went their separate ways.

#

If she threw the hanging man, his head would always point in the general direction of the next demon on her route. The directions were vague, but they nonetheless guided her. He burned in her hand when there was a demon nearby, too. Hotter and hotter the closer they were. Usually, the result was a warmth with intensity bordering on the uncomfortable that left her hand sweaty.

She wondered sometimes just how much of the hanging man was inside every individual cross. Whether he inhabited every single one, eager to guide every last person to take his symbol, or whether he was only inside a select few. The first time Forrest had seen Adelaide throw her cross, he seemed appalled, so she had to assume he didn't know the trick.

It always seemed to leave him befuddled, anyway. Eventually she made a game out of it- since he refused to believe the real answer. Magnets, aliens, complex mechanisms of string, latent psychic powers, and many other bits of nonsense she cooked up. Forrest had only ever believed the story about the magnets, but even that was with a great sense of skepticism.

She had more than once attempted to explain the way it helped in finding demons, but by that point she might as well have been speaking in tongues. Adelaide wasn't entirely sure he understood the basic concept of demons. Most times she spoke of them he would just nod his head and filter her out. It was easy to tell when he wasn't paying attention, since she was so used to speaking with him. They had met so young, and she had known him for so long, that nothing really slipped her anymore.

There had been a slim window of time before she had met Jisako, where she had debated just marrying him. To be 'right' by social expectation. A man and a woman united under the watchful eyes of the hanging man. They had spoken on it a couple times. The idea had never gone through. Realistically, it never would have lasted anyway. To do something just for the acceptance of outside eyes usually meant that the result never lasted.

She'd learned that lesson very well. No amount of appeasing outside eyes could ever make up for a person's own insolence. Adelaide sighed, hands squeezing the steering wheel.

Her mother, Sepheline, had always been the type to appease other people. She'd married to appease her own parents. Had a child to appease the world around her. Cared for that child to appease her husband. That marriage had come to an end when Adelaide was quite young, and that husband had left, without a single hint of regret for his act of filial treachery. Still, Adelaide couldn't entirely blame him. Sepheline had never forgiven him, though.

In their home, which was lit mainly by candles as Sepheline considered electricity a waste of money most months, there were many scents in the air. They purchased candles cheap, and without regard for any specific qualities. Plenty were failed scented candles that left their home filled with a foul miasma of mixing smells. Each one being obnoxious in its power. The one thing which lingered in the air most strongly however, was always fear.

Sepheline's fear had eventually become her daughter's fear. A paranoia Jisako would also leave. In that sense, however, Adelaide had become just like Sepheline in pushing her own beloved away.

Sepheline had always been quite the poisonous woman, screaming and belligerent most days. Spiteful and dead silent any other. It was too much for any man who respected himself. Adelaide had always assumed in some small part of herself that Sepheline loved her, but that was mainly because mothers were typically obligated to be loving, and Adelaide had hoped Sepheline might have secretly been trying to appease that as well.

Adelaide hadn't spoken to Sepheline in a long time, but her memory lingered. By her age, Adelaide wasn't sure whether Sepheline was alive or dead. Perhaps she'd died in the blasts, even. Adelaide had no idea where the old woman was either. They had lived out toward the countryside in Adelaide's youth, but she had no idea whether Sepheline would've stayed in town after she'd run away.

She drove past a truck with the remnants of a burnt rocking chair left standing beside it. Adelaide could imagine Sepheline- now bordering on seventy- sitting in the same rocking chair she had seemed so glued to when Adelaide was a child. An old crone, now even more bitter with the world, wearing a more wrinkled version of the same loathsome expression that had accompanied her usual behaviour. Swearing and cursing up a storm, speaking belligerently about the man who had left her now forty something years ago.

Adelaide had considered at one point or other reconciling- or at least attempting to- with her mother. Jisako had advised her against it. Despite being on the road, Adelaide shut her eyes for a moment. There was no future reunion for any of them. And in a way, not having the option anymore felt more of a wound than choosing against it of her own accord.

She opened her eyes, and soon there was something in her passenger seat. A flicker of silver- a woman in a shawl, watching the road fly by as she sat still in the car. However, the woman flickered away before Adelaide could even breathe in. As though she had appeared solely to remind Adelaide of why she had no place to judge her mother.

Adelaide tightened her grip on the wheel even further, until she was white-knuckled. "I'm sorry," she muttered, to nothing at all.

#

The city was situated on one of the heart roads of the country and yet still not a single soul seemed to believe she belonged there when she arrived. They glowered and cursed at her presence. Spat in the general direction of the cross burning in her hand. Adelaide didn't particularly mind. After all, they were simply bodies being puppeteered around. They didn't harbour much of an opinion themselves- well, not in this state. Currently, their autonomy was superceded by the demon which had taken residence in their homes. And of course the demon would be horribly irritable about the idea that she had tracked it down in order to end its life.

Adelaide did find it amusing, in some strange way, to watch its puppets all move around. They moved in not quite the right way- always with a slight, offset wrongness. Like an animator learning to draw poses for the first time and not quite understanding how things or people would move. Or a puppeteer, with a hand injury, struggling to move the marionette strings with broken fingers.

Part of her almost wanted to pity the demon- certainly, it must've been trying so very hard. She had to admit she didn't have the largest of sympathies for it, but she understood the plight must've been a rough one. Human bodies moved in strange ways to begin with. They were strong in odd places, yet fragile in others.

Adelaide hummed to herself, watching the people and the faces go by. She grabbed the hand of a wandering body in the midst of its walk cycle. "Will you attempt to possess me too?" she asked, smiling at it. The human puppet gurgled blood in it's throat for a moment- unable to answer.

After a minute or so of gurgling, the puppet was possessed, and able to say, "What are you talking about?" putting on something that approximated a confused expression. Unfortunately the expression also appeared to be somewhat constipated. It attempted to pull its hand away from her, but Adelaide only gripped it tighter.

She smiled at it. "Can't you understand what I'm saying?" she asked. "Do my words not reach you at all?"

"You're not making any sense."

"I don't know your true name, otherwise I would call it, sweet demon." Adelaide smiled. "You understand me, of course you do. You must be grand- speak every language. You've been here for all eternity, right? Since before we were more than dust? I'm sure you must understand me. Do you need my blood? I don't have anything sharp on hand."

The demon seemed to quickly realize that the charade wasn't going to work no matter how hard it tried. The puppet dropped its confused expression, defaulting to the same, hollow, glass eyed look that all the demons had. Demons only really seemed to harbour one of two expressions. One half were slack-jawed, stupid, and not even present in the world they were trying to inhabit. The other half wore the same smug expressions, which didn't seem much less stupid with their perpetually glazed over eyes. The head of the puppet lolled backwards, unable to support itself once the demon gave up even trying to control it. "You're making a needless amount of trouble."

"You were pretending not to exist," Adelaide replied, equally sharp and suddenly. "Come on now, tell me your name, I must call on the help of someone. My wife has died- I'm sure you understand, right? Don't men come to you with the same trifle all the time? Mine is no different. I have a soul- and I'm ready to lose it to reunite with her."

"Your wife has died?" Slowly, the puppet began to float off the ground. Out from it, rose a sort of dark substance- like blackened blood. It shined, in some strange way as well. It swirled, and like ink began to take a form. But unlike ink, it had no artisanship behind it. There was no beauty to the motion of the formation. "Do tell me. How?"

"She was murdered, in fact. Horrible- the deed, let me explain it. I'm sure you'd adore hearing my tale of woe? It's what you all feed on, isn't it?"

"Do tell me," the demon replied, with a hungry voice, and a hungrier mind. They certainly thrived on human misery. It was all they could create. It was all they could bring themselves to feed on, too. They were grovelling things. Human misery was like the food in a circus pig's trough. Filled mainly with trash that not even the pig enjoyed, with only a handful of things it could even really get nutrition from. Then, in what there was that the demon-pig thing could even appreciate, they would not be filled. So they chased to make humans more miserable, with the desperate hope that the humans would sate their hunger.

Or so was Adelaide's theory, anyway.

"Well, I was cold to her. Cruel- perpetually howling her insecurities for the world. And so she ran from me- into the arms of a man who was the cruellest of all mankind. When a seed festered into a child, she was killed. I found her again, but could not save her." As Adelaide spoke, the demon continued to form itself. The blood became covered in something that almost looked like a grey facsimile of muscle. It still writhed and twitched strangely, clearly having preferred it's former state of fluidity.

"Why couldn't you save her? I bet you could've saved her," the creature immediately began. They hurled vitriol, weakened the host. Adelaide wondered for a moment if she too perhaps had been born from a lineage of demons. For she had been the fruit of a woman who never seemed to know what kindness was- and Adelaide had used such cruelty on Jisako herself. It simply made sense, yes, that she must've been the result of some twisted union of that nature.

It leaned forward as it spoke. A grey skin began to form all around its form. "I bet you never even tried. I bet you didn't really care- you don't seem much like you did. Did you truly love her the way she should've been loved if you didn't even try to save her? You found her, why isn't she alive now?"

"Her body had no head when I found her."

The demon froze up for a moment, unsure what to say when she dropped such a violent comment. In fact, so stunned, that she was able to reel her fist back and strike. The creature's grey skin cracked violently under the power of her fist. "Betrayer!" it shouted, as it staggered back, and found its footing once again. Demons, despite their posturing, could not bring back the dead.

"The worst of all mankind," Adelaide cackled.

The demon turned its puppets toward her, and they all rushed forward. A massive throng of people all very suddenly compelled to charge at Adelaide and her alone. Some of the forms ran faster- others staggered behind. It was an entire town arrangement.

The town surged forward, and Adelaide quickly realized this wasn't going to be as easy as dealing with the priest before. The puppets of the demon came to crowd around it, and pushed forward. Adelaide staggered back- unsure of what to do to handle the situation herself. So she turned and she ran.

#

The cowardly act had done little to earn her much in the way of time. The bodies were continuing to hunt her- though through some small luck, their search for her through the wasteland was spread out, as she had managed to hide herself well. She'd pried up some floorboards in a basement and placed herself under them.

The bodies had chased after her for what felt like miles. Adelaide ducked and weaved between the buildings and the cars- the remnants of the humans which were now nothing more than mindless dogs. At one point, a hand grabbed for her neck, which she just barely avoided. A pair of denchers had come flying at her head, and struck her in the temple, leaving a nasty bruise, which sent her scrambling under a truck to recover. Hands reached for her underneath it, and she rolled out, scrambling away in a near panic.

They had practically chased her out of town.

So her current situation was a bit like being buried alive. It did, as she laid there, slowly occur to her that everyone in this town was dead. It hadn't quite clicked earlier. It did now, and that was a mildly unnerving thought. Though, in another way, relieving. There would be none of that "using a human as a shield" nonsense working now. Adelaide wasn't sure whether she could kill another human being in cold blood. There were of course extenuating circumstances. Some demons relied on humans to an extent, so killing them was paramount, but to kill a human being without reason. She couldn't imagine herself doing it. Demons may have attempted to ape the appearance of it, but they were far from even remotely equivalent in her mind.

She spent a large majority of the night there, under the floorboards, semi-trapped and drinking in the scent of the musk. The radiation wasn't terribly strong here yet. There would be some time before the wind carried it all the way here. The wind and the rain. Both were incredibly dangerous now. When the wind came, it would bring the radiation with it. Then, the rain would bring it in an even more concentrated form. The foolish would drink it up, too. The rain it raineth every day, she thought dryly.

Not that it mattered on account of everyone being dead here.

Adelaide smiled softly. In the dark, as she stared through the light which slipped through only the slightest of cracks, in her mind, they formed into a sweet mist. Hands, slowly reaching through, and holding her face. Sliding down, holding her neck- strangling her- bleeding repentance.

You ran. You abandoned me, she could imagine it saying. Adelaide could even imagine whose hands they were in the mist. Why were you always so cut off from me? Why would you never look at me? Why did you let him take me into the woods that day? You saw me, didn't you? Didn't you know what he was going to do?

Adelaide couldn't imagine those hands actually managing to strangle her. Jisako had nothing but a soft touch. In all things she was expert in being gentle. She was everything the world said a woman should've been. A special sort of infinitely peaceful, grace-exuding beauty who had not a single muscle for trouble. Though Adelaide could easily imagine Jisako losing her nerve, fingers trembling, and large eyes filling with tears.

Despite her thoughts to the contrary however, the hands in the mist pressed down and strangled her with a violent fervour. They dug into Adelaide's neck- and her eyes snapped wide open. She gasped for air.

She attempted to claw for whatever was on her throat, but there was nothing there. She sucked in a breath as violently as she could- and finally something went down. But it was a mistake. Something began prying at the boards above her, and she quickly realized the mistake she'd made.

Something had walked in and it had heard her. She could see shadows moving between the slats, and she near screamed as she realized how much trouble she'd gotten into by letting her mind wander. She stifled any sound from herself- held her breath, tried to clear her mind, tried to become a thing the demon could not find.

The footsteps of a puppet echoed above her, over and over. "That bitch... Where could she be...?" the distorted voice of the puppet mumbled to itself. They wandered about and in circles, clearly desperate to find her. But then it hit her that a regular puppet would've left much sooner. Wouldn't have seemingly possessed the autonomy to keep searching on its own in circles over and over, its words filled with impatient cursing. This human was the conduit. The dealmaker. The first to summon the beast.

To shutter the power of a powerful demon, find and kill the conduit.

She had forgotten to even search for the conduit earlier- overtaken by a desire to be reckless and troublesome. But it was a fundamental which she had learned so long ago.

Adelaide waited for the footsteps and the mumbling to turn away, and then she pushed herself up from under the floorboards. She stood up, grabbing the wood on the way out of the hole she'd been laying in. She ran forward toward the human. Adelaide slammed it over the conduit's head from behind. They screamed, she struck again as they reeled from shock. Confusion and screams- she tossed the wood to the side, before jumping on the fool, devolving the fight to fisticuffs. The conduit grabbed at her. Pulled her hair and attempted to pull her down. "Sovas! I need you!" the conduit called, desperately.

"Sov-?" Adelaide didn't have the chance to finish the inquiry, being shoved off rather violently. But she couldn't let this thing get away. She couldn't let the conduit survive and nor could she deal with the numerous puppets all over the place in this town.

#

The blood of the conduit stained her hands. She had been given the demon's name, and so, soon it was nothing.She looked out over the town now. The place filled to the brim with lives that were long gone. Lives violently stolen away. They all seemed, in that moment, as if they'd all spontaneously fallen asleep. A bit like that one story. She could somewhat recall it- though not too well.

Cendrillon and her needles of flax which had stabbed through her and injured her during her work. That was the story, yes, something of the sort. And after that, something of a trouble- she knew, the princess, she'd worked so hard, she'd collapsed after the injury. And soon, everyone else collapsed with her too. Then the unattended fireplaces and ovens eventually grew out of control without anyone to watch over them, leaving everyone in cinders. Something like that.

Adelaide stepped carefully over the bodies. Didn't Cendrillon lose a shoe at some point? In her work, I suppose. The story was sketched out in some rough, un-uniform sense in her head. Somewhere in the space between joy and tragedy and memory and imagination. It was the same place most of her understanding of the world was rooted.

She could not hide the fact she would always in her mind and in the minds of so many others be an outsider, just as she was an outsider in any matter involving Forrest. The houses of the dead were still filled with items and so, in some act no less parasitic than a demon, she set about taking things which she needed for her own survival. She went about loading them in the car with little regard for the sanctity of the dead.

She swore, as she worked, that the ghost was once again watching her. But by this point, Jisako was haunting everything Adelaide was or could be. And Adelaide did not have many things she was or could be to begin with. She headed over to her car, prepared to slam her trunk shut. And once again, in the distance, she swore she saw it.

A woman, standing among the bodies- with big eyes and a soft sadness to her which seemed like it could fill the deepest cauldrons of the Earth and turn them into oceans. Jisako's shawl was still held tight against her, as though the winds could chill her echo. She closed her eyes, and stood silent. She did move. Adelaide's hand twitched at her side. The cross burned in her other, with residual heat from the demon which had been wandering through the area before. Adelaide could not touch a ghost, so it would do no good, but she wanted to reach out. To feel Jisako close to her once again.

"Jisako!" Adelaide called, into the darkness. She got no answer, and after waiting for some time, she had to resign herself to her silence. There would be no reunion with Jisako this night. Or perhaps any night. She couldn't even imagine having Jisako's forgiveness with the state they were both in now, with all such cruel things which she had said and done. It was Adelaide's own fault. Why would Jisako ever forgive Adelaide for causing her death?

Why would a woman bordering on being a goddess ever give the time of day shaky apologies muttered through chattering teeth? Why would a woman bordering on being a goddess listen to the one who had pushed her away in life now, after a brutal death?

So, once more, the words snagged in Adelaide's throat, and she croaked at the time she needed most to say something. She just wound up standing there, staring at the ghost, slack-jawed and stupid. She forced her mouth closed once it became clear nothing of value would be able to leave it.

Adelaide watched as Jisako's image once again flickered away, just out of reach. A small part of her wanted to just run out into the road, and call for her until she came back. But Adelaide could hardly even justify calling Jisako her wife by this point. She certainly couldn't justify calling out to her after wasting another chance now, and so despite the weight in her chest commanding her to do so, she didn't.