Sheri waited as the sound of soft shuffling slid past the broken window. She held her breath for several long, tense seconds as she stayed crouched below the windowsill. She had caught only glimpse of the thing, a hulking mass of tendrils and what might have been leaves, slowly dragging itself along the ground. In the dim, misty twilight, however, there was no telling what exactly the thing had been, but in her experience, such creature's movements were deceptive. Large as a car, slow as a turtle, she'd tried running past similarly large and slow creatures, only for them to demonstrate terrifying bursts of speed once prey was in their sights.
Sheri looked back to her companion. Dar, the thin young man shivering in the corner of the broken down shack, was still keeping his eyes toward the floor, curled up with his arms wrapped around his folded legs, head buried against his knees. His breath was quick and shallow, on the verge of whimpers. Sheri put a finger to her lips and made as quiet a shushing sound as she could. The boy nodded, rubbing his forehead against his knees, but didn't look up or open his eyes. He did tightly press his lips together, which just made the air whistle through his nose.
Sheri grit her teeth, listening past this noise to detect if the creature outside the window was still moving. The shuffling came to a stop for a moment, and she thought she heard something like a series of rapid huffs, almost like breathless laughter. Then silence. Several agonizingly long seconds of silence. Then the shuffling continued on until it faded.
Sheri let out a low sigh, and said in a low whisper, "Okay."
Dar's breathing steadied a bit, and he peaked out at her from his curled up position. "Okay?"
"For the moment," she said.
"Okay."
They sat there for a bit just to be sure, as the cold, grey light slowly brightened a bit with the dawn. It wouldn't get that much brighter than it already was, though. Even at high noon, presumably with no clouds in the sky, an unnatural darkness persisted, as though a great, darkened lens had been stretched over the sky. A low, thick mist added to the effect, dimming illumination from every source on the ground. It wasn't just the usual sort of light diffusion, either. Light just died after a short distance, as if an unnatural limit had been forced upon it. Only the sun was bright enough to penetrate fully, and even then, the brightest day they had seen since the Terror Wave had fallen over their land was still only comparable to a cloudless twilight.
Sheri went over to Dar and gently shook his shoulder. He flinched and tried to tighten his body more, as if he could just will himself to shrink down to nothing. "Hey," she said, still softly. They never spoke above a whisper if they could help it now. "Come on. We have to get moving."
"What's it matter?" he muttered. "We've been traveling for days. We're not going to make it."
"Dar," she said. She was getting sick of his pessimism; it just made her own even worse. "Please. You don't want to get eaten."
"We're going to get eaten anyway," he said, finally looking up at her. "Everything out there is hungry for us. Our best shot was flying, and—" He shuddered at the memory.
Sheri closed her eyes and tried not to think of their two failed attempts at flight. There had been thirty-five of them to start with when they'd first taken off. Sixteen the second. Now, it was just to two of them. She still didn't know how she and Dar had survived, save perhaps by means of purely dumb luck. Most of their group had been lost in the sky, with the hideous flying shapes swooping out of the mist to snatch them up.
They'd been a variety of things. Birds, bats, oversized wasps. Each of them mutated, many tattered to the point she didn't think they should be able to fly. Some clearly were not even alive in the normal sense; they'd seen a bird skeleton flying through the air, impossibly keeping aloft on only the thin bones of the wings. They'd seen some kind of flesh-eating moth, so grotesquely fat it was nearly the size of a human torso; there was no way it could have stayed aloft with its rapidly beating wings, each still no bigger than a match-book.
Dar settled his forehead back onto his knees, closing his eyes. "We may as well just stay here. I'd rather starve than feed any more of them."
Sheri grit her teeth. She wasn't going to waste away. Better a quick death than a slow decay. She stood up and glowered down at him. "Move it or I'll drag you," she said.
"Go ahead," Dar muttered.
She didn't actually have the strength to, and he knew it. Not without using her power, and that took considerably more effort within the Terror Zone. She was barely able to keep it going enough to keep them alive, staving off hunger and the ill effects of sleep deprivation. But every time, before they could really build up enough power to get them anywhere, they'd be interrupted. She suspected the magic somehow attracted the attention of the creatures, like a candle light drawing moths from the night's darkness.
Sheri sat back down, her back against the wall with the broken window. She closed her eyes and tried to calm her nerves, tried to tell herself it wasn't really Dar's fault. She wasn't even sure why she wasn't the one curling into a ball right now. Was it her Magic? She still knew so little about it. Her mother's fault, of course.
All of this was. When women from other countries had snuck into their homeland and spread their wicked Sex Magic, offered their people a new life in a more "civilized" country, whatever that meant, her mother had insisted on staying in the tiny village she'd grown up in. She and a few other women had no interest in the backwards, morally bankrupt ways of other nations, and stayed in their village, refusing to allow their children to leave. Even after rumors that their Great Leader had attempted to destroy his own country, they refused to leave. Tucked away in their little settlement, they stayed secluded for the next ten years, not bothered by anybody. Perhaps they could have gone on living that way forever, had the Terror Wave not appeared.
Sheri hadn't even had her magic for more than a month. Her mother refused to talk about it. No woman in the village was willing to teach the girls of the power they would gain. None of the boys had any clue about it. Maybe the few men who stayed with them did. Sheri remembered nights when her mother would go to the "adult street", where the grown ups would sometimes go to do their grown up activities. Sheri wouldn't find out anything about them until she finally turned nineteen, gained own powers, and could see into the men's minds. She'd just seen a confusing whirl of lustful thoughts and aching needs that had shook her to her core. She was not completely clueless about sex, but she was not remotely prepared for the Magic that gave her such insight to the lusts of men.
