Through Glass(46)

I gasped as I saw it, panic creeping into me. I felt my hands shake as I read it and tried not to accept everything that it could mean.



The red shimmered in the light, making the word look as if it was alive. The warning cut through me.

I wanted to stop right then, grab my bag and run from the room I had unwillingly trapped myself in, run from the words.

I couldn’t.

My eyes focused on a line that ran beside it, a word beside the first, hidden underneath the piles of trash.

I stared at it, trying to convince myself to run, to leave the messages of a mad man to their buried prison.

I couldn’t.

I leaned forward in a panic, my hand shaking as I moved aside debris and forgotten memories, trailing through the piles desperately. I should have been scouring for something useful, yet I could only focus on the continuing message that was now forming in front of me.



My hands moved faster as the words strung themselves together, the paint thicker in some places than in others. They all ran together in my mind until everything was uncovered. The lines of the letters exposed from their prison and the words set free.

They chilled me right to my core.

The Tar are the dead.



I froze, my breathing trying to regulate itself as I read it over and over. The words mirroring the ones I knew still sat on the back of the door, right behind me.

I turned slowly in place, my heart beating erratically as if I expected to find an Ulama standing casually behind me, but nothing was there. The light of the fire flickered against the walls, lighting the desperate words, the destroyed room, shining off the blood that was smeared over the once white wood.

Don’t trust a cut wrist.

I stared at the words. I twisted my body awkwardly to see them and my breath caught in my chest.

“Cut…” I breathed the word out, my shaky breath distorting the word as fear twisted inside of me.

The image of the golden talons flashing through the darkness, of Cohen’s blood splattering over my skin, flashed through my memory. I stared at the words, the image running over and over. Cohen had been cut by the talons of the Ulama, only to be carried away. Only to be taken by them. I had counted it as a fluke, just another way to torture me. However the words had me instantly thinking otherwise; had me wondering what they would do with a dead man.

“Don’t trust those who are cut…”





I had watched zombie movies and post-apocalyptic TV shows before, mostly with Sarah who thought the guys in those shows were adorably fun. Not like I hadn’t minded, it was fun to watch the destruction and fall of society. Besides, watching a hot head with a cross-bow was far more exciting than it should be.

We had laughed, joked, and enjoyed watching things that would never happen.

Until they did and then they weren’t funny anymore.

Two years of everything not being funny.

Just as this wasn’t funny.

In those shows and in the movies, survivors would just walk into grocery stores, pick up a basket and simply fill it with whatever delicacy they wanted.

Saffron covered lobster tails, yes please.

Sure, there may have been a few zombies to kill along the way, but all together? It was a smorgasbord of perfect food.

This was not like that. Perhaps it was because my world had been taken over by darkness and not the undead with no brain productivity.

That was the problem.

The Ulama—the Tar—had taken everything.

I noticed it as I walked through the streets, past the ripped apart gas stations, the looted clothing stores. I had ducked into a large grocery store in hopes of being able to find something, but the inside looked worse than the outside.

I walked down what, at one point, may have been an aisle in the grocery store, but right now, I wasn’t so sure. The huge shelving units had been thrown and destroyed, twisted into large tangles of metal.

They laid over each other, dust covered and forgotten. They were scattered throughout the store, skeletal reminders of everything we had lost. I searched through the ruins for cans, for unbroken bottles, anything with a high shelf life that might still be good.

Hell, after two years of eating molding porridge, I would even consider items past their best by date. I had licked stew off a carpet after all, anything was a possibility now.

Even with my open mindedness about food, however, I wasn’t finding anything.

I held the makeshift torch I had made a little higher, letting the light shine over the isles that surrounded me, hoping that the flame would glimmer off anything useful.

Still nothing.

I bit my lip as I exhaled, turning left at what once had been the milk refrigerator and made my way toward the sign that announced ‘box dinners’ to be down that aisle.

Nothing like dried noodles and cheese powder to cleanse the palate, but at this point, again, I really didn’t care.

I stopped when I was about halfway there, the firelight glinting against something shiny. I poked the glittering object with the bed rail, crumpled papers and molding bits of who knows what moved out of the way to reveal the shiny circle of a can.

“Oh, thank God.”

I fell to my knees, careful to keep the torch high above my head. The Tar had already proven they were following me. Proven that they wanted me dead. The more noticeable I made my flame, the safer I was, as long as it didn’t go outside of my protective circle. Stay in the light.