Emily wakes to a disquieting absence of sound.

  She blinks the sleep from her eyes, reaching up to rub away the crust as she sits up and looks around. The room is as dark as it is cold, with the only light coming from the thin beams of moonlight shining through the thin cracks in the poorly-patched roof.

  Emily shivers and pulls her torn blanket tight around her shoulders as her brain slowly begins turning. There’s a buzzing pain in the back of her head, and her memories fail her when she tries to remember falling asleep, but her attention quickly slips away from the discrepancy as it settles into the background like white noise.

  Why am I awake?

  The coarse fabric of her only sleeping comfort rubs against the hairs standing on end on the back of her neck. She frowns and shifts her legs beneath her.

  Why am I alone?

  “Mum? Dad?” she calls softly, her voice but a faint whisper.

  No one responds, so she pushes herself up, keeping a firm grip on her blanket to fend off the cold desert air as she takes a few tentative steps towards the hut’s entrance. She holds her breath as she creeps towards the sheet-metal propped up in place of a door, a sense of dread slowly pooling in her gut as the silence plays on her nerves.

  Emily pauses just beside the entrance, reaching out with her left hand to ever so carefully slide the metal out of the way, flinching a little as the frigid material meets the tender flesh of her small fingers, but putting her weight behind it nonetheless. A small crack forms between the metal and the wooden frame, letting her peer out onto the street.

  Despite the moon providing the only light, she gets a good look at the row of run-down abodes opposite, some boarded up like hers and others still sitting open with ragged people hanging around, several lying passed out surrounded by bottles.

  Emily knows better than to show herself alone at night. She wouldn’t usually give in to her curiosity, but something about the odd quiet hanging over the night, like the calm before the storm, drives her from safety.

  She props her shoulder against the doorframe and pushes with all her might, sliding the door out of the way before stumbling out onto the narrow street of packed dirt. The wind blows by, as she slowly pads forward, her bare feet stinging against the sand-covered ground, but it doesn’t make a sound.

  Each of her breaths comes out in a thin mist and echoes inside her head, joining the steadily-building beat of her heart.

  Emily approaches one of the unconscious drunks she recognises, a middle-aged man named Donny who often scavenges the scrap heaps with her dad, listening for the sound of his breath, but she only hears her own. Donny appears pale in the moonlight, and when she reaches out to hold her fingers beneath his nose, she doesn’t feel a thing.

  “He’s…”

  She stumbles back, hugging her blanket to keep in her feeble warmth as she refuses to believe what she’s seeing.

  Donny isn’t dead.

  She’s forced to tear her eyes away from the not-corpse when another sound shatters the unsettling quiet looming over the street. A distant, keening howl rolls in from far outside the city’s borders.

  Emily’s head snaps to the side, gazing down the street that seems to stretch on endlessly, where she spots a group of roaming shadows closing in.

  Her heart kicks up a gear, beating a thunderous chorus in her chest as she spins on her heel and bolts for her home. She dives through the thin gap in the door and scrambles against the thin sheet-metal to find purchase, tearing her nails and ignoring the pain that comes as she pulls it closed.

  She listens to rapid paws scurrying around outside, just on the other side of her home’s thin walls, and throws herself into the corner, burrowing into the loose pile of rags that make up her parents’ bed.

  The beasts growl and wail as they run by, and her heart hammers louder and louder each second. Emily finds herself oddly grateful for the distraction as it keeps her from focusing on the sickening rip and tear of flesh joining the other sounds tainting the quiet night.

  It feels like she’s been hiding beneath the pile of rags for hours, trying not to listen to the chaos outside, when something slams against the thin sheet metal keeping her safe. It rattles in place, and Emily’s heart climbs to her throat.

  She feels her chest tightening, her breath becoming shallower and shallower as she slowly lifts the edge of her safe haven, peeking out towards the door. The metal shudders and slides out of the way as two dark figures dart in before slamming the entrance shut behind them.

  They’re both panting and out of breath, quietly hissing at each other in hushed tones as they try to draw in air, but their words come out in a mumbled mess, and Emily can’t make out what they’re saying – she didn’t hear them. She can’t make out either of their features in the dark, but it doesn’t matter, and relief floods her chest anyway.

  “Mum?” she squeaks as she begins crawling out of their bed, but her parents’ heads both snap to her in an instant.

  The faces are wreathed in shadows, their features faint and impossible to discern, but two perfect rays of moonlight shine down on their eyes, illuminating the painfully-familiar blue and green she always sees staring back at her in the mirror.

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  “Don’t come out!” the blue eyes hiss at her, panic lacing the familiar yet distant voice.

  Emily freezes, curling back in on herself as her mother’s tone sparks a deep feeling of foreboding.

  She’s heard that tone before.

  When…

  “Don’t even make a sound.”

  The blue eyes step away from the door while switching to a soothing tone as the green panics.

  “What are you doing? Help me!” he implores, turning away and fading back into shadow as the back of his head faces her.

  “It’s too late. They can smell us in here!” Emily’s mother hisses back, stepping towards her as the sheet metal her father’s bracing quivers violently, and the sound of claws scratching wood starts to close in.

  “Emily, darling, stay there no matter what,” she says, softening her voice and crouching down to meet her daughter’s mismatched eyes with a strained smile far too shaky to be comforting. “Okay?”

  Oh... It was when they died.

  The door is knocked aside, and two quadrupedal shadows bound in, leaping at Emily’s father. They knock him to the floor, and he only screams for a second before one of their jaws latches onto his throat, ripping the shadow apart in a spray of darkness. His head rolls back, his clear green eyes meeting Emily’s without a flicker of life remaining, carving themselves into her mind.

  She barely blinks, and her mother hits the floor as well, valiantly holding in her final screams for her daughter’s sake as her chest is torn to pieces.

  Emily silently weeps, clasping her still-bleeding fingers over her mouth to muffle her sobs as she watches the monsters enjoying their meal.

  The sounds of monsters eating her parents mix with the gnawing outside, but Emily barely notices, quickly accepting that they were already corpses as she stares into her mother’s vacant one-eyed gaze – the other already bursting in the jaws of the grinning beast looming over her.

  It feels like hours could have passed, but Emily strangely knows it’s only been ten minutes as she finds herself counting the seconds. A third beast, shrouded in darkness, prowls through the door, pressing its nose to the floor and sniffing. It passes over her parents’ corpses, taking in their scent as it goes, and begins inching closer and closer to her.

  Six hundred and thirty-four. Six hundred and thirty-five.

  Emily stills the faint quaking of her hands and flattens herself to the floor, taking a deep breath and forcing herself to relax.

  Six hundred and forty-two. Six hundred and forty-three.

  The monster pauses right in front of her, the faint edge of its blackened paws the only thing she can see through the gap in her rag covers. It inhales, pressing close enough to brush against Emily’s back, but it doesn’t attack.

  Seven hundred and twenty-two.

  The sounds of ripping flesh and distant howling echo around her mind, and Emily can’t quite tell if she ever hears them end before she feels herself breaking apart and drifting into oblivion.

  …

  Emily wakes to a disquieting absence of sound, which quickly becomes a faint chanting chorus scratching at her brain as she becomes aware.

  She blinks the sleep from her eyes and sits up, staring off into the darkness and bringing a hand up to press against her temple.

  Fifty-six thousand three hundred and twenty-five. Two thousand eight hundred and forty. Fifty-six thousand three hundred and twenty-six. Nine hundred and seventy-six.

  Each voice of the chorus is her own, but she can hear varying levels of distress in their tones, some sounding as if on the brink of panic, and others dripping with apathy. Some of the voices overlap, counting the same numbers, while others interfere, layering so many values over each other that Emily’s unable to divide them.

  “Why?” she mumbles weakly, struggling to think through the pain, and flinching at the voice that slips from her lips.

  It’s her own, that she’s certain of, but for some reason it feels wrong. The nagging sense of incongruence forms in her gut as she pushes herself up and stumbles forward through the dark.

  “Mum?” Emily calls out instinctively, following a familiar pattern but wincing again as she hears the words.

  Have I… been here before?

  She reaches the sheet metal door of the hut and slips the fingers of her left hand into the small gap between it and the wooden frame supporting it. As she strains and pushes it aside, she feels horribly weak despite her young body, having never had the sustenance to grow solid muscle.

  The confusing feeling pooling in her gut churns.

  Stepping out onto the silent, moonlit street, Emily begins chewing her thumb as panic inexplicably constricts her throat. The action feels comforting, like an old soothing habit, but her discomfort only grows as she fails to recall ever having done it before.

  Her head spins, her eyes scanning up and down the street, and the mind-splitting chorus only builds in intensity as she takes in the scattered corpses inhabiting every ramshackle dwelling.

  They… weren’t dead yet… right?

  A splitting pain lances through her, and her vision blinks white for an instant. When the fog clears from her eyes, Emily finds herself standing face-to-face with Donny, staring down into his distant eyes as he swigs his drink from the bottle.

  A cacophony of sounds finally shatters the silence hanging over the street, and the chorus in her head is momentarily dulled by the coughs and groans of her neighbours simply being. Emily looks around in confusion, trying to remember what she was doing in the middle of the street at night, when a distant howl sends a shiver down her spine.

  She hears screams and cries of panic quickly getting closer, and watches as Donny looks up, staring straight through her as if she were a ghost, before his eyes widen in fear and he scrambles back, dropping his drink and pulling the fabric sheet covering his hut’s entrance closed.

  The monsters are here.

  Emily turns on her heel and dashes back into her home with a singular focus, but as she splits her nails re-covering the door, the start of another count joining the chorus makes her pause.

  One.

  “Monsters?” she whispers, rolling the word around in her mouth and trying to figure out why it’s bothering her.

  An impact on the other side of the door sends her scrambling beneath her parents’ bed-pile, and she watches with bated breath as two figures shift the door and slip in.

  Emily recognises them, but the chorus doesn’t, increasing in volume by several steps as the apathetic voices take the lead. She frowns, trying to focus on her parents’ obscured figures as they push themselves against the door. As her eyes strain to understand the darkness, the figures are revealed as mere shadows filled with swirling faces grinning back at her in twisted satisfaction.

  “Who…” she starts before her breath catches in her throat as the figures begin talking.

  The woman addresses her, but Emily hears the chorus join in, echoing the same words as she speaks them. She focuses on the real words to try to dull those in her head, but she’s quickly lost as two formless horrors break down the door and silence the soothing whispers.

  A third monster enters, and her own count joins the chorus as she cowers beneath the covers, listening to the haunting death throes of her street.

  …

  Emily wakes to the familiar, faint background hum of Eimdon’s slums.

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