• Night. I used to prefer it over the blinding sun, its comforting silence, hiding your secrets. Now, though, They own the night.
    The creatures, spawned from inanimate corpses from any place the fallout touched, spread their plague across continents, to those already dead, and in some cases, to the living.
    My name is Osana Min-Li, the last human alive as far as I know. God, I hope not, but then again, sometimes I wish it was someone else instead of me. For years before the fallout, I lived in secret as a magic wielder, giving aid to those who sought deep enough for it—paranormal investigation and healing mostly—but I never openly stepped out into the light. Mostly I delved in the White Arts, as that was what was needed by those seeking my assistance…however my passion was in Black Magic. From the eyes of Insensitives, there is only the effect, but for those of us fortunate enough to see, to touch the true Source, there is unimaginable, indescribable beauty.
    Well, those of us left.
    When the bombs struck Japan for the second time in history, this time from the east, I traveled to the United States to avoid anything wrong with my first and only pregnancy. Bound for Maine, as far from the possible primary targets as I could get, an EMP knocked down our plane. I and mine were the only survivors. Yet in a world now swarming with fallout and flesh-hungry monsters, I soon became the last remaining.
    As the world began to cripple and shrivel and die, so did the Source. I felt a great, mournful chasm in it, one usually filled by those touching it, and in its despair, a dark cloud now roams the Source. Sometimes I can feel it coming when I’m in contact, sometimes I can’t. More than often it will find me, lurking in shadows until I’ve drawn enough of the Source to do something, and it will strike. More often than not, it is just like now, when I face the creatures, when I am so focused on avoiding their treacherous fate, that I cannot feel the approaching Shadow.
    Times like now when my life depended on every second, every move.
    A chair writhing in flames flew across the room, a fiery missile from the explosion of a fireball, striking two creatures and catching one on fire. Fire was the only way I knew to kill them.
    My arm reached up. Not a requirement when reaching for the Source, but motions made things easier to remember. Dread poured into me as a flash of numbness and a stab of pain. I choked. Though many times I have felt this, it was never pleasant—in fact, many times I thought I’d rather die. Convulsions racked my body, despite my desperate attempts to control it. The tips of my slender fingers began turning black, the infestation of the Shadow spreading across my hand, cascading down my slim arm. Pain in my chest, an icy, burning dagger piercing my heart, thrashing from side to side, slashing my lungs. Breath became impossible without summoning yet more pain. I could plainly see the creatures approaching, cautiously, curious about this new development, seeing how it rendered their prey perfectly helpless. I could plainly see my nails grow, become a bit harder, a bit sharper, until darkness crept in on the outer edges of my vision.
    I tried to let go of the Source, to escape the cloud, but the Shadow held me, and as if sensing my failed flight, the pain increased. An enormous drill pressed through my chest, or so I thought, so it felt, and I screamed, a shriek worthy of a banshee.
    Darkness closed in.
    And what seemed a second later, darkness fled. I blinked away the fuzziness, focusing my eyes. My shirt, skirt, and skin were all torn by the claws and ravaged by the teeth of the creatures, and I was bloodied by both their blood and mine. The unnatural, thick liquid they bled covered my arms up to my elbows and dripped heavily from my chin.
    They lay dead all around me, finally finding their sleep from undead misery.
    I shuddered, though this was not the first time this had happened, not the first time I had “awoken” to find my deeds equal to or even worse than theirs.
    Shaking my head in the agonizing knowledge, I gathered a pack of scavenged food and bottled water and walked to the open edge of the floor, and dropped to fall the twelve stories to the ground below. Not suicide, no, for the fall did not kill me; instead I landed lightly on the ground, rolled shortly, and came up into a quick jog. It was one positive aspect from my corruption, but I wish I had considered jumping long ago.
    Quickly checking for any potential dangers—only finding one flailing about uselessly impaled on a sharp spike of steel sticking up from a pile of rubble and another tripping over pebbles without its head—I began a long journey away. I wasn’t sure where, but it would be a long way from the ruins of 3024 Canada. Maybe America would hold better fortune. Maybe people would be living there. Maybe I could put together an abstract of a life if I found someone, anyone.
    Maybe.
    ____
    I wandered for days. South, always south, the sunrise to my left, the sunset to my right, the majestic stars above laughing at the disgraceful land. Nothing in the land changed to tell me where America might be, no signs, no brilliant statues or towers of unspeakable glory of a nation that once symbolized hope. Only more bomb-flattened land, only more death, and no way to know where I was. South was my daily trek, the day my ally, the night my enemy. Nothing stirred other than the unsettling dirt in the dead wind. Finally I came upon a stream in a valley that seemed to once carry a river. Thankfully I washed away the bloodstains.
    Days turned to weeks, and what supplies I had were becoming stale, and my water was almost depleted. I began to wonder which would be preferable: a death from thirst and starvation, a death of radiation poisoning, one of utter corruption, or letting the creatures take me.
    No—no death. Cannot think of death, cannot, or else I might—
    “Hey! China-girl, git down!” shouted a voice.
    I ducked, hearing a gun go off and a sickly sound of a bullet finding long-dead, rotting flesh behind me. I spun to the direction of the latter sound, snarling. My foot came out to kick the legs from under the creature, and on a frightening impulse, my arm launched forward, grasping its throat as it fell and squeezing until I heard the loud, distinct crack of its neck. That doesn’t kill it, surely, but that is as good as not having a head when concerning the undead. As it struggled to blindly regain its footing, I raced to where the voice had come from, a wall of constructed of collected rubble, sandbags, bricks, and some type of deep red-brown adhesive. Three guesses to the main ingredient of that.
    A barrel-chested man in an old, dirty, torn fireman uniform greeted me, or well, addressed me. “How the damn hell are ya alive, runnin’ around like a chicken wit its head cut off like ya were? Doin’ that, out there? Damn, China-girl, ya lucky.”
    Not really knowing how to reply to that, I blurted, “I am from Japan, not China.”
    “Jap, China-girl, who gives a damn crap. Practically the same place anyway, an’ it’s not like ya can tell ‘em apart side-by-side,” he answered, completely oblivious or choosing to ignore my threatening glower that darkened with every word. “I mean, we dead anyway, it’s just takin’ us a few more years ta figure it out than it did those other people. Now, c’mon in before others show up—the sun’s fallin’ on our heads just ‘bout!”

    That night was the first time I had comfortably slept in years. He had found a cellar—full of wine, now with just as many bottle empty as full—and converted into an emergency room, an armory, and a living quarters all. Half of a hospital’s supplies sat in one corner of one room, while just feet away were a dozen weapons confiscated from dead towns of his journey, and three make-shift cots lay in perfect alignment on the other side of a full wall of wines. When I had asked him about the extra two, he explained they were for any “damn wandering Orient girl idiots like me” that came along. His eyes, however, the deep and distant pain, told the truth in all too much detail.

    A week passed, a month, almost a year. We had reached a point of acceptance, and even had taken up hunting the scarce wildlife not already taken by the creatures for fresh food, as his MREs were not something either of us wants to eat for the rest of our lives, and there was little else to do with the infinite time we had pressing boredom on us. Luckily we found a scrawny yet not terrible-looking rabbit and a buck, though what they could eat to survive escapes me. Maybe the radiation changed them. Who knew. Who cared.
    Yet even in our fortune, we had strayed farther from the cellar than planned, and we stayed out much later than originally anticipated.
    Laughing. We were swapping stories of the first days as survivalists. Then they had been painful, now we easily and lightly laughed at our follies and wondered how we had gotten out alive.
    Until he suddenly stopped laughing, staring out into the west. “What is it Richard?” I questioned, following his gaze and scanning the vapid, flat land between us and the horizon. Only when I found nothing that I realized he was looking just above the horizon. The sun was almost gone.
    To the north was a party of thirty creatures, and maybe forty undead to the south, some holding back undead dogs or bears or mountain lions. North was the direction of the cellar.
    “Head east an’ circle ‘bout,” he whispered forcefully.
    “You couldn’t possibly take them all yourself,” I argued, and mentally added, but I could. That though, was a road I had not traveled for just over a year…
    “Just do it, girl!” he barked. “I’ll not be a-losin’ you too.” At that addition I choked back my retort and could only stare. Never before had he ever admitted any emotion at all involving me. “Well, be goin’, then!” he urged.
    Knowing he had a better chance of defeating all of them than I had battling his resolve, I ducked and ran to the east, starting to make a large circle to our safe house. The whole while I heard gunfire and distant taunts until I had closed the steel reinforced door and blocked out the dead world.

    Time passed. Minutes went by with painful sluggishness, and soon turned into an equally slow hour. An hour almost became two when the door opened and Richard silently walked down the stairs, confused, untouched.
    I leaped up from our cot. “What happened,” I asked, taking every bit of patience to keep the worry out of my voice, to keep away the tremble that would surely accompany it.
    Pale, he turned to me. “There be hundreds out there, but I walked right…by …them….Right between them.” He swallowed, obviously making an effort to force himself to continue. “It’s your blood they be wantin’, not mine.”
    Silence interrupted, staying for minutes until figuring its welcome had expired.
    Suddenly, I said, “I—I will go out. You, you stay here, and don’t you dare try to follow me in an ill-fated attempt to save me. If it’s my blood they want, then they shall have it, but not without losing some of their own.”
    Then I knew I must be going mad—or had accepted a fate I didn’t fully understand.
    Richard offered no protest other than a quick and even more quickly silenced “Wait…” as I marched up the steps. No longer was I a mere wanderer surviving in a dead wilderness. In their own silent way they had called me out, beckoned me to come forth and face them, showing me the purpose I had lacked for so many years. Richard gave me that purpose.
    Outside, they waited, ever as patient as death, in a semi-circle spanning fifty yards, several bodies thick. I walked towards the center, and many of them moved to close the gap behind me. Finally, I stopped in the center. Time slowed, waiting for one side or the other to make the first move, not caring about how history was shaped as long as it happened.
    Arms content by my side, I closed my eyes, reaching out with my mind to the Source, feeling the power as it flowed through me. The Shadow was nearby, lurking. Stalking. Hunting.
    I drew deeper on the Source, until it filled every pore of my body, waiting.
    A steady rumble reached my ears as the undead began to charge.
    The Shadow waited, seeking the best moment to strike.
    My arms stayed by my side, my eyes did not open.
    The rumble became louder as they came nearer.
    I took in a deep breath.
    The Shadow rushed.
    I opened my eyes.
    The Darkness enveloped me, now everywhere in my body, but now there was no pain as I allowed its entrance.
    All went black as I embraced the Darkness.