The Lost and Forgotten

The Lost and Forgotten

The soft golden reds of the sunset play across the decaying remnants of the buildings from before, some of them gaping like lightning struck trees while others yawned completely broken and shattered to the sky. Where once there had been an entire coliseum there was now a huge crater with vague cemented shapes in the ground around it, the streets rotted and crumbled. But nature remained triumphant in the struggle despite the lowly conditions, greenery springing forth amid broken cracks of cement and piled refuse, forgotten rotted corpses and debris giving rise to large patches of moss, molds and mushrooms that clung to parts of the buildings and the urban landscape below.

Daniel looked down on the broken city from his perch high up in one of the long-forgotten skyscrapers. It was starting to lean to one side but he figured it to be plenty secure enough to last him the night at least. His climbing gear lay piled next to him, hammered metal hooks and hand-woven rope. They were simple but enough to get him up into what buildings he could, get away from the lost. As the sun was setting he could hear their howls amongst the ruins, a hollow and sorrowful sound that reminded him of what once was. What could've been and all that he had never seen and all that had been forgotten.

He hadn't been alive to see it, but he could imagine as he looked at these places, moved through them, that it had all once been a sanctuary. A home. But that was long ago, now it was a desiccated corpse, waiting to be eaten by the worms and turned into something useful once again. The glimmer of hope as life was breaking through was enough to briefly warm Daniel's wandering heart, but danger lurked everywhere now. Even the sanctuaries that did exist were not truly safe, the lost a constant threat. Only the high and inaccessible places were even vaguely safe, and even that was still a gamble. There were no true homes any more.

Daniel had picked the highest place he could find, despite the biting cold winds whipping through his flesh and to his bones and the precarious lean to his current residence, for good reason. He would rather gamble more in favor of the building than the lost. He would rather it collapse and he be crushed to death than to suffer whatever fate the afflicted may suffer him. The very thought of him chilled him to the bone as a loud wave of howls came up. As he listened he swore that one of those howls sounded more like a human howl of pain than that of the warped things lurking in the growing shadows, a thought that made him clutch his coat tighter against the wind and put down the binoculars.

Best not to look. Probably just a trick of the mind anyway, right? He thought. Despite that, he still felt no desire to raise the binoculars once again and with each of the howls he felt a chill down his spine. He didn't want to see their twisted faces if he could manage it, he had enough nightmares as it was and he hadn't seen one of the lost yet today. He did a quick scan of the crumbling remains of the floor he was on. Much of the flooring had given way but there was still something of a patchwork of fairly stable floor. Daniel had set up his sleeping roll by a crumbled wall next to a structural support beam, a bundle of strange looking stitched together strips of boiled leather and a pile of leather bags filled with food and drink.

The shadows cling amidst the dark columns of the building but with the deepening dark of the night and Daniel's adjusting night sight he can make out the vague shapes of the structures of the floor. He couldn't see anything moving and he didn't hear any howls anywhere near him.

A sliding rasp from the wall behind made him spin around so fast he nearly fell to the floor, practically jumping straight out of his skins. He stumbled and rested his hand on the wall and felt that it gave slightly. With a panicked gasp he backed up slightly from the wall, not putting any significant weight on it. That could come off at any moment and he didn't want to lose an arm or his life to it. Looking closely he could see small fissures running through several parts of the wall and cursed himself for being so foolish.

With a small sigh he headed for his roll, shedding a couple layers of leathers to crawl into his roll, a talon-like hooked blade with leather grip held tightly in his hand for defense. The soft creak of the leather of his gloves and the grip pressing tightly against each other soothed him enough that, within the hour, he was able to fall asleep. Mutated only vaguely animalian faces haunted his mind as he listened to the howls growing in the night and they followed him into his dreams.

Dark sinuous shapes chased him through crumbling corridors and rooms, forcing him to clamber into dilapidated walls and through cracks he had to hold his breath to get through to desperately get away from his pursuers. He hardly dared to look back, even a moment's hesitation and they would be on him in no time. Their howls grew in intensity in his ears, ringing through him like a bell of lost souls. He could almost hear them trying to form words, human words in mouths that were no longer human. He could hear the terror and pain in their voices. And the hunger, an all-encompassing hunger.

As he slid up into the recess between two rooms in his dream he could feel something wet and slimy wrap tightly around his leg, coiling up onto the calf like some monstrous slug of incredible strength. It stopped him dead in his tracks and he desperately held to what crevices he could find in the darkness as it pulled him downward and back out. Abject terror gripped at his chest as he felt its limb tightening around his legs and excruciating pain began to fill him.

His eyes shot awake just as there was a loud ripping noise of the leathers of his roll being ripped apart and he could feel the bones of his left leg starting to creak and crack under incredible force. In the darkness he could make out something thick, black and dark coiled tightly around it like a tarry snake. He slashed in desperation at it with his hooked blade, the sharp edge striking true on the thing. It felt like cutting through wet tensed rubber and an inky, black, foul-smelling ichor spat forth as he severed it and an alien howl filled Daniel's ears.

Panic truly struck him then as he turned and in the moonlight could make out the milky green orbs of
a half dozen eyes with transparent lids on a melted face, a gaping lamprey-like maw of rows of teeth lurching toward his face. He had just enough time to hook the blade of his knife into its mouth before its rows of barbed teeth attached to his skull and then levered it over him as he slid out from under it. A foul smelling slime covered parts of him but now was not the time. A puddle-like black shape with long thin limbs branching out was all he could make out of the lost by his bedroll.

Daniel stumbled back into the darkness, away from the maybe-once-human creature, wincing at the pain in his leg. He had a strong feeling it was broken, but now was not the time for waiting and seeing. The moonlight didn't go far into the building and it wasn't long before he was left fumbling across the slanted flooring of the leaning building to make sure he didn't slip or slide off to his death. He was thankful for wearing gloves so he didn't cut his hands on the dust caked floor.

Fumbling through the dark he felt the beam he was crawling across came to an abrupt end. He reached out, feeling feebly through the darkness if the other side were near. He might be able to cross and if the lost that had disturbed him was a crawler it would be unlikely to be easily able to reach him. Visions of its melted vaguely human face with tar black skin and far too many fish-like green eyes haunted him as he tried to fumble through the dark.

The next moment there was a loud creak and crack of steel and Daniel felt the ground underneath him shift out from under him and then slam up into his knees and then suddenly he was falling. Tumbling down through darkness for what felt to him like an eternity. He knew this was the end, he knew what was coming as he twirled through empty air, and the last thought that entered through his mind before the hard ground came to meet him was that thankfully he would not become one of the lost. Merely one of the forgotten.