#Inktober2019 - Day 09, 'Swing'

As originally posted at https://archiveofourown.org/works/20854958/chapters/49573574

I keep my eye on the ball as it drops toward me, bat tensed and ready in my hands. Around me, I can hear the roar of the park, feel the energy of the crowd as they wave in the stands, knowing that my mom and pop are up there somewhere, smiling at me. Once, I might have been blinded by the floodlights, but not today - no, today my eyes are as clear as my arm is true. I swing the bat with all my strength, eye never leaving the baseball until I feel the wood shudder in my arms, the shock racing through my flesh even faster than I hear the crack of the impact. I grin as I watch the ball soar away, further and higher than ever before: yes, that’s one for the stands. I drop the bat, bowing to each of the stands in turn, grinning through eyes wet with tears.

I’ve always wanted to do this, hit a home run in my home park.

Not that there’s really any point running.

The fantasy fades faster than my smile as I stare around the derelict stands, the concrete already veined with moss where it hasn’t been overgrown completely. Peeling boards rot around each level of the stands, each bearing the promise of luxuries long lost to seats long abandoned.

Now that they’re going to stay that way for long, once the sun finally slips beneath the horizon and those mighty floodlights fail to come to life.

Still, I decide, there are worse places to die. It’s no longer a question of where I die, trapped on this field with nowhere to go but into the ravenous dark. Nor is it even a question of when, since I know what’s going to happen as soon as the light fades. How? Well, I’m not sure of the specifics, but I’m sure it’s going to be painful. And while I don’t know which one it will be that finally strikes the killing blow, I can already see the shadows who are going to do it, flitting around the shadows pooling at the edge of the ground - though perhaps nowadays, it’s better to treat them as a what, rather than a who.

As for why?

Well, that one’s easy too. Desperation, poor decisions, poor decisions in desperation. We never planned to come so deep into the city. Nobody does anymore. If you’re smart, if you have any other choice, you’ll walk away and never look back.

Sadly, we were neither.

There were nine of us this morning, all certain of the plan and our roles and rules. We’d been putting it off for as long as we could - going through smaller hamlets and villages, scavenging what we could. It worked, for a while. But the truth is, if everyone has the same idea, eventually everything has been picked over. The world now’s nothing but skin and bones picked clean three times over and if you want food and medicine and proper tools, there ain’t nowhere safe to get them anymore.

The city has a way of sucking you in - we knew how far we’d scavenge, had the plan all set and ready. And yet within an hour we were deeper than we’d ever agreed, lost in a maze of streets which seemed to shift around us, a living labyrinth of concrete and asphalt. Suddenly, we were at a crossroads, staring in despair at signs weathered beyond hope, skyscrapers in all four directions and not a landmark in sight. There’d been no warning, no dark portents, no sense of foreboding; we were simply lost.

Everyone knows the crabs, as sure as they know the mist which still sometimes swallows the cities. But sometimes, if you peer at the shadows lurking in the mist and the darkness, too tall and slender to be the crabs, you could almost mistake them for men. Until, of course, they move. Jerky, spasming, impossibly fast, impossibly flexible, sacks of bones which mimic movement unbound by the limit of joints or speed.

No man moves like that.

No living thing moves like that.

We didn’t realise we were dying at first. We waited at the exit of a building for the two at the rear to catch up, and they were simply gone. No cries, no shrieks, no struggle; just gone. We waited fifteen minutes, called out loud enough to attract every secret eye in the city, and still nothing.

By the time we made it to the ballpark, there were only three of us left, and if we didn’t already know what was lurking in the shadows, none of us would have been able to say what had happened to the others. The hope was that we’d be able to get out onto the stands, get a view over the city from height and light, maybe find a way out. It didn’t really matter. Three of us walked in, and as soon as I arrived at the top, alone, I knew none of us would be walking out.

Still, there’s worse places to die. I have a lot of good memories of this place. Even after he got sick, pop brought us every week and we’d sit with hot dogs and popcorn up in the stands. He was one of the first to get it, before they knew what it was - Chronic Maritime Degenerative Bronchitis, they called it back then. He fought it until the very end and the day before he died, he made us wheel him out here to watch the last game. The team lost, of course. But he still squeezed my hand all the same and wheezed that he’d been glad to see the place one last time.

I smile as I watch the sun dip below the horizon, as the stands begin to fill with dark, fuzzy shapes, shifting and unnatural, indistinct even in the half-light. It must be nearly ten years since this place was last so full, back before they started shutting down big public places where disease could spread, and yet they pour from every corner, thousands upon thousand of dark and silent shapes, like ants pouring forth from cracks in the earth.

I smile as I heft the baseball bat again, raising it to my shoulder. A home run with nowhere to run, and no chance of victory.

As the first shadow man jerks toward me, I plant my feet and aim for the stands.

I do what dad wanted.

I go down swinging.