Miranda (admiredmiranda) wrote in nevermore_logs, @ 2012-10-13 17:59:00 |
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Current mood: | scared |
Entry tags: | miranda lowsley, phantasos |
WHO: Miranda [Narrative, but OPEN]
WHEN: Early Saturday
WHERE: The streets of NYC... somewhere
WHAT: Trying to get home in the darkness
WARNINGS: The wonderful things of mass panic: dead bodies, violence, attempted rape. And is this is an open scene to anyone and I'm up for anything - except for Miranda dying! - I'll add whatever else needs to be added.
Miranda kept scratching at the insides of her arms. She'd been doing it for hours, since she'd been trapped at midnight in a subway train somewhere below the city with a hundred other terrified commuters. The train wouldn't move and eventually they'd forced the doors open and almost everyone had taken to walking the dark tunnels to get free. Miranda hadn't even realised she was free of the tunnels until her hand fell upon the edge of the platform. Still dark here though, so all the lights must have been out. In the tunnel a woman had shoved her down in her rush to get out - her knees were both cut up from the gravel - but now a man helped her, giving her a boost up onto the station platform and she helped pull him up after her. Together the both of them helped another girl up - twelve, Miranda thought, no more than thirteen.
The man beside her was blurry, like he was much further away, and he said, "can you hear that?"
Miranda tried to hear anything that wasn't the sound of panic and crying and scrabbling feet, of people calling out to loved ones.
"Hear what?"
"I'm glad we're out of the tunnels," he said, which wasn't an answer to Miranda's question. There was an edge of panic in his voice. Miranda was sure she would have had it as well. "Something grabbed my ankles in there. Something wet and cold. I wasn't a person."
Miranda shivered and said, in the most calm voice she could manage: "you're letting the darkness get to you. There was nothing in there but us. This is all just an electrical fault."
But it wasn't an electrical fault.
When she got close enough, she saw the clock in the station said six-thirty. The light above it must have been failing because it was nearly impossible to see from a distance. But it would start getting light soon and then this horrible crawling panic inside her would go down.
But at seven it wasn't light.
At eight she was walking and it still wasn't light.
At nine it was still dark.
She thought she'd lost her phone in the jostling crowd in the carriage, but she found it now, buried deep inside the broken lining of her bag. (She kept meaning to get that fixed. She kept telling herself to do it because one day she'd lose something important. Like today.) There was a text from Kat and Miranda replied, trying to keep calm as she walked, staying as close as possible to walls.
There were screams - distant and close - and the sounds of things breaking. She walked over the broken glass of smashed out shop windows and around fires burning through... whatever it was that people had lit. The fire hardly seemed to light up the darkness.
She found a man bleeding on the sidewalk and when she went to help him she realised he was dead and purpled with bruises. She crouched there for a long time and cried.
Passing an alley, rough hands grabbed her and dragged her with them. She kicked and screamed and the men tore the hip of her pants open. She bit down hard enough on his arm that it drew blood and with a scream he released her. Miranda ran and the darkness that terrified her now acted to hide her. The man didn't come after her. She pulled her elastic out of her hair and used it to secure the ripped sides of her hem together.
There was blood under her nails and the insides of her arms were raw and bleeding, drops of it hitting the pavement as she walked. Rubbing her faces left smears on her skin that she didn't know about.
Her phone battery died completely and Miranda put it back in her back. A group of people ran past her and Miranda, holding her breath, pressed herself flat against a wall until they were gone.
"Maybe I should stop," she whispered, speaking out loud just to hear something that wasn't screaming and panic all around her. Her voice was shaky. "I could just wait it out somewhere until it all ends."
But what if it didn't end? There was the knowledge that maybe this was the world now. Maybe the whole of the earth was cloaked in darkness and fear and this was the end.
She slid herself down the wall and curled up, praying to Isis and Osiris for wisdom, for strength, for the ability to stand up and keep moving to her sisters. She could have called out for Hermes, for Hecate, but she couldn't think of them right now. She felt disconnected from the factual immortality of her family. It was to her Lord and Lady that she looked for strength, because it was they who she felt had guided her since she was twelve years old. That faith had never died, no matter how the world around her had changed.
She felt like Isis' wings were drawn around her, and Miranda stood with a deep breath. She would keep going. She was still far from home, but she would find her way there, eventually.