Once the pain subsided sufficiently, Rita managed to drag the mouldering remains of a couch over to barricade the door. Then she collapsed onto said couch. Her legs flopped all over the place, but she had more important issues to worry about than her gross spider limbs.

“Now start from the beginning and tell me who you are, how you got here and why I can’t get rid of you.” To any outside observer, it appeared as if she was simply speaking to thin air.

Okay, here is what I know. Before this, I was just you. Your conscience…

“You are sure as hell not my conscience.”

Ok, ok, whatever then. Your… something. Let’s go with common sense since it appears yours is missing.

Rita snorted but said nothing.

Ever since you woke up today in your apartment things have been a bit… weird. Like I was a bit more apart from you than usual. Like we were somehow… separated a little. I didn’t give it a second thought at the time. Hell, I didn’t exist to give it a second thought, I was just… you. Trying to nudge us in the right direction. The direction of survival.

“So why aren’t you me anymore? Why are you… you now?”

You kept freaking out and disregarding my advice. And every time you did, I think I became a bit more… me. A bit less you. When that bastard attacked us, and you refused to fight, something just… snapped and I must have broke loose from you completely.

“So, I have like… a split personality or something now?”

What do I look like, a shrink?

One of the springs under her back tore loose from whatever it was that was holding it in place and struck her in the back with a painful ‘sproing!’. Rita jumped up with a yelp and glowered at the now sharp looking metal sticking out of the couch while she rubbed her back.

Good idea. Start looting while we talk. We need stuff. See if you can find a weapon or some food.

Rita sighed and began to mechanically check the place. It appeared as if it had once been quite an elegant little apartment with a tasteful dining room set. Now it was mostly rotting material hanging off skeletal frames.

“What do I call you?” she asked as she dug through a cupboard.

Grab that knife. It’s nearly as good as the one you left behind due to being a little dirty.

“A little dirty!? It was covered in layers of blood and gore!”

If it could still stab possessive masked teenagers, who cares? Stop begin a baby. A little blood never hurt anyone.

Rita sighed and put the new knife aside. “Ok seriously, what am I supposed to call you? And stop trying to change the subject.”

I haven’t decided yet.

Rita spluttered. “What do you mean you haven’t decided yet? Do you have a name or not?”

Hey, an hour ago I didn’t exist as a separate entity and things have been a bit hectic since, okay? I haven’t had time to name myself. I’m thinking about it.

“Fine. Then I’m just going to call you Dark Rita. Since you are clearly the psychopath side of me.”

Dark Rita is retarded, edgelord bullshit. Just call me Alice. I can live with Alice.

“Because this place makes you think of Wonderland somehow?”

No, because you and I appear to be stuck on opposite sides of the looking glass, wouldn’t you agree?

Rita didn’t bother replying.

The idea that someone else was living in her head was strange. She didn’t know what to think of Alice. On the one hand, she really seemed to have their best interests at heart. On the other, she’d just brutally stabbed a young boy to death.

A young boy who’d been trying to kill them at the time. Okay, fine, perhaps she could give Alice a chance.

Hey, I’ve got a question…

“Hmm?”

When you took over again, as we stood over the that young man’s corpse… did you also feel strangely hungry?

Or maybe not.

***

Come on, I know you must have felt it too!

“Shut up, Alice! I don’t want to think about it!”

Rita was working her way through the apartments on the bottom floor. The take so far? Another knife, a particularly shiny spoon, two cans of… something that might or might not be edible and another bottle of water rescued from a fridge that Rita had almost refused to touch.

It’s the only time we’ve felt anything resembling hunger. Aren’t you curious about that?

“So maybe we just had a big dinner last night” Rita guessed.

You threw up all over our bed when we woke up. Our stomach is empty. Yet we’ve never been hungry… except when I stabbed that little redheaded child through the chest. If you hadn’t taken over, I would have taken a bite out of him just to see what he tasted like.

“Alice! That’s disgusting! Fine, yes I felt it too, but we are never resorting to cannibalism, okay?”

Have you checked our ass recently? I don’t think it counts as cannibalism anymore.

“I’m a person, so eating another person is cannibalism!”

Not really helping your case here. Ooh, what’s that?

Rita lifted the blocky device and watched dejectedly as the bottom half ran like goo and splotched onto the counter that she had found it on.

“Portable battery. I’ve been trying to find something to charge my phone with. Somehow I doubt this one is functional.”

I’ve been wondering what you’ve been searching for so industriously. I had assumed food, weapons and water.

Rita sighed. “Yeah, those too.” Most of the things she found were useless. As in, they would have been useless even had they been in perfect working condition. Anything that needed to be plugged in? Useless. There was no power at all. Anything too big to carry around? Useless. Shoes? Hahaha… sigh.

Among the rest, most were broken or ruined beyond usability. Food especially seemed to have been hit hard, though she did come across a few items that were strangely untouched. Like a single juicy looking apple sitting in a bowl of complete rot. She hadn’t trusted it, especially after the granola bar. And, just like Alice had pointed out, she wasn’t actually hungry. That was strange on its own, since she hadn’t eaten since she woke up. A few sips of water were all she had ingested.

If only she could find a way to charge her phone! Last time she switched it on, she had just enough time to see that it had two bars of signal before it ran out of power. She might even be able to call for help!

She dropped the remains of the battery into its own mess, still bubbling happily on the counter, and skittered into the kitchen. It was unlikely she was going to find another battery in this apartment, and it was the last one she hadn’t checked on this floor. Except for the locked doors.

I still think we should have grabbed the kid’s crowbar. Weapon and door opening tool in one. Would have allowed us to break open all these locked apartments.

“For the last time, Alice, I am NOT going back up there. What if my tenuous grasp of sanity unravels even more and you end up with a whole gang of roommates?” Rita asked, checking a can opener against the greyish light coming in from a broken window. Perfect. Not too rusty. Now she could explore the mystery contents of those two cans she found. Eventually.

When Alice didn’t respond and the last apartment offered up no other tantalizing scavenge, Rita headed to the entryway of her building.

It was a short corridor that ran from the front entrance to the stairwell and the ground level apartments beyond. On the walls were all the residents’ post boxes. For a moment she considered trying to rip them open – their locks had always seemed so small and dinky – but what use did she have for mail, really?

The electronically locked gate at the entrance to the building was depowered, unsurprisingly, and swung open with a gentle creak. So much for security. Rita poked her head out and looked around, planning her next move.

She’d gotten much better at moving around on eight legs instead of two, but still didn’t want to have to run if she could avoid it. The risk of tangling up her legs was omnipresent and while fleeing from something that was attempting to devour her was the worst possible time for it to happen. Rather just avoid the risk entirely and stay out of sight.

The streets were filled with the rusting hulks of cars and buses. If it wasn’t for the decay and how eerily empty they all were, you could be forgiven for mistaking it for ordinary traffic. No sign of pedestrians, or even corpses of pedestrians for that matter. Just… nothing. Except garbage. There was plenty of garbage being blown about by the wind howling between the buildings, but that would have been fairly normal even before the world went to shit.

The strip mall on Beakerley Street had an electronics store. Maybe we can find a working battery there.

“I know. But… look how empty the place is. Where are all the people? If they all died in whatever happened here, what happened to their bodies?” Rita asked.

Currently I’m wavering somewhere between world war three and a zombie apocalypse. Now get moving before we get eaten by a Nazi zombie.