It was utterly black inside the hospital. There were no distant stars, no deep purple sky, to vary the darkness. Just an all-consuming void outside the meager glow of my flashlight.

The hallways were long, with many doorways. It reminded me of the library, except for the emptiness. The library had been full of people, and the evidence of them was unavoidable even when no one appeared to be around. Half-read books, clothing drying on a radiator, the faint smell of cooking meat wafting up from the kitchen. It had always been full of life.

But this place: it was dead. And I don’t just mean no one lived there. There was nothing. No litter in the hallways from passing Loners, no creaking and groaning as the building shifted, no distant rustles of rodents or birds. My own footfalls were deafening no matter how softly I walked, and I winced with each one. Imagining I might awaken whatever spirit or demon haunted the place at any moment.

There was a pressure to the silence, building at the back of my skull.

I focused on the boot prints in the dusty floor, my heart tight in my chest, my palms moist, and took one step at a time.

It must have only taken thirty seconds before I followed the prints into a side door. But the trek down that long, still, hallway felt like it took me an hour.

The interior might have once been an office. There was a tall window along the far wall, and the room had a desk and several chairs, all rotten and rusted, and an ancient cabinet of thin metal.

The small boot prints led directly to the cabinet.

My throat was dry, and I found the prospect of calling out too dreadful to contemplate, so I approached, then took a moment to listen.

I felt the mind before I heard the breathing. The mind was small, curled in on itself, hard as it cowered inside a carapace of mental steel. The breathing was so faint I perhaps wouldn’t have been able to hear it anywhere except the silent hospital, but it was there. I reached out slowly with the butt of my spear and tapped gently against the metal, three times.

The breathing quickened. The wheeze of a filter mask unmistakable.

And somewhere high above, something heavy thumped against the ceiling.

I froze where I was. The mind inside the cabinet burst with cold far before snapping shut again.

The thumping came again. Then again, seconds apart, moving away from us. Big, slow, footsteps. Someone was upstairs. Or something. Something big.

I didn’t want to find out what. I waited for whatever it was to move further away, then licked my dry lips.

“Hello?” I whispered to the cabinet, my voice trembling. “I’m not going to hurt you. I’m here to… help. We need to get out of here.”

The occupant let out a frightened whimper. It was understandable. The poor thing had most likely just seen her entire family murdered. That sort of thing tends to take a while to process, in my experience.

But I also didn’t want to stay in the hospital a moment longer.

I reached out, pulled the door slowly open, and shone my flashlight inside.

Inside was a small person, sitting on the floor, her knees held close to her chin and her arms wrapped around her legs. She was clad in the fur outfit of the Horse People, a blue scarf wrapped around her jet-black filter mask. The visor seemed to let barely any light through, completely obscuring her face, and it was decorated with a border of bright hand-painted flowers in vibrant blues, reds, purples, and yellows.

She moaned, holding up a hand to shield herself from the flashlight, and unfurled her limbs to scramble back away from me, pressing against the back of the cabinet. A wave of fear and anguish washed out of her like a wave. Strong enough to stagger me.

“Sorry,” I whispered, lowering the light. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

She said something that might have been words, might have been incoherent babbling.

I shushed her, quite harshly, and when she stopped, I pointed a slow finger at the ceiling. The footsteps continued to lumber away from us, and after a few painful seconds, they stopped. I let out a breath.

There was no mind up there that I could sense, and I didn’t know if that should be a comforting or terrifying.

“Um, sorry,” I said again. What did I know about comforting a hysterical child? For once, I wished Mother would show up. I thought back to all those times she had comforted me when we were back in the library.

I squatted down low, so I wasn’t looming over her, and put down my spear. I held my hand to show it was empty and softened my voice. “I’m here to help. Are you hurt?”

She stopped babbling and just stared at me, shaking a little.

I gave her a quick once over and couldn’t see any obvious injuries. I was bad with guessing kids ages, but I’d have guessed she was somewhere in the early teens.

“It’s not safe here, we have to leave.” I gestured for her to come toward me.

“Nay,” she said, and shook her head. “Nay. Eik nay gorra.”

{Go away,} was what she was thinking. People are harder than animals. They can talk with their mouths, so they don’t usually try with their minds.

“Ew gorra far ei. Ew gorra far ei. Liv Eik. Eik stigga. Eik lowre.” She said something along those lines. It’s hard to remember exactly because it was mostly just noise to me. Her accent was strange, not one I’d heard before, and sharper and harder than the careful, quiet speech of most city dwellers.

Looking back, the Horse Peoples’ language might have once been the same one our ancestors spoke, but it had mutated too much for me to understand. Back in the library they made us listen to old plays by this man, Shakespeare, from before the Bad Times and even before the Good Times. Her speech reminded me of those plays. The odd word here and there sounded similar, but it was mostly just incomprehensible gibberish, because the way people speak now is too different to the way people spoke… how long ago was he around? One thousand years? Two? No. One and a half?

In any case, she was terrified and wanted me gone. Perhaps if I’d just left her there, she’d have made it through somehow.

But as far as I could see she had no food, no water, no Tribe, and no weapons. She didn’t know the area and couldn’t even speak to the locals to barter. Leaving her there would have been almost like killing her myself, and I wasn’t a killer. Not at that point.

“Listen, it’s dangerous here. You understand? Very bad. Death.”

She responded with more incomprehensible talk in her language, and her mind told me to go away again. It dawned on me that she wasn’t going to leave no matter what I said, and that dark pressure at the back of my skull was only getting more oppressive.

I took a risk.

People didn’t usually like it when I thought at them. They couldn’t do it themselves, so they panicked when someone else forced thoughts into their head. They often shouted things like ‘witch.’

Words weren’t working though, and I didn’t think I could make the situation much worse.

{I am not going to hurt you.}

She fell silent, regarding me from that impenetrable floral visor. Then, after a moment. {Leave me alone.}

I blinked. She’d done this before. She was like me.

The thoughts that came at me now were focused and deliberate now. If I could make a comparison for you, it was like the difference between reading someone’s facial expressions and listening to them speak. Though I do feel the need to reiterate, we weren’t thinking in, ‘words.’ There is no language barrier in the mental realm because there is no language.

{If I leave you, you’ll die,} I sent to her. {This place is… haunted.}

{I don’t care. Let me die then. Everyone else is dead.}

I could relate to her position completely. I’d been there once, and I knew exactly what to say.

{Your horse will miss you. He’s the one that sent me in here.}

{I don’t care.}

{Well, he cares a lot about you.}

{He’s just a horse.}

{You won’t mind if I eat him then, once I leave?}

{Why would do that?}

{There’s a lot of meat on a horse. I’m hungry.}

Her thoughts faded for a moment, fiery red rage sparking somewhere deep in her consciousness. I got the feeling I was being glared at from behind that obsidian visor.

{I’ll kill you if you do that,} she sent.

{Will you?}

{I’ve done it before.}

{Then you’ll have to leave this cabinet.} I stood up straight and turned to leave, though carefully, as to not make noise.

{No. Wait.}

I heard her scramble after me, but I kept moving.

{Stop. STOP!}

Her thought hit me like a hammer. My brain jumped in my skull. My vision blurred. I fell to one knee. I’d never felt anything like it.

My head swam as I turned to look at her, my flash light swaying. “What the…”

She was standing up now, only a meter away, her hands twisted into fists at her sides. Hot rage emanated from her like a bonfire. {I told you!}

Perhaps she wasn’t like me after all. I couldn’t do whatever that was. She was something more.

I staggered back up to my feet. {I wasn’t actually going to—}

A horse whinnied. People shouted outside. A male voice first, then a female one. Too far away to make out what they were saying.

{Don’t make a noise,} I thought at the girl, and clicked off my flashlight.

In the pure darkness, her rage dissipated in an instant, replaced by cold fear. {Who is it?}

{I don’t know.} But I had an ominous hunch. I crept to the window, feeling my way in the dark.

Two people had entered the carpark. They held bulky guns in one hand, submachine guns, I guessed, and swept flashlights around with the other. They seemed to find no reason to lower their voices, and as they drew close their words became clear.

“There, see, told you we’d find it,” the woman said. “Broken in animals don’t go far.”

“Yeah, yeah,” the man said. “Lets just grab the thing and get back. This place gives me the creeps.”

The woman chuckled nastily. “Don’t be a wimp.”

But there was something like a nervous edge to her voice, and both Sweepers—they could have only been Sweepers—stopped halfway across the car park. I couldn’t see the horse from where I was, but I could hear to snorting and tramping around, probably still right next to the entrance.

“You go grab it then,” the man said. “If you’re so brave.”

“Well, I’m not worried about ghosts, if that’s what you mean. But, erm, we did see those other foot prints.”

The bulkier of the two silhouettes shrugged. “Probably one of them got out on foot, or its some dumb Loner.” He hefted his gun up to rest the barrel on his shoulder. “They’d be pretty stupid to have a go at us.”

{What’s happening.} The girl’s sudden intrusion made me jump.

{They’re going to take your horse.}

{We can’t let that happen.}

{We’re ‘we’ now, are we? We can’t really stop them.}

The two Sweepers had stopped arguing now. The woman was moving across the car park as the man sat back against the rusted hull of a car.

{Please,} the girl pleaded.

{He’s just a horse,} I quoted back at her, and I was immediately disgusted with my own pettiness. Fear was making me lash out. {Look, what do you want me to do? They have machine guns and I have a spear. All we can do is stay quiet and hope the horse is all they take.}

She fell silent, and together we waited as the heavy footfalls of the sweeper drew nearer. There was a metallic jangle that accompanied her movement, as if she were covered in tiny bells.

“Come here you dumb thing,” she snapped. And the horse whinnied again. “Stop fucking strug—”

She fell silent suddenly, and I caught myself hoping the beast had kicked her in the head. That hope was dashed a moment later.

“Hey, someone’s here! Inside.”

My heart began to pound again my ribs.

“What?” The man shouted.

“Yeah, there’s prints.”

“Leave them,” the man said, and I held my breath, hoping that superstition would save us. But he did get up from his seat and start moving.

The woman laughed again. “I want me one of those pretty scarves. You stay here with the animal.”

{We need to go,} I thought at the girl, already fumbling around in the dark to grab her arm. {They know we’re here.}

She let me tug her back toward the entrance to the office. Fear was still pouring out of her like a cold fog. It was probably pouring out of me too. We couldn’t stay where we were, the prints would have led the Sweeper right to us.

I froze, an idea occurring suddenly. I risked turning my flash light on for a brief moment, let go of the girl, dashed back to the cabinet she’d been hiding in, and closed it again.

“I’m not coming in there after you, no matter what I hear,” the man said.

The woman scoffed. “Yeah yeah.”

I clicked my flashlight and grabbed the girl again. I’d seen the hospital enough times from a distance to know it had multiple exits. We just had to get to one before the Sweeper woman caught sight of us. In the dark I stumbled down the hallway, one hand on the wall to guide me, the other wrapped around the girls arm. Something smashed against my shin, and I suppressed a moan but carried on.

I risked a glance over my shoulder. The fierce beam of a flashlight was just rounding the corner into the hall, trained on the ground for now.

My hand on the wall found empty air. Another doorway. I dragged us inside. The hall outside lit up a moment later as the Sweeper raised her flashlight.

“Come out, come out, wherever you are,” the Sweeper cooed. That jangling noise grew louder as she stepped down the hall.

I did a quick survey of the new room. Again, it was too dark to make out much, but I could see the stars of the night sky peeking through another tall window. The layout seemed to be the same as the office we’d been in before.

{We’re trapped,} the girl thought.

{Wait. Stay calm.} The message was directed at myself as much as it was the girl. I released her arm and readied my spear.

The jangling drew closer, closer. “I know you’re in here.”

The Sweeper stopped a little down the hall, near where the door to our previous hiding spot would have been.

“Where could you be?” she said, her voice thick with cloying mockery, and I heard her step into the office we’d just left. She was close enough now that I could faintly begin to feel her mind. It was lively and excited, hungrily grasping at the surroundings as if it could taste our trail.

{Now, quietly. Be ready to run.} I clicked on my flashlight, keeping it pointed at the ground in front of us, and padded out into the hall.

The glow of the Sweeper’s much more powerful light spilled out of the room next to ours. I moved in the opposite direction as quickly as I dared. At the time, I hoped that all the jangling rubbish she had hanging off her would make it difficult for her to hear me. Much later, I came to the realization that the Sweepers as a group probably couldn’t hear very well, on account of all the shooting and loud music.

“There you are!”

A burst of gunfire reverberated around the building. I broke into a sprint, hoping that the girl would follow my lead. Somewhere behind us, that empty cabinet was being riddled with bullets.

By the time the gunfire stopped I’d made it most of the way down the hall. I didn’t stop until I reached a turning, hoping that the Sweeper’s ears were ringing as badly as mine from firing off so many rounds in an enclosed space.

{Wait for me!}

I pressed myself into the corner and looked back. I’d gained a few meters on the girl. Her legs were a lot shorter. I’d not taken that into account. I wasn’t used to being around children. Around anyone, really.

{Hurry,} I urged, and clicked off my flashlight.

She reached me at the same moment the Sweeper emerged from the office. I grabbed her and pulled her behind me. The flashlight snapped in our direction, and I ducked back out of view. I had no idea if the Sweeper had seen me, but it didn’t matter, we needed to keep moving.

{Oh no.}

I turned to see what the girl had reacted to, and my heart fell. A section of the hospital’s roof lay in the middle of the hallway, atop several stories worth of ceilings and floors. The pile of rubble formed a massive barrier that would have been very slow and very noisy to climb over.

We were trapped.

“Nice trick!” the Sweeper shouted. She was furious. “You got me there.”

The jangling grew louder, then suddenly stopped. She was running from doorway to doorway. “But there’s only so many places you can hide.

Another burst of gunfire. A window shattered. The girl flinched next to me. “And I have more than enough bullets.”

I looked desperately around for an escape route and found nothing.

I felt sick. I knew I was going to die.

{What do we do?} The girl asked. This close, her fear poured into mine, doubling my terror.

{Okay. Now we fight.} I knew she could feel my despair though.

I thought about telling her to start climbing, that I’d hold off the Sweeper while she escaped. I thought about making the sort of noble sacrifice my childhood story book heroes were always trying to make.

I dismissed the idea a moment later. If the Sweeper killed me, it’d be over very quickly, she’d have more than enough time to track the girl down afterward. The only chance of survival for both of us was if we managed to incapacitate our pursuer somehow. Or, more likely, we’d have to kill her.

That was the first time I came up with a plan to kill another human.

I would wait for her to waste more bullets shooting up cabinets, keep an ear out the sound of her reloading, then rush her with my spear. If I managed to get to her before her weapon was ready to mow me down, I might have a chance to beat her in a fight.

Perhaps the girl could help too, if she could do to the Sweeper… whatever it was she’d done to me earlier.

I stood there shaking, clutching my spear, imagining all that playing out in my head.

The sweeper jangled closer. Another burst of gunfire. I tried to count the shots.

“Come out you little rat, let me reunite you with your Tribe.”

Rage flared from the girl, and I heard her begin to move.

I held out a hand. {Wait. Not yet. When she reloads.}

A click echoed from down the hall.

{She just did,} the girl thought.

It had only been a few seconds. Guns took less time to reload than I thought, apparently.

{When she gets closer, then,} I suggested, trying to prevent myself from panicking completely.

Another burst of gunfire. Deafeningly close now. The Sweeper would round our corner any moment.

“Oh come on! I was sure I had you that time. This is getting boring, come out and—”

Somewhere above us, that heavy thump came again. Dust fell from the ceiling. The sweeper stopped where she was.

A moment later the noise came again, then again. The footsteps were back, moving again. Perhaps they’d been there this whole time and we’d been too deafened and too full of adrenaline to notice.

Someone, or something, was upstairs.

{What is that?} thought the girl.

{A ghost.}

The thumping moved away from us, back toward the entrance foyer, passing right above where the Sweeper stood.

“Found you!” The Sweeper crowed, and a long stream of gunfire ripped out from around the corner.

{Now!}

I charged around the corner and towards the Sweeper. She was firing her weapon into the ceiling, the flash of the muzzle lighting the space in pulses of white fire. I finally got a good look at our persecutor.

I hadn’t seen a Sweeper up close before, and in that particular moment of I didn’t really have time to process all the details but, piecing together what I’ve seen of other members of her Tribe since, here’s what she probably looked like.

Imagine a lean build wrapped in cargo pants, combat boots, and one of those vests with lots and lots of pockets. Around her neck is a necklace of spent shell casings, which are also woven into her vest and pants like some form of chain mail. She’s absolutely covered in holsters, pouches, and belts, all of which hold spares magazines or loose bullets. Her filter mask is black, armored, and with narrow vision slits instead of a full visor. She wears a helmet adorned with a crown of—can you guess?—more bullets.

Every Tribe has a unique look, a theme, a culture. The Sweeper’s culture was the gun.

Anyway, I charged her, my footfalls masked by her deafening gunshots, and thrust my spear deep into her stomach. I had wanted to aim for the arm, but those were up above her head, and I didn’t want to miss.

The gunfire cut off as she howled in pain, dropping her flashlight and clutching at the spear caught fast in her innards. Her mind ignited with rage, as if the wound were a spark amongst flammable vapor. Mad, wrath filled, eyes fixed on me from with the slits of her mask.

“Sorry,” I said, dumbly. Ridiculous, I know, considering I had just impaled her and was still holding the spear, but that is what I said.

“You!” she screamed and raised the gun one handed.

I stared down the barrel, into the black oblivion of my own death.

Then the Sweeper’s head snapped to the side as if hit by some unseen force, her whole body lurching after it, the fire of her mind sputtering, threatening to go out. The gun exploded to life, tearing at my ear drums as the air itself seemed to split apart. But there was no sudden bite of a bullet. Her shots went past my head, tearing up the wall of the hallway and spraying us both with dust.

The machine gun clicked. The stream of bullets cut off. The Sweeper dropped her weapon and clutched at her wound with both hands, swaying from side to side like she was drunk. I let my spear go, and she collapsed as if I had been the only thing holding her up.

She stared up at from her back, the spear planted in her abdomen like a flagpole. Our eyes met, and she might have said something to me, but all I could hear was a high-pitched ringing.

{Look out.} The girl’s forceful thought came with an image of the Sweeper’s hand, wrapping itself around the grip of a pistol in a holster at her waist. A tiny body slammed into me, and I let myself be knocked sideways, through a doorway and out of the hall.

A chunk of the door frame exploded into splinters a moment later.

{Thank you.} I took a moment to stead myself.

{She’s still coming!}

I looked back at the hallway. The way the Sweeper’s flashlight had fallen, her silhouette was cast on the wall opposite. I watched in horror as the shadow person began to shamble to its feet.

She might have been wounded, but she still had a gun. She would still kill us both when she got to her feet and rounded the corner.

{You did the… thing to her?} I asked. {Can you do it again?}

{Maybe, one more time.} Her thoughts were weaker than they had been a minute ago, more faint. I decided I’d rather not gamble on her trick working a second time and looked around for a way out.

“Finally,” I gasped, out loud. The room’s window had been fractured and broken in one of the Sweepers rampages. Fine webs of cracks emanated from at least five different bullet holes.

{Follow me.} I charged toward the window, picked up the rusty remnants of a metal chair, and hurled it with all the strength my starved body could muster. It crashed through easily, showering glass into the car park. The girl caught up to me, and I lifted her through.

I spared one last look back as I was throwing the girl clear. The Sweeper was in the doorway, gun raised, but I could have sworn it wasn’t pointed at me. I didn’t stick around to get a better look, but she seemed to be aiming off down the hall, her outstretched arms shaking. Her mind was cold and quivering with terror. The ground might have been shaking, or it might have been my pounding heart.

I leaped through the window, gunshots ringing out behind me, I could still hear those. But the bullets didn’t snap past my head.

I fell to my knees as I landed. There was a breeze outside, and as it hit me it was as if that oppressive pressure that had been pressing down on me since entering the hospital was blown away. I sucked in a breath as deeply as my mask would allow, letting myself recover for just a moment.

I stood. And found myself face to face with the second Sweeper.

He was pointing his machine gun and shouting at me, but beneath the ringing noise I could barely make out a word. I think the female Sweeper might have been screaming, back inside, and that might have been why his mind was so scattered and desperate.

I held up my hands anyway, and began babbling. “Please don’t shoot. I didn’t kill your friend. She’s still alive in there. We can help her if we’re quick.”

He’d let go of the horse to run over to us. It was still back near the entrance to the hospital, but was trotting over now at a casual pace, perhaps not grasping the stakes of the situation. Its trajectory was locked on the girl.

The male Sweeper cocked his head and shouted something toward the broken window. Perhaps, “are you still alive in there?”

I don’t think he got the response he wanted, if any, because he suddenly shouldered his machine gun and pointed it at my face, shouting even louder now.

“I’ve got a first aid kit,” I tried, “I can patch her up if you let me—”

The girl took a step forward, the man turned his gun on her. Then his head snapped aside, and he fell back at step. The hit was weaker than the last, and I reacted slow, making a dash for him a heartbeat after he started to recover.

“Witch!” he screamed. I heard that clearly, at least. He trained his gun back on the girl. There was nothing I could do to stop him pulling the trigger.

But when the full body weight of a horse slammed into the back of his shoulders, he crumpled like a paper bag. The horse reared up again, letting out a fearsome snort, then brought a hoof down on the back of the prone man’s head.

You’ve probably not seen—or perhaps more gruesomely, heard—what it’s like when the weight of the entire front half of a rearing horse is applied to a human skull via the surface area of something as small a hoof. Trust me, you don’t want me to describe the results in detail.

Rest assured, the Sweeper was very dead. Even if the initial blow hadn’t killed him, the horse saw fit to stamp on his ribcage a few times for good measure.

I thanked the horse with a thought, drawing, heavy ragged breaths into my sore lungs.

{Help girl.} It snorted one last time, and trotted over to its owner, bowing its head to let her stroke it. She looked even smaller next to the huge creature, and was clearly exhausted, leaning on the huge head for support.

{Yes,} I thought. {Help girl.}