a shack at the end of the world
Peter eats a can of tuna while sitting on the side of the road, just scoops it out of the tin like a deranged man, and then he licks his fingers after he’s done. He’s famished, though he’s so tired he’s queasy, though his leg hurts so much with every step that it makes his stomach flip.
He keeps walking, though, and only stops to drink water and to eat. He doesn’t look at his leg, doesn’t want to look at it, doesn’t need to look at it. He knows it’s bad.
He got bitten by a dog with a mouth full of germs and he didn’t have any antiseptic or alcohol to wash it out with. The wound is sizeable, and he can still feel it oozing blood after hours have passed by. The shirt he tied around his leg was grey, and now it is completely black. The sight of it makes him unwell, so he makes it a point not to look at it.
He just needs to get out of the city. That’s all he needs to do.
Then he can die in a meadow somewhere.
Peter doesn’t know which direction the group he was following went in, but they are too far gone to follow anyway, too fast for Peter to follow with his slow steps. He walks, but it’s laborious, and he’s tired in a way he hasn’t been in years, his bones aching, his skin itching.
A few hours after sunrise, people start appearing in house windows. They look out, spooked, eyes darting around until they catch on him. Then they just look until he goes past their house, spooked by his appearance. Bloodied as he is, he isn’t good incentive to step outside the temporary sanctuary that four walls and a roof offer.
There’s people on the streets, too, soon after that, and Peter would love to avoid them, love not to be seen at all, but he has nowhere to run and nowhere to hide and it’s just like the rest of his life, people gawking at him or refusing to look at him at all, so he bears it.
He keeps to less busy streets, reads a few street signs and tries to use them to navigate around, figures out that he should take a left at an intersection to go in the direction of New Haven, knows that’s another city so that the road towards it has to lead him out of this one, as well.
It’s a sort of stick and carrot logic that isn’t going to get him anywhere, but it’s all he has.
“Have you seen a girl?”, a woman asks him, panicked voice shrill, outside of a decrepit house in a bad area of town. Some houses have broken windows, some plots are being razed down to build something new, something better, something more expensive. Some houses have their doors boarded up. Peter took this road because there were too many people in the street next to it, too many raised voices, too many chances of something going wrong, “She’s blonde. Have you seen her?”
Peter just looks at the woman, in her housedress, has fluffy slippers on her feet. She’s thin, her hair wild around her head. She’s not a threat, from what Peter can tell.
But he has not seen the girl.
“Have you seen her?”, the woman holds a hand out at hip height, her fingers shaking. Her eyes are bloodshot, “She’s five. Please, she’s five”
“...No”, Peter says, in the end, and he is terribly sad that this is the truth. He has not seen the girl, “I haven’t seen her”
“Emily!”, the woman yells out of nowhere, and Peter jerks where he’s standing. His leg pulses with pain at the movement, and Peter watches, dumbfounded, as a toddler waddles out of the house next to him. The woman’s son. He has a diaper on, and he’s terribly cute, “Emily! Come here!”
Peter knows he should leave, but he finds himself standing there. There is nothing he can do to help, has a feeling that the situation could not be helped even if he could.
The toddler walks a few more steps down the cracked walkway, and the woman snaps her head in his direction when she hears him, stops screaming.
“Danny. We have to go look for your sister”, she tells him, takes one big step and scoops him up in her arms, turns around and looks across the street and the houses surrounding them wildly, “Emily just went on a walk. We’re going to join her”
And then she walks on, the door of her house left with open, starts yelling her daughter’s name again. Peter looks at her as she rushes off, locks eyes with the child she’s carrying on her hip. He wonders what’s going to come of it.
Two years old, and the world has ended.
After a minute, Peter finally figures that someone is going to come to investigate all of the noise and that he has to get moving, starts walking again.
He walks a few more blocks, drags himself through them, before he stops to have some water. He’s running out of water quickly, and he has no idea how he’s going to get more. He takes a few gulps and then closes the bottle, knows he has to conserve liquids if he wants to live. He eats the apple instead, a bit bruised by being in the bag all day but still delicious, so sweet it coats his sore throat and makes it stop hurting, if only for a minute.
At an intersection, Peter looks to his left when he hears a loud noise, sees a group of people surrounding a soldier and yelling. Peter walks on before anyone looks at him, keeps his head down.
The sun starts going down, at some point, and Peter is shocked. He can’t believe all this time has passed, can’t believe he has been travelling from dusk till dawn and is still not out of the city. He wonders what he’s going to do, where he’s going to spend the night, what he’s going to do about his leg. He cannot walk forever, cannot walk for much longer at all, actually, knows he’s going to have find a safe stop to sit down and rest.
That’s when he comes across a man searching the pockets of a dead man. Peter has seen many dead men today, laying in crashed cars or out in their front lawns, so that’s not the part that makes him draw to a stop.
The man pulls open one pocket, tsks at its contents, and then looks up at the sound of Peter’s footsteps. He’s standing in someone’s driveway, blocked from view by two vehicles parked one next to the other, and the man who he is robbing is very dead and very old.
Probably a failed pacemaker, Peter thinks, looking into the strangers eyes. The man straightens up, and he’s taller than Peter, more muscular, not an omega. He’s wearing ripped clothes and has a crazed look to his eyes, has a twinkle to them that Peter doesn’t like.
He pulls a knife from his belt, points it at Peter. There’s a few steps between him and the man, but Peter can’t run, is quite run he couldn’t outrun the man even if he could, and he feels his heartrate going up. And up.
“Give me your money”, the man says, and his voice is young, younger than Peter thought it would be. People that rob dead people should be at least be of drinking age, he thinks, as the man steps towards him, and Peter shakily steps back, “Put your bag down”
“I..”, Peter says, and his voice cracks. He has to swallow thickly before he can continue speaking, “I don’t have any money”
Because money doesn’t mean anything now. Not a fucking thing. It’s not going to buy heating in the winter, and it’s not going to buy water to drink, and it’s not going to get him out from being gutted right here on this street.
“Put it down!”, the man yells, his voice booming, and Peter drops his bag. Steps away from it. Looks as the man rushes to it, as he rips it open and starts throwing Peter’s things on the ground. Peter tries to inch back while he’s doing it, tries to do it slowly so the man does not notice, so he does not look at him, like he could slowly fade away until he’s across the street, “Where is it? Tell me!”
The man opens all of the pockets, shakes everything out of Peter’s bag until its all on the ground, until Peter has nothing left. Peter tries not to feel bad about that. He has bigger things to worry about.
“Give me your fucking money”, the man says, swipes his knife at Peter in a wide, threatening arc. He’s too far away for it to make contact, but it sure does make his point, and Peter brings his hands up, feels them shaking terribly, “Take off the earrings”
Peter reaches up instantly, starts pulling on the pin earrings he has in his ears. Diamonds, or at least Adrian said so. He’d given them to Peter after their first year together, like they were a couple, like it was a gift of love. And Peter’s been expected to wear them ever since.
His fingers are shaking, and Peter pulls on his ear so harshly it stings, but he gets one earring off, starts on the other one.
“Omega, are you?”, the man says, suddenly, like he’s just made a great revelation. Something must be really wrong with him, other than stealing from dead people’s pockets, because everyone could tell Peter was an omega at a glance since he turned fifteen and stopped growing, “Come here”
He says it like Peter’s going to fucking listen.
Peter looks at the man, at the look in his eyes and the knife in his hands and he tries to think and he comes up with nothing. The clock is ticking in his head, the rate of his heart putting up a tempo, and it’s neckbreakingly fast.
He throws the earrings away from himself, in the general direction of the man, and starts running away.
Peter finds out that he can run, actually, when he’s faced with the very real possibility of being raped. Raped and then killed.
By a man that’s very greasy.
Peter’s leg is in fucking agony, but he runs, goes right across the street, jumps over an abandoned scooter and almost falls down when his leg gives up on him when he hits ground. He drags it for a few steps and then starts running again, tries not to look back to see if he’s being followed.
He runs up someone’s driveway, goes all around their house. He’s hoping to get onto another street, lose the thieves trace, but runs into a hedge instead. It’s less dense on the left side of the backyard, so he barrels onto that side, feels the branches catching on his hair and scratching his face on his way through. Bangs his injured leg against a thicker branch, feels pain zipping up from his ankle to his thigh.
“Wait!”, the man yells from behind him, not too close but still not far enough away, as Peter pulls himself out of the hedge.
There’s a shed in the yard he’s entered, and he wills himself to go towards it. He hears the other man rooting around the other yard, still unable to determine which way Peter left, but he knows he doesn’t have much time. He’s going to have find something to defend himself with, or he’s going to have to hide.
He goes towards the shack, rounds it until he finds the entrance, opens the door and rushes in. Closes the door behind himself.
He leans against the door, rakes his eyes across the inside of the shed for something to use, for a shovel or a hammer or something. He hears his breaths echo across the room, and he tries to slow his breathing, tries to breathe more quietly, tries to make his breaths slower, tries to listen to what’s happening outside.
“Hello”, someone says from the ground, and Peter flinches so badly he bangs his head against the door. He can’t see anything, didn’t see a fucking man right inside the shed with him, the darkness unnatural and all-encompassing and terrifying.
Peter turns around, feels around for a handle to open the door again, can’t find it for a second and thinks his heart is going to burst, thinks he’s going to pass out.
His fingers catch against something, and he wraps his hand around it clumsily, pulls. The door starts opening, moonlight coming through the opening crack, but something pushes it shut.
Someone pushes it shut.
“Hi there”, the man says from behind him, and Peter can feel himself shaking all over, great big tremors overtaking him, and he wonders at how he can stand when he’s shaking so badly. He thinks his vision would be blacking out if he could see anything at all. His head is spinning, “I don’t think you should leave. Someone is chasing you”
Peter feels like a deer in headlights, caught between a wooden door and a man he cannot see. His voice is deep, and it comes from above Peter’s head, and Peter can feel heat from where his body is almost touching the other man’s.
Someone bangs on the door, aggressively, and Peter jerks back, feels his back hitting the strange, huge man in the chest. There’s a hand on Peter’s shoulder, and he feels his skin prickling in fear, feels himself detaching from his body.
He’s going to die in a fucking shack.
“Open it!”, a man yells from outside the door, bangs on the wood so intensely Peter wonders how come it doesn’t splinter open, “Fucking open the door!”
“Calm down, omega”, the man standing behind Peter says, and Peter actually feels the words in the man’s chest as they’re leaving his mouth. His voice is very deep, alpha deep.
“Open this fucking door”, there’s more banging against the door, and then the wood shakes terribly at a greater hit. Peter supposes the man is trying to break the door open with his shoulder. He feels himself being pulled aside by his arm, feels himself stepping away without having given his legs direction to do so, “I’m going to fucking kill you, bitch! I’m going to fuck you so hard your guts spill out of your...”
The door opens, and Peter watches as the alpha from the shack looks outside. Moonlight shines across his silhouette, and Peter takes another step back. The man is too tall. He’s too big and he’s too tall.
The man pulls something from his waistband, reaches with it outside the door.
“Problem?”, he says, and Peter steps back again. His back hits a wall, some tools clattering to the ground. He sees something glint under the moonlight, blinks and then thinks that the man is smiling.
“I...”, the other man’s breaths sound heavy and pained, sound ridiculously strained. His voice is like a child’s compared to the alpha’s. He sounds very confused, all of a sudden, “I was ch... My omega’s in there. He ran away”
“Hmmm”, the alpha says, and Peter feels renewed panic filling his body. The man could just give him over. He could just hand him over like a misplaced phone. Because he’s not this man’s, but he is someone’s, and everyone knows that. All omegas are owned, “Nope, no omega in here”
“Just give him to me, man”, the thief says. He’s bargaining, and Peter’s life is up on the line. An agreement between two men. Left up to the whims of a man sitting in a shed in the dark, “Give him to me or I’ll..”
“Uh uh”, the alpha says, and it’s terribly placed in this conversation, is almost comical, “You’re going to walk away or I’m going to put a bullet between your eyes”
“He’s min..”, the man outside the door says, and a shot sounds. Peter jerks, feels his heart skipping a beat at the sound. He’s never heard a gunshot. Not in real life.
He hears a body falling to the ground and thinks that’s it, thinks he’s just witnessed his first murder, then hears shuffling outside and steps, running away.
The door closes again, and the man in the shack with Peter is once again invisible. And he has a gun.
“What?”, he says, his voice eerie in the dark, and Peter thinks his knees are going to give up on him. He’s going to die of shock before he even gets shot, “I make it a point not to commit murder in front of someone I’ve just met”