She felt nothing.

  Nothing at all.

  Her mind kept replaying the last two days, inexplicably backward. It ends with her hitting the ground. Before that, her hands getting numb, letting go of the branch she's been clutching. Before that, she was climbing a tree, terrified out of her wits.

  Covered in blood, not hers.

  And yet before that, the origin of her repeating nightmare. The wolves, silently slithering through the shadows and finding them.

  In the nightmare, they do not howl or growl, they make no sound at all. In the near pitch-black darkness of the night, they just come, and begin feasting on Tammy.

  Isabelle screaming, trying to wrestle the things away from the girl, her screams ending with a wet gurgle.

  Adelle herself, blindly clawing around, trying both to find Isabelle and fend off the wolves, who all but ignored her and focused on their bleeding kills.

  Dragging convulsing Isabelle with her, sprays of blood washing her face and arms, only for her friend to be mercilessly tugged out of her hands by a far stronger animal.

  She did not remember climbing that willow, but she must have, otherwise, what would she'd fall off of?

  Numb, she idly contemplated the cruel mercy of the wolfpack that ignored her barely conscious self and absconded with the corpses of the other two women.

  Curled on blood-soaked grass, she let her mind replay the same memory on repeat, endlessly.

  Suddenly, there was a new element to it. A distant clamor of many voices, with one drawling tenor outshouting all the others. Had her little group returned for her? Was that the voice of that damned bully Kyle, or the cold-eyed fucker that joined them lately?

  Neither.

  The voice was shouting in English, but clearly different from either.

  She could not believe she was being found. That she would be saved after all.

  Why would anyone waste the time to try to save an old whore? Worse, an old whore who let her friends die? Why hasn't the rescue come sooner? When Isabelle was still alive, and Tammy had at least a small chance?

  The first feeling that came to her numb mind was not hope or relief. It was a detached feeling of injustice. The unfairness of being rescued when others had died. The voices came closer, and soon there were hands on her, many, many hands, lifting her up.

  White hands, black hands hands of all colors.

  And along with the hands, she saw a whole rainbow of human faces around her. Black, White, Asian, young and old, male and female. All concerned, all shouting different things in very different languages, but the message was clear.

  “ I..am, I am all right," she croaked, but the people around her did not believe her. They checked her for wounds. Someone looked into her eyes. It was a large, beefy White man with flushed pink jowls and a handlebar mustache. He was shouting something in a strong American accent, and waving a finger in front of her eyes, but she did not understand a thing of what he was saying. She did not want to understand. Why couldn't they just leave her, and let her die?

  Then someone pushed past the huge man. It was a slight Asian boy. Skinny, but wiry with muscle. Young, eighteen-year-old at best. The boy did not say a word. He just hugged her fiercely. Pressing his small chest against her grimy body.

  'Oh, so this is what it is about... alright then.' she thought to herself. Her mind supplied a ready-made answer, honed over years of working the Oldest Trade, and she started kissing the boy's neck. The young man jumped up, startled.

  “No, no, lady you are confused! I just want to calm you down. Make you warm. I am Keito Nakamura. We are here to save you. Save everyone!” She would have chuckled to herself, but her throat was too sore from sobbing already. Meanwhile, the big mustachioed man had shooed away the rest of the group. Which by her estimation was easily an order of magnitude bigger than the group that abandoned her. The big man leaned over her.

  “Hello, ma'am. My name’s William Donahue. I'm an officer Of the Minnesota Police Department… Uh.. Of America," he added hastily. " Can you tell me your name?"

  ‘What's with this again?’ She thought to herself. But she had a lie on the ready. "I'm Adelle. Adelle Van Vuuren."

  "And how are you feeling, Miss van Vuuren?" The man asked.

  "I'm… I'm all right, just... just very tired," she lied again. "What about... what… what about my friends?" The man just shook his head sadly. "Sorry, ma'am. But if there was anyone with you here, they're dead. We flushed out the wolves from their meal but..." He sighed wearily, playing with a wooden club he was holding, as it was the most useless tool in the world. She knew, of course. She heard them being devoured.

  "What about the rest… the people who went across the river?"

  The man frowned. "What do you mean across the river?" Before she could respond the Asian boy interfered.

  "I told you, William. There was smoke, smoke over the river, people were there. There is civilization."

  "There’s a burned-out island," she said, pointing away at the river. “Our well…, our leader and the rest of my group went there to investigate, to see if there is a sign of other humans or possibly of rescue. I stayed behind with a wounded girl and another woman, but then the wolves...and.." Words got stuck in her throat, and the nightmare threatened to replay again in the private cinema of her head.

  "It's all right, Ma'am. There... there’ll be time to talk about this." William patted her on the hand with gentle awkwardness. "Let's get you sorted up first.” He stood up and started shouting orders at his little army. People looked up, and though few seemed to understand English, they still understood his basic gestures.

  Two women came to her. Each of them spoke soothing words in a completely different language, neither of which she understood. They helped her bathe in the river, scrubbing away the dried blood off her skin. They helped her drink rainwater from folded-up leaves. Someone else came and fed her berries, and slices of some kind of a root that tasted almost like a carrot. She almost immediately threw it all up.

  Nobody chastised her for wasting the food. They just gave her more, as well as some more water. She noticed that the boy, Keito, never left her side, though he made sure to avert his gaze from her vulnerable nudity allowing her minimal privacy. ‘What a strange, innocent creature’, she thought. Surrounded by naked humanity, he still made sure not to ogle her, as if it could make her any more uncomfortable at this point.

  She sat cross-legged, gazing at the sudden torrent of humanity around her. The two women who bathed her simply cuddled her for warmth, and soon plenty more came, combining their precious body heat.

  Meanwhile, people bustled around her. Dozens of men, cooperating, using nothing but gestures and simple language of necessity, dragged up a few fallen logs, the ones Amir thought could not be moved. Young men and women stood watch around their group, wooden spears in hand. A bald, grandfatherly-looking man with a near-toothless smile was starting a fire expertly, with nothing but a few pieces of bamboo.

  Before the old man was even done, others came and brought kindling, dry moss, and armfuls of bark for the fire. Then bigger and bigger branches, until, seemingly within minutes, there was a roaring bonfire in the middle of the clearing.

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  Soon burning twigs were carried away to start more fires. Suddenly, she was not among a group of terrified survivors, but sitting in the middle of a small village of freshly minted hunter-gatherers.

  Watching the fires being lit, she allowed herself a small flicker of hope to come alight inside her. She was warm. She was fed for the first time in days. And there were fifty spearmen between her and the dark forest. It was so different from the time she was under the gentle care of Kyle.

  “Mr. Donahue,” she spoke up, aloud for the first time.”How on Earth did you manage to bring this group together? Me and my group were wandering these woods for days and barely survived.”

  Donahue turned towards her and chuckled.

  “Now ma'am. All I did was show the guys how to sharpen spears. And shouted at them until they snapped out of the shock. But keeping our little army together, helping people understand each other and cooperate, that was all Keito's doing.” He patted the boy on the shoulder, proudly. “Kid’s got a knack for languages, and folks trust him. And once we got a few of them shaped up, turned out plenty of them had useful skills. ” He gestured around vaguely.

  “Sure, some of the big city folks we have, especially White people from big places are all but useless in the woods and trip over their own feet. But we have dozens of people who were simple rural folk in Africa, or Asia, or fuck knows where, who know how to hunt, track animals, even fish with their bare hands. We have fishermen, weavers, medics, even a goddamn pianist who used to make caveman-style stone blades as a hobby. Now it's his main job. Hell, we got a real-deal Navajo hunter with us. Native, and a Park Ranger too. Guy says he’s happier here than at his old job.”

  The bald man stood up from the bonfire and waddled towards her. He put a finger on her forehead. And sang something happily. Then he patted her shoulder gently and departed.

  “What was this about?" she asked.

  “We have no idea," said Billy with a shrug. "We don't understand the word he's saying. The general consensus is that he must be some kind of a Buddhist monk or something. So I guess this was some kind of a good luck prayer? Or maybe he just tried his best pickup lines on you. Who knows? To be honest, we don't even know his name. We just call him Monk. All we know is that he is best at starting fires and he is always jolly, which goes miles making folks distracted from the cold and the fear.”

  “What about the rest of you? Do any one of you know what the Hell is going on? Why are we here? What…what happened?”

  Nakamura looked her way. "Every one of us… we died in the old world. And resurrected here. Nobody knows why. Nobody knows how. Mostly we cannot understand each other. But of the people who speak English nobody knows anything. Everybody has the same story. We die, we wake up in the woods.”

  “But why so many people?" she gestured at the crowd. “The last few days my group was wandering around these woods and we only found seven. Somehow you found how many fifty, sixty people?”

  “Seventy four!" Nakamura said, perking up. “And it was the same for us. For me and Billy, I mean. First few days, There was only me and him and then we found people.”

  His face fell, saddened.

  “Most of them were dead. But then we found some who were alive. And there were more and more of us. Then we found little groups and then big ones. And then there were a lot of us, so we were not afraid of monsters anymore. So we started shouting and burning big fires In the night. So that more and more people could find us.”

  She examined him. Keito’s face showed pride and fragile hope, but there was tremendous tension underneath. Just like she was, just like all of them were, he was keeping a lid on the trauma. A lid that would have to come off at some point.

  “It's like the kid says,” Billy added. “We are finding a dozen people a day. Which is a good thing, but also a problem. There’s few peeps among us who know their way around the woods, hunters, farmers and so on, and all of them say the same thing. There are too many mouths to feed in our group, and if it grows bigger, we will not be able to feed ourselves just off the land. For now, we forage, sometimes we hunt something down. But at these numbers, food is thin. Worse, it's getting colder and colder every day, and we have no way to clothe all these people. All the fires we can burn they're not enough. Can’t build permanent shelter either, because if we stay in one place for longer we’ll starve. Meanwhile we had people die from the cold itself already. Mostly older folk.”

  “What about children?” She felt her stomach cramp at the thought.

  “Thanks Jesus, we haven't found any children, alive… or otherwise. Seems only adults or young adults end up here. Nakamura is actually the youngest among us, I think. And the Monk seems to be the oldest, but he's like, I don't know, sixty five, maybe younger? Not to mention, spry as a fucking mountain goat. So no kids, but no truly old folks either. So whatever brought us here at least wants us to have a chance of survival. Seems that the rules are no old folks, no kids, no cripples. Nobody who would be completely helpless. But still…”

  “What?”

  “Well at least half of the people we find are corpses. This place is not kind. Not fucking kind at all.” He sighed, and sat down, wearily. Adelle noticed that he was younger than she thought, probably early thirties. It was the quickly diminishing bulk, the grime, and the haggard look of his face that made him look older, and somehow, more authoritative. This was also a man held together by the last thread of willpower, even if the thread was steel wire.

  “We need to find help soon then.” she said matter of factly. “Across the river.”

  “Yeah, that's what I thought,” said Billy. “We need to get across as soon as possible. We've been going back and forth along this shore for six days now, and we pretty much ate everything around here that was to be eaten. People are trying to get by on a handful of wild fruit, some nuts and dandelion roots, but soon we’ll run out of those too.”

  She suddenly felt self-conscious about vomiting out the berries they fed her.

  “We ain't going downriver because of the swamp,” he continued, “and we ain't going upriver because of the fucking hyenas. The bastards are merciless and they are not afraid of our group. We killed a whole bunch of them, but they keep skulking around, snatching stragglers. Every time we hear the fucking giggle in the woods, we gotta bunch up and stay awake through the night. And we cannot go away from the river. We would be walking away from the chance of rescue and deep into the green where fuck knows what lurks. So that's out too. So our best guess now is to try to get some folk across the river to investigate, see what's what, and then find a way to get all of us across it.”

  He stood up, dusting himself off, as if scrubbing away the few dry leaves could give him extra dignity and improve his authority. And in a way, it did.

  “Alright y'all, here’s the plan,” he bellowed. All heads turned towards him, and she saw people quickly translate his words to others. Seemed like there was a fragile network of shared, or at least mutually understandable languages among them. It led to a halted speech, in which Billy gave a long pause after each sentence so the translation could keep up.

  “I need five people to go across the river with me.” He looked around and pointed. “Ruslana. Ali, Xiao. Hmm… The other Ali too, the big one. And Lawrence. You know your way around boats Lawrence?”

  “Why yes, Billy, Im a yacht engine-” the man started.

  “Good enough, Larry. We’ll be making a small raft out of the logs right there,” he pointed at a bunch of men pushing a big fallen beech into the water, and debranching it with sharp stones. Others floated smaller pine logs near it. “You supervise these guys. Ask the Pakistani women to make you some grass rope for it, we ain’t got no nails.”

  Before Lawrence could respond, Billy moved on.

  “Rest of you. Build shelter and wait for us. We will go to the other side,” he pointed across the river. “ We will find help. Stay put. Yes, there will be little food. You need to tough it up for a few days. Vikram is in charge of the camp. You hear me? No grumblin’! Listen to Vikram.”

  A tall Indian man with the face of a stern math teacher stood up, and nodded at Billy. A few people scowled, but nobody argued.

  “Hashké is in charge of hunting and foraging. Nobody goes out in the woods unless he says so. Is. That. Clear?” A man looked up from skinning a freshly killed pig. He had a gentle, boyishly handsome face framed with a shock of long black hair, but his deep brown eyes were so intense it made him look like a falcon focusing on a rabbit.

  “All food goes to Marike.” He pointed at a plump, Nordic-looking woman. “All food is shared. Equally. Marike will distribute’-” he hesitated, “Marike will give everyone enough.” He raised his club. “If I learn some fucko ate more than their share in secret, there be reckoning.” He slammed the club into his meaty palm. No translation needed, she mused, seems like they already understood the necessity of impromptu socialism, and from the few winces she saw, it was clear this law had already been brutally enforced a few times.

  Adelle nodded to herself. A rare occurrence in her life, she found a man she could trust. Not fully, of course. Enough to untense her shoulders, and not be on guard around him.

  “Hate to ask you, Miss van Vuuren, but are you up for the trip as well? I know, you’re-”

  “Yes, of course,” she nodded. “And just call me Adelle.” She untangled herself from the heap of people who kept her warm.

  “Oh.” He raised his eyebrows. “And I had a whole speech prepared to convince you. We could use you if we encounter your old group. Sometimes, there is, ya know… friction, when we find other groups.”

  Her lips spread in a cold, predatory smile. “Oh, there will be friction with them, I'm certain. Two fokken gemene basters in that group could really get a little bit of your… reckoning.”