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The apocalypse snuck up on the world slowly, much slower than anyone could have predicted. No one even noticed at first, aside from maybe scientists and those paranoid folk. People with panic bunkers, three years of rations, and his short-wave radio, just waiting for the worst to happen with a kind of glee. Whether any of it did them any good in the end, Mumbo had no idea.
Mumbo was a simple man. Before everything, and after. He had an honest job in tech, a few friends (who also happened to be coworkers), the occasional trip to a museum to keep him sane. Every day, he would wake up at exactly six in the morning, brush his teeth, shower (ten minutes exactly, to save water), eat flavourless but healthy cereal and drink a tea with milk and no sugar. He watched his health. He watched his schedule. He owned five variations of the same suit and tie. Some would call it boring. He called it efficient.
Then everything changed, and it didn’t matter how efficient he was. No one cares about the health benefits of eight hours’ rest when nearly everyone is dead.
It started on a Tuesday. Or the world started to notice it on a Tuesday. There were monsters on the street. Strange people from the forests, maybe the same people who were spotted a few years back. The ones who never really wandered closer than the farmland on the very outskirts of the city. When he watched the news that evening, the broadcaster had called them ‘Outsiders’, and warned folks to stay in their homes.
It was funny, looking back on it, that the media still managed to make everything seem so mundane. That his boss called up to ask him where he was the next morning, as if work was still a priority. The world kept turning despite it all. For a while.
Eventually, the television flickered out, the lights turned off, and Mumbo said goodbye to his normal life. He hadn’t been outside since the first sighting of the Outsiders, and since then, the world had changed for the worse.
Some dawn came to show a stark, white sky, the sun an ivory black, waves of void pulsing out of it like ripples in a pond. It hung in the air, still as if the earth stopped turning. Logically, Mumbo knew that wasn’t possible. But despite logic, the sun went on not moving, ever unchanged by man’s attempts to rationalise it.
Every day brought more bodies. Piling up on the street outside his house. The corpses melted into the ground in some gross acceleration of decomposition, growing lichen and maggots from gaping wounds until they were nothing but stains on the concrete. That, or eaten overnight, wasting away and quickly replaced by a fresh round of unfortunate victims. People just collapsed, as if something Mumbo couldn’t see was catching up to them.
But he could see Outsiders. He saw their shadows passing through his windows at night. Never got a good look at them. Never tried. So long as he stayed in his house, he wouldn’t have to deal with them. He wouldn’t have to deal with any of it.
It was amazing, actually. He pottered around his little house, eating in rations and passing the time with a book he’d been meaning to read. Housework he’d ignored for months suddenly had his time of day. Mumbo couldn’t help but wonder if his mental health had improved during the apocalypse, despite the constant screaming and sounds of destruction outside. He even had a self-care routine! Who knew those skincare products Scar got him for secret Santa were still in-date?
Good things can’t last forever, though. Realistically, things were going to go wrong at some point.
The morning came like any other, a bright fire blazing in the endless sky. At six o’clock, the sun remained an inky black, hovering at its midday mark as always. Screaming birdsong echoed into the walls of the house, warning daybreak like ice shattering across concrete.
Mumbo went through his usual steps, making his way downstairs to his living room window. Curtains drawn; light streamed through the fabric as if it were paper. A blinding white, like the sweet resonance of a snowy morning, promising a day of frozen hands weak from shovelling the driveway, and the simple sound of laughing children playing in the rare winter miracle. If he squinted, he could pretend nothing ever happened. There was no apocalypse. He lived in a safe world.
Only, it wasn’t winter. That wasn’t snow glowing through his curtain. There were no children. He opened the curtains, and there they were.
Outsiders. Two of them perched just outdoors. Turned away from him, they stood right at the window, one further away than the other, though both were merely shadows of a thing. And at the sound of movement, they turned—pale, ever-shifting eyes alight with hunger.
Mumbo startled, tried not to scream, and ducked under his windowsill, crouching low against the rough carpeted floor. His heart jumped in his chest. Even then, he’d known they had seen him, their warped eyes following him through the wall. Their blinking shattered through his skin, eating into his ribs. Briefly, a familiar sensation ran through him—like getting an X-ray scan. Knowing he couldn’t possibly feel the waves permeating his flesh, but, being unable to stop his mind’s rambling paranoia, he could feel it. A crawling, physical radiation like static across his body.
And they came closer. Or one did, from the sound of it. He didn’t get a good look at their forms. They had been documented briefly on the news, those freakish figures sighted out in the woods, mistaken for deer at first. Years back, when people living out there started to go missing, they were coined as some type of monster-cryptids. Fanatics warned folks to stay clear of the “flocks”. Their territory.
It seemed they had grown tired of living in the forest. Perhaps the apocalypse forced them out, too, scared them into the cities, as humans were scared into hiding. Making them a problem that could no longer go ignored. Mumbo didn’t blame them, honestly. They were animals and had probably been there a long time before any human cities were built. Now they just wanted their homes back.
He refused the believe the apocalypse could just make monsters appear from nothing. Even if Outsiders weren’t always like this, there had to be something before. Not that it would matter when the claws ripped through his skin. Did they have claws?
Closer, still. Mumbo curled into the corner, the freezing brick wall pushing against his back as he buried his face against his knees and covered his head with trembling hands. Breaths came sparsely, each swallow of air seeming warmer than the last, as if the approaching monster were causing atoms themselves to move faster. Something like fuzz droned in his mind, a wave of light-headedness overcoming him.
The shattering of glass. None of it landed on him. He couldn’t bear to look up. Outside, chaos blustered in. Like water through a drain. People screaming. Car engines running. Dogs barking as if rabid. He imagined the foam spitting from their mouths. Gnashing teeth, tearing flesh.
With his eyes screwed so tightly shut, his other senses tried to compensate, despite Mumbo’s every intention to just let himself die utterly unaware. His heart thrummed in his ears, blood rushing through his body too fast and too forceful. The bitter, sharp taste of iron danced on his tongue, and he couldn’t tell whether it was from his own teeth breaking the skin, or a horrific spike in fallout.
A slow, almost wet sound. Mumbo tried not to imagine too much of what the creature might look like. Slinking through the window, landing on his carpet with a dull, almost soft, thud. So close his skin tingled with the changing atmosphere around them. His breath caught painfully in his tight throat.
He hadn’t realised he had been crying until the sad noise of a sob wrenched itself out of him. It only made him flinch, hands moving down and gripping his legs so tightly his knuckles must have turned a bony white. The monster’s breath laid on him. Hot. Withering. Loud.
It didn’t move. Mumbo froze. Too terrified to open his eyes. Too sure he would die the moment he blinked. He’d watched, once, from the safe distance of his bedroom window, someone mauled by an Outsider on the street. The way their body seemed to morph like clay, their eyes spilling from their skull, their hands cracking apart as the imperceivable monster ate through their chest…
Safe to say, he threw up on the bedroom floor. Now, Mumbo only hoped he’d get an easier fate. Something kinder. Quicker. Terror raked his spine in waves, eating at him, devouring his senses one by one. Darkness. Silence. Numbness. A rancid, sour decomposition sitting on his tongue. The monster’s heaving gasps lingered, coating his hands in heat, strong and damp. How close could it be? He braced for death, a pitiful whimper shuddering out of his throat.
And nothing happened. Nothing continued to happen. Aside from the warmth, and the continuous sharp spikes of fear. Beating in his chest, painful strikes filled with mortal terror. The fabric of his trousers buzzed under his hands like static. Like nothing.
The sudden quiet left him unanchored, adrift in the ocean of unknowing; his death drawn out so far for so long, he could no longer picture it. Something he’d been imagining his whole life no longer seemed imminent. It teetered on the cliff edge of reality. For a fleeting moment, he was immortal.
Like counting down for a shot at the doctor’s, Mumbo’s entire body tensed and relaxed against his will. The monster did nothing, those piercing eyes surely on him, waiting for the perfect moment to strike.
But he knew he couldn’t stay still forever. It smelt like mould. Decay and rot and promises of death. Every human part of him screamed. Every cell in his body fought against the idea. The monster still did not attack.
With a sickening, dread-filled nausea creeping down his spine and into his gut, he made his choice. A tiny movement, at first. Just the twitch of a hand. A test. In all his mind—his instincts, something primal buried deep within him—there was a certainty. When he moved, he would die. And yet, he moved, and nothing happened.
Eyes still closed; he lifted his head. A slick, trilling whine from the creature rattled through his ribcage, and he flinched. Hard. But this time, he didn’t freeze. If it was going to kill him, so be it. He gained nothing from drawing the process out even longer. This would be the end of him. Fine.
He would forever be Mumbo, who did nothing useful with his life. Mumbo, who pined after anyone who gave him the briefest scrap of attention. Mumbo, who didn’t have real friends, just people he knew and people who knew him. Mumbo, who would die to the jaws of a monster in the middle of an unexplained apocalypse, in his home where no one else lived. Fine. Fine.
But no teeth dug into his neck. No claws ran themselves through his skin. No shadows melted his body into something unrecognisable. Simply, another sound echoed through the room. Quiet. Almost cautious. Gurgling like an infant.
And Mumbo opened his eyes.
He wasn’t sure what to expect. Despite the cacophony outside—the terrible sounds of splattering blood and dying screams—he remained alive. Sitting there in his living room, barely feeling his own body, staring at a monster.
And stare he did. Because, frankly, there was a lot to look at. A lot to take in. So much shifting and changing that for a good, long moment, he couldn’t tell what to make of the Outsider at all.
Where he’d expected shadows, there lay pale skin. Where he’d imagined teeth, it had no mouth. Where before he’d seen feral animals, he’d been sitting with something calm.
It looked right back at him, with two—three—eight, then two eyes. Large, blinking spheres melting into its face and back again. Purple-black irises, turning to yellow and white and receding to darkness, dripping like paint, examining him curiously. The liquid formations steadied themselves into something resembling human eyes. Again, it seemed as though it could see right through him, all the way into him and out the other side.
Settling, the creature stopped the majority of its transformations. Pausing long enough that Mumbo’s muddle brain could get a better read of its form. In the back of his mind, he questioned if it deliberately tried to let him see it more clearly, or if it had decided to trick him into a false sense of security. Not that he felt particularly secure with the beast crouching right up next to him.
It huffed at him, as if attempting speech, and Mumbo considered the rest of it. Almost human. Perhaps. Human-like skin, which morphed into black, purple, red, and all sorts of scaled, reptilian patterns. Two arms—no, four legs—in a vaguely humanoid shape, each with razor-sharp clawed hands—feet—whatever. Its chest brandished exposed ribs and a beating heart—almost black, or some other dark colour—to the air, as if entirely unbothered by such human things as skin and flesh.
Further down the body, a tail covered in fur, forked and split into two. And, perhaps most surprisingly, an array of feathers, or plates, or scales, flittered in crawling waves like insects across the creature’s body, moving out independently of its skin, underneath it and atop. As they caught the light, they sparkled like diamonds.
In its strangely shaped face, a long wound opened, slow and mesmerising. Black, tar-like fluid spilt from the laceration, dripping onto the carpet. It sunk into the fibres, bubbling and hissing as it left deep stains. A little deliriously, Mumbo dreaded getting it cleaned.
The split widened to form a mouth, showing off a dark chasm of pointed, impossibly white teeth. Rows of them, shifting slightly into whatever free space revealed itself, with sticky, blackened bile dripping between pale gums. The horrific chasm opened to a relaxed shape and rested there, the face almost complete with its uncanny, inhuman-human features.
Only then did Mumbo notice the creature’s curled up posture. The way it seemed to mirror his own body, staring almost expectantly at him with its own claws wrapping around its knees (joints?) in a perfect mimicry of Mumbo’s terrified form.
Its mouth stayed open. Heavy, deep breaths. It sniffed, despite not really having a nose. As it analysed Mumbo, it seemed to take on even more human qualities. The scale-feather things smoothed over, covering the gaping wound of its chest, and it attempted more human-like hair, rather than fur, a blond mop of strands growing from its scalp.
Then, as if it couldn’t confuse Mumbo any further, it spoke.
“He-llo,” it warbled, in a voice which didn’t suit it. More like a composition of several voices, stuck haphazardly together in a collage of tones. The word itself was almost buried in the mix. The vowels drew themselves out like screams, not too dissimilar from the ones Mumbo heard every day outside his house, though the sheer number of voices made it impossible to pick out any one individual.
Mumbo’s heart couldn’t take this. “Um. Hello.” His voice cracked. Fortunately, it is hard to feel embarrassed when you’re staring a deadly monster in the face.
Said monster smiled. Or, at least, tried to in some horrifying way. “Gri-an,” it said with half a dozen fewer voices. Grian. Was… that its name? Not a word Mumbo had heard before, certainly. From the way the Outsider gestured to itself, Mumbo could only assume.
Well then. If introductions were in order. “Hello Grian.” He took a shaky breath. “I’m Mumbo.” The Outsider seemed to process, mouth moving as if trying to wrap its limited speech around the words before speaking them. Its undefined brows pinched together, and Mumbo wondered what kind of struggle went on inside its head.
Eventually, it managed in broken syllables. “Mum-bo.” Hearing his own name spoken in the overlapping, screaming voices of strangers didn’t sit right, but he tried to seem enthusiastic for the Outsider, anyway.
“Yes—yes, that’s right!” His voice bordered on hysterical. Grian’s face had changed again, into something a little more human, with a nose and almost-lips. Though its eyes were still wrong, too big, too bright, or too dark, and its ears were more like misshapen lumps than anything functional. Mumbo wondered how it all worked. How it breathed or heard anything. Whether its body acted more as a chassis or shell, a disguise, than a true aid to its senses.
He made a valiant attempt to stay still as Grian’s clawed hand knocked against his knuckles. “Mum-bo friend.” Oh. Okay. What? If people could buffer, Mumbo was sure that’s what he’d be doing. His wires were crossed somewhere. His server had gone down. He bluescreened, and so on.
Expectantly, Grian blinked at him. Rather violently coming back to his senses, Mumbo let out a strained laugh. “Uh, yes—absolutely. Mumbo friend, if you—if that’s—if you want.”
Grian let out a series of somewhat unsettling clicks and trills, a few eyes sprouting on its face as its body seemed to melt a little. Despite this, it seemed happy, tail thrashing against the ground and chest shuddering almost like a human laugh.
Before Mumbo could say anything more, his arms were grabbed. Instantly, fear shot through him, thinking perhaps he’d been too hopeful too soon, and now he’d ended up as a meal. But, instead, he found himself being lifted to his feet as Grian stood with him. The Outsider’s strength took him off guard, and he almost stumbled over, but a moment later he’d righted himself. No harm done.
Well, apart from his broken window. Mumbo stared at the shattered glass, amazed none of it got on him or Grian, but lamenting the likely fact that no one was alive to fix it. In turn, Grian stared out of the window too. One set of eyes focused on the carnage in the street, while another remained fixated on Mumbo.
Something like determination scattered itself across Grian’s shifting face. Its scale-feathers puffed up a few times, dusting out debris.
“Mum-bo. Follow.” Another confusing mess of voices. Grian looked at him eagerly, eyes twinkling as they moved. Of course, Mumbo hesitated. Was he really about to follow a monster to who-knows-where? He weighed his options carefully, leaning against the windowsill for support.
On the one hand, he wouldn’t last much longer in his house. With a window broken and his supplies ever-dwindling, he’d be dead within a month without ever knowing more about the world outside. On the other hand, he’d only ever heard of Outsiders killing people, and the world aside from that wasn’t exactly safe. Would Grian protect him, or abandon him at the first sign of danger?
The hopeful expression on Grian’s face almost made it look cute. If a monster could look cute. Which, Mumbo decided, it could. He let the quiet linger, Grian staring at him as its body continued to melt and change. Distantly, Mumbo knew he might be stupid, or suicidal, to follow the thing.
Even so, he took a deep breath, and smiled. “Okay. Lead the way.”