Hours Too Late

"The worst part of surviving isn't what you endure—it's waking up safe and realising everyone else might not have been."

My head jerked upward without permission, a reflex that tore me from whatever shallow unconsciousness had claimed me. The transition from murky half-sleep to waking was violent—disorienting, dislocating, as though my brain had been dumped back into my body from a height.

For a confused moment, I couldn't remember where I was or why every muscle in my body screamed protest.

Then memory flooded back. The creature. The blood. Beatrix's trembling frame pressed against mine as we'd waited out the darkest hours on the cold kitchen tiles.

My movement must have been sharper than I'd realised, because Beatrix stirred beside me with a soft sound of confusion. She lifted her head from where it had found refuge on my shoulder sometime during our fitful vigil, her hair wild and tangled, eyes blinking against the invasion of light as she struggled to surface from her own brief escape into sleep.

The living room had transformed while we'd cowered waiting for daylight.

Sunlight—actual, honest sunlight—sliced through the blinds in golden bars, painting patterns of light and shadow across surfaces that had held only terror hours before. The contrast was almost obscene: the cheerful intrusion of morning against the carnage we'd witnessed, the blood still drying on walls we hadn't had the strength or courage to clean.

I became aware of sensations I'd been too afraid to process during the night. The ache in my lower back from hours pressed against cabinet doors. The numbness in my left leg where circulation had been compromised. The grit in my eyes and the sour taste coating my tongue. My body was a catalogue of small miseries, each one a reminder of the night we'd survived.

Beatrix looked wrecked. Her mascara had long since surrendered to tears and sweat, leaving dark smudges beneath eyes that held the particular hollowness of someone who'd seen something they could never unsee. Her red dress—that elegant thing that must have cost a fortune—was ruined beyond salvage, the tatters speaking more eloquently than words about the violence she'd endured.

We'd made it to dawn.

The relief should have been overwhelming. Instead, a different emotion began to crystallise, cold and sharp, as my sleep-deprived brain finally connected pieces that should have clicked together hours ago.

"You said this creature followed you from Clivilius?" The question emerged heavy with implication, each word weighted with the horror building behind my ribs.

"Yes," Beatrix replied, her voice soft, defeated—the sound of someone who'd already processed everything I was only now beginning to understand.

The realisation hit me like a physical blow.

The creature came from Clivilius.

Which meant the creature had been in Clivilius.

The camp.

"Fuck!" The word exploded from me, raw and desperate, as the full scope of what I'd done—what I'd failed to do—crashed through my consciousness. I'd spent hours huddled on this floor while my people, my settlement, my brother had been exposed to something that hunted in darkness with dead eyes and claws that could tear through flesh like paper.

The screams we'd heard in the night. The Portal activating without my command. The dogs' frantic warnings before chaos had erupted.

They were surrounded, Kain had said. Surrounded.

I surged to my feet with energy I shouldn't have possessed, adrenaline flooding my system with desperate fuel. The room that had felt like sanctuary now felt like a prison—every second I remained here was a second my people might be bleeding, might be dying, might already be dead.

Paul. Jamie. Joel—Joel who'd survived death twice and might not survive a third encounter. Glenda and Kain and Karen and Chris. The community we'd been building, the song Joel had sung just hours ago, the toast we'd raised to a future that might have already been extinguished.

Let us celebrate our story. The words we've yet to write.

The lyrics mocked me now, fragments of hope from a world that might no longer exist.

My hand found the Portal Key before conscious thought could intervene. The living room wall erupted with colour. The Portal blazed to life, a doorway to answers I was terrified to find.

I didn't look back at Beatrix. Didn't offer reassurance or explanation. Didn't do anything except throw myself toward the colours with the desperate certainty of someone racing toward a disaster they'd already caused.