4338.207 · July 26, 2018 AD
Ribbons Knows the Way
The track leads to a building that stopped being a building decades ago — corrugated iron and rust, a calendar frozen on August 1987, a name scratched into a locker by someone who wanted to prove they existed. Rose and Mack make it theirs as best they can: a mattress dragged to the safest corner, half a sandwich rationed between them, a spaceship game that transforms the wreckage into something bearable. Then night falls properly, and something outside the walls reminds them that pretending only works until the dark starts listening.
Rose and Mack follow the left fork through scrub until a derelict mining building appears, half-sunk into the red earth. They explore its remains — rusted lockers, a faded safety poster, a map sealed since 1987 — and Mack drags a mattress to the most sheltered corner, builds a fort from tarps and broken furniture, and rations their only sandwich. As darkness falls, Rose transforms the building into a spaceship to keep the fear at bay, with Ribbons as the navigator who knows the way home. Mack plays along. Then a sound outside the wall — scraping, deliberate, unidentifiable — shatters the game instantly. They sit in absolute darkness, holding hands, not daring to breathe, while Rose discovers the kind of fear that doesn't scream. The kind that sits under your ribs and waits, and never tells you when it's over.
