#anyway sometimes you read domain by james herbert when you're ten years old and it embeds itself somewhere deep in your psyche

[shootingstarpilot]

Trick or treat?

trick or TREAT, my friend, have a snippet!

Voices, then. Fuzzing in and out of the edges of his hearing but indisputably there, and the next gutted cry owes more to relief than anything else. Voices come with hands and feet that make the rats go away. Grabbing tails, swinging hard, kicking and catching between foot and wall or down into the grey and rushing river.  (Nalen had died in the night, and none of them had noticed until the snout came up through his belly.) The echoes of the agony reverberate oddly in the space so abruptly empty. Every inhale tastes moldy, every exhale catching on another sobbing wail, the sudden absence of pain as disorienting as its onset. (He’d made a little noise, hadn’t he? And Ben had shushed him, assuming fever, the mumbles of the dying- but the rats don’t wait-)