Embedded Files
Nov 14th, 2036
Richard no longer needed her to guide him through the yard. He didn’t pretend to know where all the traps were—only where it was safe to stand. And he was certain that if she ever tired of him, she’d change that map real quick.
Bunnygirl was usually out in the garden or near the coops, always somewhere in the open air. Once he hit the porch, he’d start scanning the perimeter. She always spotted him first. She’d come running, grinning like mischief incarnate, leaping into his arms—legs wrapped around his waist—like the world hadn’t taught her fear. Like she was still allowed to be that young.
And she was. Young.
He felt guilt, sometimes. Not enough to stop, but enough to keep the thoughts quiet. She was half his age, if that, and she met life like it was a lover she meant to seduce—joyous, wild, and without consequence. Exactly the kind of fire that could lift a man out of the wet ashes of mourning. She made him feel young by osmosis. And wise... yet not superior. There was a simpleness, a lack of complexity, to her but also the hints of a deeper well.
His father had just died. His purpose had just died. He'd quit being a cog in rebuilding society for a madman.
She was life, burning bright in a world gone dark.
He needed that.
She was either hunting or inside.
He knocked on the door.
“Come in,” a voice sobbed.
She didn’t need to ask who it was. If someone had made it this far without losing a foot to the fox-mines or tumbling into a pit of stakes, they were either a friend…
…or already limping from a past visit.
She was on the bed in blue-and-black checkered flannel pajamas. Her face said everything—if she wore makeup, it would be streaked with mascara. She was already pulling herself back together, already forcing the pieces into place. Trying to become bubbly again.
And suddenly, Richard wondered just how much of their time together had been an act.
"Are you okay?" he asked, settling on the edge of her bed and giving her shoulder a gentle squeeze.
"Do you need me to kill someone?" The words came soft, with only the faintest thread of humor running beneath them.
His training told him to match her emotional tone—but what the hell did that mean when someone was performing? When the emotion was real, but the face wore a mask?
"Do you like me?"
There was a cry tucked inside the question, soft but raw, and it cracked something in his chest.
She wasn’t one to talk about herself—not beyond the surface. At first, he’d thought it was the language barrier. But after three months together, her English was nearly flawless.
Still, she kept her center sealed tight. Pleasant. Cheerful. But always guarded.
Richard had chalked it up to being an adorable young woman in an increasingly lawless world.
"Of course. Who wouldn't?"
"You don't know me," she said, voice trembling. "I'm just a convenient… arggh…," she struggled for the English word before giving up, "eine Ablenkung... on your path."
Richard winced at his own German—charitably called limping, realistically hobbling along on a crutch. He didn’t know that word. But he didn’t need to. He understood it in her eyes.
He reached for her hand.
"Then let me in," he said gently. "Let me meet you."
“It’s a long story,” she said, pulling in a deep lungful of air like she was about to belt the opening note of a sad operetta.
Then she dropped flat on her back, arms flung out wide, effectively keeping him a solid thirty centimeters away.
“You don’t have to stay for the whole thing,” she added, eyes on the ceiling. “You can leave whenever you no longer want to be here.”
Then she lay there.
For a full minute, she said nothing—gathering her thoughts, or building her courage, or maybe just forcing open the rusted vault door to some long-sealed part of herself.
Richard, who had long ago mastered the art of waiting out silence, found this to be the longest, hardest minute of his life.
Then she spoke—her voice low and steady, but running with a rich vein of emotion, like grief and defiance braided into every word.
"I grew up not far from here. Austria side, way up the spine. Big place—fields, gardens, animals, a dozen ranch hands. Five sisters. One brother. He was the oldest."
She spoke slow, like the words were heavy—like pulling them up out of wet earth. Richard didn’t interrupt. He lay there, still as the night around them, silently praying nothing would break the moment open.
It was the first time he felt like he had all of her. Not just her body—but her. The real her. The woman wrapped in firelight and old wounds.
"I was gardening before I could talk properly. My first words were probably a garden tool or a plant."
Her voice cracked, and she fell quiet. Richard panicked inwardly, already crafting ways to pull her back.
"When I was eight, my dad taught me to shoot a child’s hunting rifle. Just a few months later, I took down my first roe deer. I was so determined to drag it home myself, but I wasn’t strong enough yet. Dad carried it—with me gripping the tail and him pretending I was helping."
Her tone shifted then—just slightly.
"And a month after that... the world changed."
She went quiet again.
This time, Richard just waited.
"At first, it didn’t feel like much. People stopped accepting our money, so we stopped accepting theirs. But we mostly traded goods anyway.
"We stopped trading the cold-cellar stuff—jams, jellies, beets, pickles, anything that would last. We held onto those. Started hoarding. Only moved the fresh stuff—milk, eggs, meat, what couldn’t wait.
“We had animals. Plenty to trade. Dad mostly wanted fuel.
“We’d always been off-grid. Solar and generator. He taught me how to fix the generator. Me and Kaspar—that was my brother." Her voice caught a little on his name, like it brushed something raw.
Silence opened between them again, quieter than before. Richard shifted closer and wrapped his arm around her, slow and careful. She let him—for a second—then pulled away, just slightly.
Not rejection. Just survival.
Richard rolled onto his back. He didn’t feel rejected. He felt lucky—grateful she’d opened up this much. She’d say more when she was ready.
And then, quietly, she did.
Her voice came from somewhere else—low, flat, almost mechanical, like she was tunneling the words up from far inside herself.
"Then one day, just like Dad said it would happen... a flood of people came up the mountain. Literally a flood. Like they were liquid. Dad had told us the vast majority would head down the mountain, toward the towns. So I can’t even imagine what that looked like.
"But we’d had drills for this. Real ones. If they come, Dad said, find the closest, most hidden place. Hide. Don’t worry about us. Don’t worry about the baby. Everyone fend for themselves. No one comes out until I call.
"I was closest to the big barn. I pulled the door closed as quietly as I could—a door I could barely move—and I buried myself in one of the haystacks. Got in deep. Really deep. But I could still see with one eye, through the straw. Not that there was anything to look at... just the inside of the barn."
Richard recognized the rhythm. She was stalling—circling something. Something she had to say, needed to say, but was trying to keep sealed inside.
"I’d been in a flood once before,” she said, voice still quiet and far away. “Water came pouring down the mountain. Killed half our animals. I’d seen windstorms too—crazy ones, tore through like knives. This... this sounded like both of them, combined.
“No voices. No yelling. Just noise. Overwhelming noise. Not even human. Just this... roar.
“And then the barn started shaking.
“All I could picture was water again, slamming into it, flowing around it. The whole building trembled like it wasn’t made of anything real. It shook so hard a few of the hay bales up in the loft broke loose. One of them landed square on the straw above me.
“Something wooden jabbed into my back. A hoe handle maybe. A bale strap. I never figured out what it was. Just knew it hurt like hell. Knocked the wind out of me and pinned me solid. Couldn’t move. Could barely breathe.
“I thought about trying to squirm free. Started to, even. Then realized how dumb that would be. Dad has said to stay hidden.
So I froze. Let the pain crash through me like a wave and then recede. I went limp, like prey playing dead. Then, slow as breath, I used my free hand to tunnel a little hole in the straw. Just enough to see out. Just enough to witness.”
She stopped.
Her breathing was ragged now—heavy, shallow, like she’d just sprinted uphill and couldn’t find enough air. She didn’t look at him. Just stared into the firelight like it might tell the story for her, if she waited long enough.
Richard didn’t speak. But his mind, traitor that it was, filled in the blanks.
He saw two paths ahead. Two grim, plausible ends to the memory she was clawing her way through.
Neither good.
But maybe the world would surprise him. Maybe she’d surprise him. Maybe it was some other shadow, something survivable. But...
If it was, her voice wouldn’t sound so dead.
And still, she said nothing.
"Then the barn door was ripped off."
She said it flat, like it was just a fact—not a memory that lived under her skin.
"That huge, heavy door—easily opened if they’d had two brain cells to rub together—was torn off its runners and thrown aside. I don’t know how many people it took, but it was more than one. And they weren’t people people. Not anymore. Just... shapes. Bodies. Driven by something feral, not thought."
She paused, breath hitching again.
"And the flood came inside. It broke into pieces, like water around rocks. Some ran for the rafters, some kicked open feed bins, some just screamed at the air. Looking for anything worth stealing—or breaking. So little left in the world that still worked... and they wanted to wreck it. I never understood that. Not even then."
Her voice cracked at the edge, but she kept going.
"A few kicked at the edges of the haystack I was in. One of them pissed on the straw nearby. But they didn’t pull it apart. They didn’t see me. They found the solar storage batteries and somehow—somehow—coordinated enough to carry them off in groups of three or four. Like ants carrying off sugar cubes."
Richard remained still. Every breath from her now felt like a win.
"And then," she continued, softer now, "as if someone told them to, they left. Just... turned and went. The flood rolled back out."
She fell quiet again.
"Now I had a viewport," she said at last, voice barely more than breath, "through the hole where the door used to be… into the chaos outside."
Richard didn’t speak. Didn’t even move.
"I didn’t want to look," she went on, "but it was better than thinking about how hard it was to breathe. So I just… watched."
She swallowed audibly, voice thinning to a whisper.
"I lay like that for hours, pinned under that bale, ribs aching, shoulder numb. Just… watching. The blobs moved like amoebas, oozing together, pulling apart. No direction. Just chaos in motion. One group lit the grain silo on fire. For no reason. Nothing to gain from it. Just to watch something burn."
A longer pause now. When she spoke again, her voice carried a fragile edge.
"I started to worry—for the first time—that when Dad called, I wouldn’t be able to yell back. My chest was too tight. My voice was gone. But I still believed he’d call. I never doubted that."
She exhaled, shaky and slow.
"Night fell. The field lights didn’t come on. No generators. No voices. Just the moon… and the burning silo glowing like a warning beacon. I must’ve fallen asleep wondering if, worst case… you could eat straw. I figured—cows did."
Richard didn’t dare say a word. Not yet. Not until she finished crawling out from under that haystack.
Suddenly her voice lifted, pitched higher, like she was forcing the words out before they could drag her under.
“I woke up to Kaspar screaming.”
Richard didn’t move. His entire body went still.
“I looked through my little straw hole. Out past the barn, about halfway to where the silo used to be... he was framed in the doorway. A man had Kaspar bent over.”
She hunted for the words. She didn’t need to find them. Richard prayed she wouldn’t.
Her voice barely rose, flat and scorched clean of emotion. “He was using him like a woman. I didn’t know what that meant yet. I wasn’t even curious about my own body. But we’d seen the animals.”
The briefest pause.
“...We knew the motion.”
Her voice dropped to something colder. Numb.
“Kaspar was screaming. Louder than I’d ever heard. And no one cared. Dozens of people still in my view—wandering, looting, talking like it was a festival. But that man—he didn’t stop. Each thrust dragged them farther out of sight. Until they were gone.
And eventually, I couldn’t hear the screams anymore.
But I still hear them.”
Richard didn’t say he was sorry. He knew better than that.
They all had trauma.
His might not compare—but still, he’d just buried his father. Like everyone left on this broken planet, his life had been hijacked, rerouted through hell.
Still—he needed to offer her something. Some shelter.
So he reached for her again. Slow. Gentle. Just a touch—a hug. Something human. Something safe.
“I am not fucking finished!” she screamed, inches from his face.
Richard flinched like he'd been struck—then froze.
Recovered.
Put on his ambassador face.
He said nothing. Did nothing. Just waited.
But his mind spiraled.
If that wasn’t the worst of it…
He didn’t want to know what was.
She opened the top of her pajamas.
Richard froze. Was that… an apology?
A test?
Did she need to know he still found her touchable? That she wasn’t ruined?
Was this about comfort—or control?
He kept his face soft. Gently neutral. He did nothing.
After a while, she turned her head away, let the fabric fall back into place, and kept speaking.
“For four days, I waited for Dad to tell us it was safe.”
Her voice was thinner now, like it had to crawl past razors just to be heard.
“I pissed myself. Shit myself. A couple times that first day. I still feel guilty about that, like it mattered. Like I broke some rule of decency hiding under straw with a broken rib and no food.”
She swallowed.
“One of the cows wandered in on day four. Found its way into the haystack. I wondered if it could smell me. Hell, I could smell me. It was moaning. They did that when they needed to be milked. Dad taught us they had to be done twice a day. This one must’ve been in agony. It was Kaspar’s job to milk them, but I knew how too. I fantasized about eating it.”
A ghost of a smile passed across her lips—mocking, bitter.
“Poor thing, moaning and trying to figure out why the haystack smelled like relief. Just stood there—enormous, aimless, and patient—leaking pain.”
She drew a shaky breath.
“It took half the day, but eventually the cow nudged the bale loose. Just enough. Not on purpose—just wandered in and bumped it, bumbling around looking for me to milk her. I crawled out, slow—inch by inch. Felt like being born backwards through a needle, lungs too tight to scream. First thing I did was drink from her. Drank like a goddamn animal. Drank till I puked.”
“You know,” she said, her voice flat but edged like broken glass, “for all the ways I judge that mob… I still can’t figure how they were so fucking stupid they didn’t take the cows.”
She gave a soft, humorless huff. “Probably the most valuable things on the whole damn farm.”
Richard’s gut tightened. He knew that tone now—knew that pivot, that moment when the pain got too close and she reached for anger instead.
It was a stall tactic.
It was armor.
And it meant the next part hurt even worse.
"I found my dad first."
Her voice flattened, not dead but dulled—like something beautiful rubbed to the grain. Richard didn’t move. He knew not to.
"Pitchfork through the neck. Pinned him to the front door of the house like a warning." Her lips twitched, but there was no humor in it. "He fought. You could tell. One of them probably ran, bleeding. But it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered."
She swallowed, harder this time.
"Then I found sweet Ta."
Her voice thinned again, softer now, cracking just slightly.
"Only four and a half. She had hidden in the water reserve. We’d played in there before—knew how to lower ourselves in, hold the shelf, stay quiet. I think... I think she got the lid closed behind her somehow. Maybe tried to climb out. Maybe the hinge caught. I don’t know."
A sudden sob punched out of her. Just one. Small, but sharp. Like a glass shard flicked into the silence.
"I think she held herself up as long as she could. Little arms clenched tight on the ledge. Waiting. Hoping. Probably fell asleep." She wiped her face with the back of her hand, more annoyed than mournful now. "Drowned alone in the dark while I was twenty meters away under hay and couldn’t help her."
Richard’s heart twisted, but he said nothing.
"Over the next few days," she went on, steadier now but hollowed out, "I found everyone. All of them. Every little body except my mother and Kaspar."
She paused, and Richard’s voice slipped out before he could second-guess it.
"They could still be alive," he offered, his voice low. It felt weak in the air between them, like a balloon drifting up into barbed wire. Still, he needed to say something.
But her response came fast. Not cruel. Not sharp. Just honest.
"Oh God, I pray not."
That landed like a slap.
Richard opened his mouth—then closed it. He didn’t get it. Not at first.
But the silence gave him space, and the truth began to unspool.
If they were alive...
They hadn't escaped.
They'd been taken.
Still preyed upon. Still suffering.
Better to be dead.
Better to have died then, than to be out there still enduring.
And so he said nothing else. Because now he understood.
“And while I don’t think my family managed to hurt any of them,” she said, voice steeling again, “I do know this—same kind of mindless stupidity that left behind three cows that could’ve fed them till spring also caused twenty-seven of them to get trampled on their way through.”
Richard blinked. “Trampled?”
“Stampede. Panic. Crush of bodies in a narrow space. Happens in the woods more often than people think. I guess the barn funneled them just right.”
She exhaled through her nose, sharp and humorless.
“I know the exact number because I had to move every single one of those fuckers off my land.”
Richard looked at her, confused.
“I couldn’t get the tractor started,” she continued flatly. “Tried for days—real days—then gave up. So I lashed the hay slide to the cow, tore skin off my arm doing it. Strapped one bloated corpse at a time—had to rig a harness to a goat to get the bodies up on the sled. Ropes, pulleys, me conducting everything. Led the cow to the ravine’s edge… and carefully shoved them over.”
A pause.
“It took all day. Every time. Had to haul and lash and push and pray nothing burst.”
Another pause.
She looked up, her eyes flaring just a little in the firelight.
“But damn it… Twenty-seven days, one by one, till my land was mine again.”
“And hard as it was—and it was grueling, believe me—big bodies, little girl, dumb cow… stubborn goat, none of it compared to burying my family.”
She didn’t pause long enough for Richard to speak. He thought of all the cuts and scrapes—probably a broken finger, maybe a stabbed foot—none of it mentioned, because it was microscopic compared to everything else.
“Dragging corpses is one thing. Shoveling graves with a bruised rib and no help? That’s a whole different nightmare. And you can’t teach a cow to dig.
I was too small to handle a shovel. Just had a hand trowel. That was it.”
She laughed.
Short at first. Then it kept going—tight, breathless, unhinged just enough to make Richard’s skin crawl. He didn’t dare move. Didn’t even blink. Just waited for it to burn out.
Eventually it did.
Burying my family… that broke me different. Dad—pinned to the door, pitchfork through him—I dragged him loose with the cow, clawed a hole with the trowel till my knuckles split. Took my time, dug it right. Like Dad would’ve wanted. Christian. He stunk so bad by the time I was done. The others—Ta, the wee ones— were easier. Small deep holes. One each. No help, just a garden tool and a rib that screamed every breath.”
She turned her face away.
“More images to take to my grave.”
A beat.
“But I did it. Because they deserved that much.”
“I stayed after,” she said, her voice quieter now, more controlled, like a blade laid flat. “After I buried everyone. I couldn’t leave. It was still ours, you know?”
She didn’t wait for a response—just pressed on.
“I gathered what was left. Three cows, a few goats, and the rabbits. The cows were half-starved. One wouldn’t stop limping. But they came when I called. I gave ‘em new names. Pretended they didn’t remember what happened either.”
She swallowed.
“I didn’t try to run the whole place, I wasn’t stupid. Just worked what I needed. Planted a little garden—beets, lettuce, kale. Enough to get by. Cleaned the troughs. Fixed the fencing. I’d brush the cows every evening just to remind myself I had hands.”
She stared into the dark, voice getting more clipped.
“I slept in the hayloft for months. Couldn’t stand the house. Smelled like blood and rot and family. The generator held out longer than I thought it would. But the plumbing…” She gave a short, bitter laugh. “First thing I lost. No water, no toilet. Started hauling buckets from the stream. Learned real quick how to boil things I didn’t want to drink.”
She shifted beside him, wrapping her arms around her knees like she was folding into herself.
“I thought I could do it forever. Thought I would. Just me and the animals and the silence. It almost felt like safety.”
Her voice dropped to something colder. Resigned.
“Then I started changing. You know. Puberty. Everything got loud again—in here.” She tapped the side of her head. “Couldn’t drink the milk anymore. Couldn’t eat right. Some days I wanted to touch everything. Other days, I wanted to rip my skin off.”
Her tone darkened, edged with something between shame and defiance.
“And I kept thinking… maybe I had one thing left to trade. And if someone took it—really took it—maybe that’d be easier. Maybe I’d get it over with. Maybe I’d just break and be done with it.”
She laughed again—too loud, too long—and Richard flinched.
“Don’t worry. I didn’t. But I thought about it. A lot.”
She glanced sideways at him, daring him to look away.
“So I packed. Meat, mostly. Tools. Rope. A good knife. And the only part of me I hadn’t spent yet.
I left the farm like I was walking out of a funeral—quiet, hollow, and not sure who the mourner was supposed to be. But I knew what I was burying."
Silence stretched. She didn’t fill it.
Then, after a beat, her voice came again—calmer now. Almost teasing, almost a challenge.
"I needed to say all that. And I do feel lighter… but it drained me. If you stick around, I’ll tell you the rest another time. My trip down the mountain. How I came to Mittenwald. Meeting the Ghost..."
"The Ghost is real?" Richard blinked, startled at the shift. "I thought he was just a boogeyman parents used to scare their kids."
"Oh, he's real. Old and strong—the way my dad was strong. Kind, too. But he'd chop off your arm to save your body without blinking."
She let that settle. Then, softly:
"But as I say… that’s a story for another day."
She turned back to him, eyes steady now. Almost daring.
“So now… do you still want to fuck me?”
"Honestly?," Richard looked into her eyes, and saw not just the pain, but the fragile hope that hid behind it. He let the silence hang for a moment, letting her know he understood the weight of her question. Any lingering feelings of horror he shoved down in a box in his mind.
He'd taken just long enough for her to brace against her fears — "I’d really like to make love to you. For the first time."
She turned into him, arms tight around his ribs like she was holding herself together through him.
He held her just as tightly—quiet, still. Letting the silence say what words couldn’t.
"Something horrible happened to you. You did nothing wrong. You lived. You survived. That’s not a sin," he looked deep in her eyes, "You are... something else, Bunnygirl."
She looked not just at him, but in him.
"Call me Lyna."
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