Survival/Apocalypse16 min read
Lighthouse Days and Blood Moons
ButterPicks14 views
1
“My name is Kiley Riley,” I said to the empty room, because that felt like the honest thing to do.
“You really should stop talking to yourself,” Maria Berg said from the doorway, rubbing at her apron like she was dusting off a memory. “Or at least don’t do it in the living room.”
“Maria, I already told you I’ll move if you must,” I answered. “But not today. I have exams next week.”
“You have more important things to do than complain about exams,” she said, the way small-town people lean against a memory and never let it go. “Kiley, I’m sorry, but the house—there’s mold. The council is furious. I have to fix it. You need to leave.”
“I paid rent,” I said. “My contract—”
“Contracts mean nothing when the health inspector shouts,” Maria cut in. “Look, I thought of you. There’s a place. An old lighthouse. White Crystal Lighthouse. You like quiet, don’t you? You’ll be alone. They’ll rent it to you cheap. Go take a break from your thesis. Please.”
“Alone?” I laughed. “You mean like—alone alone?”
“Yes. That’s the point.” She handed me a form. “They gave me the keys. It’s yours for a song. Just until repairs are done.”
I went because I was too tired to argue and because lighthouses sounded like the sort of isolation philosophers romanticize about. I went because my graduate supervisor was too boring at six in the morning and because Maria’s eyes had been hollow lately.
“You really think I’ll study in a lighthouse?” I asked the old man in the council office when he handed me the keys.
He blinked once, the way old men blink when they remember a different war. “You won’t be bothered,” he said. “Most people only come when it’s sunny. White Crystal’s a tourist novelty now. You’ll be fine.”
“Fine,” I said, and I believed him at the time.
2
The lighthouse smelled like salt and old paint and the kind of silence that had learned to be polite around memory. The main room under the lantern was a round, sunlit bowl. I set up a hammock, a small table, a lamp, and dragged in the boxes of supplies I’d bought in a panicked spree earlier that day. The whole thing felt theatrical, like I’d been cast in a movie about artists who need solitude.
“You’re dramatic,” I said to the empty chair and poured a beer.
My phone buzzed like a trapped insect. It was Travis Mustafa.
“Kiley, are you listening?” he said without hello. “You have to get supplies. I sent you video. It leaked—something big.”
“You called at midnight,” I told him. “I slept. Sorry.”
“You have to—this is not a joke. The lab. X virus. It leaked. People go crazy. Buy food, water, anything. Don’t go outside if someone changes.”
“What do you mean ‘changes’?” I asked.
“Just buy things,” he said. “Be careful. I’ll come for you.”
His voice fell into that kind of carefulness he used when he rescued lab samples at three in the morning. Travis had always been the smart one. He worked at a private lab in the Five-Star Empire—secretive, efficient—he’d always been the type to think first and panic later. I listened and then I did what he said.
“Okay,” I said, because when your brother tells you there’s an infection with a two-day window, you stop being cute.
3
The supermarkets were slow and then suddenly they weren’t. I loaded rice, flour, oil, canned meat, bottled water, a godawful amount of tin tuna. I bought masks, sanitizer, batteries, solar panels—things a grad student in philosophy convinced herself would be enough. I blocked out anyone who laughed at my shopping cart.
“You really think buying ten sacks of rice will save you from existential dread?” the grocery clerk asked, a sarcastic grin in his voice.
“Maybe,” I said. “Or maybe I’ll write the thesis under a pile of rice.”
He laughed and handed me a discount. I hugged three cases of bottled water.
Someone watched me while I pushed a cart the size of a small raft. I saw the man only in passing as I left Tesco—tall, baseball cap low, a black mask. Later, in a five-and-ten hardware, he was there again, pretending to buy tools, but he watched my hands climb a generator into the back of my truck.
He followed me out with a cautious gap.
I told myself stories to explain everything—curiosity, coincidence, chance. I told myself the man had children and nothing to do with me.
“Don’t look at me like that,” I told my reflection in the cracked truck window when I hauled the generator into the lighthouse.
4
I named the stray kitten I found on the hood of my truck Hope, because that was the only practical superstition available.
“Hope,” I said, and she blinked, black fur bristling like spilled ink. I put her in a box and she purred like a gum ball machine.
The first night at the lighthouse was indecently calm. I turned on an old lamp, opened a can of beans, and for the first time in a long time, let myself think that maybe my life could be solved with a little order. I read for an hour, drank a beer, and let the ocean do the rest.
Then a noise pulled me from the hammock. A phone call. Travis, somewhere behind a thick voice and static:
“Kiley, it’s worse. Someone—an accident. Watch the video I sent.”
The video was a hand-held camera, shaky. People screaming, a man with his face twisted, blood and foam, the thing—no—someone—leaping. Change came faster than the phone could buffer. The creature—a person—jerked, bit, tore.
I shut the laptop down and didn’t move for ten minutes except to breathe.
“Kiley, you hearing me? Don’t go outside,” he said when the signal came back. “Don’t let anyone in. I’m trying to get a ride. I’m trying.”
“I’m fine,” I said. “I’m fine. I’m at the lighthouse. Don’t—don’t worry.”
He said something that broke the call like a brittle branch.
5
“You were right,” I told the horizon the first time I used the telescope. “You were right about the leak.”
The city was a bruise in the distance. The first fire I saw was a gas station turning to a torch. Men in uniforms ran. One half-made man crawled out of a car and shuffled like lung-wracked metal toward the firefighters. The tempo of things changed there; the police were useless because five minutes changed hands with time.
I watched until my throat dried out.
6
“Infection vector is saliva and tissue. Five minutes to onset,” Travis said on a call that came through like a rope through stormwater. “They’re mutating faster. Don’t touch anything that looks weird. Stay quiet. Keep Hope inside.”
“Hope is sleeping,” I said. “Everything’s set.”
“Noticed anything else?” he asked, breath tight.
“The moon,” I said. “There was something wrong last night—blood-red. The infected seemed to behave differently when the moon went red.”
“You saw that?” He breathed. “Keep notes.”
“Okay.” I wrote a line in a notebook and called it the lighthouse journal—White Crystal Observations.
7
The first people to find the lighthouse were ragged, like the kind of men who were angry at gravity. Three of them. One big man with a scowl and a nickname like a curse. Mariano Bernard he told the empty air like he owned the coast. A second, Carver Bradley, twitched his jaw like a dog checking a bone. The third, Penn Hofmann, kept glancing over his shoulder. They called from the bottom of the lighthouse.
“Anyone home?” Carver shouted, sloshing through snowwater.
I put my hand over the glass and thought of a thousand polite ways not to open the door. I started with paper.
On the stone step I pushed a note: WHO ARE YOU? I slid it under the crack. They read it, mouths together like a small apology.
“I’m Mariano,” one of them said when I popped a second sheet. “We’re cold. Can you let us in?”
“You said no earlier,” I wrote back.
“Please,” Mariano said, “we have a woman, she’s hurt. We just need shelter, ten minutes, that’s all. We’ll go. We swear.”
“You’ll be gone in ten minutes?” I wrote.
“Yes!” Carver shouted. “I swear!”
I watched them with the scope. I debated letting them in. The smell of someone’s desperation made the lighthouse feel like an argument.
“Open the door,” Penn muttered.
I left the paper at the crack: NO. GO AWAY.
Then they changed. That is the cruel art of the whole thing—one stupid errand can tilt everything.
They didn’t go away. They camped below the lighthouse under a tarp and made a fire and scrounged and waited. The country is full of people who believe hunger is justification.
8
“Let me in,” a woman called the night they dared the next step. “Please—PLEASE. I’ll do anything. Please.”
Her voice crackled with the kind of pleading that makes you suspicious. She’d been the driver of the sideways car on the far end of the valley. She had a pink hoodie and a way of crying like someone auditioning.
“Tell me who you are,” I wrote and slid the paper.
“Kendra,” she wrote back through the slit. “Please.”
“You lied before,” I wrote. “You and your boyfriend.”
“Kendra started weeping dramatically again. “He was trying to save me. He’s out there. Please.”
I waited. Someone is either honest or dishonest; the lighthouse is not a confessional.
She tore at the door. She tried to climb the cliff. She screamed until the ocean swallowed the sound and spat it back as a silence. Then, like a stunt on the edge of a stage, she ran, she tore, she crashed into the ditch. A crash. An explosion of wet and living grief. The things converged, gnawed, and the river ate her and transformed her into something that shrieked.
The river did what it always does: it preserved and erased. The thing that rose did not step into the water. It lay like a grotesque tide on the bank, it shuddered, and then it stopped.
9
“Water matters,” I wrote into the brick of my notebook. “Water=antidote or at least a deterrent.”
Travis called and we started to map. I told him where I’d put barrels. He told me there were pockets of survivors holding out. He said bittersweet things about containment and nuclear plans and nuclear options that were whispered like blasphemy.
“We need to keep lights low,” he said. “Lights mean signal and signal means death.”
“What about the people below me?” I asked. “They’re still here.”
“Don’t let them in,” he said. “Not yet.”
10
The men below didn’t obey. They banged the iron door with battered tools and shouted about hunger. They argued about morality like men arguing about weather.
“One of them, Mariano, tried to climb,” I told myself. “He wanted to get in.”
When his foot slipped, I thought: if he makes it, it will mean a new kind of end. I had bought a small, heavy pistol when the town emptied. I had not wanted to use it, but I held it like a promise.
“Don’t make me do this,” I said aloud. Hope twined around my ankles and blinked like a small comet.
Mariano got to a place where my fingers hovered like a trap. He hammered and scraped and cursed. He thought the tower was a prize, a home to be taken. I thought of the words Travis said about mutation and waiting. I thought of the videos he had sent me—of mouths and of teeth. I thought of the cat in my lap.
He reached up and I tipped the sack of lime I'd saved from the old wall paint and poured it. It created a white rain that blotted his head and eyes. He fell, screaming like a man who’d been suddenly abandoned by his senses, and slid to the ground.
“Let us in!” he screamed. “You—monster—give us the door!”
I fired a shot above their heads, a warning, the way a parent might clap once. It sent them scattering.
11
And then they starved.
I watched them in the days that followed. I watched every petty cruelty and every small glorious moment of survival. I watched as loneliness turned them inward, as hunger turned them out.
One night, they ate one of their own—the one who had smelled the thing on the riverbank—because he had handled something he shouldn't have. They made a feast in the rain and laughter that sounded like breaking glass. I watched the flames, my breath bunched into the scarf that I had knitted with impatience and fear.
“What does it matter?” Carver asked the fire. “We are hungry.”
“It matters,” Penn said weakly. “It matters to remember species.”
They did not remember.
12
The world kept making new horrors.
The first thing we called an Omega—what I had written in the notebook as omega, for the way it appeared like a thick gaunt parasite made of blood and nerves—broke out of a cocoon people had made out of hundred dead bodies. It crawled out like the inside of a storm and then it made a meal of a man in the street as if the man were nothing more than roughage.
I watched through the lens. I wrote descriptions in bullets like an archivist of rot:
- Omega: born from mass body-cocoon. Body: neural-mass, tubed holes like a honeycomb. Feeds via proboscis-like tendrils that burrow into cranial cavities. Fast. Leaps.
- Behavior: hunts at dusk. Hates water. Forms nests. Returns.
I watch, and the thing that came from the cocoon crouched like a predatory geometry until it was satisfied. People called it a “mature form.” We called it a predator.
13
Once the Omega hatched, they began to collect like a stampede of nightmare.
It was the sort of scene that rewrites a person’s memory of what safety is. The city was a chessboard of smashed windows and bodies and new life the size of monstrous experiments. Then the next phase happened: they built the cocoons—piles of bodies wrapped in each other like a terrible chrysalis—and inside things changed, shaped, and burst.
When the first true mature form left a cocoon near the old market, the survivors around it tried to do the only thing humans can sometimes do well: they panicked. The monster unfurled its mouth—a thing that quieted the very pity out of people—and then it fed. In minutes it unmade a small crowd.
I wrote it all down. Travis called and he was quieter than I had ever heard him.
“Kiley,” he said. “There is a second-stage. The cocoons are their nursery. They’re breeding intelligence.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Alpha forms,” he said. “Some of the mature forms show problem-solving. We’re seeing coordinated hunting. Don’t touch the cocoons.”
14
Word traveled in a broken sort of geography. Survivors consolidated in pockets and then forgot the geography entirely. I watched a group of people—an organized crew, soldierlike in equipment—approach the gorge weeks later to blow the iron bridge I had crossed on my way to the lighthouse. They detonated charges. I saw the whole bridge turn into a scream of metal and sparks.
I saw something else after that. As the bridge fell and the river churned, the Omega forms rushed to the edge. They did not enter the water even though they were faster than men. They assembled like an army on the far bank and howled in a way that was of no language I knew.
Someone in those men had tried to keep the bridge intact. Someone had not trusted the lighthouse’s isolation the way I had.
15
The survivors who demolished the bridge thought they'd bought themselves a safe perimeter. They were wrong. They were also starved and desperate in the way that made humans either brave or ugly. The group that came to the lighthouse after the bridge had been blown were the same three—Mariano, Carver, Penn—plus a new face, Zed—whom they treated like a younger brother.
They tried to negotiate at first, and then insisted and then tried to assault.
“Let’s talk,” Zed said when he crept toward the door with a rope.
“You should leave,” I wrote.
“We have a child,” he said. “We’re hungry.”
“Go away,” I wrote back.
“You have food, let us in,” Mariano shouted. “If you don’t, harsh times call for tough choices.”
“And if I open the door, will you leave with your hands empty?” I asked.
“I promise,” Mariano said.
I did not believe him.
16
Punishment
They were the kind of people who thought the rules were suggestions other people had written. For that alone I hated them. For their cruelty toward the woman in the hood, I resented them. For their cannibalism I made a calculation and wrote it down, small and clinical: predators eat their own when civilization stops being gentle.
But the law that says ‘bad people must pay’ is not mine to carry out. I watched as the world did something worse and more perfectly public.
It started with a rumor I did not spread. The men in the old market—a band of discarded farmers who had made a brutal code of survival—heard that the men near the lighthouse had eaten someone. They came with old implements and torches and a righteousness that can curl steel. They did not move quietly. Their arrival was a procession, a clumsy court of people wounded and proud, and they had eyes like accusation.
I watched them assemble on the ridge across from the lighthouse at dawn. There were twenty of them, and they had banners of fabric tied to sticks, and they had made a list in the mud and nailed it to a tree: A LIST OF WRONGS. The men from the campsite below saw them and began to tremble with something I had seen before—panic, or pride, or the realization that someone now had the authority to judge.
“Open the door!” they begged, finally. “Open!”
“No,” I wrote. “Stay away.”
Mariano had an idea: he would stand, he would step forward, and he would claim the moral high ground. He called down to me, voice ugly in the cold light: “We’re not animals. We didn’t do… what they did. Let us in and prove it.”
The farmers across from me were not there for proof; they were there for vengeance. They had wives and fathers who had been eaten or taken or stolen. Their faces made that day look like a tribunal.
It was public.
The first blow of punishment was not mine. In that way it felt both inevitable and fair.
Mariano stood and boasted and tried to explain the nuance of desperation. He gestured toward the men from the shore like a man choosing a color in a paint shop. “We were pushed,” he said. “We had to—” And his voice broke.
A torch tumbled. Something—someone—shouted. A whistle blew. Then the farmers massed, and their judge was not law but grief.
They dragged the men forward, rough and half-blinded with panic, and exposed their deeds. One broad-shouldered woman spat as they displayed the evidence—the meat someone had hung under a tarp, the way it had been salted to keep—“for later.” The crowd hissed. “They ate a woman,” someone cried. “They ate their own.”
In my notebook I wrote the sequence like a medical report but my hands shook.
Mariano tried to deny. “We only—” he began.
“No!” the woman with the torch said. “You chose.”
They were forced into the open square like a bad show. People had gathered along the ridge. Young men who had been brave in the dark now looked away. Someone had cued a few cell-phone cameras—phones now precious like toys—and a small crowd on the ridge filmed the whole thing. The cameras whirred. The tweets and the feeds were not yet global but they were shards of a wild audience.
“Shame!” someone called. “Shame!”
The farmers stripped the men of their wet clothes, and what followed was a ritual of humiliation and exposure that does not belong on paper. They were made to sit on the cold stones and forced to look at the remnants of the world they had participated in destroying. Mariano’s face collapsed into a mask of disbelief and anger; Carver’s jaw clamped so hard it whitened at the skin; Penn trembled, eyes like a man who had expected a different fate, denial at first—then bargaining.
“You don’t understand,” Mariano said, voice rising. “We were hungry. We were cornered. We—”
“You used that hunger to become cruel,” the woman interrupted, each syllable like a flint. “You ate a person. You made a choice.”
There was a public list of their acts and a demand: confession. The men were forced to recount the details, step by step—how they had argued. How they had burned the meat. How they had justified it with myth and hunger.
Mariano’s performance moved from arrogance to anger. He spat and cursed. He laughed at one point, a try at contempt, “You judge us, but you would do the same.” He smiled a terrible smile but the cameras kept rolling. There were neighbors who wanted them hurt and neighbors who wanted them dead. There were men who wanted blood.
“Please,” Carver begged. “We’re sorry.”
Denial metastasized into fury, then collapse. Their faces shifted: first they were smug, then shocked, then pleading, then frantic. “You have to let us go,” Penn said. “We can be useful.”
People went quiet. One of the older farmers—call him Eli, because that will keep the memory shapely—stepped forward and did what small communities find to do: he asked for a punishment that would be public enough to unmake the memory of the eating, but not so barbaric that it became a blood carnival.
“You will work,” he said. “You will confess on the ridge and you will perform penance for each night you fed on flesh. You will go to the places you stole from and you will rebuild what you can. We will watch, and if any of you fail, we will remove you from the living.”
Mariano roared at him and tried to swing, but a dozen hands held him down, wrists squeezed like ropes. They dragged him to the well and scrubbed him with salt and berry bark and poured strong tea on his face until the salt cleaned his eyes and then the crowd forced him to stand and recite his crimes like a prayer. Carver was made to climb the ruined fence and repair it, every hour, watched by a man with a ledger who struck a mark if the work was poor. Penn was given the worst duty: he was to stand in the watch and call out at night for three weeks in an attempt to regain the trust he had plundered.
The punishments were public because the atrocity was public. People recorded it, and those recordings rippled into other pockets of survivors who had not yet formed law beyond the necessity of life. The men’s faces changed from arrogance to a red-raw pleading, then to hollow understanding. They tried to deny. They pleaded about hunger. They promised. They begged. They denied. They broke.
I watched from the lighthouse and the cameras kept shining into my little room like a set of accusing moons. Some of the watchers cheered their punishments; some spat. People wrote things in the mud that read like ancient verdicts: NEVER FORGET, NEVER ALLOW.
At one point Mariano sobbed in a way that came from somewhere else entirely—like someone who at last felt the weight of what he’d done. His voice ran like a broken wire, “I didn’t think—I didn’t—” He kept saying that because he couldn’t say the truth: I did know and I did it anyway.
The audience gasped at the moment when the leader of the farmers—Eli—spat at Mariano’s boots. “Let that be the salt on your conscience,” he said. Photographs captured it. A dozen people who had been mocked, stolen from, or whose kin had been eaten spat on him. They were not violent beyond their desire to preserve their small patch of order. Their punishment was humiliation and obligation and the insistence that the men could only live if they earned it.
When the cameras stopped, the farmfolk returned to their trenches. The men—Mariano, Carver, Penn—stayed and worked. Their faces were raw and taught with the effort, and the wound of the world had become their labor.
I did not smile because I had not arranged it. I only recorded it and watched the play of human law on human sin, and I wrote notes in the white margin of my book.
Somewhere, a child recorded the end on a cracked phone and later it traveled to another half-quiet camp where people who had believed in unending hunger read it and said, “See? There is shame. There is consequence.”
A week later, one of them tried to desert his sentence. They found him and brought him back. The public punishment had a power I had not anticipated: the world needed its small, crooked fairness like a man needs a bandage.
I felt sick watching it, and at the same time, calmer. The punishment was ugly and public and needed because the offence had been public and monstrous. People needed to see an answer to the appetite that had become irresistible.
When the last of the tasks was done, the men stood before the ridge and spoke short words of apology into the cold, and the crowd murmured. It was not forgiveness. It was a record. It was a line drawn in the snow.
17
The punishment changed the men. It did not clean them. It made them visible. It made them accountable. They continued to work and the town watched them while the Omega hunkered in the city and larval husks formed like dark onions in the streets.
I watched the cameras and closed my notebook and thought: justice is messy. Public punishment is messier. It is the small law we keep for the sake of being human.
18
Afterward, when the cameras moved on and the fires dwindled, the Omegacocoons multiplied. The second wave showed us how clever the virus could be. It made its own leathery nests of bodies and then it split from the body like a parasite leaving its host. The forms now hunted in packs with patterns. They nested in the ruins and created fortifications out of human bodies. Their behavior had logic that was not human.
“One more call,” Travis managed through static. “They’re forming… nests. The second evolution is shaping.”
“What do we do?” I asked.
“We learn to hide from them,” he said. “We learn that water is an edge. We learn to be quiet.”
19
Winter closed around the lighthouse. My garden of pots produced small things: peppers like tiny suns, basil that smelled like a basil heaven, radishes that I ate like candies. I stood over them like a mother ruining the timesheet. Hope curled in the hummock of my coat and slept.
I kept the light off.
I kept records.
And I wondered, always, if my brother, trapped somewhere in the Five-Star Empire, was still alive.
20
One night I heard a new sound that made the ocean sound like a lullaby. The moon came up red and the Omegans—those new creatures—began to move in ways that looked like a collective intelligence testing its muscles. It was like watching an insect hive. They twitched, bundled, and then collapsed into a shape that was not alive in the way we meant life. The cocoon count increased.
The air smelled of salt and something that refused the name of rot. I held Hope in both hands and watched the moon while I scribbled in the notebook.
Travis’s final message, when it came, was a plea and then a promise. “I will come,” he said. “I am being held but—Kiley—I will come.”
I put the phone down and touched the small black cat’s fur, and thought of home.
I breathed in the ocean and wrote, and the lighthouse held its light in its glass, and I believed that if the world ended, it would do so in an orderly paragraph.
The End
— Thank you for reading —