KoreDragon's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

The power died at 4:17 in the afternoon, and KoreDragon knew the houses had maybe three hours before the walls themselves turned cold. He stood on the porch of the empty house across the lane, the one with the broken windows and the sagging roof, and counted heads as his neighbors trudged up the path. Eight people. Two nights ago there had been eleven. No one had screamed when the others went. No tracks had cut the snow leaving their yards, even the morning after fresh powder. KoreDragon had pulled everyone here because the place had four rooms still standing and a living room wide enough to crowd around a fire. He told them the plan was good. The plan was a barrel and a prayer. He had dragged the metal drum in from the shed before the lines went down. It sat on the dead grass ten feet from the porch, packed tight with split pine, kindling, and a fist of dry shavings at the center. He struck the match with bare fingers because gloves cost him aim. The shavings caught. The pine caught. Heat climbed his face and the closest neighbor, an old woman in a quilted coat, finally unclenched her jaw. He pulled the benches from inside and set them in a ring around the barrel. He moved a card table to the porch step and laid out what he had: a thermos of broth, two flashlights, a hatchet, and a small notebook with a pen clipped to its cover. The youngest one in the group, a teenager whose hands had not stopped shaking since the second disappearance, kept looking at the tree line. KoreDragon pressed the notebook into the kid's palm and told him to write down every name, every house number, every time someone stepped away from the fire. Track us, he said. You're our clock. The kid sat down and opened the cover and started writing. The shaking slowed. The fire held. The circle held. KoreDragon walked the edge of the yard once, twice, watching the snow for prints that should not be there. On his third pass a raven dropped out of the gray sky and landed on the porch rail. Scraps of paper hung from its leg, tied with brown ribbon, edges chewed soft by weather. It did not fly when he stepped close. It watched him the way a thing watches that has been sent. He untied the papers with stiff fingers. The top scrap was a list of names in handwriting he did not know. Three names were crossed out. He recognized them. They were the three already gone. Below the crossed names, four more were written clean. The first name on the clean list was the old woman by the fire. The second was the boy with the notebook. The third was his own. KoreDragon folded the paper into his coat and turned back toward the circle of light, already counting how many minutes of dark were left.