The scent of flayed human flesh followed him as he trailed after her with a limp, his bare feet slapping against the asphalt, leaving smears of blood in his path. The reanimated corpse-boy had no name, it dissolved with the flesh on his tongue. What was left of him however, was rot and decay along with the worms in his guts and the maggots eating his brains. And she didn't see him but she could smell him. 


Moira carried her body as if she was a ghost herself-eyes hollow and unblinking, a sunken face, and so thin she showed bones. Her black, oversized clothes hung off her figure like they were trying to escape the body beneath. The oversized hoodie she wore was torn at the edges, falling apart at the seams and caked with crimson liquid that didn't belong to her. 


Moira hadn't eaten in days, but she didn't feel hunger as her stomach was like a phantom organ. She picked at the skin on her fingers then reached towards her wrist to feel for a pulse. Of course it was there, she just didn't feel one. 


The corpse-boy didn't speak. He couldn't. His jaw hung on one side, the bone cracked and sagging from where it had been chewed through as he attempted to readjust his chin. Bugs nested in the hollow behind his ear, crawling in and out of the socket like they belonged there. Despite his white and milky eyes, he could just make out Moira's figure and continued to follow her throughout the cemetery. 


Moira had gone to the graveyard to find proof-of her own grave. If she was dead, surely someone had buried her, maybe left her flowers even. Instead she found him. His hand had reached out of the earth, dirt packed under his cracked fingernails, pulling himself as his vertebrae continued to click. 


"Are you one of mine?" She had whispered, his head tilting like he died by hanging as if the noose was still tied around hiss head. 


Currently the walking corpse was still behind her, his foot snagged on a root, and he collapsed into the leaves. Something crunched as he hit the ground-probably his jaw again, but he didn't make a sound. He just dragged himself upright again, a broken hand flopping at the end of his arm like a dead fish. A strip of skin peeled from his neck as he moved, revealing a raw, pulsing artery. If she wasn't dead inside she'd probably laugh. 


Moira turned. "You don't have to keep following me." He stared at her, his tongue lolled from the side of his mouth, black and bloated. If he could respond she wouldn't have heard him anyways. So she sighed and kept walking.


She had unplugged her ears with scissors a few nights ago. The corpse-boy had watched her do it as she had sat on the floor of her bedroom slicing careful incisions around the soft cartilage. Blood spilled down her jawline, didn't even flinched. But the corpse-boy had mimicked the motion, dragging one jagged fingernail across his own earlobe until it split open and peeled like fruit. Like they were kindred.


They came to a gas station that stank of piss and old meat. One of the neon letters buzzed above the door, blinking sporadically like it was trying to send a message in Morse code. Moira wandered toward it, drawn to the flickering light, but the corpse-boy paused because was someone inside, someone living. 


The drunks head had lolled against the glass of the fridge where he'd been leaning, breathing fog onto the frosted door when his eyes caught the boy's silhouette in the dark and widened.


"What the hell..." He muttered, stumbling toward the window. Still, the corpse didn't move as Moira watched. The man stepped outside, holding a half-empty bottle of a beer while slurring his words as he tried to sober up. 


"You look like shit." The man said, snorting before the boy lunged. 


His fingers dug into the man's throat, his nails snapped off as they scraped the old drunk's bone. The man screamed and gurgled as his windpipe collapsed in on itself, blood spraying from the gash. misting the boy's face in a red veil. The boy bit down-not to feed, not like an animal. Just to taste.


Moira didn't scream nor run... She was hungry. 


As the corpse sanked his teeth deeper into flesh, Moira licked her lips as if she was reminiscing her own autopsy. She almost giggled as the man fell to the cement - almost, seeing how much dead she was not the inside as the boy was dead on the outside. 


Moira twitched as an idea came to her, approaching the bloody corpse. The idea was this, she was going to remove the dead mans organs and surgically insert them into her. Maybe with each organ she would no longer be dead inside. "And you're going to help me."