The sun was setting rapidly, it was already long over the horizon, and the ruin of a house down the hill was the only shelter in sight so Sophie figured she better make for it and hope it was empty. Staying out in the open wasn't much of an option.
She crept up to the building silently, watching the windows and keeping low. When she was nearly at the door there was sudden movement in one of those windows, so she ducked out of view, pressing herself against a wall and not daring to breathe. Brighteyes, they had to be brighteyes, flailing about like that. There was some shuffling, then a thud, then nothing.
Sophie waiting another moment, then carefully lifted herself to peek through the corner of a window. The brighteyes was laying on the floor, not moving. She watched closely, but saw no sign of breathing either.
Just as Sophie was working up the courage to go investigate, someone yelled from elsewhere in the house, "Jerry! Jerry you a*****e, where's the rest of the diamond? There was at least two more hits there, you best have left me my half!" The woman belonging to the voice stepped in to the room and Sophie ducked lower to avoid being seen. Another brighteyes, by the look of it - her eyes were getting the beginning of the the telltale red tinge as the sun disappeared.
"Get up you lazy son of a b***h," the woman screeched at the figure on the ground, walking over to it and kicking it. "Get up! Get up! Hey...get up Jerry. Jerry?" The woman's attitude changed as her companion failed to react to violence. She knelt down and held one of his eyes open, put her head to his chest, shook his body, but nothing. "Oh Jerry, oh god Jerry, no Jerry..." Sophie didn't think brighteyes were capable of real emotions beyond rage and drug euphoria, but there was something resembling sadness in the woman's voice.
For a moment anyway. Her red eyes drifted close to Sophie, to something just out of Sophie's view below her window, and the sadness flipped to red hot anger. Sophie ducked as the woman came charging toward her, but the woman stopped short, picked something up off the floor and let out a banshee shriek like nothing Sophie had heard before. "JERRY! YOU TOOK ALL THE CRYSTAL AND KILLED YOURSELF AND LEFT NONE FOR ME YOU UNGRATEFUL a**! I SOLD MYSELF TO THOSE TRADERS FOR THIS, THIS WAS MINE!" Sophie didn't dare look through the window to see what the woman had found, but she could easily assume it was the empty container their shiner had been in.
Sophie stayed low as the woman tore the room apart, from the sound of it, shattering glass and splintering wood. The angry thrashing moved away from Sophie's hiding spot and to another room, accompanied by angry muttering. Once it had been quiet for a good long while, Sophie hazarded a peek through the window again, just in time to see the woman's return. She held weathered looking doctor's bag in one hand and used the other to rummage through it. Finally she found what she had been looking for - an antique looking syringe, brass colored and huge, and so threw the bag into a corner. When she knelt by the corpse, Sophie could see she was shaking violently, probably in desperate need of a fix.
"Think you can steal all my diamond huh? HUH? I'll drain every last bit out of you JERRY, EVERY LAST BIT!" Sophie puzzled over what exactly the woman could be talking about, but didn't have to wait long to find out. The woman plunged the syringe into the corpse's face, right at the eye, and drew out as much blood as the syringe would collect. She then quite expertly tapped it for bubbles, rolled up her sleeve and injected the blood into her own arm. Sophie held back a retch, but could not look away as the woman repeated the process several more times. Sophie was skeptical about the effectiveness of this action, but several syringes full of blood seemed to satisfy the brighteyes woman, actual effects or no. She lay back on the floor, twitching rapidly.
At long last Sophie stopped watching, sat down in the dirt outside the house and wept. She felt she should have been weeping for what had become of humanity, for the greater tragedy before her, but in that moment all she could think of was that this was the closest she'd come to human contact since lowering Lena's body into the deepest hole she could dig by herself and covering it with rocks and earth. She was so alone.
