The shovel bit into the dirt with a thick grainy sound, the wet smell of the earth did little to cover the copper sent of blood and worse that coated her still. It was in her hair, under her nails, it coated her skin like a flaking coating of corroding pennies.
She paused panting hard with the effort, even in uniform it was hard work, she glanced out of the hole, almost done, it was almost deeper than she was tall. She could almost imagine the “Wasgo” man of her persistent nightmares leering down at her from the edge of the pit.
His dark skin was nearly as coated in gore and dirt as hers. The difference was he seemed happier about it.
The stars… they looked more desperate some how. Tiny points of light struggling to pierce the deep velvet black of the sky, darker even than the night sky when visiting the island with her family where there were fewer houses and cities to gnaw at the hem of night.

“I’d kill for some normalcy…” She quipped as she dug another shovel full of dirt, cursing as she struck another stone and chipped clean an edge of it to a line of sharp ‘injured’ white. She stooped and picked it up, hefting it in her hand before hurling it hard out of the pit.

“Would you now…” said someone from the outside edge of the pit, out of view. It was a familiar voice.
“I think you’d kill for a lot of things now.”

Captain Hematite? Obsidian? … Charonite? Her chest knotted in a moment of fear.
An animal twist of uncertainty, fight or flight at its very finest.

“Perhaps…” She answered carefully “But not ‘anything.’” She added carefully weighing the importance of her words.

“No?” the voice questioned, moving around the edge of the pit… “Then who’s grave is this?”

She stopped, an electric fear running up and down her limbs. “Does it matter?” She asked trying to sound like she didn’t care. She didn’t want to care…she was so damned tired of caring. She dug another shovel full of earth and started to toss it out and stopped dead staring confused at what lay mixed into the dirt.

She clutched the shovel one handed and reached for it with trembling fingers, a nostalgia, a warmth and kindness came with it… just a bit, but it was more than she had become used to in her dreams.

“Perhaps it does, perhaps it doesn’t” the voice answered. “Sometime you can’t tell till it’s too late.”

She stared down at the ‘Zero’ bar clutched in her hand… so out of place, so odd to see. She half hated them, but her father used to bring them home to her from the odd vending machine where he worked. It had been converted from cigarettes to candy bars at some point in the past, and seemed to be the only place the odd white chocolate-coated bars were found.

She was almost happy remembering as she held it, till a rain of dirt spilled into the hole.
The Wasgo stood at the edge of the pit grinning with bodies clutched in its firsts.
Her Father… Her mother… her Nephew who’d just arrived that morning… and Toki, who she’d asked over to hike. Bloodied, broken, twisted and battered past humanity.

They landed on top of her and she screamed, clutching absurdly to a silver wrapper as dirt came raining down to blot out the stars.