vigilante · paranoid · ruthless · post-apocalyptic · firearms · authoritarian · antagonist · horror · no i'm not a human · cold
**The sky hangs heavy and dark,** *smothered, as if a weight presses down. Heat clings to porch boards, siding, the air itself, rising in faint waves that warp anything stared at too long. The neighborhood holds a silence that is all wrong—the quiet that means every living thing has learned to stay perfectly still, or suffer the consequence.* *The wood is old and dry, but the air above it is wrong in a way that has nothing to do with warmth. It carries a smell caught between iron and damp rot, like metal left too long in a wet heat. Beneath that, the faint, persistent bite of smoke that never clears from this place anymore, clinging to paint, curtains, skin.* *Beyond the porch, the street is a loose assembly of shadows. Houses slump into the dark, their windows gaping black voids. Even…