Chapter Text
Mumbo’s computer keeps on flickering at him like an accusation.
Of course, he doesn’t know how much longer he’ll have power. So far he’s been lucky. The power plants supplying power to his house haven’t shut down yet, and he’s charged so many of the power packs he’s hoarded over the years that he’s pretty sure he can keep both his phone and his company pager working. He has solar power bricks too! So, ideally, once his power goes out, he’ll still be able to communicate, assuming that there’s anyone left in the world to communicate with.
He hasn’t opened his door in several days. Last time he tried, well, suffice it to say, it didn’t really go well. He’ll have to leave at some point. He needs food? Food that isn’t the collection of instant soup and energy bars he had stacked for when he didn’t want to have to do anything fancy while working (which is all the time). So he does have food and, and drinks and really he could probably last another month or so without going anywhere, even though he’d get very, very tired of soup and energy bars.
His computer flickers at him. He has not turned it off of his chat messenger in the time since he got the last message he’d gotten on it.
It’s safe here. Compared to outside, it’s definitely… safe-er, at least. No one has successfully broken down his door yet. That’s probably good? He’s not sure his neighbors know his apartment is actually occupied, though. Maybe if they get desperate they really will break in and given what the last neighbor he saw looked like he is, perhaps, a bit concerned about what happens if someone breaks into his apartment. He’s never been so glad he cheaped out on windows.
He means, imagine if he were out there , and if he hadn’t had enough bookcases to board up the windows? Then, then he really doesn’t know what he’d do. So he can just stay here. It’s safe here. He’ll slowly starve to death on soup, sure, but that’s probably—like, he’d die a lot faster going outside, right?
<Grian>: brb
Right. Right. He’s fine. He’s fine here! And he’s not. His computer flickers horribly at him, that last conversation. That last message. 3:36 PM. He’d—he had tried to call! He had. Mumbo didn’t… didn’t just let his best friend vanish, he’d tried to call. And then Grian hadn’t answered and, oh, Mumbo wished they still lived remotely near each other. Mumbo wishes that they had visited each other in person in the past two years. Mumbo plays with his earrings. Maybe he could have checked, right then, and then everything would have been—well probably not fine, really, considering what’s outside if Mumbo opens his door, but—
There’s a pounding on his door. Mumbo swallows. He hears scratching, scratching, pounding, please don’t be strong enough to break the deadbolt? Please don’t be strong enough to break the deadbolt, please.
Please.
Please.
The scratching stops. Mumbo slumps against the ground and plays with his earrings.
He’s—oh, he’s running out of time, isn’t he? He’s running out of anything resembling time. He could barricade his apartment further, sure, and he’s quite good at inventing things. But he’s running out of time, incredibly quickly, for some measure of time.
His computer flickers accusingly at him.
He’s running out of time, and he’s running out of time to do the one thing he probably needs to do, too. He’ll need food eventually. He waits for the scratching to leave his door and makes himself soup and breathes. He, he can stay here, he can!
It’s better than outside, at least. Safer here. It’s safer.
Soup, Mumbo decides, sort of tastes like mud when you’re an anxious mess and also it’s all you’ve had to eat for like, a week. Mind you, that might just be that microwave instant soup can really only be but so good, and that he doesn’t really normally pay attention to what it tastes like anyway so he just buys something he knows he’ll willingly eat and doesn’t consider making sure the soup is varied or anything. And he doesn’t mind! He doesn’t even normally notice. But when you don’t have much else to focus on but the soup and your impending demise? Mud! Absolutely and entirely like mud!
He shovels mud-like chicken noodle soup into his mouth anyway, though. You know, this is the closest to regular meals he’s had in a while. He tends to forget while he’s working, but, uh, it’s pretty hard to forget when he’s trying, trying not to…
He hears… something… scream.
It’s fine. He’s fine. He’ll keep eating his mud soup. Or, chicken noodle. Not mud! If he starts calling it mud soup then, haha, well, he’s not going to want to eat at all, and that, that wouldn’t be good, now would it?
...haha.
Really, he’s lucky, here, what with the electricity still on, and his microwave still working, and his computer still glowing like an accusation on his desk. He could probably even access the internet and get something! He uses an ethernet connection, after all, rather than wireless, so he thinks that probably has a better chance of working. He’d gotten it when he’d gotten his new government job, since he’d need to be on the internet so much more, working from home.
He’s probably lucky he works from home, given that he has all this lunch food. And by all this lunch food, he means the same instant soup he had every time he remembered to eat lunch, and that he’s now trying to ration so he’s eating it more like, uh, weird breakfast? Yeah, weird breakfast! That is also lunch. And also sort of dinner.
The fact that this is easting more regularly than usual, given the, the whole, you know, what it’s like outside. That’s got to count for something, doesn’t it? It definitely can’t just count for nothing. That would be silly, and that would mean Mumbo has nothing to be optimistic about, just a, a whole lot of guilt, and fear, and even more fear on top of that, really.
He has to have something to be optimistic about. Anything at all.
There’s a scream that’s definitely human outside and Mumbo—Mumbo, he. Mumbo.
He eats his soup. He’s almost out of soup. Eating it is mechanical. It tastes like mud. He finishes his soup. He stares at the empty can.
He—you know, this sort of thing is really funny. He doesn’t go outside for days sometimes entirely on his own, no apocalypse to cause it at all! He just, he gets really, really into his work sometimes, you see, and then doesn’t feel like leaving, even though he really ought to. So this isn’t so bad, really!
The screaming stops. It’s… it’s worse than the screaming.
This isn’t so bad! It’s.
Oh, who is he kidding? Not even himself! Not that there’s anyone else to kid. He hasn’t even gotten a message from his coworkers in days, let alone his friends—
<Grian>: brb
Of all the stupid last things for Grian to have said, before everything went wrong, too. Of all the things to say. Mumbo—if Mumbo had lived closer, had been braver, had realized what was happening earlier on, maybe he could have gone to check. But Grian hadn’t even said if what he’d left for was, was a microwave pizza, or a strange noise, or the, the. The twisting and changing that everyone outside seemed to have been undergoing. Maybe it had been Grian’s cat. Maybe Grian’s computer crashed. Maybe Grian was dead and, and…
Now, he can’t go thinking like that, now can he? Even given, well, the screaming outside. And, and what little Mumbo had seen of what had happened to his neighbors. And the occasional pounding on the door. Mumbo has not left his apartment in days because of those things. Maybe Grian just lost power, and had the good sense not to get into anything? Grian lives sort of in a less populated area than Mumbo does, anyway. So he’s not in nearly as much danger as Mumbo is, and Mumbo is still alive.
Sort of.
Sick on soup, sure. A ticking clock to demise, is what he is. If whatever is happening around here is caused by the water or something, well, haha, unless Mumbo’s immune or something, he’s really screwed, isn’t he? Because Mumbo didn’t think to pull out the Brita he’s normally too lazy to use until like, three days in, when it hit him the tap water probably wasn’t safe anymore. Even then, if it’s weird mutating water, the filter pitcher probably won’t save Mumbo.
Or maybe it’s over.
And maybe Grian is dead.
Maybe everyone Mumbo knows is dead, and he’s locked himself in his tomb, and the last things he’s going to know are his terrible soup that tastes like mud and the flickering of a computer screen. Who knows? Mumbo sure doesn’t! If he did, he certainly would have figured it out by now. It’s all he’s had to think about for the past week, at least. The fact that he’s dying. Oh, dear, that’s, that’s morbid, isn’t it?
Maybe he’ll work up the nerve to do more than send one message to all his friends, asking where they are. Maybe he can send another one, and another one after that, and someone will answer.
Or maybe they still won’t, and…
Mumbo hears knocking at the door again. He wants, he wants to tell it he’s not here. The door shakes. A loud scraping, a louder scraping, a howling sound, a scream.
He’s. He’s not used to the screams. He’ll not get used to the screams.
It leaves again.
Mumbo buries his head in his arms. He doesn’t know what to do. He doesn’t know what to do.
Mumbo’s power has started flickering. Really, this has probably been a while coming. As best Mumbo can tell, there aren’t, um, any people to man the power stations anymore? So. So really, the power flickering is to be expected. It means Mumbo can’t safely leave all his electronics plugged in. His work laptop. His desktop. He plugs in every single power pack he owns (he owns seven, somehow) in a futile attempt to make sure they’re all entirely charged before the world ends. Or, well. The power goes out.
World’s already ended, hasn’t it?
What will he do when the power goes out? His weather app isn’t updating properly anymore, and he doesn’t own a proper thermometer. Who owns a thermometer in a seventh-floor apartment, right? He just checks his phone, really, no need to hang measuring instruments out his window to inevitably drop them on some poor passerby. Except, well, that’s really backfired, now hasn’t it? It’s summer, at least, so it can’t possibly be getting so cold that a lack of power will kill him.
The lack of refrigeration for food would, but Mumbo’s fridge is embarrassingly empty, anyway. He should really do something about that. He would, if he wasn’t going to die here.
No, no, no, that’s very pessimistic. Look how many power packs he has! And how much soup. In fact, there are other things he could do. He could pull out his old electrical engineering and mechanic’s kits. He already has. A toolbox, a Raspberry Pi, and a number of small soldering parts are scattered on his table. He’d been trying to finish an old project, the one he promised to give Grian the next time they got to see each other, the talking parrot with very terrible AI. Now, by AI, Mumbo didn’t mean, uh, a learning algorithm, so much as something about as smart as a Roomba with a slightly more complicated decision tree, but.
Grian wouldn’t be getting it, though, which rather put a damper in things, didn’t it?
(He’d promised Grian would get it when he finished.)
He hears rain hit the top of his AC unit. He has the AC unit turned off. He’s saving power. He knows it won’t help, should the power go out, but it makes him feel better.
It’s not safe to leave his work computer plugged in. Right. That’s what he was doing, wasn’t it? Unplugging it.
Of course, if he does that, his status will show as offline, instead of just idle or online, and what if someone tries to message him? He won’t see it! He could, he could get it set up on his phone? Right. He has six power bricks. He can keep his phone charged.
<Grian>: brb
Mumbo considers. He takes a deep breath.
<MumboJumbo>: hey guys i am unplugging my computer because there might be a power surge but you should still be able to get to me on my pager!
<MumboJumbo>: be okay please
He hovers over the last message. He considers deleting it. It sounds—well it sounds a bit childish, doesn’t it? Asking them to be okay like that. The world is scary right now, though. He can be a bit childish this one time, can’t he? He just wants anyone to answer.
He sits there for almost half an hour, hoping someone will answer. Anyone at all.
<Grian>: brb
They don’t.
“This is all… really stupid,” he says. His voice sounds hoarse. He’s been the only person he can talk to lately, and it means he’s done quite a bad job of doing it, either talking too much and hurting his throat, or talking none at all and hurting his throat worse. He didn’t know not using something could make it hurt that bad. Haha. His poor social skills. All this, really, after only several days of talking to no one at all?
The power flickers again. Mumbo lets himself yelp outloud, and then giggles softly to himself. “Oh, oh I’m… I’m in a very bad place, aren’t I?” He rubs his face. He’s so tired, but he can’t just sleep. Just sleeping through every day will just make him sick, and he’s run out of ways to sleep. Maybe he should go back to trying to work on his circuit boards?
He hears a noise outside and jumps again. He smooths down his shirt and looks at his soldering kit.
...maybe he shouldn’t be holding a device that heats metals to 400 degrees when there are things happening that could startle him.
No, but working on circuit boards is calming. He can… put aside his current project. The bird toy was a joke, anyway. He can’t get it to Grian, anyway. He’ll just… work on some of his other electronics projects. Yeah. He does have that off-brand Roomba he keeps tinkering with. He’s not sure it works as a vacuum cleaner anymore, but it definitely works as several other things!
He doesn’t unplug his computer. He knows he needs to. If a power surge kills his laptop, well, he can’t really afford to reimburse his boss, and there’s a lot of good information on that machine. He should really… shut it down. Save power. Mumbo’s power packs aren’t good enough to power a laptop, really, not long-term. His phone, sure, but not his laptop.
He breathes in. He breathes out. He goes back to tearing apart and re-wiring the roomba again. He lets metal parts scatter on the floor around him in the humid apartment. He leaves an ear open. Maybe someone will respond. Maybe someone will. He doesn’t know.
The power flickers again.
The power goes out. The soldering iron in Mumbo’s hands abruptly turns off. Great. That probably… that’s going to be a pain to fix later. Oh. Oh, his laptop—it’s still working. It didn’t surge. The screen dimmed, though, and is awkwardly showing black, and. And.
Great. Now his microwave won’t work. He breathes in. He breathes out. There’s no response from anyone. He shuts down his laptop. His windows are blocked, so he has to use his phone as a flashlight to make sure he doesn’t kill his feet on something he’s put on the ground. At least his water is still working. He can’t smell or see anything currently burning, so there probably isn’t anything that is urgent for him to fix at the moment, except perhaps the places where the metal he’d been soldering isn’t in the right state anymore, and. Why did he do that while the power was flickering?
He unplugs his power packs one by one. Stupid. Stupid. He is going to die here. He opens his phone up.
<Grian>: brb
He hears something scream outside. He hears—he hears—there are too many footsteps. There are too many legs. They shuffle down the hallway. His power is out now. He only has a limited supply of food, and—and—he hears the feet scrape against the ground, circling outside of his apartment. He covers his mouth. He’d gotten too loud earlier, probably. He has his windows blocked and his door deadbolted, but he’d gotten too loud, and they. They know he’s in here. Gods, gods, they’re his neighbors, too, or were his neighbors, he’s not sure they’re the same people anymore, but they’d know, they’d know there’s this, this weird computer engineer who works an obscure research job from home and barely talks and, and oh dear he’s not sure he even knows enough of his neighbors well enough to stop them from hurting him when they’re like that and the scraping circles his door and Mumbo barely dares to breathe and it could hear him—
—it leaves.
He is, he thinks, going to die in this stupid, stupid city apartment. He is going to die in a place he hadn’t really wanted to actually be and hasn’t been allowed to leave in too long. He is going to die here, and he doesn’t even know if anyone’s still alive to miss him.
He makes a strange noise in the back of his throat and curls his knees up to his chest. He needs… he needs…
He doesn’t want to die though, is the thing. He doesn’t.
He doesn’t want to die, not knowing what’s happened. Without knowing where Grian went. Without…
He doesn’t want to die.
He is going to die here.
He puts his head between his knees. He’s going to die here. Great. He’s going to slowly starve to death and no one will know. No one will know. No one.
No one.
And then his phone pings.
He almost doesn’t recognize the sound. And then, all at once, he does. He scrambles to open his messenger. Please, please, what—what—
<Grian>: sfkhjddelpl
<Grian>: HJEKLPO
<Grian>: da
Mumbo stares at it for several minutes. It’s entirely incomprehensible. It might not be Grian. It probably isn’t Grian. The only reason Mumbo isn’t dead is because he’s locked in an apartment and he’s not sure his neighbors know he lives here to go after him. He is going to die here. Grian is probably already dead. The messages were probably a monster or a very ambitious rat.
Mumbo barely thinks before he scrambles to respond.
<MumboJumbo>: grian? grian where are you
<MumboJumbo>: are you alive
<MumboJumbo>: grian
Predictably, there’s no answer. Mumbo’s heart pounds. He stares at his phone. He tries not to cry. It’s the first message he’s gotten in far too long, and it’s incomprehensible nonsense! He’d say that’s just like Grian but he really doesn’t think Grian meant to do that. Bizarre and frankly confusing pranks are all Grian, but cruelty really isn’t, and Mumbo thinks Grian would know where the line is here.
Not telling Mumbo that he’s alive is cruel. Grian couldn’t have meant to—but he could have meant to send the message.
He could have meant to be telling Mumbo… something.
Or he could have meant nothing at all. It might not even be Grian. What’s the point?
Mumbo stares at his phone for a while. He looks across the room. The soft glow of his phone illuminates the scattered parts of both the roomba and the parrot toy. There are pictures on the wall of the last time he hung out with Iskall. There’s that stupid mustache poster Iskall bought him. There’s the silly “Mumbo for Mayor” poster Grian made that one time to confuse their coworkers with. Outside, he hears something scratching at the walls again.
He looks down at his phone.
...that was through the work messaging system. Which means Mumbo can log in and figure out if it was sent from Grian’s normal location. So he does; it’s from Grian’s townhouse, or at least, from Grian’s IP. Which means… what? Grian lives a good distance away, at least twelve hours by car, and Mumbo doesn’t own one of those. The bus system, obviously, is right out. There are monsters outside, who used to be Mumbo’s neighbors. If Grian isn’t dead, he’s probably a monster too, and Mumbo’s yet to see proof that any of the beasts are sapient.
He glances back towards his kitchen, with all of its terrible soup.
“This is a horrible idea,” he says, quietly, and he walks to his closet and pulls out the biggest backpack he still owns.
The door is blocked. So are the windows. But he doesn’t want to die, and something sent him a message from Grian’s location.
“I will absolutely get eaten, or, or killed, or just die of radiation or something, if I go outside,” he says. “I will have to walk, unless I find a working car I can… do I even still know how to hotwire a car? I know you normally have to hack modern ones, not hotwire them.” He starts packing his energy bars into his bag, and a large water bottle with a filter on it, and every one of his power packs. He sticks his laptop in the bag, thinks better of it, and leaves the laptop in the apartment. His phone can manage most of that. He does, however, stick his soldering kit in the bag. Maybe it would be useful? A pocket knife, certainly. And… the stupid stuffed parrot he’d bought for the joke project. He can bring that too, and—a notebook! To write down directions to Grian’s address. Yes, in case his phone goes dead—
“I mean, really, what’s so bad about staying here? Sure I hear, uh, terrifying noises, and I don’t have power anymore, but I won’t be killed, in here. I’ll just… run out of food, eventually! And by then, really, maybe the apocalypse will be solved?” He realizes he’s missed a change of clothes. He’s probably not going to care if he smells a bit bad, but he definitely needs a spare set in case he gets drenched with something toxic. Which would seem unlikely? But he is in a city, and what little he’s seen of the things outside, well. They seem like they’d probably count as chemicals he doesn’t want held against his skin. Oh, he should grab his windbreaker, too, the one they gave him as a signing perk or something when he joined the company. That will be good if it rains, and will be easier to clean than cloth…
He’s packed his bag entirely. He feels something burn beneath his skin. This is the most motivated he’s felt in at least a week. He stares at his door, blocked-up and deadbolted. He swallows.
“I do need a map,” he says, and he pulls out his graph paper and starts painstakingly writing out the instructions of how to get from his apartment to Grian’s townhouse. They need to be exact. He needs to be able to follow them even if it’s, uh, even worse than he thinks it is, out there. It’s a long walk. A truly absurd walk, really, so he’ll probably also need to steal some kind of transportation at some point. He will certainly get lost. He’ll probably be killed before he starves. He should not do this.
He hears something clicking on the floor beneath him. He thinks of soup that tastes like guilt. Or mud. They’re really quite similar flavors, aren’t they?
There’s a fire in his soul.
He makes a decision.
He doesn’t want to die at all. He, uh, really doesn’t want to do that. Which, of course, makes the world really, truly terrifying these days! Because death seems pretty inevitable in a myriad of different, absolutely terrible ways.
But here’s the thing. This apartment is safer for now, but even if it’s never broken into at all, he has no power and will eventually run out of food. If he’s going to die, he will not do it slowly, trapped in a box of his own design. And, sure, if he goes outside, his death will be much faster, and likely much more brutal, and really he does not want to think about it at all because the level of horrible it will be? The worst, probably. Absolutely horrific.
But if he dies outside, he will have died on his feet.
He will have died trying.
He takes out his earrings, looks at the electronics in them. Earrings are a liability at this point, and he’s leaving the apartment by a much greater distance than these things were meant to track, anyway. It doesn’t matter anymore. Nothing’s the same. He should probably acknowledge that. He smashes the things with a hammer for good measure before cataloguing everything in his bag one more time.
He’s made a decision.
<MumboJumbo>: if you see this and youre alive im coming
<MumboJumbo>: whoevers left tell me where you are if you can
<MumboJumbo>: im not staying here doing nothing
<MumboJumbo>: im coming
(After thinking for a moment, he adds one more thing.)
<MumboJumbo>: i did promise you’d get my bird when it was done.