Paucity

"QTNA, amirite, fam?"
"Fam," said Pestilence, his gaunt white face bright in the sodium streetlight as the car passed momentarily beneath it, "what the hell is QTNA?"
"Questions That Need Answering," said Famine.  He sounded happy but his face was drawn and his eyes suggested tears.  "All the ones on fleek, right, like, the ones that are sleek right, the ones that arise in the night, amirite?"
Pestilence turned the heater in the car on and shivered.  Technically he never felt the cold, but he had the sensation that this was one of those nights, the ones when the old gods woke up and took a turn around the property to see where things were being neglected.  Some sensitives described it as the feeling of a storm over the horizon but headed your way, others described it as a bone-chilling, bed-wetting terror that pressed down like a pillow over your face at midnight.
"What," he said slowly, precisely, "is wrong with you Fam?  You're practically incomprehensible these days."
"QTNA, amirite, fam?" said Famine miserably.  "Take a left here, bro."
On the left was a sheer drop, fifty metres down to a concrete carpark behind a big box retailer, but Pestilence flicked on the indicator and took the turn as smoothly as a racing driver.  The car behind him slowed at first, the driver unable to understand the indicator, then fishtailed as the driver stamped on his brakes and lost control watching the car in front of him drive off the road.  Red taillights disappeared downwards and the driver wrenched his door open and ran to the edge of the road, unwilling to believe that he'd just seen a suicide.
Below him were the floodlights illuminating the carpark, and a complete absence of wreckage.

Pestilence's car hummed softly as it drove through the air.  Around them the world had changed, becoming more shadowy and less substantial, and they might be driving on a cobweb bridge spun by the world's largest spider.
"Better than the horses," said Pestilence after a while.  "Don't get me wrong, I liked them, but they're harder to ride, and they get all temperamental and jittery when something big's happening.  None of that with these machines."
"Yeah," said Famine.  He drawled, sounding Texan.  Then he yawned.  "Jesus, bro, how long have we been away?"
An aurora rippled across the sky in front of them reflecting off the polished black bonnet of the car.  Pale greens and blues swapped large bands of themselves around like a rubik's cube preparing to be solved.
"Five years," said Pestilence.  "It didn't feel like it.  I couldn't have told you that back in the World.  I'd have thought it was only a few days."
"Too long," said Famine.  "Too much belief in us these days."
"Deeper than belief," said Pestilence.  "We're victims of our own success, you know?  People know deep down that we're real and that we walk amongst them.  They're proud of it, in some odd way.  You know they're worried that I'm going to win against their antibiotics?  I attended a conference on it.  Everyone knew I was real, everyone knew in their hearts that I was going to win, all they could do was hold me back for a few days.  I could have proclaimed myself King in that hall, and they'd have raised a temple to me."
"Same," said Famine.  "They all think they're pretty much one harvest away from being guests at my table.  It's like two thousand years ago again, only they're somehow starving because they're too afraid to eat."
"Why are you all incomprehensible though, Fam?"
"Hah."  Famine's laugh was practically a sneer.  "Paucity of vocabulary, mate.  There's a famine of language going on, and it's caught up with me.  Empty words, empty phrases, sounds parroted by the sublebrities of the day and mimicked across social media.  I can read all the dictionaries you want, I can sit and discourse for hours with the erudite and intellectual, but at the level of the lowest common denominator it's on fleek, amirite?  Fam?"
"You're a mystery to me, Fam fam," said Pestilence.  "Am I doing it right?"
"QTNA, mate," said Famine.  "What happened to the other two?"
"War's got groupies," said Pestilence.  "I think he's hiding from them.  And us, for that matter, I don't think he's handling the fame so well."
"And the big boy?"
Pestilence drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, watching the aurora dance for a few seconds.
"Last I heard," he said, with reluctance clearly audible, "he'd invented the Selfiecide."
Fam laughed, a hearty belly laugh that seemed wrong coming from someone thin enough to think emaciated was a compliment.  "You've got to hand it to him," he said. "He moves with the times."
"You'd think he'd be busy enough."  Pestilence sounded disapproving, his voice tight and prissy.
"He's only getting busier," said Famine.  "Like us all though, amirite?"
Pestilence looked over at Famine, wondering if there was irony there, and then peered through the windscreen.  "Ah," he said. "We're heading back in.  It was nice talking to you, Fam."
"I can still hear you, bro," said Famine quietly.  "It's just that it's a bit of an echo chamber at the moment.  You can still spill the serious tea with me, you know, bro?  I've got the screenshots."
Despite himself Pestilence giggled, and the car transitioned from the unreal back to the real, entered the World on a dusty, empty highway.  A little distance away the red light of a diner's neon sign flickered a welcome, and somewhere far away in a lost direction forces that might be gods paused to observe that there were Horsemen out there still, untouchable by any of them.

Fam

Moths were fluttering under a streetlight outside, dancing around to some music only they could hear.  Stood below them were two women on the wrong side of thirty wearing crop-tops and mini-skirts and made up to look like they were in their early twenties.  Their slouch suggested they didn't want to be there; the way they straightened up and posed whenever a car cruised too slowly past or a single man went by suggested they were on the clock.
Pestilence sighed and turned away from the window.  Across the diner table sat Famine, the laminated tri-fold menu held in pale, wasted hands.  "Emphysema," he said.
"Nice," said Famine.  "You don't get that a lot.  And you've avoided anything obvious, like a job-related illness.  Both of them?"
"Nah, I got the one on the left," said Pestilence.  "You can have the one on the right, bro."
"Cool, fam."  He waved to the waitress who wrinkled her nose and reluctantly hauled herself off a counter stool and lumbered over.  She was heavyset and her beige uniform had grease stains on the skirt  and down the left-hand side of her blouse.  She was wearing support stockings that might once have been white but were now a uniform grey and her name badge had been broken in half at some point.  All that was left was a red-bordered white plastic shard reading "AIL".
"A couple of hotdogs for the ladies outside, please," said Famine.  "With extra mustard.  It must be cold out there.  And I'll have the entire breakfast menu.  Twice."  He looked at Pestilence.  "Fam?"
"You're Fam, bro," said Pestilence.  "I'll have a banana split.  Extra whipped cream."
"What from the breakfast menu, son?" asked the waitress.  She shifted her weight from one thick leg to the other and farted.
"All of it," said Famine.  "Twice."
"There's seventeen items on there, hon.  Which of them do you want?"
"All seventeen.  Twice.  That's thirty-four items."
The waitress eyed him coldly while she counted up seventeen twice in her head and decided that the answer was in fact thirty four.  "Fine," she said.  Behind her a cockroach scuttled across the floor.  "Two breakfasts for kings, a banana split with extra whipped cream, and hotdogs for your girlfriends."  She turned away and waddled to the kitchen.  Half-way there she turned back.  "How do you like your eggs?"
"All the ways you do them," said Famine.  He smiled as nicely as he could, but his hollow cheeks and dark-ringed eyes still made it look like a skull grinning.  "You're fam too, fam," he said to Pestilence.
"Nah bro, I'm your bro.  You're fam."
"Not Fam, fam.  Fam."
"Fam?  Shut up."
"Bro, just hang, right?"
"Jesus, Famine, were you always like this?  What were you like when you were a kid?"
Famine stared at Pestilence, his eyes burning in his head like coals.  "The teachers called me trouble," he said.  "They blamed me for the other kids's problems.  Like when everybody's lunchbox turned out to be empty because all their mothers had forgotten to pack them lunch."
"That sounds like something you'd do," said Pestilence.
"Yeah, right, but I didn't know I was doing it back then," said Famine.  "My dad was still Famine back in those days.  When I was eight he got me into the family business, let me team up with Crop Failure and his gang.  I'd go out riding a Harley on the weekends and we'd tear up some cornfields or a potato crop.  Didn't know that the whole Famine thing was going to land on my shoulders.  Bro."
"A Harley?" Pestilence nodded his head slowly.  By the kitchen another three cockroaches had appeared and were creeping under the door.  "Rich fam, Fam?"
"Nah, but War's parents were sharing out the spoils.  They liked horses, so the cars and bikes and aeroplanes were being handed out like candy.  They were good times."
"My sixth grade class all came down with galloping pleurisy three days into the start of the school year," said Pestilence.  "I got exclusive tuition for the rest of the year, and the teachers all treated me like I was the only survivor of a car crash or something."
"I heard about that," said Famine.  Outside a young kid in chef's whites was delivering hotdogs to the women in the lamplight.  Everyone looked confused.  "Didn't the same thing happen the next year."
"Sort of," said Pestilence.  "Half of them got yellow fever and the other half got scarlet fever.  After that  there weren't any kids near my age to be in class with me.  What did you put in the hotdogs then, Fam?"
"Tapeworm," said Famine.  "Classical and classy, that's me.  How're the cockroaches going?"
"Hundred and fifty so far," said Pestilence.  "I don't think we're going to get served you know." Screams came from the kitchen.
"Should have ordered ahead," said Famine.  "You've think we'd remember by now."

Trainride

It's always dark outside the windows when we leave the city.  I sit in my window-seat and stare out into the apparent nothingness that the train races through, straining my eyes periodically to try and see something, anything that might be out there.  I never see anything back, though now and then it seems like there might be a darker shadow keeping pace with the train, something that would become clear if only it came closer.  But I rub my eyes and the shadow disappears and I know that it was just a tired mind longing for something new to look at.
The cities were all built inside pressurised domes back when the sun was still visible, but the light now comes from all around, from many sources.  Luminescent moss coats most flat surfaces, firefly genes have been inserted into almost all the birds, insects and small mammals so that they constantly give off additional light.  Some people have gone so far as to be fireflied too, but they're a minority still, and the doctors are just as busy turning fireflies off as they are turning them on.  It's just too odd.  There are street-lights everywhere, and in the richer parts of the cities there are huge aerial balloons that provide light as well.  Because outside the domes it's just dark.
It was an accident, no-one intended to put the sun out.  They, whoever they are, were testing a nuclear weapon and something went wrong, something caught fire in the atmosphere, and the resulting ash and dust filled the sky and blocked the sun out.  Or sometimes people say that it was accident, a plane carrying a nuclear bomb crashed into a volcano and the bomb exploded, throwing millions of tonnes of ash and dust into the atmosphere, blocking the sun out.  Or perhaps the bomb was just a coincidence, and it was a tidal wave that crashed into the Harwell crater that was the largest active volcano on the planet, and the resulting conflict between seawater and boiling rock thrust millions of tonnes of ash and dust... you get the picture.
It was no accident, and there is no ash or dust in the atmosphere.  The planet has been shifted from its orbit and is going to a new home, all by itself.  Though there's only a few of us who know this, and we all expect to be dead by the time we arrive.
The train is quiet, there are never many people who want to travel between cities these days, and the restrictions are getting harsher anyway.  But tonight my carriage is actually empty apart from me, and it feels a little lonely.  When the ticket-inspector finally tramps to my seat, I turn, almost pleased to see him.
But it isn't him, it's a young girl with ratty brown hair down to her shoulders and a grubby notebook in her hand.  She sits down opposite me without introduction, and I find myself a little annoyed.
"That seat's taken," I say, and she smiles and shakes her head.
"There's only us on the train," she replies.  "It's been arranged."