Color of The Doomsday Sky
Warm afternoon sunlight dappled the ground, streaming in between the green leaves of trees high above. Enid lay on the cool dirt and stared up at the foliage gently swaying in the wind. It was that kind of cool, crisp breeze that brought to her senses a wake of new smells. It was the only thing that gave a slight hint of the changing of the seasons, to the slow fade of summer and the shy autumn that would eventually approach. The light danced across her face and sometimes into her eyes, although she didn’t much mind. Here in the Glen the weather was always this perfect, the light always just right, the sounds of birds and other small animals blending into a pleasant hum of life that settled into the background like shadows settled into crevices.
Turning her head to the left, Enid spotted a small blade of sweet grass that stood apart from the rest, dancing back and forth with the movement of the air. She reached out and sniffed it with a black-tipped nose, just barely grazing the blade and producing a ticklish sensation. The blade of sweet grass bent toward her and then bowed back, as if imitating a childish wave.
She closed her eyes and felt, just felt. She felt the hard dirt pressed flush against her strong bones. She felt the strength and warmth of the sun as if it were shining like a lamp only down on her. She felt the breeze tousle her soft silver fur and send gentle shivers up her spine. She felt the blade of sweet grass occasionally tickle her nose. She felt someone watching her.
A twig snapped.
Enid’s eyes flew open.
It was Comb. He was the only human allowed in the Glen, given the title of honorary wolf. But no wolf would snap twigs trying to sneak up on someone, and so it had to be a human, and that human had to be Comb.
“Sorry,” he mumbled.
Comb stopped beside a tree at the edge of the clearing. He was tall, but much too lean and awkward, with light blond hair that fell into his face and gave him the appearance of being much younger than that of a high school junior.
Enid sighed, watching down her muzzle as specks of dirt raced away from the air that rushed out of her nose. With a weariness beyond her years, Enid pulled her weight off the ground and rolled onto four padded paws. She stood up, shook off, and shifted.
Maybe once upon a time a boy like Comb would have been startled to find himself just paces away from what must have been a supersized wolf. Maybe once upon a time he would have been even more startled to watch as the wolf transformed into an average-sized girl, with tanned skin, dark hair, and deep, wide eyes. Maybe once upon a time that was so, but now he watched the proceedings with faded interest, like it was a favorite television show, but one that he’d seen enough times to have all the lines memorized.
“I don’t want to go back,” Enid said as she started toward him, knowing this was the reason for his interrupting her.
“You don’t have to,” he replied, studying her eyes, the only thing that remained the same between her two forms. “I can go alone.”
She simply walked past him in cognizant silence, and after a few steps, he turned and followed her.
They both knew they would go back. They always went back, day after day. It was true that she didn’t have to go, that she could survive in the Glen for the rest of her life, but Comb could only stay so long before the magic began to bother him, like a tickling rash just underneath his sensitive human skin. And if Comb was going back, then Enid was going back. She wished he didn’t have to. She wished he was born a wolf and could stay in the Glen where life was peaceful, as opposed to the dangerous outside world of terror.
She didn’t want him to go back because he was only human and couldn’t protect himself. He didn’t want her to go back because if they found out she was a wolf, they would kill her.
The Glen was safe. The Glen was a utopia amongst an apocalyptic war. The Glen was an oasis in a desert of destruction, famine, poverty, and oppression. A desert of violence and treachery and hatred. They were reminded even more so of this as they stepped out of the lush tree line, as they crawled their way across the boulders and ducked into the secret cave system that led them out of their oasis. Their footsteps echoed along the rock walls, a solemn warning that every time they left, they might not come back. Finally, they emerged from the cave into the haze that, even at this distance from the city, strangled their throats and eyes, threatening them and taking possession of them once again.
The city lay like a corpse before them, broken, mangled, and burning. Its organs had been gutted and abandoned, and its cells turned into parasitic waste that crawled amongst its long rotten bones. Smoke rose from a bullet hole in its head, and the screeches of scavengers could be heard fighting over the nothing that was left. The brain of the city had tried rebuilding itself, but it could never be resurrected when its heart was long gone. And so there were organizations and laws, crumbled by gangs and guns, rules enforced by the same people who broke them.
They had to go to school. Unless of course they dropped out and joined a gang, got killed, or both, which was the fate of approximately 73% of their school’s student population. But instead, they did what they were told, they kept their heads down and tried to survive, and they dreamt of the day they could escape, or the day someone special would come along and save them and raise their city and their existence from the ashes. But those were only dreams, because they knew there was no way to escape and no one to save them.
By the time they arrived at the dilapidated concrete building known as the high school, they were late for class. At this point, Comb suggested they just turn around and try not to be late tomorrow, but they both knew the consequences for skipping would be worse than those for being late.
Principal Fitznee believed that the solution to disobedience was harsher and harsher discipline, otherwise known as punishment. He believed in breaking children before building them up.
Enid and Comb walked into the main office, heads bowed and eyes on the ground. The secretary glanced up and then waved them down the hall. When they entered Fitznee’s office, he gave them a wide, toothy grin and a hearty laugh. He should’ve been a hyena.
“You know what to do,” Fitznee said as he stood up from his chair to grab the Zip.
Enid and Comb both turned their backs to him, knelt on the ground, and removed their shirts.
“This is already the fifth time the two of you have been late this year.” He said, stepping up behind them and switching the Zip on. It made an electrical hiss and spitting sound, the crackling saliva of a well-starved beast. “It seems like I need to take some stronger measures to prevent our youth from running amok and causing trouble. What do you say we turn it up a notch or two?”
He eyed them as he twisted the dial, clicking the contraption into place.
“Then again, I have to wonder…it’s always just the two of you, never one or the other or anyone more. I suppose I should ask, Ms. Finnley, whether or not you’re pregnant before I electrocute you.”
Enid swallowed and replied, “No, sir.” Her face was as blank and impassive as ever.
Comb, on the other hand, blushed the color of the doomsday sky. This was, of course, even though Enid would if he ever tried to kiss her.
“Well then, that’s good to hear.”
Without further ado, Fitznee jabbed the Zip into her back, landing with a two-pronged bite amongst a dozen other similar scars. The electricity that shot through her body was like venomous lightning, but that wasn’t the worst part about it. The worst part was that the magic in her blood was trying to counteract the pain, and so all her focus went to holding back the urge to shift and snap, sinking fabric and flesh under her teeth. Every atom in her wanted to turn to the wolf, but she had to hold it down if she wanted to stay alive.
As she resisted the urge to shift, Comb resisted the urge to offer to take two burns in exchange for letting her go, but instead he sat silent, his eyes shut tight because he knew that any alternative action, violent or pleading, would only make it worse for both of them.
For a moment, Enid flashed back to another world, an earlier world, one that she couldn’t quite remember but would never forget. A world where everything was like the Glen, where you could lay down and sleep anywhere you wanted and would still wake up the next morning. She saw things that weren’t broken, nice houses and friendly neighbors, green pastures and wildflowers. Comb’s grandmother called the Zips superpowered cow prodders, but she didn’t know what a cow was or why it needed to be electrocuted like that. It was a relic from another time.
After a long twenty or thirty seconds, Fitznee removed the Zip and stepped over to Comb. The procedure was repeated, but unlike the silence of Enid’s pain, Comb screamed his heart out. Enid continued to prevent herself from attacking Fitznee with open jaws, but she couldn’t prevent herself from staring at Comb. Her eyes wouldn’t leave him, even as the shivers raced down her spine. Finally, it was over, and Comb fell all the way to the floor in a heap, tears and saliva streaming down his front, his body curling up on the cold tile.
Fitznee leaned down to his ear and spat his message. “If a girl takes pain better than you, you need to either man up or die.” Then the principal stood and turned back to his desk. “Get to class.”
Enid scrambled off her knees and lunged for Comb, pulling him off the floor despite his agitated protests, then she was dragging him down the hall and screeching to stop outside the door to his class.
She shoved his crumpled shirt against his chest. “Get through the day.”
He took it and sniffled, wiping tears from his eyes as he watched her rush off to her own classroom. To anyone else, such a command would have sounded harsh, but Comb knew it was laced with how much Enid cared about him.
When they had made it through the day, and Enid and Comb were released from school, they made their way to Comb’s grandmother’s house. His parents had died long ago, and his grandmother was the only family he had left. They stopped by the house for a few hours, helping to take care of her and keep her company, before finally Comb told her that he was going to stay at Enid’s house again tonight. She smiled and agreed, because she still believed there were good people in the world, like her grandson and his friend, and because there was really nothing she could do except smile and agree. They didn’t tell her they had been late to school or gotten the Zip. And, as always, they didn’t tell her Enid was a wolf and they were actually going to the Glen.
Upon leaving the house, they passed through the city as quickly as they could, staying away from anybody they saw and keeping inconspicuous profiles. Once, they rounded a corner to find two burly men beating a woman to death on the street. Even though Enid knew better, her feet tumbled to a stop, a growl rising in her throat. Then Comb grabbed her arm, and although he was nowhere near strong enough to hold her back, the gesture was enough. They watched as one of the men landed a fatal blow, the woman’s skull imploding and disfiguring her face. She crumpled finally to the asphalt, lying blood-soaked and forgotten.
Enid’s eyes fell back to the ground at her feet and she let Comb tug her away.
They ran from the city, through the cave, and when they hit the tree line, she snapped into wolf form and sprinted on, pounding the ground with her paws, racing openly, freely, away from all that was lost. He kept running after her, just far enough so that when he glanced over his shoulder, he could no longer see the exit. Then he gave in to the pain, the exhaustion, the ache in his legs, and the feeling of hopelessness. He wobbled and collapsed to the ground, finding a tree to sit up against, and started to cry.
Enid circled back to find him this way, trotting up with a dejected look on her canine face. She curled up beside him on the ground and laid a blocky head on his knee. He reached out and ran a hand through her soft, silky fur, running his fingers up and down her spine and occasionally massaging one velvet ear. The effect was calming to them both, and Enid was glad that they were both facing outward, as opposed to looking at each other, so neither could see the other one cry. After all, what was there to be crying for? It had simply been another day.
The next day they were on time for school. Yesterday had been forgotten or buried in a shallow grave with rocks piled on top, as most days were. The two of them stepped through the door and past the main office, heading toward the classrooms when Comb suddenly held his hand out and brought them both to a stop. Enid’s eyes went to him, and finding him looking ahead, she turned to see three armed hunters standing in the hall.
She didn’t know how they knew, but somehow, they knew. And just like all the other wolves, they were hunting her.
It was as if her looking at them suddenly compelled them to turn in her direction and lock eyes with her. The man in the front gave a slight smile that even from the opposite end of the hall made Enid want to throw up all of her internal organs. It was a smile a man gave when he was excited to eat something exotic, which in this case was her. Images of the wolf factories flashed in her mind, places she had never seen but had heard grotesque stories of, warning her about humans. Big metal buildings where wolves were tortured, where their magic was extracted, packaged, and sold to humans, marketed as the only thing left in the world that could guarantee happiness. And yet all it did was provide humans with a temporary high, waste magic, and slowly kill all the wolves that were chained up and drained.
Now something happened that had only happened a handful of times in Enid’s life. Now, she was scared.
“Run!” Comb whispered-yelled in her ear. “Enid, run!”
She turned to look at him.
“Run! What are you doing? You’re faster than them, go!”
She stared at him for a second longer, as the hunters raised their guns and advanced down the hall, then she grabbed Comb’s arm and ran.
They rushed around a corner, out a door, and down a street, twisting and turning, and sprinting blindly.
“Enid!” Comb yelled, still being dragged along by his arm. “Just shift and go! I’m slowing you down!”
“No!” she yelled back.
“Yes!” he argued. He started to pry her fingers off.
“They’ll kill you too!” she yelled, holding his arm tighter and running faster. A panic had crept into her voice and now Comb was stumbling along at the increased speed.
“They won’t, I’ll be fine, but you need to get on four legs and get to the Glen.”
She ignored him. He was lying and he knew it. They would kill him for being friends with her, for knowing what she was and not reporting it. Maybe they would even torture him, interrogate him until he revealed the secret location of the Glen, the magical fantasy land where everything was okay and everyone was happy and nobody died. The special place that would be corrupted the moment any human like them stepped into it.
“You’re coming with me,” she muttered.
But the words were hardly out of her mouth before all of a sudden the end of the alley they were racing down was filled with hunters. They skidded and turned around, gunfire echoing behind them, the noise reflecting off the walls of the crumbling buildings that towered overhead, solemn witnesses to their destruction.
Enid screamed and dropped to a knee, bringing Comb to a halt. She’d been shot in the back of the leg. Not with a real bullet, but with the small electric bullets the hunters used to paralyze their prey. They couldn’t risk using lead bullets to kill the wolves, or worse, poison the expensive magic in their blood.
Enid struggled to stand but couldn’t walk. Comb desperately tried to carry her, to drag her, to do anything, but he was just too weak. Just like he’d been all his life.
More bullets ripped into them both, bringing them to the ground. Hunters surrounded them, flooding in and trapping them. Just like that, it was all over.
Through blurry vision and blood Enid could just see the hunters as they struck Comb with their Zips, over and over again. Screams echoed in her ears and mounted pressure in her head, threatening to burst her skull, but she didn’t know if they were his or hers, or both. Her body was being moved, rolled, and lifted, without her input, only felt through a layer of numbness. She hadn’t even been able to fight back, to shift and strike with teeth and claws. Now she wanted to, now she was ready to show her true self and let them have what they had come for, but now she couldn’t. They had weakened her beyond what she had ever felt before, and now she was trapped somewhere deep inside herself, only able to glimpse through a haze what they were doing to her and her only friend.
❧
When Comb woke up with his face smushed against the pavement, he believed he was dead. At first, he awoke only in his mind, only able to see blackness, not open his eyes or move his body. The second time he awoke, he was able to crack his eyelids, feel the pain radiate through him with every shallow breath, and pass out again. On the third try, he managed to roll onto his back, let out a muffled groan, and realize that he was somehow still alive. For that, he could only thank the fact that he had seemed so dead that the hunters hadn’t bothered to do anything other than leave him there.
For the longest time, he lay on his back in the alley, bleeding and aching, staring up at the darkened sky that was somehow still too bright. Part of him wished he had not woken up alive at all. He tried not to think about Enid because he knew if he did, he would start to cry, and then he would hurt even worse because his tortured body would not be able to withstand him sobbing.
By some miracle of force, after hours of lying in painful silence, Comb managed to shove all his agony into a little locked box, and stand up, swaying and leaning on the brick wall beside him, before gaining his balance, taking a deep, aching breath, and blinking wearily at the alley before him. As his eyes adjusted, he saw a group of strangers several yards away, gathered around a bonfire in a barrel. They had turned and were watching him, now a few of them stood up.
“Boy?” A man yelled, taking a step closer to him. “You alive? You been lying there for at least two days dead.”
In a croaked, hoarse whisper, Comb replied, “I’m alive.”
“Well, shit,” the man muttered. “Any boy that can come back from the dead ought to be of value.” He turned toward the others in the group, then back to Comb. “You want some water?”
He nodded and they all stared in amazement as he stumbled over to them, bones creaking and cracking under his skinny frame, bruises, and dried blood.
“Here now, sit back down,” the man said, handing him a cut-up can filled with brown liquid and motioning to an overturned bucket.
Comb eyed the bucket, considered the fact that if he sat back down, he may not be able to get up again, and then eyed the liquid, took a drink, and replied, “No, I don’t think I will.”
“Alright then, dead boy, stand.”
He nodded again, took another, longer drink, and despite being in the worst condition of his entire life, felt for the first time like maybe he wasn’t as weak as he thought.
So he joined a gang, one whose name and members changed like the weather, but to whom he was loyal and forever in debt for giving him food, water, and a place to sleep the night after he rose from the dead. At first, he was their expert in sneaking around, being able to fit in small spaces, moving quietly and quickly. But over the years he started to gain weight, muscle, and strength. He was no longer the skinny, half-dead boy he had been most of his life. Comb had grown to be a man, one that most people would cross the street to avoid if they saw him. His arms were thick like tree branches. The golden hair that used to fall into his eyes was now cropped and brown. He rose in rank until eventually he was running gangs, making a living, and watching as everything dissolved around him.
Over the years, he thought of Enid. He passed by the wolf factories daily, knowing she was in there, knowing she was suffering, and knowing that no matter how much he had changed, he still couldn’t help her. He could carry her out of that alley now, he could fight a hunter, he could take a gun and shoot them all, he could survive the shots they fired back. He could do all of those things now, like he hadn’t been able to do when he needed to most. But he couldn’t break into a wolf factory, one of the most highly secured places in the city. He couldn’t fight the hundreds of guards with real guns and real bullets. He couldn’t figure out how to disconnect her from the machines without hurting her. He couldn’t take her back to the Glen. He could never go back to the Glen anymore, with or without Enid. The Glen was not for people like him. It was not for dangerous men who would inevitably hurt it, even if they knew in their heart that they didn’t want to.
So he stood outside of the wolf factory, considering what it would take to get in there. How many people would he have to hire? How many weapons? Where would he get the money? How would he convince his help not to hurt the wolves once they were inside? He knew that if he ever got inside, he wouldn’t find her. He would find a shell of his former friend, weak and ugly, drained of life and the magic that always gave her a slight glow. But still he would have taken her, still he would have saved her. Perhaps he would have brought her to the cave, to the entrance of the Glen, and told her to go home and be well, to make it through the day. To make it through all the days ahead, without him, because he was everything that he wasn’t before.
And as he stood there, staring up at the metal building, he knew she was gone. He felt it like a punch to the gut that splintered and cracked his ribs and sent bone flying to impale his heart. Enid was dead. And he hadn’t shown up to save her.
His legs started moving, and before he knew it, Comb was very far away from the factory. He had walked, in a haze, across the city. And there, sitting on the sidewalk with his back up against a broken building, was a man holding a little bottle. Golden liquid splashed around inside, gleaming and glowing with magic and life. The man held a needle in the other hand, but both were much too shaky for him to get the needle into the bottle, much less draw out the liquid and inject it into his arm for his momentary high of happiness.
Comb stalked up to him, and the man, already in a drugged haze, barely had time to look up and register that there was another person before Comb had snatched the needle from his fingers and stabbed it into his neck. The man died with a little groan, as fast as if he was already playing on the edge and had only needed a little push. Then Comb sat down on the street beside the dead body, took up the bottle, and stared at the little golden life that lay cradled in his palm. Stared at golden liquid that many years ago might have been his best, his only, friend.
“You didn’t need to kill them.” He whispered, tears stinging his eyes, constricting his throat. “You just needed to know them.”
Maryn Pope is a senior graduating from Maryville College, Tennessee, in May of 2026 with a bachelor’s degree in business management and minors in psychology and writing communications. Over the past two years, she has served as Prose Editor and Editor-in-Chief of her college’s literary magazine, Impressions, and four of her other fictional works can be found there. In her free time, Maryn enjoys reading, painting, and taking walks in the woods.
