forthedog | Derailment

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Derailment

He's not sure what wakes him. It could be any number of things. It could be the light on his face, the air moving over him, the shift of cloth against skin where before it had just been the cool of the sheets and the heat of two bodies. It could be the hard ground under his back, which would also explain the aches in him as consciousness drifts closer. He's gone soft, he thinks sometimes, fallen out of the habit of sleeping well on the ground, lost in the embrace of Tom's big bed. But he still roughs it sometimes, so at first the fact that he's clearly outside doesn't sound any alarms.

But it's the kind of outside. It's not the light but the quality of that light; not warm and glowing but thin, pale, anemic. When he opens his eyes it's not the trees swaying over him in the morning breeze but what they're like, them and the other plant life, still thickly growing and untamed but bad. Unhealthy. Sparse where it shouldn't be and dense where it shouldn't be. No birds, no fucking birds at all. The hints of a world knocked out of balance and gone horribly wrong.

There's a cold wet nose pressed against his cheek, and a weight pressing into his arm, numbing it. He rolls, pulls it away and sits up, shoving Neil harder than he meant to. Dexter steps back, whining softly, and Mike stares around and then down, absorbing it in quick shocked bursts. The car. The campfire, smoking ashes. Dexter. The two figures, curled together on the ground. Tom's old and ragged sweater. His own pants. Camo. Boots. The itchy feel of clothes that haven't been washed for a while.

His gun.

There's no mistaking what this is.

He doesn't want to wake them. As long as they're still sleeping, this is his nightmare and his alone. Maybe they never have to wake up. And yet he has no idea what's really worse: being back here or being back here on his own.

"No," he breathes, barely above a whisper. No louder, because he's honestly afraid that he might scream. "No. No. Fuck."

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"We can't...we can't panic. Not yet." Tom looked around at the site, all the familiar bags, canteens, that fucking sweater that Tom hasn't seen Mike in for months. He reached out, running his hand down the oily surface of hemlock tree beside him.

"The Island plays games," he said to Mike, dropping to pull one of their packs in to his lap. Dried meat, some water, a handful of shotgun shells. On the island, commerce was carried out through volunteer hours. Here it was fucking bullets.

And it all made perfect, god damned sense.

He watched Neil's slim frame disappear off to the car, something pulling hard and sharp in his stomach.

"He's here," he said, looking up at Mike from a crouching position. "That has to mean something."

Tom swallowed, starting to roll up the bedrolls. It had to...

Mike's mouth twists sharply and he looks off towards the car, Neil in the driver's seat. Once he would have yelled and hauled him out by his ear, no matter who he was, but now he just looks and feels his stomach sinking into his boots.

"Like what?" He shakes his head. "Yeah, it fucking does play games. So maybe this is just the last one for us." One last prank, dumped back here without so much as a warning. And Neil coming with them just seems like one more bit of cruelty to spice the entire thing.

Except it doesn't feel like that's all it is.

"Look, whatever else... we can't stay here. We don't even know where the fuck we are."

There are no keys in the ignition, but there's a knife in my boot and an extra handgun in the glove compartment. I sit there for a long time with my hands on the wheel, ten and two, staring out the window and listening to Dexter pant excitedly at my side.

The island's a wilderness in it's own way, but there's almost always someone else around. Here, there's a kind of eerie silence, a vast, oppressive emptiness I feel all the way down into my gut. Like we're the only people in the world, but not in a good way.

Kicking open the driver door, I stick my head out and call, "You fuckin' comin', or what?"

Tom stared up at Mike steadily, almost surprised at the return of the old pessimism. Familiar scenes probably made it easier, but it was jolting, almost to the point of being unsettling. He'd watched the same man put his daughters to bed the night before. His daughters...

"We're getting through this," Tom told him, nodding at Mike to pick up the rest of their sparse belongings. "Right? And to do it, we get to hope for just a little bit longer. Give this until Tuesday, Mike. You have to promise me that much."

"Coming!" Tom shouted back, giving Mike one last look before turning to conceal the remains of the fire.

Old habits came back fast.

Edited 2009-07-07 20:35 (UTC)

"You know I suck at promises." He clenches his eyes shut and squeezes the bridge of his nose. Until Tuesday. So all they have to do is stay alive until then. And after...

He can't help believing that after will be more of the same. But Tom pulls him along, like he always has. He sighs and bends to scoop up the rest of the blankets. He heads to the car, tosses them in the backseat, leans over the open front door and regards Neil with a hundred different emotions fighting for supremacy. When he slips his hand into his pocket he feels the familiar weight of the keys.

He manages a thin smile. "You think you're gonna drive?"

He's different.

It's such a subtle change. A tension boiling under the surface, all hard edges where he's been so much softer for such a long time. It scares me, more than I thought it would, and instead of fucking with him and insisting on keeping my seat, I murmur, "Nope," and clamber between the headrests to tumble into the back seat.

Tom covered the last of the evidence that they'd been there, burying ashes, tossing the extra, piled firewood back into the woods. There was no way to hide all the evidence, but then, there never was.

And there was no telling who was looking for them now. It had rarely been so simple as fighting against just one front.

He slid into the front seat, startled for a moment at the flood of sense memory - the old upholstery, gasoline, ammo, and the faint smell of Dexter, who was currently sharing his normal seat with Neil. With a sigh, he opened the glove box, digging a battered compass from underneath a few handguns and crumpled pieces of paper, half written letters to Sophie. He snorted quietly. Right.

"Okay," he said, looking down as the needle aligned itself in his palm. "I guess we're heading west."

He pauses for a moment, hand on the door, looking from Tom to Neil and back to the road again. He hadn't ever wanted to be back on that road. All roads are the same road, and none of them have an ending.

Except one.

"Fuck," he whispers softly, and slides down into the driver's seat, pulling out his keys and starting up the car. There's an old familiar rumble and for a moment he's almost happy to hear it again, until he remembers where he is and it vanishes. It's too easy to slip back into old habits, far too easy, and it makes him wonder if all the change he'd thought he'd gone through might not be just a fresh coat of paint over rotting boards. If under the surface is the same old Mike Pinocchio, just waiting for the right time to reassert himself.

When they start moving he manages to steel himself, glancing at Tom and then back at Neil and making himself a silent promise. Not the same old shit. No way.

"We'll be okay," he says gruffly. "We just gotta work out where the fuck we are and we can go from there. Find somewhere safe to lie low." Or what passes for 'safe', here.

Edited 2009-07-08 00:14 (UTC)

There's about a hundred things I wanna ask, starting with for how fuckin' long?, but its not a question either of 'em can answer, and it wouldn't do a damn thing but make shit worse.

From what I've heard about this place, safe just doesn't happen. But I'm not worried 'bout that. I'm worried 'bout the looks on their faces. The panic I hear in their voices. I'm worried about the fact that the girls aren't here, and I don't wanna think about all the things that might now be lost.

I lean forward into the front seat, my elbow resting on the back of Mike's chair, and say, "Don't suppose the fuckin' radio works, huh?"

Tom laughed, sudden and loud and beyond grateful for the distraction. He fiddled with the controls, bringing up the familiar sound of static on all stations.

"Might be," he said, "If there was anyone out here running stations." He slid the scanner all the way up and down. "Guess that means there's nothing like Santiago City anywhere around here."

"You doin' okay back there?" he asked, turning to look at Neil, sitting in the same place Florence had, all long limbs and silence. But Florence wasn't here now. But somewhere in the Realm....

He wondered if she'd remember them, the Island-them, or if she was still wrapped up in revolutions.

"We went to Louisiana and heard some blues, once," he says quietly, almost to himself, the memory stealing up out of the depths of his mind like a ghost. "Crackly. Like it was really fucking far away." The echoes of a dead world. But someone, somewhere, wasn't letting it die completely. He'd smiled a thin, sardonic smile, made some kind of comment about whistling in the dark. But now he sees why people do just that.

Sometimes that's all you have.

"Hang on." He turns the wheel sharply, swerving to avoid a place in the road where the asphalt has crumbled away entirely, long years of rain or maybe one big flood.

I don't have time to brace myself, especially since I wasn't fuckin' payin' attention, so with a startled yelp, I fall back in my seat, jostling Dexter and flailing pretty fuckin' pathetically before I can right myself.

"Jesus," I mutter with a snort of sheepish laughter, craning my neck to watch the huge pothole disappear through the rear window.

Tom braced himself against the low roof and cursed as they clattered over the gaping hole in the road, banging his head on the ceiling in the process.

"Aw, Jesus," Tom muttered, glancing back to make sure Neil and Dexter were okay. "The roads here are crap. Makes the boardwalks look like a damn freeway."

He gave Mike a look over the gearshift and did something he'd never been able to do before, not here at least. It never would have occurred to him. He reached out and grasped Mike by the bicep, just squeezing gently, thumb swiping the inside of his arm.

"Hey," he said softly, "Take it easy. We leave the undercarriage up and down this footpath, we're twice as screwed as before."

Edited 2009-07-08 04:18 (UTC)

Tom touches him and instantly he feels himself calm and loosen. It's like a reminder: this is not how things were before. Everything has still changed. He's better, stronger, and Tom and Neil are with him, and that doesn't have to be all bad.

It's all right to be a little selfish.

"Okay," he says, just as softly, giving Tom a quick and grateful glance before reaching back and touching Neil's knee. "You all right?"

"'m fine," I answer with a slightly hysterical laugh, and for some reason, it's right this moment that it hits me how utterly out of place I really am right now.

Scrubbing a hand over my face and lounging back in my seat, I say, "I always did want us to take a fuckin' vacation."

"Yeah," Tom said, rolling his eyes, relieved to see a flash of what had become familiar from Mike. "But the beaches just get so damn crowded..."

It was a swamp, not a forest, once the car took a bend in the road. There were the remnants of a gas station sagging back into the spreading, putrid marshes, and all the water in sight had an oily, slick appearance. On the side of the road, a few ducks that had made the mistake of landing on the black water lay dead and rotting, feathers black and stuck to their bony frames. Even the scavengers had failed to pick them over.

Tom stared for a moment, stomach tight in his belly, hunger already starting to prickle through the nausea. It had been pizza at the Winchester last night. Who knew where the next meal would come from...

"Here," he said, popping the glove box and digging out the old handgun, a few spare clips, and the holster. He handed them back to Neil with an almost apologetic look. "You know. Just in case. We used to go weeks not seeing anybody out here. Still. Just to be safe."

He barely notices the dead birds; makes a note of them and passes on. On the Island, such a sight would have horrified him. Here, it hardly seems worth comment. It's all context, maybe.

"You remember how to use it?" he asks, catching Neil's eyes in the mirror as they bump and jostle over potholes and splash through mud that paints the sides of the car and sends dirty flecks in through the wire grille. He's sure Neil does, but he's asking anyway, for his own peace of mind if for nothing else. And to remind Neil that here, he might truly have to know how to kill someone. No more playing, no more games.

"Yeah, I remember," I murmur, slipping the holster on and checking the clips and the chamber of the gun, my thumb clicking the safety off and back on. I remember, but this already doesn't feel the same. I quit lookin' through the windows a couple yards back, and the gun feels heavy and strangely warm in my palm.

I always figured I'd be excited in a situation like this. Some real action, for once. But I'm not. I just want us to go home.

"No maps," Tom sighed, looking around the floor of the cab and in the glove box. He rubbed the back of his neck and stretched in the seat, tolerating it when Dexter lept from the back seat and curled up in his lap, anxiously licking his hands and neck.

"I guess we're gonna just drive until things start to look familiar..." he muttered, stroking his fingers over Dexter's skull distractedly.

"You got any clue, Mike?"

He's about to say no, looking around at the scattered and burned-out houses. Usually it's just a few but now it's every one he sees. A fire came through here, singed the treetops, but there's nothing he could identify easily, nothing different from any of the other shit-holes they've been in. And then suddenly they come up over a slight rise and he sees, in the distance and grey and ghostly, a skyline of ruined towers, some of them decapitated with steel spikes sticking up like bones from necks. It's barely recognizable but he recognizes it anyway. He's seen it before.

At the same moment the radio crackles and hisses and, faintly and masked with static, a song drifts through like a transmission from another world, slow and plodding and mournful.

Going to Chicago
Sorry but I can't take you
No use in crying
Tired of your lying

"A few, yeah," he murmurs, eyes fixed on the city.

"Jesus. That's pretty fuckin' creepy," I mutter, watching the radio conk to life. You'd think after three years on the island, I'd be used to something like that, but for some reason, I'm more unsettled than I can really account for.

In the distance, there's a forest of twisted and devastated metal, and there's something horrifying about the sight. A fucking massacre happened here, and I feel the same type of sick fascination I might if I was looking at an explosion of blood and gore.

Tom's stomach twisted and he paled by a few degrees, recognizing the hazy skyline, the twisted heaps of metal that clustered hungrily around the road like vultures, stretching out bent and twisted claws. The trees didn't rustle here, but when the storms picked up you could hear the dead twigs snapping like broken bones.

"Fuck," he said quietly. He remembered Chicago, a weekend escape with Sophie and then, years later, the wasteland that had been left behind. They'd called it the second city, and with New York a ten mile crater on the East Coast, it was the biggest metropolis left in the States. Or it would have been. Swamp overtook forest, and destruction overtook cities like mold.

"There's gotta be something else we can do until...for the next few days," he muttered, squinting out at the desolate surroundings.

"And eat what?" he says tightly. He hasn't turned towards the city but the road is bending towards it anyway and it's drawing slowly closer. They must be in the near suburbs now. He's never been in this particular part, but it's still starting to look familiar. "You wanna risk trying to hunt out here, you be my guest, but I'm not chancing it. And we got potable water to think about."

Out the window and in the distance, he hears the whining howl of a dog. He hopes it's a dog.

The radio crackles again, still singing its mournful tune, and he shuts it off with a tense finger. "Fucking people," he mutters. "They get a transmitter, get a generator, let it run on a loop until it dies. Their idea of a joke or whatever." Only he still knows that it's not that at all.

Of all the shit that's happened, all the shit I've seen, I've never had to worry 'bout where my next meal's comin' from. Not really. Even in New York when we were living on sandwich meats and ramen noodles, there was still food. Not much, but it was always there.

Suddenly I feel incredibly sheltered and spoiled, a feeling I'm totally unfamiliar with.

"People live out there?" I say, looking out toward the ruins of the city and sounding more than a little skeptical.

"Mostly people," Tom said. People, amongst other things and people that...well, were only mostly people."

"Chicago rotted while it was standing right up," Tom said, mouth pulling in a hard line. "Didn't just fall apart like Detroit and Cleveland. People tried to reset the whole government there. The People's New Order." Tom went quiet, shook his head. "Pacifists, mostly. Old Quaker roots, if you look at any of their documents, which are hard to find now. Santiago made sure of that."

He sighed, looking over at Mike. He was right. Tom knew that. Didn't make the thought of chocking down Chicago any easier.

"Six months after New York got wiped out, the Order was doing a pretty good job of raking order out of...ashes. They...uh...they would have had a chance, I think. I mean, maybe in another place, it would have worked. They were just...helping people. Food banks, working with anyone they could find to keep the fields going, getting safe, public housing set up. Kept the PD in order. Chicago had the lowest crime rate in the world for about six months...

"The fourth time their Prime Minister appeared publicly, he was shot through the head. His wife got the next bullet. Every member of his cabinet was dead in ten minutes. His two daughters were sold into white slavery, and his son was hung in a cage over Buckingham Fountain until he died of exposure. He was thirteen."

Tom ejected the magazine into his palm, squinting at it for a long moment. "It wasn't even Santiago. This was long before his time. It was...gangs. Chicago's always been a gang city - Capone, Dillinger. The Old Order, it's what they called themselves. They've been getting bigger and more powerful since the day they took over. Second biggest thorn in Santiago's side to date."

Tom glanced back at Neil. "Welcome to Chicago."

Derailment

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