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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"She doesn't know what he looks like," Tom pointed out impatiently. He dug in a cammo pocket, pulling out old matches, thinking they could get gas from the car if it came to it. The fire would take time to get threatening. Whoever set it would have time to get back long before the ants started crawling out of their hill.

"One of us is going in there, Mike." His mouth was set in a thin line, ready to fight.

"She doesn't have to know what he looks like," he says patiently. "All she's doing is getting some intel and letting enough of the slaves out to make some more chaos. And then we pick the guards out when they come out here after 'em. The fire's good but I wanna stack the deck a little higher."

He reaches out and lays a hand on Tom's arm, reassuring, though it's an act and he knows Tom must be able to tell. "And then we go in for him. Both of us. I promise."

Tom shuffled around, feeling angry and impatient. He looked down at the decrepit theater, and wondered about the stench, the blood, all that crime welling up like stagnant water around a blocked drain.

"You're right," he said finally, letting out an aching, disenchanted breath. He closed his eyes. Right now, they were running on lies they told each other, "It will be okay"s and "Wait 'til Monday morning"s.

"Look...you work it out with Florence. I'll grab half a gallon of gas out of the car and meet you on the northwest corner of the block behind us in fifteen, okay?"

He looked up at Mike pleadingly. "We can't keep waiting."

"I know," he murmurs, nodding. His mouth feels numb. "I know." He turns to Florence, and her face is still set and grave, her eyes dark. He doesn't need to tell her what to do. He never did.

"Just get as many out as you can," he says. "If you see this skinny kid, dark hair... get him out too. If you can."

She nods, shoulders her gun, but her eyes are questioning him. Not directly, not asking it, but the question is there. What is this really about?

"Look," he says, and he looks down at his boots, scuffing in the rubble. The words are hard to say, and he already feels exposed, like she can see everything in him. "Look, when this is all over... I'll tell you. I'll at least tell you as much as I can. That's a promise."

She looks at him for a long moment. Finally she nods again, turns and slips into the shadows, heading down the street for place to cross that's safely out of anyone's line of sight.

* * *

There's a side entrance. It's small, barely a crack in the wall, but she sees it as she sidles around the side of the building, and she edges up to it, gun drawn. Five feet from it, she can see a man inside, standing watch, but from the set of his shoulders and the bored sag to his face she can tell that his mind isn't on his job. She crouches down below his sightline and moves slowly along the wall. Once she's right under the opening she pauses--and her foot slips and breaks a twig with a sharp crack.

"Who's there?" he asks sharply, and she doesn't hesitate; she straightens up in a single smooth movement and rams the butt of her rifle under the man's jaw. He goes down without another sound and she steps over his body and into the building. It's dark. It stinks. Somewhere, she can hear sobbing.

She steels herself and moves silently into the shadows of the hallway.

He's starting to get impatient. In the dark, when you're worried, time stretches and stretches away until everything feels like an eternity and disaster is imminent.

Tom checked his watch for the fourth time in five minutes, lurking in the shadows outside the dilapidated warehouse, canister of gas in one hand, fingers of the other trailing over his holstered gun.

He was jittery and he knew it - it was dangerous. Most likely, they didn't know enough. But...Mike would be coming soon, and they'd go in together. Which had to be a start.

Edited 2009-08-19 01:30 (UTC)

He comes around the side carefully, keeping his head down and keeping to the shadows, catching Tom's gaze and waving a hand briefly to keep himself from being shot at.

"She's in," he says when he draws up at Tom's side. "Took out one of the guards at the side, too, so that's one less to worry about." He'd thought for a moment that he might have to shoot the man and betray their presence early. But he should know by now not to doubt Florence.

He glances down at the gas can. "Ready to do this?"

"I'm ready to have it over with," Tom said, but there was some degree of relief in his face and his tone. Florence - god. One steady constant while the rest of the world was still skidding - Tom felt like the real crash hadn't even happened yet.

"Place is dry as a bone," he added, "And there's sawdust and crap all over the place." He lead the way inside, peeling back rotting plywood and stepping inside the musty, high ceiling building. In the corners there were needles and broken bottles, scraps of clothing. If they looked hard enough, Tom wouldn't have been surprised if they found bones.

"C'mon," he said, kicking together a pile of kindling. "Lets get this over with."

He nods, takes the can, uncaps it and starts to splash it carefully around. It's not going to take much, and it's not like it matters anyway if Tom is right and they're really going home again, but part of him rankles at using so much of something so precious.

But it's Neil. Neil. He bites his lip, narrowly missing splashing some of it on himself. The fumes are practically wavering the air, making him faintly dizzy.

"C'mon," he says, jerking his head towards the door. "Let's get outta here. I'll make a trail with what's left."

Tom nods, holding back the plywood door for Mike when he follows, and proffers the matches to the other man uncerimoneously. "Shouldn't take long to get their attention."

Anxiously, he looked over his shoulder down the dark block to the horroshow of a movie theater.

"I hope they're doing okay."

He takes the matches, bends and walks backward, tipping the can as they go and spilling out a thin line of gas. It has to work. Right now, everything has to work, because he will not fucking allow any error, because there is no margin for it. None.

"They're fine," he grunts, and it sounds hollow and facile, just like it used to when he'd talk like this. "We'll all be home in time for fuckin' dinner."

He stops when they're a safe distance away, sets down the can, strikes a match and with absolutely no hesitation, lets it fall.

The line of gas burns quick, back across their footprints in the dust, and when it reaches the building there's nothing at first and he's horribly afraid that it hasn't worked. Then there's a heavy wumph, a wave of hot, concussed air, and flames bellow out of the door, rising higher every second.

"Jesus Christ," he murmurs, staring at it. "It could burn the whole fucking block down."

So they'll have to move a little faster now.

* * *

They're scared when she finds them. She had sensed their fear from outside the building. A room full of children, young men and women, filthy and huddled together, staring at her with huge sunken eyes. There's an empty patch outside where the guard had been before she broke his neck. No one saw her enter. No one will see her leave, except the children.

She lowers her gun and inclines her head sharply toward the door. Run. None of them are tied. The men had been overconfident.

They won't make that mistake again.

Some of the braver ones are starting to move forward, a ghostly kind of hope dawning in their eyes, when she hears the sound like a large, flat rock hitting a mattress and feels the shockwave hit the building. Faint, but there.

She inclines her head again and waves sharply. MOVE.

It's quiet for a long time.

Long enough that I start to wonder if maybe I've been forgotten. That I start to wonder why I'm the only one down here. They've got others, they have to, so where are they keepin' 'em? I start to wonder, and inevitably, I start to worry. About what's gonna happen, what the fuck they're plannin' on doin' with me, what the fuck kind of asshole my pretty little ass is gonna get sold off to, what the fuck's gonna happen to all the others, and more importantly, what's happened to Mike and Tom.

The last hour, I've been searching every goddamn corner of this cellar, looking for a way out. Running my fingers over the dirty bricks, crouching in corners, peering through the tiny slit under the door. A fucking hour before I let out a frustrated groan, kick the plate of food splattered on the floor with my foot and pace toward the center of the nearly pitch black room, hands fisted at my sides.

And that's when it starts. Shouting, at first. Not angry or excited like last time. Frantic, afraid. Scrambling feet overhead, the doors upstairs bang open and closed, and right around the time I hear someone yell Fire! I think maybe I smell smoke.

"Jesus..."

Edited 2009-08-19 03:28 (UTC)

It spreads faster than either of them had intended, and for a brief series of moments Tom is convinced it won't work. They'd fucked themselves and boxed this private nightmare in with fire. Excellent. Wonderful. What they hell had they been -

But just then, three men stumble out of the front door, shouting to eachother.

"Fuck, look at that, what the fuck happened - where the fuck is Steve -"

"Dead," someone else shouted back, hauling hose out of a rusted closet at the end of the block, desperately using a wrench to coax the sad looking hydrant open. "Somebody's really fucking clever."

"Let the brats out too," a third man said. They had to shout now over the sound of the flames. "Watch yourselves, boys, we got a comedian on our hands."

Crouched behind the weak cover provided by corrugated metal and scrap, Tom glanced at Mike beside him and leveled his shot, taking aim.

"Here we go."

He nods. He barely even does that. His focus is narrowed down to a bright point, everything strangely clear and sharp. He can see the man moving in his sightlines. It's so easy, it always was, and that was always the worst part. Just a little squeeze of his finger and the back of the man's head explodes into a spray of red and he drops, flickers, is gone.

"Where'd--" one cries, and another yells, "Shit! Sniper!" But it's not even that much. Just a couple of schmucks with guns and it's like a fucking shooting gallery. You were stupid, boys. You're gonna pay for that now.

The man at the hoses falls to Tom's bullet, and the third went down to his or Mike's, he's not sure, but it's over in a moment and all that's left is a linger after image from the shutter of light. He'd almost forgotten what that looked like - once, more than once, he'd felt that static claw of it as it exploded across his chest.

After watching the door for a few more seconds, he and Mike share a look and start moving, crouched low against the lee of buildings as the fire lit up the sky like Armageddon.

"Can we get in the entrance Florence used?"

He nods shortly, looking for it through the smoke, coughing and glancing back to see if anyone else is coming out to join the party. "Might be the best way. It's just a fuckin' crack in the wall. They probably won't be guarding it." Four down now. Or is it five? He doesn't know and that's not good, because he should know, he should have a running tally of the bodycount in his head. How many down, how many probably left to worry about. A place this size...

Who the fuck knows.

"Here," he says, ducking into the wall. The guard is still lying there in the rubble, unconscious. So only three or four. He looks at the man a second, raises his gun and pulls the trigger. The man jerks once and vanishes.

So, four. Or five.

Edited 2009-08-19 03:56 (UTC)

I hear the first gunshots, and for a moment, I'm not even sure what they are. Firing a handgun at a target in a clearing sounds different than this crackle snap snap pop coming from above ground. Standing there in the middle of the room, my heart starts to pound, and I let myself hope, just for a moment, that it's them.

Jogging up the steps, I jiggle the doorknob, banging and clawing at the thick, scarred wood. Each time my shoe hits the kick-plate, it's hard enough to make my teeth rattle. I'm stepping back to throw myself at it one more futile time when it suddenly swings open and I'm herded back down the steps by a gun barrel and a broad chest.

I look up, up, up and it's the same guy that brought me the food, tall and light-haired, with a craggy, scarred face and a mean grin.

"Where the fuck you think you're goin'?" he laughs, clamping a hand around the back of my neck and shoving me toward the back wall. Hovering in the open doorway, there's another guy with a gun -- wiry and nervous and really, really young. I only see him for a moment before I'm shoved face forward into the bricks.

There's a lot of noise, the fire, the shouts of the previous victims as they found their way to freedom somewhere on the other side of the building. If the death, the destruction, bothered Tom Hobbes at all after so long on the Island, it didn't show. He nodded Mike along as the grunt flashed out of existance.

"I heard something," he hissed, nodded down into the dark recesses of the theater. Somewhere, a transistor blew in a low explosion and the lights flickered once, twice, and went out.

"Oh, shit," he grunted. "Come on. You hear that?"

Edited 2009-08-19 04:27 (UTC)

He's looking for Florence as they go, hoping she might be able to tell them something. But while he can hear rushing feet and the bellowing of angry men, there's no screaming of anyone else. If there are any slaves left in the building, they're being very quiet.

Or they're somewhere else.

He glances into a big main room, and it's obvious what it was once used for: ripped up seats and a long stage on the far end, rich carvings on the walls and the ruins of something grand and ornate. And it's obvious what it was just used for: a row of toilet buckets in a corner, dirty rags on the floor. But as far as he can see, it's empty.

He glances up sharply when Tom says it, and whirls when the lights go out. Great. Flying blind and now in the dark. You deal with what's in front of you.

He hadn't heard anything besides the lights blowing. He stills and listens. Maybe... a faint pounding, somewhere. Not mechanical.

"Yeah," he says breathlessly, looking down a long hallway. "This way?"

"You fuckin' asshole," I say, laughing mechanically, slumping against the wall and just... wanting it to be over. I'm so fuckin' tired. I shouldn't be here. Every fuckin' inch of me's screaming to get back home and for one horrible, frantic moment I wonder whether getting myself killed here is the way to do it. "It's over with. People are dyin' up there, what the fuck are you doin' down here?"

He laughs, standing so close I can feel the warm dampness of his breath on the back of my neck, and I shudder, pressing myself more tightly against the wall like maybe I can get away. "You think just 'cause we're losin' a couple of hired guns, I'm gonna let somethin' like you go?" he says, his big, meaty fingers sliding up along my throat, curving over my chin and probing at my lips. What I do next, I do without thinking. It's a reflex, my lips parting and my teeth clamping down on his fingertips hard enough that I taste blood.

He roars in pain, rears back and shoves me forward by the back of the head, my face slamming into the bricks, light spangling behind my eyes, and I swear I feel something crack. I let out a sob of a sound, a kind of hysterical laughter clawing at the edges of it, spitting in the dirt in the few blissful moments I've got before he's on me again.

"You little shit," he sneers, his forearm clamped across my shoulders, holding me pinned against the wall.

"Hey, man. Let's just go," I hear from the doorway, that scared kid with the gun, but he's ignored, dismissed with an angry, "Fuck off, Martin! I'm teaching the kid a lesson."

Edited 2009-08-19 23:46 (UTC)

He hears the murmurur of voices, shouting and something lower, softer, followed by a sudden shout. It comes up through the floor boards, just barely on the verge of hearing. He spins on his heel, ducking back out of the dingy little salesroom and into the hall. There's a door, tucked beside an old concession stand, and it's open just a few inches, but there's a wicked looking lock on the door with key still in the lock. Where they keep the valuables, Tom thought hysterically, and glanced up, catching Mike's eye.

No more talking. Now, this close to the door, he could hear the voices clearly.

He indicated the door with his gun, swallowing hard. Here, he mouthed, edging closer to the open door.

He sees it the second Tom does, nods, gun raised. Teaching the kid a lesson. Might be nothing, might be some other 'kid', but he doesn't think so. It's all too perfect.

He gestures to Tom, nods again at the door. You're pointman. I've got your back. Like everything else, they're going in blind, and there are a whole lot of things about that that he doesn't like at all. But like with everything else, there isn't really any other option. He slides to the wall, presses his back against it, nudges the door silently open with the toe of his boot.

"This is what you been wantin' the whole time, isn't it, you little slut?" he hisses into my ear, full of laughter, and my eyes flicker open, the world snapping into startlingly sharp focus. The texture of the bricks, flecked with grit and a tiny splatter of blood. My blood, I guess. It looks fresh.

I can remember the stark white of the fiberglass shower floor, right under my face. The smell of baby shampoo and the freezing cold water beating down on my back. I can remember how I didn't even have a chance to fight back. Not that time. Well, fuck that.

The world's going to shit around us, but I've forgotten, and I figure he has too. There are hands groping at my waistband, shoving impatiently and tearing at my clothes and I shove back, using the wall for leverage, as hard as I can. Kicking and clawing and snarling and sobbing until his knee connects with the small of my back and the air's choked out of my lungs, and he's just so fucking big, one arm clamped around my throat and the other working at his own zipper, it seems like there's no point.

Please, God. I just wanna go home.

It's just like any other hostage situation, Tom tells himself. They've racked up enough of them over the years. It's just like all those other times, you get in, talk everyone down, and you get out, and hopefully everyone walks away healthy, unharmed. One foot in front of the other until you're clear.

But everything has changed. They're dirty, hungry, dehydrated and the smell of smoke is getting stronger, and maybe Neil is halfway across town with Florence by now, or maybe Neil's already been sold off, beaten, rap-

Tom took a deep breath. This isn't like anything he's experienced. No bodies, but the whole fucking place smells like blood. Sharing one last look with Mike he shouldered open the door and waited just a moment for his eyes to adjust.

He sees a lot in just a few seconds and something dark and primal clawed it's way through his breastbone, all teeth and blood and hate. He forgets the gun for a brief moment and coldcocks the kid on the stairs - seventeen? eighteen? Could he convince himself he cared? - startling a bloody spray of spit out of him and a garbled shout.

"Hands off him," Tom said, hands shaking with adrenaline and restrained violence. He remembered the gun and pulled it up, leveling it at the man that was...that was down in the darkness of the cellar, with Neil. The kid had fallen to the bottom of the stairs and was cursing, scrappling for a weapon stashed in his clothes.

"That's enough!" he barked, easing down the stairs. "Hands. Off."

Edited 2009-08-20 02:57 (UTC)

He follows close on Tom's heels, gun up, and it's dark but he practically forces his eyes to adjust. And he sees a stairway, a kid standing in the way, a big guy down at the bottom, and he's almost too big to see past, but he sees a shock of dark hair, a bloody hand pressed against the wall, and then he sees red.

Tom knocks the kid down and he follows, leveling the gun at him long enough to know that Tom's got it under control, at least for now, before he lifts his aim to the man by the wall.

"Let him go," he says, his voice low. Steady. "Let him go and we all walk outta here." And he doesn't mean it in the slightest.

At first, I think I'm imagining it. The voices. And I think, Oh Christ, I've fuckin' lost it. But then I'm being hauled up, my feet practically leaving the ground, and he's panting frantically in my ear, dragging me deeper into the dark with his arm clamped so tight around my throat I can hardly breathe.

The room's swaying in and out of focus and as the adrenaline starts to burn off, the first real spark of fear laces it's way down my spine.

He's shouting something, shouting back at the voices in the dark -- I can feel the rumble of it in his chest pressed against my spine and smell the hot and rancid stench of his breath fluttering across my cheek -- but I can't hear him over the pound of my own blood in my ears.

Edited 2009-08-20 03:34 (UTC)

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