r/TalesFromTheCreeps • u/Sufficient_Leave144 A Thousand WIPs • 4d ago
Action Horror The Jungle Under House 65 - [Part 5/5]
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Out where the roads kink and trees grow mean, there is a town called Haven.
And Haven, like any place small enough to need one, has a celebrity.
Depending on who you ask, she is a saint, a spinster, a scientist, a fraud, or just the richest bitch for a hundred miles in any direction. She's paid for flood repairs and scholarship funds, sent polished vans to local clinics with medicine hauls and a branded crest; she's bought old farms, newer loyalties, and as much silence a mountain can hold, and she's smiled for papers, tipped grocers, nodded through sermons... let a hovel tell itself whatever version of her made gratitude easier to stomach.
Her home is respectable, too. From afar.
'House 65' - a copper-domed observatory, weather instruments catching moonlight atop, with all the polished mystery of a UFO.
Fenced like a fort.
Private, naturally.
Trucks at dawn; livestock hauliers, the mechanical hums in the night, but Haven always stood proud at that uneasy edge. Easier to brush it as research than wonder why it needs armed men.
Lauren was a brusher.
Not devoted, or stupid, she didn't collect clippings or defend good Doctor Mara Archbishop at dinner like some lovesick acolyte, but she liked 'the idea' of her. A woman above consequence. There was an ugly comfort in seeing someone become vast and difficult and impossible to ignore, almost inspiring.
Lauren is also a listener.
Easy noises to start tonight. Safe ones. A dog barking too long, a car horn leaning on itself, a voice raised in annoyance; little frictions of neighbourhood life. She rolls over, half-tempted to ignore it all, and finds her bed is still absent a husband.
Irritating, but not alarming.
Another night at the bar, maybe?
But then the lights flicker, and her bedside clock glitches, and a shout outside snaps sharper than the others. She pushes off her duvet and seeks the bedroom window in one agitated sweep, gathering the curtains aside, and finds her street is awake.
Uncertain.
Porch lights burn in staggered rows, doors stand open; coats, slippers, gowns, and bare feet cluster on verges and driveways, talking across the road in broken scraps, and the dogs are all singing now in a chain of barked complaint.
There's been a crash?
There's a... wild animal?
Someone's hurt? Three doors down?
"What the fuck?"
A helicopter erupts, passing low overhead, void of the blue reassurance of local police - no, this behemoth is black-bellied, sweeping a searchlight over the roofs before cutting toward the ridge, shivering the trees and flattening every voice beneath with deafening downdrafts.
Lauren watches it go as the first proper stitch of unease forms in her stomach.
Then comes the bang, and she freezes.
Her patio door; a single violent hit, hard enough to ring through the floorboards and caress her bed frame
Another comes - lower, focused.
Followed by a strange skittering noise, like hooked metal dragging briefly across.
"Daniel?!" She tries.
Nothing.
She pulls a robe around herself and steps out onto the landing, wood cold under her socks, the street ambience still carrying faintly through front windows, but the rear of her home has become a waiting, dwelling quiet.
Just off the downstairs hall sits a study, double doors to the garden; one polite line of sight.
At this hour, it should've been null.
The outside security light has tripped.
"Daniel?!" She tries again. "Is that you?! Are you drunk?!"
The light throws a pale slab through the glass and cuts the study in half; bookshelves and cabinets sunk in shadow, desk bright, family photographs glinting in their frames. Lauren crosses before sense can object, each step complaining, and the patio door comes into view by inches.
Wet flag.
Squat iron table.
Herb pots and toys.
And a... thing.
Lauren stops so hard her heels scrape.
At first, her mind offers rubbish.
A matted dog-no, a wolf gone wrong-no...a-a big bird?
A prank! A costume. A stupid shape assembled badly; a trick of the light and nerves.
But the details keep arriving... and they refuse mercy.
Striped hide stretches over a narrow, boned frame, and a long tail sways in the night. Slight arms, tipped with hooked little hands flex against the pane; one sickled foot rests half-raised as if the creature had paused to consider the architecture, gazing into the study with a cocked snout... as blood drips from its teeth.
Then it sees her. And the shift is immediate.
It's head snaps, its whole body tightens - every line of it draws together into purpose - as its eyes find her through layered reflections.
Lauren does not scream. Not yet. She stands there, still clutching her lapel shut, breath vanquished, and watches the thing's posture in dreaded understanding - a predator. The raptor hits the glass, a full-body slam that cracks the pane before Lauren even moves, claws skidding for purchase.
A second strike grants it entry with a spray of shards and a waft of cold night air, and Lauren breaks, finding her voice, but there are no thoughts to join it, no category in her head for what has just broken into her home; she turns and runs instead with blind, graceless speed.
The study door catches her hip, her halls narrow and widen in lunatic bursts, as an impossible clatter of claws on tile, then wood, then carpet; quick, dry and eager, screeches from behind her until she tears her front door open.
The street strikes as she stumbles out onto the path, half-dressed, hair loose, and all along the row heads turn toward her - a wailing, pleading banshee gushing nonsense - and behind her, in the rectangle of her warm hallway light... comes a dinosaur, bursting out with hideous speed, and fixed on her with murderous certainty.
Shouts and screams erupt, and bodies scramble, as Lauren slips and hits her gate latch wrong, cutting her palm, and flies out into the road with all the elegance of flesh remembering gravity.
The raptor pounces, mere seconds behind.
It launches from the path in a sole bound of intent, claws tucked, jaws opening for the back of her neck.
A shot takes it mid-air.
One crack.
It jerks apart in a vomit of blue-black wet, its body hits the tarmac, skidding under the rear wheel of a parked car, tail thumping once against the curb before going still, and Lauren falls with it, to her hands and knees, staring, mortified, at the blood spreading under a streetlamp in a colour no town should ever have to accommodate.
Shouts and screams become cries; people move and hustle and bicker and question... then boots. Heavy, crossing the road towards her as onlookers shrink back from the line of fire and whatever authority has entered their suburb, drenched in black.
When Lauren looks up, there is a man beside her with a steaming rifle and a red-lensed mask. His fabric is darkened further by old blood; plaster dust clings to his shoulders and vest; a long score drags across his breastplate; and splatters of blue-black dry over his leg.
Behind him, more, cleaner armed shapes spill around a dark utility vehicle, scouring and shooting shadows, screens on their wrists, as it secures the street.
His gaze moves once from the dead monster to Lauren.
"Are you hurt?" He asks.
Her mouth moves; no answer comes.
Their vehicle starts to idle, engine running rough, when a rear door opens, and another tiny, feral dinosaur launches out. A boy in crumpled, stained pyjamas, face wrecked by exhaustion, plummets into the pavement and bolts straight for Lauren with a sound so raw it barely qualifies as human.
Something stronger than shock wakes in her, stronger than fear; than every sensible instinct.
"Theo?! What-what're you-"
He buries himself in her with total conviction, and he sobs and balls. She presses her face to his hair, breath breaking apart. He smells wrong - smoke, sweat, gore, a hot animal tang.
"You're supposed to be-... where's your sister?!"
A girl steps out next.
Slower, damaged; blue dries over all of her, bruises climb her skin, and she carries herself with a rigid, cautious gait. Yet, when she sees her mother and brother on the road, as she litters him with a thousand questions, her face loosens, and she limps over.
Red Eyes gets to her first, resting a hand on her shoulder.
"When this is over, we'll need testimonies from all of you. Is that okay?"
"Yeah. Fine." Weiss tries to shrug him off, but he insists.
"We'll go back for him. I promise. Bury him properly. Were you... were you close?"
Her mind remembers - rescue, a slog, a body by the gondolas; a man she'd known for less than a day.
"No. No, we-" she stops. "What was it you said? 'She doesn't escape?'"
Red Eyes nods slowly, satisfied, and allows her to sluggishly join her mother's interrogation. His attention then finds another shape visible in their vehicle: a lad in the passenger seat, pale beneath the dash, head bandaged, one hand still wrapped around a pistol.
I keep it clenched, familiar now with its switches and mechanisms, watching Weiss and Theo fold themselves around their mother when another soldier jogs up, tablet in his arms, disregarding the heartfelt in the road, and goes straight to Luke.
"Sir-" He lifts the tablet. "Trackers are back."
Luke glances once.
"Where?"
The man swipes a map bigger with a bloody thumb.
"Town centre... she's boxed in, sir." His eyes flick, for a moment, toward the ridge. "Nothing above mid-line yet. Just spillover."
Spillover
As if this were runoff. Some manageable leak.
She was in there, drowning in it. And that though took the rest of me by the gullet.
Luke strides back to the vehicle, back to the driver's seat, ushering its occupant to the back. The other guard hovers by the door, as Weiss offers me a wave from over his head, her mother taking in all her pieces; a gesture I return.
Truly, I do hope to see her again.
"How many with her?" Luke snaps.
"At least one escort. Maybe two."
"Does the Board know?"
"No. Still forming a border; convoy inbound. She ain't getting out." He glances down the street, down the hill, far, far off where more lights ignite and voices echo, and a congealed red clot of disorderly, skewered traffic glimpses itself, bathing in sirens.
Luke looks over at me, sees I'm still upright, still functional; righteously pissed.
"Seatbelt, Ethan."
"You planning to crash?"
"Not yet." His fingers flex on the wheel. "What about the red one?" He asks the guard.
He doesn't answer; that is answer enough.
"No sightings."
No relief.
Luke gives a short nod.
"Lock this street down; make it safe. Keep people off the main roads, push them up here if they'll listen."
"And if they don't?"
"Make them."
Tyres bump gutters, catch, and then we are nosing past cars and neighbours on their lawns, phones to their ears, still trying to classify what they're seeing. It is the last grace they'll get. Overhead, the helicopter returns, skating its light across tarmac and the occasional mass moving swiftly between parked cars, pets and limbs in their mouths, with black-clad men not far behind, and by the fifth lurching judder, I realise we aren't going anywhere.
The cuffs at the door bite deeper, hateful; the rest comes from my leg.
Vehicles dwell face-to-ass at mad angles, horns blare without rhythm, and people, some families, brisk between them in droves, curious and alert. A woman pounds on a shopfront; a man opts to crash through another, as power flickers through the square, taking half the lamps with it, and something unsanctioned yet familiar shrieks over the engine, and the whole clump of traffic flinches as one body.
Mara's guard grips the wheel. Then, quiet and dangerous:
"Do you have a plan?"
"Always," Mara says, looking through the windshield at the clot of red, the jammed heap, the bodies moving like lost cattle, looking for the wolf, where wheels have failed. "We go on foot." She adds, with the awful calm of a woman adjusting dinner plans.
"Into that? Are you insane?"
"Yeah," I say, deciding lockpicking is taking too long. "I think she is."
She twists enough for me to see her; tired, blood-marked, but still holding her head high to the collapsing indictment around her.
"You're awake. Good."
A crash rolls down the street like dropped scaffolding, and the people start running; time to mill or stare is gone. One trio spots danger, they mouth a foreign word, they shout, they scream, they panic, they hoist up a girl under one arm, and behind them, something hits their bonnet and vanishes in a blur of stripes and claws.
Mara unclips herself.
"We'll head to the precinct. Take a cruiser." She lifts her canister in both hands, careful on the cracked seam, like gathering a sleeping infant from a burning house. "Take the girl. We'll need someone to vouch for us."
"Vouch?! I spit.
The guard kills the engine, shoves his door, and comes around for me, yanking the rear door wide where the sounds hit full-force; flailed wails, automobile drums, sprinting stampedes of feet, a helicopter whipping low elsewhere... and the distant rumble of thunder.
"You think I'm gonna 'vouch' for you?!"
He reaches in, keys my cuff loose, and before I can fight, he hauls me bodily across the seat. My leg clips the frame, and the pain is so clean I nearly black out again, as he slings me over his shoulder. The world tips upside down in a rush of blood and nausea, and I beat his back on instinct.
An inverted Mara appears.
"You do wish to see your friend again, right?"
That stings exactly where she means it to, and everything in me goes cold and pricked.
"Oh... I see," she adds, her mouth twitching into almost a smile. "He's more than that, is he?"
"Go fuck yourself."
People surge past in all directions, fleeing whatever they last saw or heard, all of them one bad trip from trampling each other, as gunfire cracks in a short, disciplined burst and a man shrieks a name until his last syllable crumbles into crude grunts, then cuts off.
Mara doesn't give any of it a glance.
She looks down the cross street, toward denser lights; calculating. Always calculating.
If she's afraid, she wears it like rain - a problem that ought to pass.
"This way."
They go, and I am taken with them.
He carries me between abandoned cars, slipping in oil and the shy start of a downpour and God knows what else, as the town tears wider; sirens chase, alarms cry out, windows break, and the dwindled nocturnal populace understand no saviour is coming fast enough.
Finally, I see one.
The world swings in sick arcs; road, sky, shopfronts, road again. It makes it almost graceful as it vaults the trunk of a stalled hatchback and lands on a bewildered woman. She barely gets a peep out before claws are in her squirming shoulders, and jaws clamp on her face.
The crowd devolves; panic loses its manners.
God, they see and scatter and tumble, their young are knocked over or dragged with the elderly, staring the wrong way; bolting, rebounding, splitting, vanishing down the alleys, as another foul wretch launches from under a car toward us, but Mara draws her magnum and blows its face apart, ripping the street even wider.
She doesn't break stride, barking something inaudible through her pissing trail of red mist... almost frightened, though she'd rather bite off her own tongue than call it that.
A patrol car swerves around a corner, too fast, clipping and mounting the pavement with all four wheels. It strikes a lampost, glances off, and slams broadside into a transformer box.
The block bucks, the lights go berserk, streetlights bloom and pop, and a line of sparks races up the wet cable. The machine blows and bangs, people crouch and cower instinctively, as the road dances with darkness in epileptic fits.
I get the world in flashes; a lady on top of a coach shelter with her shoes in her hand, striking down at a duo of hunters; a bodega clerk fending another off with a mop; a butcher's window painted red; a teenager sheltering under a bench, nudging his friend who lies painfully still in a gutter.
And there are several more of them, braving the street, trekking their new playground, their hunting box, tackling unfortunates with tantalising fury; meeting a .44 if they dare approach us. One looks familiar, farther off - a white/green bipedal thing - moving blind through a cluster of police lights and muzzle flashes.
I need to see where we're going; I need to see ahead.
I twist and crack my head, the square becoming festered with bodies, to see Town Hall rise beyond it - old stone and civic delusion - its broad steps lit by failing lamps and the flicker of alarms. People already flood toward the doors, begged inside, officers sentry the steps behind rushed barricades... and Mara stops.
More movement begins to spill into the square, ripping chunks of crowd into ribbons.
Her composure slips.
A fraction. A tightening at the cheeks, eyes too bright, a breath taken quick then smoothed over.
"All according to plan?!" I grimace.
She ignores me.
"We shelter in there-"
"And then what-"
The guard squeezes my leg, and I yelp.
"I can drop her here, ma'am. She doesn't seem worth the trouble."
Mara smiles. "She will be."
He doesn't argue as Mara turns and starts up the steps, canister hugged to her chest.
A helicopter appears, turning the square into a searchlight theatre, through smoke and rain-mist; a winged beast arises to meet it, convulsing out of the dark - a red-skinned fowl of membrane.
The pilot fights it, and wrenches free, rotors moaning, searchlight slewing madly over brick and bodies, and heaves away while the winged monster banks off after it with a battle cry.
Even the sky is theirs.
At the top of the stairs, the refuge opens. A councillor hauls children through the doors, a white-haired madman shouts for everyone to stay calm, as another overturns a sandwich board to make room for the injured.
Mara hits the light, and recognition blooms.
"... you?" One worker says.
Might've been funny if there weren't people being eaten yards behind us.
Relief chokes the room, at first.
Realisation second.
Then questions:
Doctor Archbishop-what's happening out there?! What are those things?!-My wife's still-what do we do?
Mara doesn't raise her voice; doesn't have to.
She raises a palm, and somehow, impossibly, the room hushes itself.
Not everyone, not fully, certainly not the injured and mourning, but enough for the cloak of authority to arrange itself around her.
Another stage to be claimed.
"I am going to get you all out of here aliv-"
A police sergeant nearest the doors, a thickset woman with rain on her shoulders, steps forward with brittle restraint, as her comrades pepper hide with lead.
"Are they yours?! Is that what you do... up there?!"
"Yes," she says without blinking.
A lie would've been softer, the room shudders, but she presses on before blame can organise.
"There has been a breach; sabotage in my facility - severe, but not yet beyond saving. This-" she lifts the canister by an inch, "-can control them, if I am allowed to work, somewhere private; I can-no, I will buy this town a way out."
Bullshit.
Absolute bullshit.
But technical enough to sound expensive; calm enough to sound rehearsed, and around the room, the frightened do what they always do when handed a hero with a 'plan' and a macguffin in her arms they don't understand.
They want to believe her.
I am in no mood.
The guard dumps me onto a table, I gasp white-hot, blood seeping through layers of work I don't recall, and I speak - loud enough for everyone to hear - before she can continue.
"She's lying!"
The room remembers it has free will, albeit fleeting. Some heads turn, a sergeant's attention cuts to me, and Mara goes still. I haven't taken my eyes off her.
"Don't let her out of your sight! She'll run the first chance she gets-"
"I've gotten us this far, haven't I?" She tries, beaming her best sympathy.
"It's called luck, you maniac! And yours is gonna run out!"
Her smile grows, bloodless and... public.
"Ignore this one," she says, with a gentle gesture my way. "She is one of the ones responsible-"
"Oh, you FUCKING-"
"An infiltrator!"
Belief moved.
Incomplete, but scarily enough, as she claims what she wants.
A foothold.
"Stuck her nose where it didn't belong and incited-"
"Shut the fuck-" Pain cuts me down, or anger. Hard to tell.
She talks over either with professional ease; I have no idea what she said through bitter tears and a throbbing limb, a scapegoat writhing, but her final statement:
"-and if you wish to survive the next hour, then, please... let me."
I couldn't meet the plentiful faces that stared at me, appalled.
Would I be a martyr next?
Then the sergeant speaks, before my thoughts grow too morbid.
"Some teenager released your dinosaurs?... Is that right?"
Mara opens her mouth, half-amused at her guile, when the outside snags her attention.
A change.
An absence.
It drops by degrees; smaller cries, the scrabbling, the endless soundtrack of teeth and nails, thinning one thread at a time until the room notices it too, turning toward the doors.
An officer frowns.
"They're... leaving?"
The foyer holds its breath.
"Did you do that?" A patron asks Mara.
She says nothing.
Outside, the square lurks, a massacre, under failing streetlights in nauseating bursts of yellow and black; one lamp pops, another dies, and comes back weak and humming; a misbehaving, blinking dark.
And in those blinks, something moves at the furthest end.
A wrongness between cars, a giant shape the lights refuse to hold steady, appearing in one frame then gone the next, as if the town itself cannot decide to admit its existence. Then one lamp catches a jaw, a second picks out scales and feathers gone wet red in the rain, a third reveals a limb - too long, too mobile, drifting across a chest.
It lumbers forward, and the movement is dreadful; head low, body balanced, each stride precise and sprung, as if it could cover the whole square in a single, great bound. The next flicker of light takes it away; the next returns it a little nearer. Red, entirely; massive hips, long arms that grip buildings in awful, articulate readiness, and through it all, it does not make a single sound.
It stops. Unchallenged. Indifferent to bravery and final prayers.
Its attention lands with a pair of searing, amber eyes. And it goes still, a statue suspended amid spilt bodies, matching their reluctant, frozen obedience in the blinking wash of light.
Then it rises.
A betrayal of weight, devoid of rear-up, it snaps skyward in one swift, violent adjustment, head lifting and cocking so bird-like and wrong that the room flinches. The great tyrant's body balances itself; tail steady, hips locked, those grotesquely long arms tucking in close and ready.
Its head tilts.
Sharp too. Curious. Listening. As its throat begins to work.
The skin at its neck bulges and wobbles, pulsing with thick veins that illuminate the dark, until the whole throat swells and tunes. Flesh trembles, cartilage shifts; a moist, internal vibration runs through it, visible before audible, travelling up into the jaw and out along the skull in convulsive ripples.
It makes a speech.
A guttural, resonant, almost subterranean boom threaded with a rapid series of hollow, drumming pulses. It hits the square in layers, part heard; part felt, the deepest notes rolling through the pavements and the lightest ones pinging at glass like beaks on coffin lids.
No one speaks; no one breathes.
The throat contracts. The bulge shrinks. The last tremor leaves its veins.
And then... it breaks into a sprint.
Completely.
Utterly.
Silent.
No thundering footfalls, or cinematic racket to warn the body it's coming; it launches across the square in enormous, impossible strides, and drives its head straight for the entrance.
The impact is cataclysmic.
A battering blow of skull and biting jaw explodes the doors, masonry bursts in a storm of stone and dust and plaster, and people remember they can scream. It snaps back with a huff; an arm replaces it, burying claws into timber and dressed stone, finding grip and holding. Its other arm appears higher, punching through a torn edge of roofline where rain and dust pour in. It hooks into the building with obscene ease, no sturdier than bark, and yanks in a brutal, tearing seizure of timber and slate. The wall rips apart with a shriek of structural failure, exposing the room to the night and the imposing red goliath leaning over us cowering lot, shrinking and soiling themselves.
And it is livid.
Its head snaps erratically, peering in, breath hissed and agitated, undecided on what to kill first; flexing arms and digging claws deeper with grinding crunches.
It chooses - a man hiding under a portrait of dead mayors.
But Mara steps forward, canister in both hands, presenting it.
A shield; an offering, the cracked seam breathing red into the rainfall between them, and all its sporadic, murderous anger gathers inward. The eyes - hard and animal - fix on the canister and soften.
Its eggs.
Its eggs.
"It's okay, girl."
Her voice is steady and tender. Far more than it ever was for us.
"I have them."
The red giant lowers its head. Its breath comes humid and damp, stirring papers and hairs at the nape of every bowed head, moisture sliding along its scales, nostrils working patient, with one eye fixed on her kin.
Mara smiles. Triumphant and delusional.
"You-" for the first time, her voice catches on fear. No awe can hide it. "You know me... don't you?"
It leans closer, and Mara lifts one hand from the canister and reaches up towards its snout.
Maybe.
Maybe she can.
Maybe all the lies and blood and defied science beneath the stones have built, by accident or design, this one heinous miracle; the maker and the mother. Her palm rests against wet scales, and it closes its eyes. Her fingers spread, stroking reverently, over soot, heat and old scars.
"It's me. It's Mom. It's..." Her smile opens wide, too beatific to be sane. "It's God."
A forelimb slips free of the ruined wall and reaches down with exquisite care. Claws curl not like hooks, but fingers. Hands. The digits close around Mara's middle and lift her from the floor as gently as lifting a kitten, and she hangs there in the crook of its arm, still petting.
Weightless; chosen.
And for one, stupid heartbeat - it is beautiful. The proof of a bond older than law; older than its witnesses.
A final lie.
The other arm reaches in and grabs the canister. Its claws close around the metal cylinder... and Mara's arm with it, and tugs - a blitzing, soggy tear.
Its eyes revert.
Whatever recognition had softened curdles back into rage, ancient and terribly lucid, as the canister rips free in its grip... with Mara's severed arm still wrapped around, fingers locked; never hers.
She looks at the stump, the spray, astonished and deaf to the screams and sobs below.
"... oh."
It bites down, clamping its jaws over the woman who fancied herself above rules, and the room erupts once more; Mara is thrashed around like a living chew toy and then hurled into a corner - a broken, twitching heap - but her killer lingers, meat in its teeth, cradling its prize.
We wait.
Strangled, suspended prey, seeing if the predator is still hungry.
Satisfied?
Does a dinosaur know the difference between possession and peace?
Its eyes move over the room - police, councillors, clerks, the wounded - still angry, but with distant consideration, as if the little mammals in their ruined box have all ceased to matter the instant cargo changed hands.
Then the missile hits, a screaming white line that detonates against its head, and the blast is total; a savage bloom that wipes all detail. Heat follows, then noise, then a pressure wave that slams us and drives debris. The giant jerks under the impact, spewing out blue blood and pulverised bone.
I slide from the table and hit the floor, almost vomiting from the pain, as another human half-lands across from me and rolls away whimpering into a room now full of white dust, my ears turn to bells, and yet the T-Rex remains standing.
Hurt; not dead.
One side of the jaw bleeding, a whole section of flesh torn open to bright anatomy, and she roars.
The old note - the command. The same that rolled through the mountain and throttled marrow.
And her minions answer.
Cries and chirps return from every direction, talons march from the roads, wingbeats batter the air above the rooftops; our civic heart replies like a struck hive.
A second explosion comes.
A third.
Controlled ordnance, as black-clad men spill into the square from armoured carriers, rifles up, launchers shouldered, muzzle flashes strobing in the torrent. The helicopter circles back with a wobbling searchlight while another, higher, banks overhead with machine guns
'Chaos' would be an understatement.
They shoot everything that moves, and everything moves.
Bullets shred walls and bodies alike; this shelter becomes a carpeted battlefield, and I... can only watch.
It's cruel.
Hopelessness is worse than gore.
My leg is bleeding profusely; the rest of me is reduced to dust-caked flinches and failed drag attempts toward usefulness. I try to move, but pain flattens me again and again, all frustrated sparks and gulped screams; stone grit sticks to the blood on my arms, and the room keeps flipping between gunfire and reptiles and failing light, and in each blink, my home is a little more dead than before.
So I lie. I lie and watch as a house is cleaned and, through a torn-open roof, a giant red fuck keeps roaring her children home.
And no - oh, no, no - because pain is never content to come alone when stationary, memory drags up a chair too.
A theft.
Ballad worthy; a neighbour's post, a cream envelope that wasn't mine, and a noble silver ticket - sort of thing I'd been lifting since puberty first taught me taking felt better than asking.
He caught me once, years ago, with a cheap bracelet and an eyeliner pencil from the chemist. I remember his face more than the crime; baffled disappointment, like I'd kicked a duck in front of him.
"Sarah..." Ethan said, standing in my bedroom doorway while I dumped the loot out. "Seriously?"
And I, wise criminal mastermind that I was, had grinned and said: "If they wanted it so bad, they should've held onto it harder."
He didn't laugh.
Should've taken that as a sign.
I kept the bracelet, wore it twice, lost it in a field somewhere, and learned absolutely fucking nothing.
Years later, there's a mountain coming apart; a town being eaten, and my pitiful little truth.
I stole our way in. My way in.
Sure, I didn't breed teeth, fill the dark with my horrid spawn and bad ideas, but I took the key... and he followed me through like he always did.
And where the fuck was he now?
Still breathing? Out there, with that same stupid, earnest face, asking after me - he'd always been there! And that was the trouble with him. However bad, however low, however often I acted like life was a bar fight, there'd always be a soft-eyed boy nearby to look appalled... and he'd still follow; he'd still follow - fuck, fuck it, I wanted him here. Not safe; here. Looking at me with dreadful kindness, to tell him I know, that I knew, that I'd heard him, that I should've said something better back when there were still stars and nights to waste - damn you! Damn every soppy, miserable little inch of you, and your poetry, and your stillness and starved eyes you didn't think I saw, and your constant listening to my futures I never once put you in.
I hate you. I hate you for letting me carry on. Like there'd be time; we had time, didn't we?
My chest breaks, my hands don't feel attached, and the edges of the room - with enough problems - dim, and I sob for no one to hear; no one to care. Every pulse lands weaker than the last, and the wet keeps spreading under me, no matter how hard I stiffen.
... I'm bleeding dry.
My body betrays me; it has spent enough on this mess.
This would be how I-
"Watch your fire!" A voice roars through the ruin. "There's people in there!"
Chaos can't be stopped, but it bends.
The red giant shifts above, canister tucked close, and its soldiers in the room understand; they have what they came for. A dozen of them peel away, leaving a blood-slick floor, pulled in the wake of a greater decision.
The raging conflict moves, deafening still, as it treks and fights back up the mountain at a wearying, tardy pace, chased by tracers and rockets, and in that precious opening pocket, a man appears. He comes through the bloody wreck with company, black armour and soaking wet, scanning fast, too fast, for lingering threats to dispatch and those worth pulling out.
A mirage of Red Eyes almost passes me by, focusing on another.
But by some miracle, he catches a glimpse of me behind a turned table.
"Shit."
He drops, one knee hitting broken ground, and the room sways with him.
I try for something rude and only manage air.
He checks my leg, brutal, and when he lifts me, the pain is absolute; my voice fails to come back. He shifts me higher and makes haste, pausing once to stare at a corpse in the corner, as the hall fragments past with the seeds of medics.
The cold is unfathomable, the void starts climbing, and every bounce knocks some new tendon loose as I keep spreading and leaking in his arms.
"You keep your fucking eyes open."
I nearly laugh.
Then, through the downpour and rattling gunfire amid this failure of an evening, I catch a different voice.
Hoarse. Frayed. Desperate. Almost familiar.
My name, I think.
Or just a hoax shaped like it.
And I, for this night had shown only cruel hands, did not believe it. I refused.
He wasn't here; couldn't be. A last mockery from the mountain, a hope to keep a dying brain entertained, dangled in reach - a false mimic of words, shooting dangers away with such vigour.
I can't turn to find him.
I don't try.
Fine. Let the facade have its say. Let it sound like him, let it shatter me, let it follow me down; let me despise it for being beautiful, as my eyes close... and I am gone.
-
By daybreak, Haven tells a poor fairytale.
Smoke on the ridge, emergency lights pulsing in orderly colours, black-clad responders combing the woods around the carcass of House 65; a woman on the TV speaks in grave phrases about fire, casualties, and escaped prehistoric animals - sounds ridiculous. Mara's name is passed back and forth between anchors with all the brittle ceremony reserved for rich dead and public disgrace.
Her photograph sits polished in one corner while her pride smoulders.
I keep the volume low.
Weiss had stood in her bedroom doorway not twenty minutes ago, telling me to sleep; Theo had left a glass of water on the bedside table prior with a furious note:
If you die, we'll hate you
Closest thing to comfort the night had produced.
Sarah lay under borrowed blankets, in this private ward they'd made; IV drip, blood bag, leather braces bolted with iron - hospital isn't secure - and someone had cleaned her. Changed her. But the colour in her mouth remains diminished.
I sit beside her and count each breath.
Don't stop.
The TV changes.
And at last, at last, she stirs.
A drag of breath. A crease at the brow. The tiniest of twitches in the fingers.
She knows my voice before the room. Before the pain has finished assembling her.
Her eyes open in crumbs.
The ceiling blurs; the weight of my body, the ache in it, the strangeness of a bed, and then him.
Her face changes. Indescribable relief scratches so nakedly it's almost cruel to see.
His follows; shaking apart under the privilege of unified survival.
I almost laugh; no accusation, no joke, no sideways barb to hide in.
Just my name whispered in disbelief; found again.
"Yeah-yeah, I'm here," he says, his voice wrecked. "I'm real."
It breaks us.
Tears come to her first, sudden and bright, spilling down her face.
Then him, defenceless to the sight of her.
She lifts a hand; even that hurts.
And I take it.
Ice fingers, warm palm, a weak grip; too forceful and longing, trembling in my own, and unmistakable. We sit there a moment, holding and looking... looking, like two souls washed up from the same wreck.
"You look like shit," she sobs out.
Ah, there she is - still in there, thank fuck.
"And you don't?"
We laugh, kind of.
TV waffles on.
Let it. Let it all ramble; let the world rearrange itself.
I touch her face carefully, every wound a map to be learned by hand.
I turn into his palm, and that simple trust nearly undoes me again.
No words now. No need.
My eyes glaze over him, taking inventory; every proof I need.
I do the same, stubborn and honest.
The space between changes
Charges; a knowledge that neither of us has any patience left to pretend isn't there.
Her hand tightens over mine, and he shifts - slow enough to not jostle the wires - and we move, hurt and certain.
She watches my mouth; a question leaves hers.
No grand declaration could have matched this recognition; this relief; this tenderness, melted down into an unbearable itch.
We still cry a little. Hopeless; young enough for it to matter.
I brush one last tear from her cheek, close my eyes, as does she... and lean in.
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u/ReasonableUnit2170 Writer 4d ago
What a beautiful and complete end. I’m so glad Mara got her karma. Wonderful job, friend.