FIC: Doctor Who: Restless 4/??
Apr. 1st, 2006 02:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
zouzounakiTitle: Restless
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ghanistarkiller (Mrs Peel on A Teaspoon and an Open Mind Fanfic Archive)
Summary: The Doctor, Jack and Rose arrive in an eerily abandoned city only to find that the real puzzle lies within the walls of a drastically fenced in settlement. Just exactly what is the mysterious "illness?" What happened to make the citizens so frightened of being outside the fence after dark? And just what -or who- is dying to get in there?
Rating: R
Genre(s): Horror, Mystery
Characters: The Doctor (9th), Jack Harkness, Rose Tyler
Warnings: Mixed (mostly gen/het), Swearing
'Would you like my mask?
Would you like my mirror?'
cries the man in the shadowing hood.
'You can look at yourself,
you can look at each other.
Or you can look at the face, the face of your God'
-Loreena McKennitt
4.
Rose made her way through the marketplace, peeking over shoulders to glance at booths and stalls, taking in the variety of commodities offered. She smiled, pausing at a stand to purchase a tray of those blue-tinted chips she’d gotten that night at the diner and had since developed a taste for. Now this was holiday, she thought, following the flow of the crowd down the busy lane -a bit of shopping, mostly just browsing, and chips. If it wasn’t for the walking dead just outside the settlement’s heavily outfitted fence, it’d be near perfect.
Right. Them. So she couldn’t quite get that out of her head, the thought of them being out there, just waiting for nightfall. She could tell it was bothering the Doctor as well, he’d gone all quiet and thoughtful-like. He didn’t sleep, not really, not normally, but it had been different the past couple of days since Jack had left to join the patrol. Sometimes he was gone to who knows where, and sometimes he was stood there for hours, by the window.
‘Vacancy’ the neon sign outside their double motel room announced loudly in a kitschy shade of magenta, below declaring ‘Transients and Extra-Terrestrials Welcomed.’ The irregular sputtering of the letter ‘c’ didn‘t seem to concern the Doctor, though it had begun to wear on Rose‘s nerves just a bit. She would sit cross-legged upon the bed, still pale and fairly shaken up a bit, and certainly not ready to get some sleep any time soon in those first few hours. “D’you suppose we could, like, fix it?” she had asked uncertainly. She knew it was a rather childishly naïve question, but it was all she could manage her brain to get around.
The Doctor had turned to her, his eyebrows raised, telling her, “Despite the uncanny resemblance, I’m not actually Harry Potter, y’know.” All right, so he was a bit testy, not uncommon -a paper cut and he’d do a half hour on supercomputers whose evil schemes he had thwarted. It was his pensive hush that unsettled her and she’d started to go stir crazy after about a day of channel-surfing the three or so stations the planet’s satellite picked up. Mind, the Doctor only paused his brooding meditation when he’d caught sight of a reality show called ’Bear With Me’ on the telly, claiming it was one of his favorites though expressing his disappointment at it not being the celebrity edition.
“All right, Harry Potter,” she’d said, “you can stay here and… play with your wand, or something. I’m getting out of here. And you be here when I get back!” she added as she left. So she’d come to the bazaar to take in the sights and sounds, get her mind off of things, if only for a time.
A street-side improvised puppet theatre kept a rapt and amused audience in a group of children, all dressed in a variation of the same drab smock. A monkey-like creature with green fur did tricks while its possessor played an instrument that looked like an uncomfortable cross between a bagpipe and a tuba. Entertainers shouted from either side of her, all competing for her attention and, hopefully, generous gratuity.
She stopped in front of a sign that offered, promisingly, ‘Soul Peddling.’ She stepped forward curiously, gawking at the variety of mirrors -long, stout, short, slender, warped, clear, gilt framed or plainly adorned, they were all present in the small booth. She expected a robust pitch, an overeager performer with fast talk to pull her in. “H-hello,” she called out, as if the proprietor of the stall was concealed behind the mirrors, waiting to pounce out and surprise her.
She moved onward into the jumble of mirrors, seeing herself reflected, backward and forward, every which way she turned. “Oh,” she frowned, twisting so that she could examine her backside from several different angles, “I knew these jeans made my bum look big. Mickey‘s such a liar.” She sighed -what, exactly, was it she was supposed to be seeing? She waited patiently and, slowly, she felt an echo building, a mere whisper at first. Mickey’s such a liar -it repeated at her and she could swear, if only for a moment, she saw him standing beside her from the corner of her eye.
Just a mirror, a trick of the mind. She chuckled uneasily. All right, Yoda, I’ll play your game, she thought with a grin. She must have seen the movie a hundred times, thanks to Mickey -Luke says, “What’s in there?” glancing into the mysterious cave. His master replies, “Only what you bring with you.”
The memory stirred up a flurry of happy recollections, bouncing off the reflective surfaces, creating a sort of web of peacefulness about her. Christmases with her mum, how she always tried to find that one special surprise present; larking about with Shareen, sneaking into adult movies, giggling over boys; kissing Mickey, having a drink at the pub with him, a game playing on the telly.
She found herself gazing into an almost void-like place within the mirror, within herself. “Nice to meet you, Rose. Run for your life!” The vortex she was staring into whisked about her excitedly. Holding the Doctor’s hand, dancing with Jack. If she’d been at peace before, safe, she now felt the exhilaration of her travels. “Gimme a day like this!” And she laughed, not even aware of the tears in her eyes until the gathered at the corners of her mouth.
And then she looked too deep.
Disorder, confusion, tumult. And her throat was so parched, she was gagging for the dryness. Wanting, she was wanting, needing, craving -why was she so restless? And what was this urge that was pulling her forward? She saw herself, shambling in the shadows, her eyes a luminescent scarlet. And she -her other self- lunged, baring rotted and twisted teeth. Rose screamed, feeling hands pulling her away, out from the void. And she was back in the market, her breath tremulous, her hands quaking.
So distressed was she that, when she turned to thank the owner of the steadying arms, she nearly let out a fierce scream. The man was wearing a mask like a fitted mirror which reflected her own features as she gaped into it, as if she was staring into her own face on another’s body. “You all right, la?” he asked, the voice coming from her double so distinctively male that it made her laugh.
“I’m- I’m fine,” she assured him, chuckling away her unease. “This your stand?” she inquired and, when he nodded in the affirmative, she asked, “What’s it supposed to do, then? There were memories and I could feel a sort of, I dunno, harmony, if that makes sense. But then there were other things, things that haven’t happened…”
“Blimey!” the soul peddler exclaimed. “It works different for everyone, la, but I’ve not seen anyone quite so receptive as you!” He pulled off the mask. “The name’s Renault and she’s all mine,” he jerked his thumb proudly towards the booth. “You look a bit dazed, la, d’you need to sit down? I can get you some water.”
“No, I’m better now, thanks.” Rose frowned, “And why d’you keep calling me lad?”
“Oh, I’m so sorry, erm, miss…?” When she didn’t object, he went on, “You never can tell these days, with all the… varieties.” He was ushering her towards a seat, despite her assertion that she was feeling well again. “Never can be too careful, can we?” he queried rhetorically as he handed her a bottle of water.
She sloshed the yellow liquid back and forth in its clear plastic container, eying it suspiciously. It did look rather more than a bit like… They didn’t have plumbing in their hotel room -there was no sink, the toilet flushed dry and the shower operated on something to do with sonic waves. If the water was all like this opaque drink, she couldn’t blame the management for its choice. But she was thirsty, that strange dehydration lingered from her strange conjuring. She took a sip and it wasn’t half bad, like spring water trace with alcohol. “Why’s it look like… why’s it yellow though?” she wondered aloud.
“That’ll mean it’s clean, miss,” Renault informed her. There was that word again: Clean. Fuchsia had used it, the night they’d met, in the diner, when she told them that their badges confirmed that they were clean. The illness, it must be. But, why the water?
“Mind if I keep this?” she asked, shaking the bottle. She’d want to talk to the Doctor about this. He guaranteed her that it would be no trouble at all and she fished about in her pocket, pulling out a long platinum bar and two smaller gilt ones. She gave Renault one of the latter, a most generous tip for which he thanked her profusely. “It’s no problem, really,” she ensured him and it truly wasn’t. The Doctor had maneuvered a banking console, using the sonic screwdriver naturally, into believing that their accounts were very fat indeed. The result -more pocket money than even she knew what to do with.
“How can you own a stand without even knowing what it does?” she questioned.
He just shrugged. “Bought it off some old sod ‘bout six months ago, thought he was gonna make it out of this place, poor bastard. I asked him too, y’know, what it does, how it works. The crazy punter, he tells me that I’ll know when it works and when it doesn’t, and that’s all I need understand. He said that the air was ‘thick with souls,’ or some other such nonsense, thanks to those unlucky buggers out there, and that the mirrors captures that and, well, I s’pose it shows you things.”
“So, in theory, it might show me what they were thinking,” Rose said thoughtfully, “or what they had been thinking when, you know. In theory,” she added, abashed at sounding like a completely gullible twat.
“In theory,” Renault echoed, frowning slightly. “Why, what did it show you?”
“Nothing important,” she lied.
She became aware that Renault had led her to the back of his bizarre stall, and that things were much quieter, much calmer than on the bustling bazaar street. From her seat, she could now see the ramshackle buildings that the marketplace had been built around, seemingly unoccupied tenements, though she was sure that many who came here on the scoots took shelter within while avoiding notice. One alleyway in particular caught her attention as it was larger than the others that ran between the structures and seemed to get much more traffic. “Where’s that lead to, then?”
He followed her line of sight and started shaking his head emphatically. “Oh, miss, you don’t want to go down there!” he insisted and she smiled at first, thinking it a promotional trick to get her to check it out. But his features remained grave, serious. “It’s not a place for nice young girls such as yourself,” he said, trying to chuckle but it came out sounding forced, almost harsh.
“Come on,” she goaded playfully, “you can tell me.” But his face had gone ashen and she could see that she’d get no more words from him. Now, she could have gone back to the Doctor, told him all about it -what she had seen in the soul peddling booth, the mysterious alley that all sorts of dubious characters seemed to be ducking into. She could do. After all, she had the bottle of water she wanted to show him. Or she could just take a peek for herself, just to see whether or not it was worth the Doctor’s time…
“I’ll be okay,” Rose insisted as Renault tried to persuade her against it but she was determined, trying to quiet his protests so she could casually stroll into the alley as if she belonged. “Now hush, I can barely slip by discreetly with you hanging off of me!” He relented, rather dejectedly, and said his farewells as if he’d never see her again which, to be fair, he probably wouldn’t have even if he didn’t believe she was about to meet some dreadful fate.
The alleyway was dark, churning with an inimitable gloom, the daylight didn’t touch a single inch of it, the way it sloped down between the abandoned housing, winding its way around, she almost felt as if she were underground. It wasn’t as she expected, a bit damp, cooler than the marketplace and emptier than she’s imagined. Inside the structures, she heard sounds of life, shops selling illicit goods from food to medical supplies. And, of course, the squatters, families mostly, a lot of what Fuchsia called halfies.
“No, you can’t, please!” the cry pierced the subdued murkiness, drawing Rose running to a dilapidated, makeshift doorstep, somewhere in her mind registering how odd it was that, despite the chill humidity, her trainers never once splashed into a puddle. “Please,” a woman was weeping, holding fast to the arm of a man roughly around her own age, later thirties, maybe. Two younger men were clutching him, dragging him onto the rough pavement. The woman was trying desperately to shield two little children from the scene before them, shoving them back towards the door, even as she begged, “He’s hardly showing signs. Look at him, he’s healthy! It‘ll- it‘ll pass. Maybe with sterilization…”
“Oi, what d’you think you’re doing?” Rose yelled, running to the woman’s side. The two boys, the ones hauling the man away, they were wearing dusters, the kind that patrolmen commonly sported in their own customized way. “You patrol, yeah?” Rose frowned. “Does Tommy know you’re doing this?!”
“Where d’you think the orders came from, lass?” the first boy said grimly but not without a sort of smug satisfaction. “Start showing symptoms and they go over the wall, that’s Patriot’s instructions. He’s been reported, this one has. It’s our law, how d’you think we keep the sickness out, darlin’?”
“‘Over the wall’?” Rose repeated aghast. “How d’you know he’s infected? For God’s sake, the man isn’t even dead yet?! You know what they’ll do to him! It’s just… cruel!”
The men exchanged a glance and began to approach her now threateningly, keeping their prisoner in tow. “You questioning us, lass? You know what we do to dissidents, don’t you? We put ‘em over the wall with the rest of the trash.”
“Yeah, you think you scare me?” Rose said, her voice wavering only slightly as they loomed over her. She held her ground bravely, her chin raised defiantly. “What d’you think Flyboy’ll do when he finds out what you did with me, he won’t be half cross, I can tell you that!”
“She only just meant,” a voice interjected, a stroke of luck and not a moment too soon either. Rose allowed herself to let go of the breath she was holding inside, puffing out her chest, she might of even breathed a sigh of relief to see Fuchsia there putting her arm about Rose’s shoulders. “She meant to show him some mercy, will you?” explained the Thressian, putting two fingers to her temple and mimicking the pulling of a trigger with her thumb. “That’s all she was saying, right?” Rose nodded her head vehemently, forcing a small sound from her throat that was meant to be a chuckle but had faltered somewhere along the way.
The men looked suddenly sympathetic and solemn, one pursing his lips and inclining his head in somber assent. “Don’t watch, and, whatever you do, don‘t scream,” Fuchsia whispered, turning Rose’s face to her, pressing it gently into the soft, warm shoulder of her purpley floral t-shirt. It muffled Rose’s small yelp as the gun went off, followed by the wild, sorrowful howling of the devastated woman, echoing between the walls of the tenements and fading into the distance.
Clicky for Chapter 3
Clicky for Chapter 2
Clicky for Chapter 1
Peace, Ghani
Author:
ghanistarkiller (Mrs Peel on A Teaspoon and an Open Mind Fanfic Archive)Summary: The Doctor, Jack and Rose arrive in an eerily abandoned city only to find that the real puzzle lies within the walls of a drastically fenced in settlement. Just exactly what is the mysterious "illness?" What happened to make the citizens so frightened of being outside the fence after dark? And just what -or who- is dying to get in there?
Rating: R
Genre(s): Horror, Mystery
Characters: The Doctor (9th), Jack Harkness, Rose Tyler
Warnings: Mixed (mostly gen/het), Swearing
'Would you like my mask?
Would you like my mirror?'
cries the man in the shadowing hood.
'You can look at yourself,
you can look at each other.
Or you can look at the face, the face of your God'
-Loreena McKennitt
4.
Rose made her way through the marketplace, peeking over shoulders to glance at booths and stalls, taking in the variety of commodities offered. She smiled, pausing at a stand to purchase a tray of those blue-tinted chips she’d gotten that night at the diner and had since developed a taste for. Now this was holiday, she thought, following the flow of the crowd down the busy lane -a bit of shopping, mostly just browsing, and chips. If it wasn’t for the walking dead just outside the settlement’s heavily outfitted fence, it’d be near perfect.
Right. Them. So she couldn’t quite get that out of her head, the thought of them being out there, just waiting for nightfall. She could tell it was bothering the Doctor as well, he’d gone all quiet and thoughtful-like. He didn’t sleep, not really, not normally, but it had been different the past couple of days since Jack had left to join the patrol. Sometimes he was gone to who knows where, and sometimes he was stood there for hours, by the window.
‘Vacancy’ the neon sign outside their double motel room announced loudly in a kitschy shade of magenta, below declaring ‘Transients and Extra-Terrestrials Welcomed.’ The irregular sputtering of the letter ‘c’ didn‘t seem to concern the Doctor, though it had begun to wear on Rose‘s nerves just a bit. She would sit cross-legged upon the bed, still pale and fairly shaken up a bit, and certainly not ready to get some sleep any time soon in those first few hours. “D’you suppose we could, like, fix it?” she had asked uncertainly. She knew it was a rather childishly naïve question, but it was all she could manage her brain to get around.
The Doctor had turned to her, his eyebrows raised, telling her, “Despite the uncanny resemblance, I’m not actually Harry Potter, y’know.” All right, so he was a bit testy, not uncommon -a paper cut and he’d do a half hour on supercomputers whose evil schemes he had thwarted. It was his pensive hush that unsettled her and she’d started to go stir crazy after about a day of channel-surfing the three or so stations the planet’s satellite picked up. Mind, the Doctor only paused his brooding meditation when he’d caught sight of a reality show called ’Bear With Me’ on the telly, claiming it was one of his favorites though expressing his disappointment at it not being the celebrity edition.
“All right, Harry Potter,” she’d said, “you can stay here and… play with your wand, or something. I’m getting out of here. And you be here when I get back!” she added as she left. So she’d come to the bazaar to take in the sights and sounds, get her mind off of things, if only for a time.
A street-side improvised puppet theatre kept a rapt and amused audience in a group of children, all dressed in a variation of the same drab smock. A monkey-like creature with green fur did tricks while its possessor played an instrument that looked like an uncomfortable cross between a bagpipe and a tuba. Entertainers shouted from either side of her, all competing for her attention and, hopefully, generous gratuity.
She stopped in front of a sign that offered, promisingly, ‘Soul Peddling.’ She stepped forward curiously, gawking at the variety of mirrors -long, stout, short, slender, warped, clear, gilt framed or plainly adorned, they were all present in the small booth. She expected a robust pitch, an overeager performer with fast talk to pull her in. “H-hello,” she called out, as if the proprietor of the stall was concealed behind the mirrors, waiting to pounce out and surprise her.
She moved onward into the jumble of mirrors, seeing herself reflected, backward and forward, every which way she turned. “Oh,” she frowned, twisting so that she could examine her backside from several different angles, “I knew these jeans made my bum look big. Mickey‘s such a liar.” She sighed -what, exactly, was it she was supposed to be seeing? She waited patiently and, slowly, she felt an echo building, a mere whisper at first. Mickey’s such a liar -it repeated at her and she could swear, if only for a moment, she saw him standing beside her from the corner of her eye.
Just a mirror, a trick of the mind. She chuckled uneasily. All right, Yoda, I’ll play your game, she thought with a grin. She must have seen the movie a hundred times, thanks to Mickey -Luke says, “What’s in there?” glancing into the mysterious cave. His master replies, “Only what you bring with you.”
The memory stirred up a flurry of happy recollections, bouncing off the reflective surfaces, creating a sort of web of peacefulness about her. Christmases with her mum, how she always tried to find that one special surprise present; larking about with Shareen, sneaking into adult movies, giggling over boys; kissing Mickey, having a drink at the pub with him, a game playing on the telly.
She found herself gazing into an almost void-like place within the mirror, within herself. “Nice to meet you, Rose. Run for your life!” The vortex she was staring into whisked about her excitedly. Holding the Doctor’s hand, dancing with Jack. If she’d been at peace before, safe, she now felt the exhilaration of her travels. “Gimme a day like this!” And she laughed, not even aware of the tears in her eyes until the gathered at the corners of her mouth.
And then she looked too deep.
Disorder, confusion, tumult. And her throat was so parched, she was gagging for the dryness. Wanting, she was wanting, needing, craving -why was she so restless? And what was this urge that was pulling her forward? She saw herself, shambling in the shadows, her eyes a luminescent scarlet. And she -her other self- lunged, baring rotted and twisted teeth. Rose screamed, feeling hands pulling her away, out from the void. And she was back in the market, her breath tremulous, her hands quaking.
So distressed was she that, when she turned to thank the owner of the steadying arms, she nearly let out a fierce scream. The man was wearing a mask like a fitted mirror which reflected her own features as she gaped into it, as if she was staring into her own face on another’s body. “You all right, la?” he asked, the voice coming from her double so distinctively male that it made her laugh.
“I’m- I’m fine,” she assured him, chuckling away her unease. “This your stand?” she inquired and, when he nodded in the affirmative, she asked, “What’s it supposed to do, then? There were memories and I could feel a sort of, I dunno, harmony, if that makes sense. But then there were other things, things that haven’t happened…”
“Blimey!” the soul peddler exclaimed. “It works different for everyone, la, but I’ve not seen anyone quite so receptive as you!” He pulled off the mask. “The name’s Renault and she’s all mine,” he jerked his thumb proudly towards the booth. “You look a bit dazed, la, d’you need to sit down? I can get you some water.”
“No, I’m better now, thanks.” Rose frowned, “And why d’you keep calling me lad?”
“Oh, I’m so sorry, erm, miss…?” When she didn’t object, he went on, “You never can tell these days, with all the… varieties.” He was ushering her towards a seat, despite her assertion that she was feeling well again. “Never can be too careful, can we?” he queried rhetorically as he handed her a bottle of water.
She sloshed the yellow liquid back and forth in its clear plastic container, eying it suspiciously. It did look rather more than a bit like… They didn’t have plumbing in their hotel room -there was no sink, the toilet flushed dry and the shower operated on something to do with sonic waves. If the water was all like this opaque drink, she couldn’t blame the management for its choice. But she was thirsty, that strange dehydration lingered from her strange conjuring. She took a sip and it wasn’t half bad, like spring water trace with alcohol. “Why’s it look like… why’s it yellow though?” she wondered aloud.
“That’ll mean it’s clean, miss,” Renault informed her. There was that word again: Clean. Fuchsia had used it, the night they’d met, in the diner, when she told them that their badges confirmed that they were clean. The illness, it must be. But, why the water?
“Mind if I keep this?” she asked, shaking the bottle. She’d want to talk to the Doctor about this. He guaranteed her that it would be no trouble at all and she fished about in her pocket, pulling out a long platinum bar and two smaller gilt ones. She gave Renault one of the latter, a most generous tip for which he thanked her profusely. “It’s no problem, really,” she ensured him and it truly wasn’t. The Doctor had maneuvered a banking console, using the sonic screwdriver naturally, into believing that their accounts were very fat indeed. The result -more pocket money than even she knew what to do with.
“How can you own a stand without even knowing what it does?” she questioned.
He just shrugged. “Bought it off some old sod ‘bout six months ago, thought he was gonna make it out of this place, poor bastard. I asked him too, y’know, what it does, how it works. The crazy punter, he tells me that I’ll know when it works and when it doesn’t, and that’s all I need understand. He said that the air was ‘thick with souls,’ or some other such nonsense, thanks to those unlucky buggers out there, and that the mirrors captures that and, well, I s’pose it shows you things.”
“So, in theory, it might show me what they were thinking,” Rose said thoughtfully, “or what they had been thinking when, you know. In theory,” she added, abashed at sounding like a completely gullible twat.
“In theory,” Renault echoed, frowning slightly. “Why, what did it show you?”
“Nothing important,” she lied.
She became aware that Renault had led her to the back of his bizarre stall, and that things were much quieter, much calmer than on the bustling bazaar street. From her seat, she could now see the ramshackle buildings that the marketplace had been built around, seemingly unoccupied tenements, though she was sure that many who came here on the scoots took shelter within while avoiding notice. One alleyway in particular caught her attention as it was larger than the others that ran between the structures and seemed to get much more traffic. “Where’s that lead to, then?”
He followed her line of sight and started shaking his head emphatically. “Oh, miss, you don’t want to go down there!” he insisted and she smiled at first, thinking it a promotional trick to get her to check it out. But his features remained grave, serious. “It’s not a place for nice young girls such as yourself,” he said, trying to chuckle but it came out sounding forced, almost harsh.
“Come on,” she goaded playfully, “you can tell me.” But his face had gone ashen and she could see that she’d get no more words from him. Now, she could have gone back to the Doctor, told him all about it -what she had seen in the soul peddling booth, the mysterious alley that all sorts of dubious characters seemed to be ducking into. She could do. After all, she had the bottle of water she wanted to show him. Or she could just take a peek for herself, just to see whether or not it was worth the Doctor’s time…
“I’ll be okay,” Rose insisted as Renault tried to persuade her against it but she was determined, trying to quiet his protests so she could casually stroll into the alley as if she belonged. “Now hush, I can barely slip by discreetly with you hanging off of me!” He relented, rather dejectedly, and said his farewells as if he’d never see her again which, to be fair, he probably wouldn’t have even if he didn’t believe she was about to meet some dreadful fate.
The alleyway was dark, churning with an inimitable gloom, the daylight didn’t touch a single inch of it, the way it sloped down between the abandoned housing, winding its way around, she almost felt as if she were underground. It wasn’t as she expected, a bit damp, cooler than the marketplace and emptier than she’s imagined. Inside the structures, she heard sounds of life, shops selling illicit goods from food to medical supplies. And, of course, the squatters, families mostly, a lot of what Fuchsia called halfies.
“No, you can’t, please!” the cry pierced the subdued murkiness, drawing Rose running to a dilapidated, makeshift doorstep, somewhere in her mind registering how odd it was that, despite the chill humidity, her trainers never once splashed into a puddle. “Please,” a woman was weeping, holding fast to the arm of a man roughly around her own age, later thirties, maybe. Two younger men were clutching him, dragging him onto the rough pavement. The woman was trying desperately to shield two little children from the scene before them, shoving them back towards the door, even as she begged, “He’s hardly showing signs. Look at him, he’s healthy! It‘ll- it‘ll pass. Maybe with sterilization…”
“Oi, what d’you think you’re doing?” Rose yelled, running to the woman’s side. The two boys, the ones hauling the man away, they were wearing dusters, the kind that patrolmen commonly sported in their own customized way. “You patrol, yeah?” Rose frowned. “Does Tommy know you’re doing this?!”
“Where d’you think the orders came from, lass?” the first boy said grimly but not without a sort of smug satisfaction. “Start showing symptoms and they go over the wall, that’s Patriot’s instructions. He’s been reported, this one has. It’s our law, how d’you think we keep the sickness out, darlin’?”
“‘Over the wall’?” Rose repeated aghast. “How d’you know he’s infected? For God’s sake, the man isn’t even dead yet?! You know what they’ll do to him! It’s just… cruel!”
The men exchanged a glance and began to approach her now threateningly, keeping their prisoner in tow. “You questioning us, lass? You know what we do to dissidents, don’t you? We put ‘em over the wall with the rest of the trash.”
“Yeah, you think you scare me?” Rose said, her voice wavering only slightly as they loomed over her. She held her ground bravely, her chin raised defiantly. “What d’you think Flyboy’ll do when he finds out what you did with me, he won’t be half cross, I can tell you that!”
“She only just meant,” a voice interjected, a stroke of luck and not a moment too soon either. Rose allowed herself to let go of the breath she was holding inside, puffing out her chest, she might of even breathed a sigh of relief to see Fuchsia there putting her arm about Rose’s shoulders. “She meant to show him some mercy, will you?” explained the Thressian, putting two fingers to her temple and mimicking the pulling of a trigger with her thumb. “That’s all she was saying, right?” Rose nodded her head vehemently, forcing a small sound from her throat that was meant to be a chuckle but had faltered somewhere along the way.
The men looked suddenly sympathetic and solemn, one pursing his lips and inclining his head in somber assent. “Don’t watch, and, whatever you do, don‘t scream,” Fuchsia whispered, turning Rose’s face to her, pressing it gently into the soft, warm shoulder of her purpley floral t-shirt. It muffled Rose’s small yelp as the gun went off, followed by the wild, sorrowful howling of the devastated woman, echoing between the walls of the tenements and fading into the distance.
Clicky for Chapter 3
Clicky for Chapter 2
Clicky for Chapter 1
Peace, Ghani
