AN: This is for SuperKassu, who suggested that I might want to write Eyeless Jack's backstory. To this, I replied to myself, "of course I do, but they aren't going to like it." and then I remembered I don't really care whether you like it or not, as long as I feel good about it.

Fair warning though: there will be some gruesome things in here. This is not a very happy story.

P.S. I hope that I got the language translations right and the other bits of culture and details. I might have missed something, so let me know if I did.

EDIT: Thanks to Kassu for pointing out that Russia didn't exist in 1943/44, and being confused about the time something was happening. I've clarified both issues.

What You Need to Know About Jack

It was the winter of 1943, and the members of the Sixth Army infantry were doing their best not to think about how they were going to starve to death in the sub-zero temperatures of Stalingrad. It had been nearly 15 days since a Soviet counter-attack had cut off the Germans' escape route. Barely any food had gotten through via the airplanes that were supposed to be delivering it. Things were looking grim for the Sixth Army.

Sitting in a makeshift shelter that was half rubble and half trench were four men. Strictly speaking, they were not supposed to be sitting together, but all four of them had quietly bent the rules until their own morality allowed him to disobey their commanding officers.

They had built a little fire, and were taking it in turns to put their hands almost directly into the flames in the hopes of staving off frostbite. They had already given up on their feet. The youngest of them, a boy who had been two years too young when he joined the army, but didn't much care at the time, was already trying to decide the least traumatic way of removing his toes before ganggreen set in.

Let's call this boy Jack because by the time this story reaches present day, this is the only name he himself can remember.

Jack was, as previously mentioned, the youngest of the group, and the thinnest, but not the shortest. He had two inches on the next youngest, a man that he didn't particularly get along with, but who he put up with because they had mutual friends. He was probably the most intelligent of the bunch, though he spoke in the same course military slang and didn't ever offer opinions.

He was a good shot with a rifle, and he carried his own gun over his shoulder on a leather strap. He'd been picking off Soviets the whole day with that gun, when his fingers were warm enough to bend and he wasn't shivering too hard. He wasn't sure how many he'd hit. He had lost count.

Jack also had a letter, tucked on the inside of his clothing, right up against his skin. Despite the urgings of the other three men and the lack of flammable material, he hadn't thrown the letter onto the fire. He won't do it either, not until they're really freezing to death and possibly not even then. He's that kind of person.

The men in the trench were running out of time, though they didn't know it. In just over a half hour, an artillery shell would come screaming out of the sky, barely missing the edge of what used to be the second floor of a building, and snuffing out all four lives right there and then.

The boy we will call Jack was looking up when it happened, rubbing his hands together, trying not to think about how he was losing the feeling in his fingers. He had perhaps two seconds of warning: seeing the vague gray shape, registering what it was, and then throwing himself out of the way. He didn't even bother to cry out. There was no time to yell, to give warning.

So when the explosive hit, he wasn't killed by the immediate blast. Instead, he was thrown bodily, only feeling the sudden and remarkable warmth of the explosion behind him. Then his body made contact with a pile of jagged rubble and his neck cracked audibly.

A human has about 30 seconds after decapitation before real death sets in and they lose consciousness. What had happened to Jack was no different than decapitation in terms of consequences: his head was no longer receiving oxygen from the rest of his body.

In those last 30 seconds before death, he thought two things. The first was, "Well, it's a lot faster than freezing to death." the second, "I hope she doesn't miss me too much."

And the world turned off.

The boy called Jack sat up fast in his closet bedroom, pulling a breath into lungs still containing a small amount of blood. He coughed, bringing up some of it, and bent to spit it into a nearby bucket.

He had been dreaming again. He didn't sleep that much, but whenever he did, he had these dreams. It was always in nightmare flashes, colorful and vivid.

He shook off the thoughts and got up, not bothering to change clothes, not bothering to do more than pull on the bloody apron hanging from a peg in the wall. He stepped out of the closet and into the dim room beyond. He glanced at the calendar on the way by. It was 1963. He had been in the U.S. for just over 10 years.

There was a crate waiting for him on the low table in the middle of the room. Muffled noises rose up from it.

Jack took the wheeled cart from the side of the room, checked the knives with the palm of one hand. He checked the hooks on the ceiling, pulled the chains from the wall.

Then he picked up the crowbar and popped open the lid of the crate. The man inside it stopped struggling, looked up with wide-eyes. What he was seeing was an angular, handsome face with good bone structure, partially disguised by the bandages obscuring its eyes.

"Hello," Jack said, his English accented.

The man in the crate blinked, but didn't reply. He was tightly gagged.

Jack shrugged and leaned over the crate, checking the ankle restraints. He used a meat hook to attach the bindings to the chain and heaved on the other end of it. The man rose out of the crate by his ankles, twisting and screaming through his gag.

"Oh shut up," Jack grumbled to himself, practicing his English. He bent down and hooked the other end of the chain through the loop on the floor.

The man squealed at Jack selected and lifted one of the knives from the cart. He slid a bucket across the floor, positioning it below the swinging arms, then attached the wide sloping rim that he'd made himself to help catch the spills.

Jack stood up, placed a hand in the hair of the man hanging upside down, and pulled backwards, exposing the pulsing jugulars. The man's heart was beating itself to death. Jack licked his lips, detached hunger making him greedy. He considered taking some. Not much: just one glass. It was part of his share anyway. That was the agreement.

He set the blade of the knife against the man's neck.

"BOY," The Butcher called from the next room over. It had the kind of voice that deserved all capital letters. It boomed through the morgue, echoing off all the metal surfaces and scrubbed tiles.

Jack flinched, and the knife nicked the skin of the man's neck. A few drops of blood fell into the bucket beneath him.

"COME HERE, BOY."

Jack paused only a moment to steal a fingertip's worth of blood from the man's neck. He sucked it off his own index finger as he walked down the narrow hallway. He opened the door at the end briskly, with a short sharp one-two step that brought him inside and to attention in one go.

The Butcher wasn't so large. It was only slightly deformed, only making use of three or four extra limbs, not the ten or eleven it would make use of by the end of the century. Even so, it still looked vaguely insect-like.

Jack watched it carefully. It was one of the first things he was made to understand: the Butcher was an it, not a he or a she. It had decided long before that human was one thing that it wasn't. Like a lot of things he had experienced lately, this rubbed Jack the wrong way. In fact, everything rubbed Jack the wrong way. He learned to shut up about it. The Butcher is a harsh disciplinarian.

There was someone else at the table, across from the Butcher. They were completely obscured in cloth, so much so that he couldn't even tell what color their skin was.

"I see what you mean," the stranger said, "very human-like."

Jack was looking at the Butcher, but it was impossible to tell. The creature had fallen silent. Talking hurt it. It blinked golden cat-eyes and hummed.

"Delightful," the stranger said, and then its tone changed, "take off the apron."

It took Jack a long moment to decode the statement, and then he complied. He untied the apron and lifted it over his head. He was wearing a thin shirt underneath it, purely for comfort, but right then he knew it made his muscles stand out more than a little.

The stranger sat back, one gloved hand caressing its jaw. At least, Jack assumed that it was its jaw. It made a noise in its throat that Jack was all too familiar with: the groaning purr of someone who likes what they see. "Perhaps," It said, "I could borrow him, just for a couple hours."

Jack, understanding perfectly, looked at the Butcher. His mouth was pressed tightly closed, and if he had not had bandages over his eyes, they would have looked pleading.

The Butcher wouldn't look at him. It bent low over the table, writing its answer.

Jack broke one of his rules and spoke up. His voice was slow and careful, the English stumbled off his tongue, "May I finish with the work first?"

The stranger vocalized its delight, "He speaks, and such a sweet voice. Of course you may, darling,"

Jack glanced at the Butcher and received a nod of assent. He turned on his heel and went back down the hallway and into the first room. He carefully closed the door behind him, and only then allowed himself to start shaking.

The man was still hanging upside-down from the chain, looking a little less scared and a little more faint. All the blood had rushed to his head, which for Jack's purposes meant that some of it would be lost. More than a cup of it at least.

Jack composed himself and went to the man. He picked up the same knife as he used before and pressed it under the man's chin. The hanging man's eyes flicked to him, fear returning to them.

Jack's throat worked in a rough swallow. When he spoke, it was with his usual smooth voice, but it was tight and barely under control. His English didn't carry so much of an accent now that he was warming up. "You're the lucky one here," he told the man, "I'd much rather be you than me."

Jack moved his hand smoothly over the man's neck, leaning into it, putting his weight behind it. Under the knife, he felt ligaments snap and muscles rupture. Blood poured down with the approximate force of a firehose, spattering Jack's front with red.

Jack paused a few moments, waiting for the worst of the spray to subside, and then he took a cup from the cart and let the dripping blood fill it. He raised is to his lips and drank. It tasted like fear and pain and death, but he didn't care. He swallowed the last of it and put the cup down.

Jack left the body where it was, draining. He didn't change his clothes, but he ditched the apron. He walked back down the hallway, paused with his hand on the door to take a deep breath, then opened the door.

Jack had no illusions about what was about to happen to him. If the Butcher's personal identity was the first thing he was made to understand, the second was this: you do not say "No" to someone who is stronger than you.

After all, he deserved it, didn't he?

The thing that at some point in the future would be called Jack became aware with its mouth full of human flesh. It tasted fine, so he swallowed. He felt how his own stomach was distended, how full he felt.

Only then did he open his eyes.

He was crouched over the body of his friend. It was barely recognizable. Half of its head was caved in from the artillery blast. It was flayed open, brutally and unprofessionally. The ribs had been snapped off and lay scattered on both sides of the body. Between the broken stubs, blood was pooling in the purple-red cavern that had contained the man's internal organs only minutes before.

Jack looked down at his hands. He dropped the chunk of meat clasped in them and stared at the blood all over him. He felt for his stomach, felt the way it bulged slightly, and he understood.

Jack fell off if the body, gagging out of reflex. Then he kept gagging out of desire to vomit, but nothing came up. Jack stayed there for three minutes, trying to make himself throw up. He slipped fingers down his own throat, but that only made him taste the blood on his fingers, and the blood tasted good.

After three minutes, he gave up. He buried his face in the bloody snow and breathed deep. He stood up and looked around at the bombed-out city. He looked towards his unit, to where his commanding officers were sitting, looking just as cold and degected as the rest of the unit. He looked down at his hands, at the gunk trapped under his nails.

He turned around and walked the other direction.

The Mistake occurred not long after he walked away from Stalingrad in the big scheme of things. It was perhaps after only a month of working his way westward that the thing that would be called Jack found his way onto the railroad tracks.

It was still winter, but now it was 1944. Jack was fed up with walking. He had been walking for a long time. He didn't get tired, not precisely, but he was mentally exhausted. He stopped only once every two or three days, and even then it was only to...eat. He didn't like eating, not one bit. He didn't like sneaking into morgues and hospitals, didn't like the way he felt flesh parting under his hands. He rationalized it by telling himself that if he didn't eat corpses he would eventually lose it and kill a lot more people. Good people. He definitely did not want that.

Eventually, Jack decided to jump a train, if one happened to pass him going in the right direction.

The mistake was an easy one to make. The first train that passed Jack going west was composed entirely of livestock cars, and that was the train that he jumped.

The boy called Jack left the Butcher's basement during the day, when the monster was asleep. He'd already snuck out twice in the previous week to get clothing and a bag. He'd made up his mind. If he didn't leave on his own, he'd be there forever.

He stepped out into the sunshine, squinting slightly through the sunglasses. It a gorgeous day, he noted idly, if you were into that kind of thing.

He walked to the nearest bus stop, which was about five miles away from the house he'd emerged from, and took the first bus that showed up. It was an old thing, even back then, but Jack was still quietly surprised at the sheer amount of wealth in this country, so he found it comforting. He sat and watched out the window as the backwoods of New England turned slowly into urban sprawl, marvelling at how large the houses were, at how the cars gleamed and sparkled, at how happily plump the children were.

I spent most of my childhood hungry, he thought. There's no envy in the thought, no blame. It wasn't not their fault that they were born in this decade, after all. There was no point in blaming them. Jack reserved the right to blame Wall Street though. From the few newspapers and magazines he'd managed to grab, Jack figured they were as guilty as you could get.

A girl slid into the seat next to his. Jack glanced at her, looked around at the mostly empty bus, then rolled his eyes and looked back out the window.

"Are you a deserter?" she asked.

Jack felt a shiver shoot up his spine, "What?"

"From 'nam," she said, and smiled. Jack looked closer, and saw that her eyes are ever so slightly red. That was something he'd never seen before.

"'Nam?" he asked.

"Vietnam? Nevermind, if you don't know about it, then you obviously aren't a deserter." She raised something that looked like a cigar, but couldn't have been because it was much too sloppily rolled. She took a drag and offered it to him between two fingers, wordlessly.

Jack took the thing carefully, looked at it. His mind was doing that careful sort of calculation that let him survive impossible situations. Jack put the thing to his lips and inhaled. He didn't feel the need to throw up or cough, not even as what he was fast realizing was not tobacco smoke flooded his lungs. He held his breath for a moment, trying to place the acrid scent and the earthy taste, then exhaled.

The girl was looking at him in appreciation. There was something familiar about her, and it wasn't just that she didn't look very clean. There was something in her bone structure, her bushy hair, that reminded him of something he'd seen. He offered her the drug back. He couldn't feel it working, not yet.

"Where did you crawl out of?" she asked.

Jack shrugged, "A basement."

She laughed, like it was all some big joke. "I'm on my way to a rally, wanna come?"

Jack's eyes narrowed behind his glasses, "Rally?" He asked.

"Oh ya. Burning draft cards and everything," she smiled dreamily at him. "Deserter like you will lap it all up." She turned her head then, and Jack realized why she looked familiar. She bore a resemblance to one of the vivisection patients. The one who woke up.

The woman had woken up with her guts spread out on a none-too-clean operating table and some of the sickest minds in the world looking down at her. Jack had been standing farther back, just waiting for them to finish (He'd stuffed himself full back then; it was almost like a buffet). The woman hadn't screamed, hadn't started crying. Instead, she'd begged that her child be left alone, be kept safe. Jack had heard her, if no one else had. He'd watched her lungs inflate and deflate as her speech became more and more like screams, and he'd heard her.

He'd also known that the child was already dead. When they were that young, they couldn't really do physical labor. Eventually, it all came down to how many mouths they had to feed and how much money it took to feed them. There hadn't been much left by then.

Jack had put the child in her grave with her, though it meant almost nothing. Nevermind the fact that he'd actually touched one of the bodies would have earned him derision for months afterwards, had anyone but the boys working in the ovens seen him do it. Jack had plied them with his share of rations for the next week. The woman's organs had been a very good meal.

Jack shook his head sharply, knocking away the memories. He could feel the drug a little now. It was a pleasant unfocused feeling, but he instinctively pushed it away. To his surprise, it cleared immediately.

The girl was slumped down in her chair, almost horizontal. Jack spared a glance for her rising and falling chest. Her breasts weren't large, but they weren't small either. All he saw was the lungs and the bones and the heart beneath her skin. He was still haunted by the visions.

"So?" She asked, "you gonna come?"

Jack smiled just a little, "Yes."

He was never able to explain to himself exactly how he got into the train car. He had scrambled up onto the roof, in the wind and the cold. He could feel his broken wrist straining, and he tried not to take so much weight on it.

He got a good grip with his left hand in the sheet metal and started pulling on the rivets, trying to find a loose panel. He twisted them using the fingers of his left hand.

The next thing he knew, he had a length of metal folded back like it was fabric, and he was dropping down into the train car.

It was warm in the car, but the metal at his back was freezing cold. He blinked behind the cloth over his eyes and let his vision refocus. The train was full of people, all looking at him. They were packed together like sardines: so tight under normal circumstances that he only had seven inches of space around him. The stink of sweat and urine was thick and heavy.

Jack raised his hands very slowly. They looked like they might jump on him.

A man said something that Jack couldn't understand. "Kim jesteś?"

Jack shook his head. "I don't understand," he said, "do you speak German? Deutsche?"

There was some awkward shuffling in the crowd, a few mumbled words.

"I do," said a small voice.

Jack looked down at the child. The boy was painfully thin, almost skeletal. He was looking up at Jack with huge brown eyes.

"Tell them I'm just looking for shelter," Jack said, "I'm not here to hurt anyone."

The boy nodded and said something to the surrounding people. They all shuffled and nodded. An old woman said something, and the child turned back. "Do you want food?"

Jack shook his head, "No, no thank you. Where is this train going?"

"Somewhere safe, they said."

"Who said?"

"The police."

Jack shivered nervously, but he nodded. Better the police than the army. He was technically a deserter.

The crowd was starting to disperse, as much as it could in the cramped space. Jack did his best to shuffle sideways, pushing along the edge of the car until he was in a corner. The others were still giving him a wide berth, and he took advantage by sliding down the wall until he hit the floor. He pulled his legs up tight, unsure if he'd even feel it if they stepped in his feet. He pressed against the outer wall of the car, preferring the cold.

The little boy pushed his way through the tangle of legs in front of him. He looked down at Jack, and Jack turned his head up to look at him.

"Where are your parents?" Jack asked, because it was the first thing that occurred to him.

"I don't know," The boy said, "we got separated."

Jack frowned, but didn't say anything. He was wondering what happened that they would be separated.

"What's your name?" The little boy asked.

The man that would be called Jack someday told him.

The little boy smiled, "Me too."

Jack returned the smile, "Well that won't work."

"What should we call me then?" The child asked.

Jack thought for a few seconds, and then said, "Jünger." Junior.

The child's eyes lit up, "That's what Papa calls me."

Jack became aware that there was a strange smell about the boy, something sharp and clear amid the stench of human waste. It was a clean smell, like fresh earth.

Jack sat back again, looking out of a torn seam in the train's metal. Outside, a world of brown and white flew past. He wondered, vaguely, where they were going and how he was going to eat when he got there.

He was rather perplexed by what he saw when he stepped off the bus, following close behind the odd girl. They were in a park or maybe a field. There were tents, brightly-colored and bearing the most ridiculous patterns. And then there were the people. They were...well, they were the opposite of what he had seen the last time he was in a field full of tents. They were unkempt and bearded, letting their hair tangle and their clothes collect dirt. They looked, thought the part of Jack that still used the word Führer fondly, like a bunch idiot savages. He snuffed out that thought and went back to looking around.

He still didn't like it. Where this many people were gathered there had to be a ringleader, somewhere, and he didn't like ringleaders. In fact, he hated ringleaders more than just about anything else. Except maybe doctors.

He looked around, searching for the ringleader, and he saw him. He saw him, standing by a bus with a crowd of people, speaking to them with his hands in front of him in an almost prayer-like position. Even that far away, he could hear the way the man's voice rose and fell, arousing passion and excitement, coaxing trust.

"Impressive, isn't it?" The girl said. She's still beside him.

Jack nodded slightly. "Who's that?" He asked, indicating the man and his group.

She looked at them, and an expression of awe crossed her face. "The People's Temple," she said, "I didn't expect them to be here."

The Temple. That rang some bells in Jack's brain. He knew about the People's Temple. They had sounded good to him, as close as humans could get to actually being holy. This changed things.

"You should stay away from them," He told the girl at his side, "they're going nowhere except straight down."

He decided to stay as far away from the religious sect as he possibly could.

"Whatever you say," she waved him off good-naturedly, "come on, I'm starving."

And Jack thought, "Me too."

She got something that looked a little like curry, but couldn't have been because it didn't smell right. She seemed to enjoy it, but Jack turned down the taste she offered.

Jack soon realized that he was putting out some kind of signal, because it seemed that every time someone walked by they nailed him as an ex-soldier. A Deserter, they said, like it was something to proud of.

Then he saw one man looking at him, watching him with a blatant hungry sort of look on his face. Jack had seen lust before, and this wasn't it. This was something more his speed: distinctly darker.

Jack walked right up to him, stopped a few feet away. The man was not really a man. He was barely more than a boy. He had a bag slung over one shoulder, and inside Jack could see a bottle filled with pink liquid.

"What?" The boy asked.

Jack just looked at him. He looked down at the mask in the man's hand. It was blue, and the eyes were huge dark holes full of shadow. He wanted the mask.

"What?" he asked again.

Jack gestured towards the object, "I'll pay you for that."

The man looked down at it, then looked back up at Jack. One of his eyebrows was raised. "You cannot be serious."
Jack tilted his chin down and pulled his glasses slightly away from his eyes. "How much?"

The man didn't react. He didn't even flinch. He just tilted his head and smiled. He held out the mask wordlessly, eyes sparkling in a way that seemed almost angelic.

Jack took the mask and turned it over and over in his hands. There was a strange quality to it, heavy.

"Stay away from the food here," the man says, "enough Shrooms and Acid are going around to make it impossible not to get a dose."

Jack glanced back at the girl who seemed to be staring at something in the air above her.

"No need to worry about that," he informed the man, tucking the mask into his own bag.

He smiled that knowing little smile and walked away.

Jack didn't know it, but he'd just made contact with a Proxy, but one that would be dead in less than 72 hours and so could not tell anyone what he had done with his mask.

The train stopped, jarring the man who will be called Jack out of his stupor. Jünger was asleep nearby, half-wrapped in the coat Jack had given him, but he was stirring already. The whole train car was suddenly alert and nervous. Even the smell of shit couldn't mask their fear.

Jack got onto his knees and shook the boy awake, gently. They had been over this, and he was sure that Jünger understood the importance of what he had asked. These people had obviously seen stranger things than a man who could apparently see through cloth, but the people on the other side of that door hadn't.

Jünger woke up and looked around. "Where are we?" He asked, rubbing his eyes.

"I don't know yet," Jack replied, and grasped the boy's hand in preparation. He saw the child's eyes widen slightly at the cold, but he didn't care. He could smell something beyond the human waste and fear. Fire, he thought, smoke.

The door to the train car opened, and two men holding rifles looked in. They surveyed the contents of the car, then stepped back.

"Out," one of them said.

People began to hop out of the carriage. Jack let Jünger lead him by the hand, as if he were blind, and followed them out. Some of the car's passengers even turned to help him down, their hands warm on his elbows and shoulders. They helped the older and sicker occupants down too, but just for one second Jack was convinced it was really for him that they had stayed back.

He kept his head down until they were far enough away that he could be sure the guards could not see, and then he looked around. They were standing before a tall archway. On either side fences stretched away for a long way, too far for Jack to properly judge. Directly ahead, stretching across the arch, was a metal inscription, "Arbeit Macht Frei." Strangely, Jack could hear classical music playing. When he turned his head, he saw that it was a system of loudspeakers, and surely there was a record playing somewhere within the fence producing the sound.

They had joined a queue of people pouring out from the other train cars. Most of them looked no better than the people who had exited their car. Jack was convinced that this was the reason he could still smell the sickly-sweet stench of sickness.

Jünger was tugging at his hand, urging him to lean down. Jack did so.

"I don't see my parents," the boy whispered.

"I'm sure they're here somewhere," Jack replied. He pulled the little body closer to his, set a hand on his shoulder to reassure him.

"What are they doing with us?" Came the small voice.

Jack paused. He thought for several seconds. "It's a refugee camp," he said finally, "you said that your house was destroyed."

"My house wasn't destroyed," Jünger corrected impatiently, "they broke our windows and drew things on our door. Papa said they stopped people from coming to our store and-"

Jack squeezed his shoulder, "I forgot, I'm sorry, but we have to behave now." He included himself in the statement only because his stomach was threatening to digest itself and he didn't know how much longer he could wait.

The man waiting for them at the gate barely glanced at the pair as they passed. He took one look and waved them towards the first of two lines on the interior of the camp.

Jack leaned down again. "Ask one of them what we're in line for," he said to Jünger.

The little boy immediately turned to one of the guards standing next to the line and repeated the question.

The man looked down at the child with such contempt on his face that Jack had to restrain himself from reacting to the implied threat. He stood very still and looked only vaguely in the guard's direction.

"You're in line for the showers," the guard said, "little ones always go to the showers before we let them in. And handicapped ones like your brother."

At least they were buying his blind-man act.

Jack nodded his thanks to the man and let Jünger pull him along as the line moved.

"I'd like a shower," the boy said.

"So would I," Jack agreed.

They had to wait a long time for the shower to be ready for them. Another guard instructed them all to strip down. Jack did so grudgingly, aware of the scars that the war had marked him with, aware of the way he would stand out naked as the only one without visible signs of malnutrition. He tried to keep the blindfold on as they were led into the next room, but the guard at the door stopped him.

"Take off everything," he instructed, sounding more hostile than was necessary.

Jack untied the cloth slowly, keeping his eyes tightly closed. Now he really was blind. He let Jünger lead him into the next room and immediately felt more bodies packing in behind him. They were forcing as many people as possible into the room. To conserve a limited supply of water, he assumed.

Jack risked cracking open one eye to look around. The walls were concrete, as were the ceiling and floor. All around him were dirty people shifting nervously. He glanced up, saw the sprinkler heads above him that would release water. He closed his eye again.

The door shut with a clang, indicating the last of the people had stepped into the room. He braced for water, cold or hot it wouldn't matter to him any. Being clean would feel good, he supposed. It had been a long time since he'd last had a proper bath or shower. He must stink to everyone except himself.

There was a choking noise.

Jack opened his eyes and saw a man going blue. People were choking on something. They were gagging up bile and the last remains of their food, they were coughing and screaming, if they had the air. Something was seriously wrong.

He looked up. There was a faint hissing noise coming from the sprinkler head directly above him, and when he stretched up he could feel air against his hand. Not air, he thought, gas. Gas of some kind, and it was suffocating everyone in here.

Jack felt a tug at his hand, like Jünger was trying to take a step. He looked down at the boy's terrified expression, heedless of what the sight of his eyes would do to the child, then gritted his teeth and let go of the boy's hand. He stretched up on tip-toe and fumbled with the sprinkler, trying to find some way of turning it off. Around him, the people who had not yet been hit were starting to comprehend what was happening. They were screaming at the tops of their voices, pushing in every direction. Some of them started trying to reach the sprinklers too, but they were blocked by the spasming bodies of the ones directly beneath the outlets. Jack was the only one in any condition to reach the sprinkler and near enough to do it.

He felt the metal cut into the pads of his fingers, but there was no pain to come with it. He tried to turn the nozzle, to tighten it. He tried to find a switch of some kind, but he was just barely too short to be sure he wasn't missing something.

He gave up and reached down to Jünger, telling himself that he would find some way to save the child. He would breathe for him if he had to, but damn it, he was not going to let him die.

Jünger was gone. It didn't click for several seconds, but then Jack realized that the boy must have squeezed between some legs and gone looking for a way out. He was certainly small enough. He yelled the boy's name, but there was no answering cry.

Jack tried to move, but around him people were starting to fall still, the weakest ones already going out like lights. Their body weight was pressing on him, packed together as they were. He felt vomit slick his back as a man fell against him and fought down the urge to throw up himself. They were turning purple.

Surely someone as small as Jünger couldn't last long breathing whatever this was.

And suddenly Jack was crying. He was crying because he didn't understand, didn't understand any of it, and all he knew was that he was going to be stuck in here with all these dead people until someone bothered to open the door and get him out and he was so damned hungry he didn't think he could resist the urge to eat one of them.

It should be explained now that Jack had been "pure" up until this point. Yes, he had seen war and died in it, yes he had bloodied his hands and eaten human flesh, yes he had unwittingly been a part of the single most horrendous event in recent history, but up until that point he hadn't really understood it. On a cosmic level, on the level where gods work instead of humans, this is what really matters: the acts were all done with pure intent.

The thought that he might eat one of these people, one of these poor dead people who had been just like him only a few minutes before, this is what snapped Jack. He looked around, and realized that these same people who were now in their last throws around him were the same ones who had helped him down off the train, were the same ones who he had sat with him in the car and taught him, patiently, songs that he had never heard before. They had offered him some of their meager supplies of food and blankets, and even a warm place in the middle of the train, and this is what they got for it.

Jack screamed, and it was the sound of a pure thing dying.

When they cracked open the gas chamber and found someone still alive inside, the first thing the boys who tended the ovens did was call the guards. The first thing the guards did, after they had finished yelling at the boys, was look into the chamber. They saw the figure, hugging itself and rocking back and forth, weeping black tears with an intensity that none of them recognized.

One of them sent for Mengele.

AN: Shameless self-advertisement: if you want to read my trilogy based on the Slenderman Mythos and Creepypasta, check out my profile. This story is filed under Mythology because I figured it was probably time to reach a new audience. Anyway, go crazy.