Locus Chapter 2, a red eye fanfic

Author's Note: Sorry for the delay in updating, I've been really busy. Thank you to everyone who reviewed.

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Lisa was standing in line, momentarily lost in the music pouring into her ears through her MP3 player. Led Zeppelin's classic, ''Stairway to Heaven'' was swallowing some of the grief that still sat like a stone in her belly. The brightness of the airport helped somewhat, as well.

This was something that Lisa had in common with the man standing behind her, but she didn't know it yet. She did not know him yet. But he knew her.

The need for bright, harsh light to feel safe had begun one night when Jackson was 10 years old. His mother and father were arguing. Again. Usually, Jack could drown it out with music, or occasionally through sheer force of will, but this night was different. Jackson was sitting at the small desk in his bedroom, dutifully finishing his English homework. He was a very smart boy, always at the top of his class. Not that his parents cared at all. But Jack was not bitter, he just kept working hard, with the naive belief that it would eventually pay off. He did not really have very many friends at school, but he was adored by nearly all of his teachers.

The loud sound of his mother and father arguing continued. Jack concentrated on what he was doing, he put one letter in front of the other to form the sentences that completed his book report. The sounds of fighting slowly escalated to a hideous climax. There was the sound of feet moving heavily across a floor. A scream, then, pierced the air; a horrible, nearly inhuman sound. It was Jack's mother, screaming. Then--BANG! The gunshot nearly knocked Jackson off of his chair, though it had been fired on the floor below him. There was a dull sort of thud then, the grim and unmistakable sound of a body falling to the floor.

Jack sat numb and frozen, his clammy fingers still clutching the yellow number two pencil like a lifeline. It broke in his hand then, from the strength of his grip. The two halves fell to the floor. Jackson's stomach had dropped out of him, and there was a feeling like icy little pinpircks all along his arms and legs and scalp. He realized that he was holding his breath.

There was a tremulous silence; a pause. A blank spot in the terrible aura that pervaded the house. A moment more, then a second gunshot cut the air like a knife. Another body fell. Jackson Rippner was an orphan.

He knew what had happened, somehow. And he knew that he had to take care of it. He drew in a breath. Scarcely aware that he was moving at all, he padded numbly down the hallway in sock-clad feet to the staircase. Each slow step seemed to take an eternity as he descended to the first floor, feeling like he was lowering himself to the ninth circle of hell.

Jackson kept his eyes straight ahead. He wouldn't dare look at the bodies of his parents that he knew were stretched out grotesquely on the floor. No, he would not. As he moved for the phone, he forced himself to revisit today's history class at school. What had they learned about? He was only a few feet away now, he could see the phone on the wall. Ah, yes, they learned about Benjamin Franklin. He wrote an--what was the word? A book that talked about weather and stuff--about another few inches--an almanac, that was right! Poor Richard's Almanac. Good job, Jack.

He lifted up the reciever and dialed. After telling the woman at the police station what had happened, he hung up the phone. The police were already on their way, because apparently a neighbor had heard the fighting and the gunshots, and called. Jack realized then that it was dark. Not only was it dark outside, but there were very few lights on inside the house, either. For whatever reason, he was terrified by this lack of light, and lack of sound other than his own shallow breathing.

He felt that he was somehow shut in a tomb, this house was a tomb, now--with its silence, and dim light, and death all around--Jackson bolted out of the kitchen where he was standing, and ran for the nearest safe place, which was, oddly enough, the bathroom. Jackson flipped on the light and curled up on the tile floor. The bright, harsh lighting bathed him, protected him. He thought about that day at school again.

He thought about recess, and how the other kids teased him because of his name. ''Jack the Ripper!'' they would yell, and point, and the little girls in his grade would scream and run the other way in mock-horror. Jackson looked up Jack the Ripper in an encyclopedia, because he didn't know who that was, or why it was a bad thing to be called. Then he learned. Jack the Ripper killed people.

The sirens came screaming along down the street, and soon the police broke through the door and flooded in with noise. A lady police officer found Jackson curled up on the floor in the bathroom, in pajamas and socks that were soaked in the blood he had stepped in, unknowingly. She carried him out to an ambulance that was waiting. She smelled like roses.

Jackson Rippner stared at the woman in front of him. Lisa Reisert. For whatever sick reason, he felt safe around her. How bizarre was that? How utterly twisted? HE felt safe around her. He was about to ruin her life, he was sure. He would threaten her, terrify her, do whatever he had to to finish this job. Because this job was special. It had been made perfectly clear to Jackson that if he was to fail--he would be killed.

Ever since he had begun surveillance on this woman eight weeks before, he had felt an odd kind of closeness to her. An almost---what? Admiration? Longing? Maybe that was it. She was so...so something he did not have a word for. She seemed so strong, so together. Even on those occasions when he watched her cooking scrambled eggs in the middle of the night, watching stupid reruns of I Love Lucy, or whatever was on, he sensed tremendous strength and resolve even through the apparent loneliness she felt.

He saw the books she read, an odd, eclectic mix of things: some stupid self-help books, The da Vinci Code, a biography of Kurt Cobain, a text on art history, something about hotel management, Anne Rice's Interview With a Vampire, and something by Nora Roberts. He saw the music she listened to, knew what kind of shampoo she used...he probably knew her better, more intimately than most people ever had. Probably more intimately than he should have. But he couldn't stop himself. It was a compulsion. He had to know all about her. He wanted to.

He felt sick when he realized that she was everything that he would never, and could never, have. He felt even worse realizing that a woman that amazing and beautiful wouldn't be alone for long. And that there would be someone there with her, at night. Someone...not him. And that made him crazy. He wanted to have her see him. He wanted her to really look at him, just once, before he ruined her life.