AN: So, I decided I had better just leave this as one chapter since the final chunk of plot is going to be more than 4,000 words and I don't want to be sitting here for another month when I've got this done and... oh for chrissakes, just take it! Here! Haven't got the flashback writen yet, though.
Florida
Eleven Months and a bit after the Treaty:
Jail is a bit different when you're sitting inside the cell.
Specifically, jail is a bit different when you're sitting inside the cell, staring at the wall, waiting for a soldier to come by and drop off something vaguely edible so you can try to grill him for information about why exactly you're in jail rather than one half a pair of corpses cooling in a ditch.
Worth turned his attention to the shuffling behind him, the slight sliding sound of hands searching out soft spots in the walls. They'd been in here maybe three hours now, and in that time Conrad had worked his way carefully, stubbornly around the room twice.
Somewhere out there, Hanna was probably already plotting to break them out, pleading with his undead guardian to let him come back while they stowed away, maybe in an abandoned house a little north of town. Maybe he'd already won. Maybe the zombie was holding out. Worth wasn't counting on either option—he'd done what he could to get the kid out, and that would have to buy enough time for something else. You can spring a prison once, but you can't spring it twice.
Personal experience.
So, somewhere hopefully far away, Hanna pleaded with a dead man while here, in this cell, Conrad searched the walls for secret tunnels and Worth sat alone, in the middle of the floor, eyes open.
Wouldn't do anyone any bloody good either way.
Four hours.
Worth was listening to the creaks in the beams of the floor as the building shifted, considering sending Conrad to trace out their trajectory across the floor. But Conrad was sprawled out across their mattress like a corpse on a dissection table as of thirty minutes ago, and Worth couldn't decide whether it was too soon to be looking into digging-up-the-floorboards kinds of plans. The level of desperation necessary to pull one of those off was at least a week away, at a generous estimate. No point in jumping the gun.
He glanced out the chicken-wire window. Wherever the hell John was, Worth hoped he was getting his legs snapped off like bottle caps. Not that he particularly blamed the kid. Doc Worth figured it was his own fault—dumb fucking idea, going back for the kid. He should have known better. He got distracted, he got sentimental. He was getting old. Forgot everything he knew about the world.
Some people change. Some people don't.
He looked back at Conrad again.
"Why'd ya stay?" Worth asked, the first thing he'd said in nearly four hours. "Coulda gone with Hanna. Shield charm had ta been big enough, if it got all four'a us out the first time. Why'd ya stay?"
Conrad didn't move, hardly a muscle more than necessary. That economy of motion was the most unsettling thing about the vampire. He said, "I know better than to let you wander off alone." His voice was vague and thin. "Not after Colorado."
"Jesus H Christ, you people ain't gonna let that one go, are ya? Y' compliment one feudal lord's daughter, an' suddenly ya can't take a piss by yerself without Hanna screamin' the world's blowin' up."
Conrad—who had his own opinions about what constituted a compliment—snorted, and turned his head towards the window, with its glassless, chicken-wire panes. The fact that they had this set up, with no glass for shanks, no empty places to fly away through, made a man wonder what exactly they had prepared it for. There was no moon beyond that, but on a hilltop not so far away there were yellow lights burning between the treetops.
"Do you wish I'd left with them?" the vampire asked, maybe carefully dull, maybe just bone exhausted.
"What," the doctor shot back, "y'mean, do I wish I had this cell to myself? Sure, yeah, wouldn't be no quibbling over the color'a the curtains that way."
"I'm serious," Conrad insisted, sitting up now. "Give me a serious answer."
Worth cocked a brow. He stood, stiff from sitting in the same spot for hours, and made his meandering way over to the mattress where Conrad was sitting. After a moment, he leaned down till he could look the younger man in the eye. Conrad looked back, stoic.
"Y'wanna know if I'm pleased ta have ya here? Four hours you ain't said a thing. Been chewin' on that th' whole time? Pickin' at the wording?"
The doctor pressed a little closer, the air between them still with lack of breath.
"So," he said, "fill me in, director. 'S this the part where I confess my undyin' love, or are we skippin' a scene?"
"ARG!" The undead man screamed, falling backwards and clutching at his head. "What is it with you?"
"Whatzit wit' you?" Worth retorted, examining the cracked ends of his nails. "Ya need a date ter the debutante ball, juss say so. No need ter go sashayin' around the bit like a beaten dog in heat."
"You want me to punch you," Conrad growled, eyes narrowing.
"Aw, now yer just spoilin' the sport, darlin'. Gonna go sulk now?"
"On the contrary," Conrad replied, icily. "Happy to oblige."
They went down in a tumble of sharp joints and wheezy curses at four o'clock in the morning. Peeling wallpaper fluttered as they hit the sides of their cell. It Worth's first real fight in a week, and it was a little piece of home to make the place a bit more comfortable, like throwing an old familiar doormat across the entrance. That was Worth's estimate anyways. Maybe Connie was really just that stretched-thin.
They both had the unspoken decency not to break anything tonight, as they had managed to do on a few other notable occasions, because it would make breaking out that much more difficult when it happened. Worth was pleased to note as much, and replied by sinking his uneven teeth into the vampire's shoulder. Conrad was in the middle of retaliating with a solid strangling when the door behind them creaked open.
"Well," a deep, smooth voice noted, "it seems that it really is impossible to keep you two apart."
Worth froze mid-ear-pull. He knew that oily, almost reptilian voice too well.
"Fell?" he called out, disentangling himself from his companion's chokehold. "Fell, y'rotten bastard, I'd know yer two-timin' sleaze through a foot o' concrete."
Conrad sat up. "Mr. Fell? Here? I don't—"
"Save yer breath, dollface," Worth advised. He looked towards the doorway, where the looming shadow cut a swath in the hallway light. "Looks like he's a double-crossin' slippery bastard after all," Worth observed. "Figured as much when y' ditched us in Georgia."
The pinstriped giant strolled into the room, one elegant snakeskin boot in front of the other. He grinned, and the feeble florescent light turned him into a bizarre collection of shadows.
"Double-crossing is inaccurate, but yes, I am currently taking orders from the Prophet, if that's what you're insinuating." He flicked bits of prison dust off his Armani sleeve.
"Oh, for fuck's sake," Conrad groaned, "is there anybody in the south who isn't a traitor?"
Worth spared him a second of interest. "Well, when y' consider why there's a south ter begin with…"
"I'm not a traitor," the looming figure informed them, with the distinct sting of someone who does not appreciate being on the outside of a conversation. "My loyalty is to the most powerful. I have never betrayed that loyalty."
"Lawyer talk an' loopholes," the doctor grunted. He gave some thought to the idea of simply standing up and punching the dirtbag in his pointy, smirking face, but that wasn't likely to land them anywhere besides the looped end of a rope. Even if the feeling of knuckles cracking across the bastard's jaw would be incredibly satisfying, he probably wasn't tall enough to do it with any grace. But, on the other hand…
The three of them regarded each other. Worth watched Fell, with his black sunglasses and his snakeskin boots and his slight, smirking look of awareness. Fell watched Conrad, pale and covered in new bruises fading into old bruises. Conrad watched Worth, and whatever he saw, Worth didn't even fucking know.
"Awright, Benedict," the doctor started, staggering to his treacherously wobbly feet, "whadaya want with us alluva sudden? Come to give us a convenient villain's monologue? Threats? Torture? Spray us wit' seltzer?"
A foot above Worth's head, Fell rolled his eyes. "An offer, if you'll shut up long enough to hear it."
"Why should we listen to anything you have to say?" Conrad spoke up, with all the narrowness of an oncoming storm over the horizon. Doc Worth knew better than to bother being intimidated by Princess Achendick, but if you didn't know any better, you might almost imagine ice frosting up the chicken-wire in the early-summer room.
Fell tapped one pointed toe. "Because you haven't got a choice?"
"I can put my hands over my ears," Conrad shot back, eyes slitting nearly shut.
"Watch out," the doctor drawled, "he'll do it. 'E's a dangerous one, Conniekins is."
The vampire pointed a finger at the blond man. "Piss off, Worth. I was trying to make a point."
"Well," Worth replied, swinging his attention back towards the entrance, "me fer one, I ain't got anythin' better to do. 'S not like we been writin' the great American novel in here or nothin'. Go on, Fell, proposition us. What'll it be this time? Riches? Women? Power? Th' power'a God?"
"Take your pick," Fell replied with a shrug. "To start, the Church Universal and Triumphant owns every stockpile of gasoline between Pensacola and Valdosta, and every mechanic too. Money, as a figurative indicator of price, is no object. They even have real money, if you're delusionally nostalgic. The chancellor has a fondness for lighting his fires with hundred dollar bills."
"Women?" Worth asked, grinning at their guest. "None fer Connie though, he's on an after-life-long diet."
"One word from the chancellor could make you the most eligible bachelor in the state," the turn-coat answered. "And another word could put you conveniently out of the curfew-enforcer's reach."
"Power," Worth replied, no hesitation.
"A position on the council," Fell told him, "naturally. A post in the church, if you like. Titles, rings, all the trappings that make men so loud and prideful and dull."
"Power'a God."
The giant lifted a brow. "I'm sure there are documents for that sort of thing, although I didn't think your type usually put much stock in theological incentives."
"Well, y'got me there," Doc Worth admitted. He took a couple steps backwards and dropped like a stone onto the bed. "Cause, see, all I want is outta here. I've had just about enough of you bastards offerin' me shit I don't want."
"Ah, but think of what you could get out of it," Fell insisted, striding past them to the chicken-wire window. He clasped his hands behind his back. "So much in return for so little. I, for example, have received near unimaginable wealth and all encompassing pardons for the breadth of my crimes in return for a simple name, and more still for a paltry few weeks of advising a college drop-out in the ways of running a kingdom. This prison was my doing, you know, and the revised rationing system, and the pool of doctors you came in with."
"How could you be doing all that when we picked you up in South Carolina two weeks ago?" Conrad cut in, in that particular sputtering mixture of anger and bewilderment that he had mastered a long time before Worth met him.
"You know," Fell remarked, without turning, "for being a supernatural creature yourself, Mr. Achenleck, you ask some truly stupid questions."
The youngest man's nostrils flared, and Worth decided that he didn't particularly want to see Conrad beaten to a pulp by the man—the humanoid—who had betrayed them for what amounted to a fancy hat, in Worth's opinion. He broke in.
"So whadaya want me so bad fer, anyways?" he demanded, grabbing Conrad by the near-luminescent arm. "Not that I ain't flattered, but it's usually Hanna people go after, an' I ain't exactly brimmin' with world-conquerin' skills."
Conrad glared down at him.
"Oh, we couldn't do anything with Hanna," Fell replied, making a vague shooing gesture behind his back. "Idealists. Once they're minted you can't make them do a thing. You're a mercenary, Doctor, you're much more useful for a quick fix."
"Which would be?"
"Simple," the turn-coat said. "We need a man who can stand up in debate halls and say, 'I knew nightwalkers, and I support any measures necessary to keep them down.' That one's been on the recruiting roster for months now. Your stocky friend from Chattahoochee probably told you as much. It's all politics when you get down to it."
"Right, sure, but we both that ain't a good enough reason ter keep me alive after all the shit I pulled."
The yellow lights on the horizon flickered, and the giant turned his head just enough for the twist of a smile to be visible.
"Think of it as a gift from God, if you will. Regardless of our reasons, our promises stand firm—they always do. Take me for example," Fell went on, grandly, "I've been given everything I asked for, down to the last blasphemous bite." He pointed at the yellow spot on the horizon. "At sunrise, the city will be there, right there, for the sunrise service—thirty thousand people, the entire population, gathered on that hilltop to see me ordained into the heart of the CUT. Oh, they don't know that's what they're gathering for, but it is."
"Why would you ask for that?" Conrad muttered.
"As your indolent friend here might say, for the hell of it," Fell replied with another shrug. "I wondered if they would really do it. Of course, being what I am, they'll probably have me killed when my usefulness wears thin, but I'm not particularly concerned with that."
The doctor's hand was still in a vice-grip around Conrad's wrist, and they both seemed to realize it at the same time. Worth let go. The younger man tucked it against his chest. They both looked up at Fell again, who was watching them over the curve of his shoulder.
"Consider your futures," the looming figure advised them, cool as October wind. "Hanna and his rebel friends won't be breaking you out any time soon. A day is a long time, locked in a room. Or a week. Or months. Watching the wallpaper peel… a guard at the door, just waiting for a reason to dock your meals… sunrise after sunrise… Think of your partner, Doctor. Who's going to feed him? Where will he sleep? How long do you think you can protect him?"
"I should be so flattered," Conrad muttered, tucking in against himself a little tighter.
"Oh, you can kill yourselves," Fell continued, "there's sheets on the bed and they're probably long enough. But I know you, Doctor, and I know you're not the type. You're a patient man, but how patient? Patient enough to wither at the seams while Achenleck siphons you off over the graying stretches of weeks? Patient enough to return to this room, failed escape after failed escape, adding injury after injury to your growing collection?"
"Pretty picture," Worth remarked. "Ever thinka takin' up motivational speakin'?"
"Just consider it," the giant insisted, turning back to them. "I know it must be tempting to have the prison for an excuse, finally, but there's only so many times you can oh-so-platonically sleep on a cellblock mattress before the charm wears off."
"Oh for the love of motherfucking shit!" Conrad screeched, jumping to his feet, "That's it, I've had it with both of you!"
The blur of white hit Fell in the torso, and it must have caught him off guard because he went crashing back into the wire twists of the window, all seven something feet of him, with a rusty rattle of metal and a hard oof of percussive force. The vampire managed to land one square fist in the hollow under Fell's angled cheekbone before Worth had him by the chest and dragged him away to the farthest corner of the room.
"Couldn'ta won that if God 'imself had a bet on yer side," Worth whispered, a little impressed. "Didn't know y'had it in ya."
"Yeah, well," Conrad said, sights still fixed on Fell, "I seem to be having some temper problems the last year or so."
At the other end of the room, the thing that may or may not have been a man uncurled from his place pressed back against the window, and smiled at them.
"I'm patient also," he informed them, striding past the bed and onward to the door. "There's always plan B, as they say. I wonder if the chancellor is familiar with Orwell." He paused for a moment, hand on the knob. "It won't be too long. I'll be back after I have my church documents framed."
And then he was gone.
The ceiling creaked overhead, and Doc Worth nearly fancied he could hear the mind-numbing taptap of Fell's snakeskin boots as he headed out the door and off to his ineffable rewards. The ghost of a noise went on for a long time after any actual sound would have faded into silence.
"Well," the paler man snorted, after the last imagined footstep had rung still. "We're going to have a hell of a time holding him off."
"Dun think so, sugar."
Glaring, the vampire rounded on him. "Don't blow this off, Worth, because we are now officially in serious shit."
The doctor waved him off. "I ain't concerned with Mr. Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness. He kin keep his Orwell an' his chess matches t' himself, 'cause I ain't bitin'. Don't you worry yer pretty li'l head over it neither."
Conrad grabbed their unpleasantly discolored pillow and slung it at the nearest wall. "Why? Because he's wearing a suit? 'Cos he talks like he finished school, unlike you? I think it's about time you faced up to the fact that you can't take down an army with a gutter accent and a couple of goddamn bullets!"
Something creaked.
"Nah," Worth replied, pushing away from the mattress and toward the place where Fell had been standing. "I'd say I got it all pinned pretty tight. Cerebral types're all scheme an' no brains."
"Oh yeah?"
"Yeah."
"And after all that, what makes you think so?"
The doctor crouched down and lifted something up that reflected slightly in the dim light.
"Cause he dropped 'is goddamn key, tha's why."
-A-
When the sun rose, it rose on the glittering curved windows of a prison with one of its many inner doors swinging open and one of its many guards clutching at the purpling skin over his throat. Of course, most of its many guards were away, watching a snake in a thousand dollar suit join a church whose primary purpose seemed to be snake-hunting. And Worth had gambled a lot on that.
The doctor pressed himself into the dents and bumps of the ground underneath a withering, feral decorative shrub. Orange sunlight filled the gaps between the leaves. There was a weight tied tightly around his neck, and the knot was already starting to chafe against the hollow of his throat.
"Fuckin' hate daylight escapes," he murmured to himself, creeping a few inches farther. "Fuckin' hate 'em."
There was a heavily muffled sort of noise behind him, but he ignored it.
Worth had made it as far as the chain of parks before he realized that creeping along would probably only make him more suspicious to anybody who hadn't been present for his arrest and/or escape, at which point he straightened up, made a cursory show of dusting himself off, and with his good arm picked up a shovel that someone had left by the plot of snap peas near the east-running street. Pretty good heft. Might make a decent weapon. There was a heaviness in his steps that was irritatingly familiar—stale adrenaline in his veins, muscles whining in protest, a soreness behind his eyes demanding sleep…
Fell's key was still in his pocket, although why he wasn't sure.
From a medical standpoint, he knew that he pushed himself too hard. He'd only been smoking maybe ten years, five years chain smoking properly, but the effect on his lungs was notable. Five years, again, he'd spent getting little to no exercise outside of fistfights and the occasional mosh. Five years of starving off sleep and food, wearing his fibers thin with chemicals and magic. A bit less than a year of fighting down the plague, running nearly nonstop, and pulling off escape after escape after assault while ticking away a pint of blood every week or so to shore up their stocks for the unfriendly neighborhood failpire. And it was starting to add up.
He could feel it like the straining gears of a car that hasn't been tuned in too long.
The local high school—what used to be the local high school—was up ahead up him, and he stepped across the deserted street on a whim. The Church Universal and Triumphant had taken over the buildings themselves, hanging logos drawn in varying degrees of skill off the black faux-iron gates. The blue detailing of the Noah's ark painting caught his eye, with its little white spots of sheep floating on the waves and its little university propped up above the surface. Someone had scrawled across the width of it in black sharpie.
Cursed be Canaan, the lowest of slaves will he be to his brothers.
The handwriting was about as familiar as a sock to the jaw, and hit him with as much force. Rebel leader, Jesus Christ. Scribbling on posters.
And as he contemplated the loops of writing, with the sun rising steadily to his right, Worth realized that he didn't have even the smallest fucking hint as to where Hanna had been dragged back. A local's house? An abandoned building? He was pretty sure that it wasn't another jail cell, because if the bastards had gotten their hands on him some time during the night then Worth definitely would have heard about it. Fell didn't seem like the sort to miss out on a prime opportunity to rub someone's nose in it.
But then, where was Hanna? He didn't have the time to go poking around in every house in the city, and he definitely didn't have time to get caught in full daylight like this. He could try for the place where Hanna had stayed the last week, although that could be any house in a mile radius of the interstate-highway intersection, and even then he would need directions. He didn't have time.
Down at the bottom of the hill, where the tennis courts fluttered with a brown mass of chickens, there was a thin whinny echoing through the air.
Worth looked at the poster covered in Hanna's handwriting. It looked back.
"Can't ride no fuckin' horse," he told it, irritated.
The poster did not reply.
"Don't even have a saddle," he added.
Once again, the poster neglected to reply.
Worth ran a hand through the blond mess that passed for his hair. "Christ," he muttered, "gonna look like a damn fool."
Ten minutes later, he had convinced his newly stolen horse to hit something a little slower than a run, and more importantly, not buck him off onto the asphalt. The ugly bugger seemed to know that Worth had no idea what he was doing, and was probably just mean spirited enough to also know exactly what his uneven gait was doing to Worth's tailbone. Horses. Bloody hell.
The horse snorted and the snort was like a laugh, and Doc Worth grit his teeth as he tried to keep in mind that he was not the kind of man who could win a fight against a seven foot high, iron-shoed mammal. Not with a broken arm. He was having enough trouble just holding the reins like this.
"We get outa here alive," he grunted, "I'm squeezin' ya fer all the glue yer worth."
Streets passed by, back the way he'd come, back past the rounded monolith prison and onward. A street of red brick buildings told him that he was passing through the campus of what was now effectively a castle. There was a faint sound to his left, like wind passing between mountains. Human voices. Rhythmic. He wondered how lucky he could possibly get today—maybe real fucking lucky, if somebody upstairs hated this town as much as he did.
He kicked the horse's left flank, and they were off.
-A-
The stadium thrummed.
God only knew where they got the juice to run that kind of sound system, but the air rattled with a man's voice, deep and young, spewing from speakers all around the field.
"We are God's chosen people!" he cried.
"And our God is a Jealous God!" the people called back.
Worth strode through the shadows at the back of the stands, head down, glancing once or twice away at clouds as pink as week-old cuts drifting above the rim of the stadium.
"The man on the streets warned us!" the young man's voice announced, like fire racing across a field. "Darkness falls on those who turn away from the Lord! Their shadows grow, and swallow the paths in front of them! Hear the words of the man on the streets, and heed them, and spare yourselves the wrath of a Jealous God!"
Doc Worth looked ahead, at the man walking in front of him. The fraying edges of a yellow cowboy hat returned his glare.
"Why here?" the doctor growled, under the roar of a chanting multitude.
"'Cause I've been working here two days," Jed Bondye replied, softly, "an' it's the only place I've seen where you can keep something safe till dark."
"Mebbe I'm more concerned with gettin' myself t' safety," Worth shot back, wrapping thin fingers around the knot at his throat. "Mebbe I don't give a shit about storin' nothin' till night."
The cowboy tsked in his strange voice that carried perfectly, no matter what other sound beat against it. "You know, I don't reckon that's a scenario worth the time it'd take to consider, Doctor."
"Yeah?" the blond sneered, "an' how would you know?"
Something was digging its way up through his gut, this nagging sense that there was something he didn't know, something that set his teeth a little more on edge with every word out of the man's mouth. Bondye irritated him like something invisible constantly brushing his back. Besides, he'd already had a git of a horse reading his mind and a riddling cowboy now didn't strike him as any better.
"Oh, I know you, Luce Worth," Bondye replied, offhand, tugging open an aluminum door. Stairs peered up at them. "Trust me, doctor."
Doc Worth grunted. "So. Was it Montana? I don't remember mosta Montana."
"Concussions can do that to you."
"Fuckin' hated Montana," the doctor seethed, starting down the stairs. This morning was turning out to be an absolute moodkiller. He had no idea where he was going, he was taking shit from a goddamn pony, and the bundle tied around his neck was irritating to the point where he was reconsidering ripping it off and throwing it at a wall every couple seconds.
Behind them, the crowd chanted "The Messiah Returns!"
"Don' see what the hell they need a messiah fer," Worth grumbled, perfectly willing to share his irritation with any and all subjects. "Got 'emselves an imaginary prophet, fuck d'they need an imaginary messiah fer too?"
"The sick are healed," the young man with the microphone said, "the illnesses of the earth melt away from his sight! The lord is your physician!"
"They're still a Christian sect," Bondye replied. "The Man on the Streets… the homeless man who started everything? He promised them a prophet, and that's great, but everyone knows Jesus has to come back sometime. Seems to some folks that he's a bit late for his headliner at the apocalypse."
The crowd cried, "He heals the sick! He makes the blind to see!"
"Shoulda just called the prophet Jesus an' left it at that," Worth remarked, tugging at the knot over his collar bone again. "Two birds an' all that clever shite."
"The tamed Devil walks at his side!"
The last step dropped them off at another door, this one painted what might have been beige, although it was hard to tell with the only light source being quite a ways above their heads. The cowboy pulled out a key.
"Do you really think the people would settle for a faceless Jesus?"
The door creaked open, and Bondye lit a match—in the dim flicker, Worth gauged the room to be a storage closet. The light wavered, and then flared to life. Behind him, Bondye closed the sooty door of a lantern with brown, burnt fingers.
"Now, you take him out and leave him here," the darker man instructed, "and I'll come back for him tonight. In the meantime, I'll take you to Hanna, who'll be mighty glad to see you, might I add."
"Dunno whatcher talkin' about."
"Mr. Achenleck," Bondye replied, infinitely patient. "In the sack around your neck?"
"Who says I got Connie in here?"
Bondye crossed his arms. "When I found you outside the stadium, messin' with that employee's entrance?"
"Yeah?"
"Your back squeaked."
The doctor eyed him, still wary. The crowd above them rumbled on, but the words were lost in layers of concrete just like the growing daylight.
"How come you gotta let him out?" Worth asked, hand tapping at the empty holster still hanging from his side.
"'Cause I work here, as of yesterday," the cowboy replied, "and 'cause you cain't risk coming back into town. I mean you really cain't risk it."
Well, back to that reliable old staple. "An' why should I trust ya?"
Bondye gave him a look of such infinite compassion and pity that it basically translated to "I am so very impressed you remember to feed yourself in the morning." It gave Worth an unnerving sense of vertigo. Jed raised one hand, palm out, and wiggled the fingers.
"In case you ain't noticed, I'm not exactly what you call white, doctor. These folk aren't winning themselves any points from me, nor are they particularly concerned with that."
The doctor considered that for a moment, and grudgingly undid the knot over his collarbone. That was a fairly good argument, and if things went wrong he could always knock the man out and use him as a hostage—disfavored minority or not, turncoats were usually worth something. Not to mention it's hard to rat a bloke out when your mouth's stuffed with handkerchief.
"Why'd ya let 'em take ya here?" Worth asked, some of the bite seeping out of his voice. He'd been awake for a long time. "Yer a local, you know all'a this CUT shit better'n I do. Coulda run while we were comin' here."
"This's where things were happening," Jed answered with a shrug. "What's the point of havin' feet if ya cain't go where the action is? Put him down on this bench here."
The doctor's scarred hands went to work unrolling the prison bed sheet, tugging free the shirt and the pants that Conrad had snatched hours before. The lump of red fur in the middle of it all looked up, gave him a blood-freezing glare, and promptly became a biped.
"We are never doing that again," he announced, teeth gritted. "I am never getting that close to the sun again, are we clear on that? I've got a headache like an army was using my head for target practice. Another half hour and I'd be fried. Deep fried bat, you hear me? And who's this guy?"
The cowboy wasted no time pushing forward, extending a rough, brown hand. "Jed Bondye, pleased to make your acquaintance properly."
"Uh." Hesitantly, Conrad returned the gesture. "Are you… one of Hanna's, um, rebels?"
"Looks like it, don't it? Anyhow, we don't have a whole lotta time to get on the road, so I propose ya'll—"
Worth stepped back while Bondye went about hanging details on the outline of a plan, mostly concerning where Conrad should hide and who would be likely to find him and under what circumstances he should make a break for it, little details like stars hanging sometimes too thickly from a mobile. Mostly, Worth watched Conrad. There was a red tint across his back like a sunburn, stretching from shoulder to uncovered shoulder, slightly raised, textured minutely in a way that would probably resemble weaving on closer examination. There was a purple bruise above the left pectoral, Worth-inflicted, and a myriad of more faded contusions, which wouldn't fully heal until—
"Doctor," Jed repeated.
The doctor looked up. "Yeah?"
"Come on," the cowboy said, and started for the door. "Time to get this show on the road. I hope you don't mind ridin' backseat, 'cause that horse of yours'll go a whole lot faster with me holdin' the reins. Not quite sure how ya managed that, by the way."
Jed held out his battered yellow hat, and after a second's hesitation Worth took it. Better to look like a hick than a wanted man.
Worth glanced back at Conrad, who was stuffing his stolen shirt into one of the cluttered shelves at the edge of the room. Maybe feeling his stare, the younger man pretended that he hadn't shot a sideways look back at the doctor and went on shifting dusty screwdrivers. Red stretched from shoulder blade to shoulder blade.
There was a still moment, and the roar of the crowd above their heads rumbled through the wall. Deep in his bones, Worth wished that Bondye would just get the hell out of here for a minute.
"Don' talk ter strangers, princess," the Doc said at last, pushing his borrowed hat down over his eyes.
Conrad snorted. "Try not to get anybody killed, asshole."
Worth shrugged. "Can't make no promises."
And then Worth turned, and followed a near stranger out of the basement where his partner would spend the next twelve hours hiding in the dust and darkness. He did not look back.
Above him, the crowd shouted, "He makes the blind to see!"
And Worth muttered back, "Halle-fuckin'-lujah."
-A-
The reunion passed him by in a blur. He remembers Hanna throwing himself off the railing of an old plantation house, a blur of red hair and bandages. He remembers cool green hands gently extending his broken arm as he explained what kind of break it was. He remembers too many faces to count, passing in and out of his periphery, watching him with huge eyes as he recounted the last week to Hanna. He remembers the scent of meat and a wild hunger that slammed into him like a fist in the gut.
He remembers that the windows had gauzy curtains, and he remembers wondering how they expected him to sleep with the goddamn sun in his goddamn eyes like that.
And he remembers waking up.
-A-
He woke to the sounds of porcelain sliding across polished wood—a soft sound with a rough edge. He opened one eye, and the greenish blur of the bedroom sharpened into focus. There was a deep orange glow around the rim of the ceiling, a white porcelain pitcher on the dresser, and a nervous-eyed woman with her fist frozen around the handle of it. Worth blinked at her.
"Din' realize I was that tired," he mumbled, mouth gummy with sleep. Fuck, he needed water. "Fuck, I need water."
The nervous-eyed woman stared at him for a few seconds longer, and then nearly tripped over herself trying to get the pitcher over to him. He wriggled up into a vaguely sitting position in an entirely undignified manner and took the pitcher, sparing a suspicious look at the woman.
"Innint poison, is it?" he asked, with the distinctly unpleasant sensation that he was speaking around slime.
"Oh," she said, "no sir—doctor, I mean. Doctor. It, it sure isn't poisoned."
"Sleepin' pills?" he guessed again, sniffing the water. "Crushed up an' mixed in? I don' trust that stutter'a yers."
"No," she replied, "no, no, it's just water."
Worth shrugged and downed half the pitcher in one go. At this point, he didn't even care.
The woman stood there, staring at him, watching as water spilled down his face and his wrinkled wife-beater and onto the sheets. Like a really fucking intense statue or something. When he set the thing down, he turned back to her and cocked a silent brow.
Now, would Hanna let a crazy woman bring him water?
Judging by the evidence, most likely yeah.
"Did you really kill a skinwalker with your bare hands?" she demanded, spilling out words like a glass knocked off a table.
Now both eyebrows went up.
"Uh," Worth replied, accurately. "Whatsit t'you?"
The woman twisted her hands together in somewhat-painful looking shapes. "Mr. Cross told us about you," she said. "He told us about how you saved that girl in Oregon, and about when you killed that mob boss, and about how you broke him out of prison—"
"Four times," Doc Worth muttered, belatedly wiping his mouth.
"—And, I just—is it true?"
The doctor looked at her. The skirt she was wearing looked like it might have been her grandmother's back in the day, and her hair looked like it had been hacked off with a machete.
"You one'a the CUT douche-fags?"
She looked affronted. "I—I never sold my soul to anybody," she answered, the wording a little odd.
"Souls, yeah," Worth said, waving her off. "But ya took their food an' ya chanted with 'em an' licked their boots when th' opportunity presented isself. Din'ya?"
The woman frowned. "What does that have to do with my question?"
"Nothin'," the doc replied, "'cept me wonderin' why ya asked it. See, if yer askin' because y'think I kin save this bloody town from the forces'a Christ knows what—if yer askin' because ya think it'll give ya some kinda readin' on yer chances fer a revolution or sommat, then I ain't answerin' on the grounds that you may'er may not go skippin' back to the CUT an' tell 'em everythin' you know at the first sign'a tides turning."
"I wouldn't!" she shouted.
"Uhuh," Worth grunted. "Lady, I don't trust nobody. Getcher head around it an' ya might just fergive the rudeness someday. Some people do. Maybe." He stopped. "Or mebbe they don't. I dunno, never thought ter ask."
"You have a sad life," the woman told him, and it sounded like an insult.
He shrugged. "Don't get laid much anymore, so I guess I can't argue with that."
Not that he'd gotten laid much before America collapsed in an implosion of pestilence and shotgun fire, in all fairness. Too busy stitching up Hanna. Too broke for hookers.
The woman snatched the pitcher from his hands and slammed it down on the dresser hard enough to chip the bottom.
"Hanna said, Hanna said you were gonna help us," she informed him, lips thin, "but you don't look like any kind of hero to me. Let me tell you something, Doc: if my life is really in the hands of a… of a flea-bitten bastard like you, I might as well… shoot myself in the head!"
Worth considered that for a moment.
"Ya got a cigarette?" he asked.
Wordless, the woman tugged a pack from between her breasts and tossed it at him. It was almost empty.
The doctor shook out one for himself and tossed it back, rummaging with one hand through the bedside dresser for a lighter. A click, and grey healing was seeping through his lungs again. Shit, he'd missed this. One a day was killing him. He took a couple deep drags and then looked up at the woman with the hard, angry eyes.
"Look," he started, "I ain't yer savior come ridin' in on a goddamn white horse. It's brown, look out the window. Hanna's got this bad habit'a tellin' flatterin' stories when he's worried about somebody, so don't believe a word of it. I ain'tcher hero, lady. Hanna now, Hanna's regular hero breedin' stock. An' Hanna's gonna do somethin' stupid real soon, iff'n I know Hanna an' believe me I do, an' if he does…"
Worth took another drag.
"…well, I ain't likely ter let him go at it without proper medical backup. So you give me that pitcher back, lady, an' you bring me up some breakfast if y'got the food ter spare, an' then you go see if Hanna needs anythin' because whatever it is y'really want, he's the man to get it fer ya."
After a stony moment, the woman handed him back the pitcher and looked away.
"We just get so wrapped up in waiting," she murmured. "It rubs off on us. The CUT is waiting for the Messiah, all the time, waiting and waiting and getting antsier by the day, and we're left here waiting for somebody to come… help us. Somehow."
"They ain't exactly mellow blokes, I'll give ya that."
The woman shoved her packet of smokes back into the line of her cleavage. Excellent choice.
"I'm sorry," she said, apparently deciding that eye-contact was overrated. "I'll leave you alone. I just wanted to… I just hoped…"
Worth blew a cloud of smoke and didn't bother to reply.
"Your nightwalker… your vampire friend will be here in about an hour," she added, backing away. "Bondye is getting him now."
The doctor watched her shuffle closer to the door, and just before she reached the threshold, he asked her, "Whatcha got against th' church anyhow?"
"Me?" she said, looking up again for a split second. "Nothing, personally. I just… don't want us to forget the way it used to be." There was a flash of something in her eyes that Worth recognized, because he saw it everywhere if he looked long enough. Electric blue. Dark red.
"I don't think America's as dead as people say."
Worth nodded, slightly. "Well, I got it on good account that dead itself ain't as dead as people're prone ter say."
-A-
Worth was waiting at the highway gate when Conrad came stumbling onto the plantation, despite what everyone else in the big house had insisted he should be doing instead. Bugger on sleeping. He could sleep when he was dead, which wouldn't be too many years away if probability had its pushy way.
The lantern sitting on the gatepost beside Worth flashed green in Conrad's pupils.
"Still dead, princess?"
The younger man made a face. "No more than I was this morning."
Bondye was walking in Conrad's shadow, hat pushed low on his forehead, and Worth spared him a look.
"Anybody follow ya?"
The cowboy smiled at him. "Not that I know of, no. But considering that our rebel base is a plantation house full of a couple dozen runaways, I think that followin' us would be the least of their interests."
"Wow," Conrad muttered, "that makes me feel really confident about whatever Hanna's planning."
Like it was natural, Bondye fell into step a few feet ahead of them, talking over his shoulder, the sharp tips of his boots kicking up clouds of white dust on the dirt path. The moon flickered between branches overhead.
"The real rebellion, if y'can call it that," he informed them, "is spread out over the city, watchin' the chancellor up in his castle eatin' three square meals a day and makin' up rules like it's going out of style. That's who Hanna's been stirring up, not a bunch of sign-wavin', brick-throwin' zealots. Not yet, anyways."
Worth watched the figure in front of him waver in and out of focus as he stepped through patches of moonlight. There were a lot of things about the world that had come clearer in the last year, and although it was never smart to underestimate what a human being would do in a moment of crisis, Worth was generally unconvinced that Bondye was giving him anything in the way of good news.
"Awright," the doctor said, fingers twitching towards his pocket for the ghost of a pack of cigarettes, "so tell me what good an army'a housewives cowerin' on their kitchen floors is gonna do ya? An' I say you 'cause I'd like to delude m'self a little bit longer if it's alright wit' you."
Jed made a weird little gesture with one hand. "You ever got between a woman an' her kid with a shotgun before?"
"It was a rifle," Conrad replied for him, darkly.
"Then you know what kinda strength the Lord gave that woman cowerin' on her kitchen floor."
"You know what kinda strength th' lord gave that woman," Worth mimicked, scowling. "You sure you ain't one o' those CUT bastards?"
"Fairly certain," the cowboy answered. "And ya'll might try to remember who's just saved both your asses today."
"Don't look at me," Conrad muttered, "he's the dickwad, not me."
But Worth was thinking. Bondye was a citizen now, probably, if his claim of having a job at the stadium was to be believed, which meant that he was operating within the guidelines of CUT territory, which meant that in order to get Conrad out of his janitorial closet under the stands at this time of day—
"How come yer leadin' Connie outta the city, anyhow? What happened to the curfew?"
The vampire beside him blinked. "There's a curfew? What is this, an Orwell nov… oh, bloody hell."
"Connie," the doctor responded, wrapping a sociable arm around his companion's shoulder, "y'really need ter stop sleepin' through all the important shit."
"Oh, fuck. You."
"Love you too, sweetcheeks."
Bondye made a noise. They both looked up.
"Oh," he said, without turning, "don't mind me. Carry on. Had a bit of platonic stuck in my throat."
Conrad got all narrow and prickly. "Are you implying something—"
"Anyhow," the cowboy went on, "in answer to your question, curfew's only enforced on white citizens. I'm free to come an' go, as long as I'm wearin' black and I don't start chattin' up those in stations above my own. Above my own, sure. It's separation, not slavery."
The doctor and the vampire looked at each other.
"That dun make sense," Worth muttered. His eyes flicked upwards through the canopy over them. "Why ground yer favorite kid?"
"Maybe they do work at night?" Conrad suggested, brows furrowed. His glasses were dusty, and it occurred to Worth that he probably couldn't see for shit like that.
He plucked them off the vampire's nose.
"Hey, give those back!"
The doctor turned his attention back to their guide. "How come they got it set up like that?" he asked, twirling Conrad's glasses by one plastic leg.
"The curfew's for the citizen's safety," Jed told him, "We kin assume they aren't particularly concerned with the blacks an' the odd Asian."
Conrad snatched his glasses back and shot Worth a withering look. "Is it really that bad?" he asked, apparently directing the question towards Bondye and not towards Worth, who was snatching at the reclaimed spectacles. "I mean, Worth had a point, I've been sleeping through pretty much everything except the rescue missions. Is it really that bad?"
The cowboy took a look over his shoulder, and odd, pensive expression across his face. "Bad? Depends on your definition. Compared to Nazi Germany, Rwanda? We're livin' the dream. Haiti? Not so bad. Fifty, sixty years ago in this country? Not much difference. A year ago, in this city? Yes sir, it is bad."
"Then, how…"
"How'd it happen? Had the misfortune of startin' a religion in a little town called Perry," Bondye answered, catching on immediately. "Add a little local tension to the KKK trickledown from Kentucky, not to mention the election… well, you know. There's always been one or two screamin' about racewars from their front porches all across the country. It's an interestin' coincidence that most of them're smokers."
"If I was one'a you," Worth informed him, "wouldn'ta let some bible-wavin' nutcase kick me back to the goddamn colored fountain."
"First couple cities felt the same, I reckon," Bondye admitted. "Either of ya'll seen people around the city, walkin' around with neck burns? Big ugly cuts? Hollow-lookin' eyes?"
"No."
"Yeah."
"That's what happened to the first couple cities," he told them. "Ya'll didn't think they came in here peaceful-like, did you?"
Conrad stumbled on a rock, but Worth kept his sights set on the man in front of them, whom Hanna apparently trusted, and who set the Doctor's skin to itching in a way not entirely unlike Mr. Fell once had. There was just something that made his instincts hiss, something that made him wary. It wasn't a malevolent feeling, like a man with a chainsaw standing in your doorway—it was more like the night in Arizona when he'd found himself face to face with a half-sleeping cougar, holding his breath and waiting to see what kind of move it would make.
"How come y'know so much about this?" he questioned, fingertips tapping the empty hollow of his holster. "Y'were in Montana last Fall, you said. So how d'you know?"
"Well," the darker man replied, "I make it my business to know, don't I now?"
-A-
Hanna had them all sitting down around the dining room table in matter of minutes, after a few seconds of awkward-enthusiastic hugs. The zombie had pulled Worth aside for a moment during the reunion, but said nothing. He was waiting for something, for Worth to say something, but hell if Worth knew what. After a minute, the dead man backed away and let him go.
As of now, they had maps strewn across the table and shot glasses of whisky holding down the edges, at Doc Worth's insistence, and Hanna was explaining to them where the humanoid variants of the local Moonlight Races were hiding out, where they'd been driven or trapped after reappearing on the scene last summer. There were sparkly smiley-face stickers over haven spots, human and inhuman alike, and a silver star over their current location, labeled in hasty pen "Horseshoe Plantation". When they first came into the room, Hanna had hastily tucked a stack of what looked like post-it notes into the antique-looking drawer under the window.
Every couple minutes a new pair of shoes would come shuffling in and Hanna would grill them for some piece of information he'd apparently missed, jumping from question to question like an excitable lemur leaping between branches, and it was all the rest of the room could do to try and follow the line of inquiry.
It was the dead of night when the zombie settled a hand over Hanna's shoulder and glanced meaningfully at the clock, and suddenly the contents of the room found themselves milling around the hallway.
"I don't get that kid," one of the locals said, with a touch of exhaustion. "I really don't."
Although there was a faint dullness of lingering fatigue down the length of Doc Worth's body, he headed outside into the darkness instead of upstairs to his irritatingly green room which he was going to have to share with someone tonight. He passed a stocky weed as he headed down the stairs, waist high, and snatched it up by the roots with a spare tug. There was a hammock at the edge of the yard, and that was where he headed, watching his shadow rush off ahead of him.
The plant was easy to peel apart, strip by strip, and soon enough there was nothing to do with his hands. He would have killed for a second cigarette. Literally. He had somebody in mind, too, with a pack to spare and a face that was just begging for a bullet in it.
The stars were out, like paintbrush splatter across the dome of the sky, and the night smelled like cooling heat and smoke, and he remembered a night a little more than a year ago, when the real change had only just begun. His broken arm rested over his stomach, and he wondered how many more times they could do this before the world caught up with them.
"Nice out," a voice said.
He looked up, and found Conrad standing over him with hands pushed limply into pockets.
"Huh," the Doc grunted. "How come yer th'only one who comes after me when I wanna be alone?"
Conrad pursed his lips. "You're practically Hanna's dad," he said, apparently not beating around the bush tonight. "He won't follow you if you wander off by yourself."
"Yeah?" Worth shot back, maybe a little quicker than he intended. "Well what's yer excuse?"
The hammock creaked, and there was no answer. A strand of wind twisted through the clearing, over Worth's body and around the pillar of cool tiredness that was Conrad. Weeks like this wrung you dry, like a dishtowel in a five-year-old's hands, and they were both achingly aware of it right now.
"Do you miss it?" Conrad asked him, after a while. His chin was pointed upwards, and he was looking at the stars. "Not the little things like lights and consistent plumbing and supermarket food. Do you miss… it, the whole… world. Being a part of it."
"Oh Christ, yer tryin' to have a touchy-feely bondin' moment with me." The doctor scowled. "Did Hanna put ya up to it, or are y'really that sad?"
The vampire shot him an irritated glare. "Let me try this again. I, Conrad, would like to know if you, a dick, would like to tell me anything, in accordance with our admittedly unwise agreement which you confirmed a year and a week ago tonight."
"Thinkin'a that too, were ya?" the doctor murmured. "Anniversaries'll do that t'ya, or so I hear. Aw, wait. This ain't yer way'a tellin' me you want flowers is it? 'Cause I ain't bought flowers fer a girl since prom in ninety-one."
"You're such a dick," the younger man said, and if Worth didn't know better he would have thought it sounded almost a little fond. "You know Hanna's going to have us doing something insane in a matter of days, right?"
"Yeah," Worth replied, "unless we tie 'im up an' lock him in the attic."
"I don't think we could stand the whining."
"Gag?"
"He'd never talk to us again."
"And a roit shame, that would be."
Conrad looked back at him, with his faded bruises and his dusty glasses, and there was a buzz in the air like words waiting to be said. Worth looked back. The whisper of a melody floated through the clearing, someone in the kitchens singing something soft and high, and it brushed over the tips of the grass grown wild on its way to them.
And the moon set somewhere behind them.
TBC