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Disclaimer: I do not own Gundam Wing or any of it's characters or references.
Notes: Important Announcement: Updates from this point on will vary greatly, it may be one week, it may be four or five weeks between them. My apologies, but it will depend on when I have time to work on it. Anyone who wishes to be notified at an update either e-mail me or review me an e-mail address! The last chapter?! AAAACK! No, no, no! I couldn't possibly finish this in one chapter, no I'm afraid there are many more chapters to come. Right now I'm just trying to build a sense of how grave the situation is. Speaking of which, you guys are gonna hate me for this, I know you are. (Stargazr hides her head in a bush).
Chapter Eighteen
No Gold Tolls
The world was as silent and still as a grayscale photograph. The sound of his own breath was loud in his ears and the gate gave a horribly drawn out screech of metal scraping against metal as Odin pushed his way inside the grounds. The short gravel path crunched under his cautiously placed, slinking their way towards the building. He climbed sideways and slightly to the left up the stairs. Reaching the top step Odin put his back to giant door enclosing the smaller one and slid his hand sideways, pushing the little door farther inwards with his fingertips. The smoke pouring out of the building engulfed his legs up to the knee. He lifted his head from the wood at his back and took a quick peek around the doorframe. He looked back at Wufei, who had taken up a similar position on the opposite side of the door, and motioned for face coverings. They pulled off their shirts and tied them as best they could around their mouths and noses to act as filters. The evening was getting colder, Odin shivered in a chill wind that breathed across his bare chest and envied Wufei his extra tank-top. Neither one carried a gun anymore, but Wufei pulled a pocketknife from under his pants leg and held the gleaming blade at the ready. They entered a few paces away from each other, squinting through the haze and turning to watch all the entrances.
The vapor was not as thick as it seemed from the outside, but the stench was still overwhelming. Their make shift gas masks had little to no effect, and already Odin could feel his limbs beginning to slow. He caught Wufei's eye and pointed to the windows by the front double doors and in the lounge to the left. Wufei nodded and went to the lounge, Odin pried open the tall windows in the entryway and stumbled out the door and down the path. Wufei followed shortly and they collapsed by the gate, pulling their shirts off their faces and gasping for fresh air.
"We can't, "Wufei wheezed, "it's too thick, we'll have to wait until it clears some." Odin nodded and glared at the tall building with darkened windows.
"Sleeping gas," he panted. He squinted leaned forward. There were some curling shapes behind one of the upper story windows, like some untidy scrawl written from the inside, but it was too far up to discern the words. He curled his fingers around his shirt and crushed the material into a smaller and smaller ball, while his face remained blank. Someone had been in his house.
An hour passed before they braved the smoky building again, this time their luck was much improved. The fumes had cleared enough for their shirts to be of some effect and they prowled through the halls and rooms picking up broken pieces of property as they went, like wolves following a sent. A shattered vase here, a splintered door there, smashed plates on the floor, curtains ripped and furniture overturned. Odin grabbed a cracked banister that lay on the floor and held it like a club. It had been a strike force of some kind, they came, they smashed and they vandalized. The writing on the upper story window was no longer a mystery, threatening graffiti had been painted all over the walls, windows, mirrors and anything else that happened to be in the way. In bright red, blue and green they intoned violent warnings, and combinations of letters stamping their territory. The halls were ghostly still. So far there had been no sign of life, the kids were nowhere to be seen and the adults were missing too. The pair's breathing sounded harsh in their ears and the loudest sound was Odin's jeans swish swishing as he crept along.
Wufei tried light switch after light switch, and the best he got was a bulb that fizzled and shot sparks down on their heads before it died. Odin looked about and motioned Wufei to go down. Those responsible were long gone and they would make better time searching for clues and survivors if they split up. Wufei nodded and took the basement, kitchens and boiler room; Odin headed for the upper stories. Somewhere above he could hear music.
He climbed another flight of stairs, looking up and listening for the fickle melody shifting in and out of static. At the top stair he passed into a long hall, the sounds of the radio came from a door near the far end. The windows along the hall had all been smashed and a cold breeze whistled through the holes, playing the corridor like a bone flute. Odin reached the door with the radio's faltering music and pushed it open with his banister. The room was black as charcoal, and he had to grope his way along, following the fritzing strains of a popular song. The radio was bent in the middle, and lay on the floor with wires spread around it and the casing falling off. Someone had given it a good smash and in another second and the tune sputtered out, dead. Odin turned then, ready to leave, and came to a skidding halt. There on the wall, revealed in all its gruesome glory by the dim glow of the hall, was a message written in blood.
"Toll paid in half," the gory note read. Odin stood transfixed, watching with horrified awe as the letters leaked their juicy red ink in dribbles down the wall. The omnipresent hum of his mind slowed and sputtered to a halt like an engine out of gas. His last thought before it died completely was, where'd they gotten the blood? A familiar cold returned to his gut and he felt his insides freeze and harden. Effectively numbed from head to foot, he searched around for a flashlight. He found one under an overturned drawer, flicked it on, and swept the circle of light along the walls with an unsteady hand. The blood didn't end with one message, all four walls were covered with it, pictures of skulls with x'ed out eyes, hands paying coins and promises of retribution. Odin flicked off the flashlight and walked out the door, closing it behind him with a soft click. The cold froze solid the fear that trickled in, and gave it a tactical voice; where were the children?
Odin was standing, motionless and staring beyond the broken windows when Wufei came up beside him. He felt a tap on the shoulder and turned to acknowledge the Chinese pilot. He did not realize that he was pale as bleached cotton or that his eyes were wide and sightless. He blinked dully at Wufei, trying to kick-start his brain into running again. Wufei got the hint, took the flashlight from Odin's hand and walked into the room. He came back out with an equally haunted and closed off expression and stood beside Odin, staring at the black sky. There was no more gas up here, if there ever had been any it all flowed out the broken windows. Wufei pulled his shirt away from his mouth and said,
"I've found them." Odin snapped his head round to his companion and motioned for him to lead the way. Wufei fixed his shirt back over his mouth and guided them down the staircases, past the kitchens and into the basement. The orphanage basement was abnormally large and spanned half the floor space of the entire largest building. The ceiling stretched out over head and faded into darkness. Wufei flicked on the flashlight and ran it over the piles of gently breathing bodies. All the children had been trussed up and bound like pigs for the slaughter. Most were sleeping lightly, some were snoring and a few had begun to rouse themselves. Odin marched forward and together with Wufei began heaving the bodies out of the little hills they'd made and spreading them out on the floor. As suspected the thugs who'd thrown them down here hadn't cared about the order they landed in and many of the smaller children were suffocating under bigger and heavier bodies, the two got to work at once.
Odin found Caltha easily and laid her out with extra care. Wufei was working a pile to the far right, currently doing CPR on one of the smaller kids. He breathed into her mouth and pumped her chest with quick deft motions, in the hurried professional pace of one who'd done it a thousand times. Odin watched for a moment, then turned and heaved a body from his own pile with a grunt, he had his own lives to save. The huge bulk made a loud groan that echoed through the cavernous cellar as it landed on the floor. Odin paused and shone the flashlight in the body's face; it was Ethan. Odin rolled him over on his back and helped him sit up. Ethan blinked at him, weary eyed from the effects of the gas but growing more alert by the minute. Odin returned to spreading out the sleeping bodies and when he could stand Ethan helped. They worked in silence, their helpers growing in number as more kids awoke.
Some of the younger children were starting to wail with fright: 'where were they,' 'what had happened,' 'where did the scary men go,' and ' what happened to Anna?' There were even a few demands for the bathroom, though one boy decided it wasn't worth the trip upstairs and peed his pants. Ethan had collected a small flock and he along with a few other girls and boys tried to keep the babies together and reassure them. Odin was grateful, he had neither the finesse nor the patience for keeping them quiet and out of the way, and he was growing more troubled with each piping voice. The children were right, there was no Anna, nor any of the adults. They pulled all the kids out of the piles and there wasn't an adult to be found.
None of the children were injured beyond a few cuts and bruises. Ethan sported a black eye, Neon was favoring his limp leg more then usual and jinx had a busted lip, but nothing serious. Half the kids were now awake and looking for direction, or some authority figure. Odin took Ethan, Jinx, Neon and a few others aside to report on the condition of the upstairs, and the room with the bloody message. Ethan agreed to keep all the kids down here or on ground level at least. Wufei fired off a few questions about who attacked them and how they got in. Jinx's answers confirmed their first guesses, thugs, wearing gloves and rubber monster masks that covered their heads. They smashed their way in with pointed guns and crowbars. One of the older girls was rocking a three year old in her arms who was close to passing out again from hyperventilating, and trying her best to convince her circle of tiny listeners that it had not been real boogie men or monsters that assaulted them.
Odin and Wufei led Jinx and one or two others up to the kitchens for water. One girl tried to call the police several times and punched the screen with a shout when she got no results. Wufei ordered her to calm down, the power had been cut, run to the public vid-phone down the street and call them from there.
Odin was rummaging through the cupboards looking for bandages and first aid kits. He slammed a pantry door shut and the others flinched when it banged off the frame. Some hissed at him to be quite, others glared, there was such a hush over the place that no one dared disturb it. Odin looked to his right and stopped. Caltha had left the basement and followed him upstairs on her own and now she stood at the kitchens glass slider looking at something on the stone walk outside. Odin's brow creased and he left the others to their search, coming up behind her to see what she'd found. A black puddle was spreading bit by bit along the grooves between the flagstones and in the light of moving flashlights it had red depths. Odin and Caltha watched, mesmerized by the ripples made with each new drip into the inky pool. The drops fell from overhead, and as one the two looked at each other and then up beyond the door frame. His head still tilted upward Odin slid the glass door open and stepped around the puddle. Caltha stayed behind the doorframe sucking on her thumb and watching Odin with worried eyes, she knew something was wrong with that puddle.
Odin walked backward from the open slider his nose pointed at the sky. His coping skills struggling keep up with his mounting dread. Fright poured through him fuller and faster then it could be frozen. His pace slowed with each laborious step that revealed more of the horrendous scene, until he couldn't lift his feet at all, he was riveted in horror to the ground. His legs were so heavy and still that they felt implanted in the earth, like the base of a mountain. In that single moment, when he took his first sight of them, time lasted forever. Millennia passed within his mind and he took a breath once in a hundred years.
Every adult on orphanage grounds was hung from the eaves of the house, stripped and naked as newborns. Each man and woman dangled from a beam at the end of a rope. Starting from the far left all the way to the right the bodies made a line of homemade gallows. The house creaked from the dead weights it carried and the bodies, stiffened in rigormortis, hung like boards. Their necks were snapped and the heads rested at odd angles against the ropes, some slightly forward some to the side depending on where the rope was knotted. Green light from a nearby sign illuminated the corpses and gave their skin a sickly look, as well as emphasizing every bruise and scratch and blood clot.
It was a ghastly sight for anyone to behold, yet it was all the worse for Odin because every expression caught in sudden death, expressions he'd seen many times through his short, brutal life, expressions he knew as well as multiplication tables, he now saw hardened on faces he knew. There was the man who had passed out mail on Christmas, the woman who couldn't make anything but peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches, and there…was… Anna. His joints gave out and he fell to the ground on his knees, leaning back on his heels while his eyes traveled up, up and up.
Up from her bare feet, up her calves and up the blood that ran down from behind her knees to puddle by the kitchen. Now he knew where they'd gotten the blood. He felt disgusted at himself for staring at her the way she was yet he couldn't force his eyes away. Up her thighs, pelvis, stomach and breasts to the throat and face. The noose had slipped up her neck and was pulled tight under her chin. The pale green light from the sign darkened all her wounds and made her body look half-rotted. Nothing on her remained untouched and unbruised except for her hair, her bright red mane of hair that drifted about her face and tangled in every wind. Her eyes were open, staring out at some point beyond the horizon and the look in her face was in no way peaceful. She died thinking of her kids, Of Odin and Ethan and Neon and Jinx and Caltha, of what her attackers had done to her and them, of what she thought they deserved and how they should get it, she died thinking of revenge.
Odin couldn't move, couldn't feel his body working, everything had stopped. There was no sound, no feel, no action, no rhythm. His eyes were dry from staring at Anna's angry, bloody face. Even in death she was so full of energy that it didn't surprise him when the head of her corpse lifted from it's snapped position and looked down at him. Her face struggled through the stiffness to open its mouth and her voice was hollow and wooden as it spoke,
"What are you doing moping around down there and feeling sorry for yourself? Get up and do something about it." Fear pooled in Odin's heart as she stared into him with fogged, unreflective eyes and all the other bodies slowly lifted their heads to stare at him as well. Odin shivered, blinked, and the scene returned to normal. He lowered his head from the dead hanging above him and felt molten rage begin to leak and pool among the fear. The two mingled and together made a hot, potent mixture that spread through his limbs and his face. His mouth twitched and widened into a long grin. His eyes grew wild. All of his vision was red and his ears went deaf. Odin leaned on his heals and rose to his feet, his tongue darting out to lick his teeth in expectation of the blood he would taste tonight.
Wufei and the other kids had stopped what they were doing and gathered about the slider door when Odin stepped outside. They had watched him fall to his knees and slowly change from horror to grief to the thing that stood before them now, this crazed, pained, blinded thing. Wufei looked back at everyone behind him, all in various stages of confusion and fear and said,
"Run."
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