Disclaimer : Don't own Jack or any other characters from the movie that will inevitably appear, although I'm sure everyone knows exactly which of the characters I would like to own. looks innocently up at the ceiling
Note : No violence yet, sorry. Thankyou GeZel for your review,I'll try not to peeve you off. And thankyou Lena for your review, I'll try and keep it interesting.
Valley of Death
Chapter One : To Hell in a Hand Basket
Jack snapped awake to the sound of mortar shells firing through the air, a sound she hadn't heard in a month, so she had subconsciously thought that the war had finally stopped. The air smelled like smoke and gunfire, and she let her head fall back on the pillow with a groan.
Dream on, Jack. They're not gonna stop just for you.
Sighing in irritation at the noise, she sat up in her makeshift bed and stretched her arms out over her head, stifling a yawn. Early morning sunlight filtered in through the broken windows as she clambered out of bed and shut off the lamp she'd fixed to the wall above her bed. Grabbing under her makeshift pillow for the gun she kept hidden there, Jack strapped it over her shoulder with a practiced ease.
She sat down next to the bed and pulled on her boots, making sure the mechanisms for the secret blades in the heels and toes still worked before tying up the laces tight around her ankles. She then reached over to the table she had scrounged and picked up her gloves, pulling them onto her hands one at a time before knotting those laces as well. That done she picked herself up off the floor and walked out of her room and out onto the inner balcony of her castle, grabbing the rope she had tied to replace the stairs from the last round of troops that had come through. With a small jump and an agile twist she was able to slide down the rope to the bottom floor.
Her boots hit the cracked floor with a hollow thud and she released the rope, walking on through the rubble of the front doors and out into the desecrated morning sunshine that drowned the town in light. Jack scanned the sky and saw smoke in the distance off to her left, knowing immediately that they'd hit the school It was one of the only other relatively intact buildings left besides her own little castle and an old garage on the outskirts. There weren't that many people left in the town, just a few who barely scraped by just like herself. She didn't know their names and they didn't know hers, after all, what was the use of making friends when either one of you could wake up dead because some soldier's fire missed its intended target.
It wasn't like she didn't miss human contact, still talked with anyone she could, trying to find out the off-world news, but people started looking at you funny if you were concerned about things other than the local war.
Like I should still fucking care about them. They're both probably dead anyways, so why the fuck do I keep asking? It's like there's some kind of invisible string tying my thoughts back to them. DAMN IT! Why can't I just fucking forget them?
The ruins were quiet except for the echo of gun fire and Jack played with the idea of getting close enough to the camps to steal a real gun and some extra ammo, but decided against it in practical terms. She had plenty of ammunition for her current gun, old as it was, and lots of other useful pieces of weaponry collected over the years of her accidental exile. Right now she needed to focus on getting some food to last the next few days and maybe a little longer, and pickings were scarce as it was without risking her life. If she had to, she'd raid the dead after the fighting was done, taking their freeze-dried rations before anyone came to collect their tags for identification purposes.
All of them, they're just numbers. No one really cares that they lived and died. They're just statistics on somebody's score board.
Shrugging past that thought with a barely suppressed shudder, Jack cut down the lawn of her mansion and through a burnt out house, entering what used to be the commercial district. The first few cafeterias and restaurants had been cleaned out by looters but there were a few markets that still had some canned goods. It was towards these that she headed, ignoring the distant sounds of the dying. The sun rose higher as she reached the shadows of the once thriving building, the windows long since shattered along with the entire west wall. She still remembered that day, so fresh was it that she could smell the burning flesh of those who'd been unfortunate enough to be caught in the blast. Luckily for her the west wall had housed perishable goods and a year later there was still enough in the back stock to feed herself.
Bypassing the toppled shelves and the gnawed boxes of moldy cereal she filtered through the doors into the back of the ruined store where all the stock used to be kept. There were still crates full of canned fruits and meats, even some soups and noodles, so much that more than once she wondered if she could lug one of them back with her. But the crates were huge and despite how much her strength had increased over the years, there was not much she could do to lift even one of them. So she contented herself with gathering up as many cans as she could carry, which was about seven, before heading out of the building through the back way.
The gunfire suddenly went silent as she stepped outside and Jack instantly froze, stepping back into the doorway and looking around in case the cause of the sudden silence was nearby. Then an air-tearing sound grated at her ears as an air craft flying far too low for comfort screamed by overhead, the slipstream shrieking against its hull in protest. She looked up at the sky and saw the bomb thirty seconds before it hit, her eyes going wide as she ran in the opposite direction of its intended path of descent. Dropping her cans she nearly stumbled as she reached the inner door casting a glance over her shoulder as it hit the ground and for an instant time froze.
No, not now! Not today!
The whole back wall of the store shattered inwards, bricks and mortar raining parallel towards her, some scraping her skin as she dove to the floor others smashing around her in smoldering blocks of soot. Jack covered her head with her hands as the worst of the debris fell around her, food forgotten in order to focus on staying alive beyond this moment. When the destruction had finished and there was nothing but a smoldering crater in the street outside where the back wall had been, she sat up and looked around, coughing from the dust that had gotten into her lungs.
She stood up shakily, unnerved by how close she had come to getting killed this time, then, like the last five times she'd nearly bit the bullet, in every literal sense of the phrase, she went back to what she had previously been doing. Some of the crates were smashed and trashed, but there were some cans still intact so she gathered herself up some more, managing only five this time, for all the other ones were busted open and leaking. Estimating that this would last only about three days, Jack shook her head grimly and turned to go, but a creaking sound overhead called desperately for her attention.
Looking up, she saw a slow trickle of dust falling from the ceiling and she slowly backed away, her muscles disbelieving what her brain had just figured out. After what seemed like forever, her legs finally got the message that it was time to move but by then it was too late. With a resounding crash the roof collapsed, plaster and beams falling down over her like the whole entire sky had shattered. One of the lighter non-support beams caught her on the head as gravity claimed it and she dropped like a stone amongst the rubble, cans scattered and forgotten in the pain.