I refuse to feel sheepish. College, Gaelic, romance and wisdom teeth are highly unforgiving. Especially when fueled by midnight viewings of Rocky Horror on the west side with nothing on but a corset and black pleather boots that scuff each other when they clack against the floor of a diner at four a.m. If anything, blame nothing.
The stupid one tumbled toward the car and Zero jumped on the hood, aiming at its head with his left hand and firing a dum-dum into its temple, wincing when the spray flecked his cheeks. A second came at him from his left, and from then on it was carnage. He blasted two or three dum-dums by accident, blowing off limbs and chunks of torso. Two others dashed toward him like real wild dogs, mouths open, all limbs in use, and he blew through them, sprays of scalded blood and liquefied flesh spurting onto his jacket. The female darted between the two underlings and slammed him into the windshield, cracking it as she checked her comrades for life. As Zero aimed the gun at her, she grabbed the barrel to jerk it away, screamed as he shot her, in the torso, but managed to fling it into the snow, among the corpses. Her look was feral, no longer calculating, her grip powerful as she tore into his unprotected chest with glee. He got a hold of her, screaming as he threw her off and searched for the third gun. She ran toward him and struck a long gash down his arm like a tectonic rift. In a swift movement he tossed her on the ground, pounced as she shrieked and growled at her. His teeth extended beyond his lips and his back hunched, shutting her up. The growl was low but fluctuating. When she made any attempt to move, he bent closer to her, and her hands would stop and uncurl from his bloodied, freezing jacket. She stared up at him, threatened, cornered, looking for a way to kill him but finding none, too far gone to have her life flash before her eyes. She just kept glaring at him, the hunted beast. So he shot her.
She flopped down, legs twitching and stilling. He licked his teeth and clacked them together so as to lure out others. The cold slowly began to wake him up, though it made him sluggish, and he knocked away the rest of the glass in the broken window of the car, undid the lock, and hopped in. He started it, and the hum reverberated in the thicket, penetrating every burrow and every den. When he'd started out of the clearing, quick rustling echoed closer and closer in the trees, so he slammed the stick forward, and hit the gas.
The wheels spun in the snow for a few seconds as the sounds came closer. He whipped out of the clearing and around a curve, hearing a nasty crack as the axle gave and he flew through a small snow bank. His head bounced off the wheel, turning the white world all colours, and the seatbelt ripped into wounds until his skin folded around it through his tank. The scurrying came closer and he heard footsteps approaching the car. Undoing the belt, he reached blearily for the shotgun on the passenger seat, cocked it, and fired out of the window with blood running into his eyes.
Kaname wakes in less than a second. The early desert evening spills over a windowsill and creeps toward his toes with admirable persistence. Thin shadows cloak strips of bloodied skin held shaded by metal bars omitting light. He keeps himself as small as possible, huddled in a corner of the storeroom, fingernails digging into white ankles. The bodies in the shop need to be buried, he theorizes vaguely. Dead blood crawls over the linoleum as a fragrant reminder, but nothing, not a thought can enter his head through the dull sheen in his eyes. A small, half-painted shelf stood carefully in the corner captures his full focus. Pupils pinpoints, he wraps his vision around it, invisible optic tendrils, and memorizes every sliver, scuff and chip, raking the wooden frame with intensity so great he can distract himself from picturing the dead girl behind the door.
He looks up, suddenly, at the beam of soft light entering the room and visually combs the lambent dust particles, finding more and more to distract himself, but still, he thinks in the back of his mind, he should really get to digging that hole.
Opening the door is an easy task. He knows what's on the other side; there is nothing to surprise him. He looks down at the girl and the men between the shelves, all soaked in blood, much of it dried, faces cold and eyes caught in infinite terror. He closes them to help himself. Each man is slung over his shoulders two at a time, and he walks them to the back door. Earlier, the light streaming in had been weak and comforting, illuminating the dust and little else. Now it is stark, burns his eyes and makes his skin tingle. A couple of crates are stacked against the faded stucco wall, and gently, he sits them against the rough wood. Perambulating to the centre of the shack, arriving at the girl, he kneels and his arms slowly shove under her, gliding over the blood and slathering it on from the back of her drenched blouse. Curly black hair pours over his pale flesh and he closes her eyes mechanically, drawing her legs together and heaving her up with little effort and great delicacy.
The back door, half-open, glares at him with the glint of the late sun. Her arms are tucked neatly into her lap and her head burrows into his torso with dead affection. It is no coincidence that, for the time he holds her, all he can think of is Yuki, but strangely enough, it is always the girl's face.
He lays her apart from the men he's killed; hunched as if sleeping, body curled gingerly in the dust. He looks away and across the desert, not bothering to blink or squint, allowing the sun to burn his eyes as they heal. Trails of tire marks zigzag between towering white dunes and grassy bramble. Burning quietly on the horizon, the sun casts clouds pink and the sky a bluish haze. Again, his focus is complete. Immobile, prone, he stands stoically before the bodies at the closing act, and the wind pauses in anticipation.
As the sun sinks ever-slowly behind one dune, the largest nearer to him changes, a colour nascent, grey, but the light dips further in retreat and new life emerges from the sand.
Standing much taller than him, the dunes come to life, all shades of blue in the retreating light, and crash against each other as gargantuan waves, rising from the dead landscape to consume each other in violent, looming tides. Diaphanous whitewater sea spray illumined by a fattened red moon hovers over each conflict; blue spires shoot out into long, airless atmospheres. A freezing gust blasts in from nowhere, sweeps past him and leads the spray to splash weakly against the crates before calming, whipping hair across his stoic face and back. As the waves recede to crash, the gust sucks towards them, pulling sand in rivulets toward destruction. Kaname witnesses the brilliant devastation with numbed disbelief. And then, without warning, the wind is silent once more, and the waves stagnant on the plain as they were. Lips trembling for a second, he collects himself and forgets the vision to return to his job. The stars shine clearly and brightly, rising up his naked back as he ponders whether to dig a hole or open a crevice. He blinks and his decision is made for him: a gaping patulous maw gobbles sand like a sinkhole, waiting for him as if it always were. Each body from the crates is delivered to the grave and he covers them liberally, creating a small hill. Now there is only the girl's body.
The pale red moon peeks over his shoulder and calls for him to turn around, and he does. Lying still asleep, or so he imagines, the girl cradles her arms with delicate fingers. He dreams she's dreaming, but he knows nothing about her, so it amounts to nothing. Sand has turned her hair grey without age and gypsum dust speckles her white blouse. It catches the breath he doesn't have. Sparkling, tiny coruscations, each grain reflects the same blue of the desert, the tiny Pleiades, until her torso is nearly illuminated, and a playful breeze shakes the folds of her skirt to stir the light alive. She glimmers in the dark with an eerie half-light, swathed in an infinitely short afterlife conjured by the desert. Each twinkle reflects inverted the night sky, hanging a deepening blue with splashes of the Milky Way purloining darkness from dead beauty. It seems to be that the only way for this to be possible is if she's moving, but she isn't, and he is left to his fears. Yet the moment disappears upon arrival, and he begins a slow walk toward her, careful of his own mind as he bends down to collect her. She hadn't turned, had she? No. She hadn't moved in five hours.
Lifting her seems harder for some reason. She is exceedingly light, but his body defeats him and he remains kneeling with her half-cradled against his bare chest. Her skin is blue with the night and chills as the temperature drops. Nausea overcomes him and he backs away, letting her flop to the ground as he hobbles back and falls to the grave of a dune, shaking, unable to control his limbs as he gathers on all fours and vomits into the sand. His breath becomes ice in the air and the baking desert betrays itself. Sweeping nunatuks with pointed, snowy crowns replace the dunes and the vomit steams as it chills. Parts of it glimmers and he shudders, retching again until his stomach and throat burn with nothing but acid to tickle his tongue. A long, tenacious string of saliva and mucus attaches itself from his lip to the spill like a wet black spider web.
No illusions play over this of his creations; no sparkling bodies of the dead seeming lively again. The blood seeps into the sand without special effect, remaining what it is and shining briefly before soaking in. More gobs and bone shards are left to see among the red, as well as a button and a hard, malformed lump. He hiccups, recoiling to sit on his knees, arms in his lap as the string grows smaller and finally snaps in the middle. He wipes his face only to meet dried blood on his arm and has the forbearance to forgive it and give up. Staring at the lump, he picks it up and feels it.
A bullet. He blanches. When had he eaten a bullet? Had the men fired at his stomach? He'd never seen a holster. Feet digging into the sand, forming an erratic rooster tail, he leaps for the door and breaks it open, tumbling into the outpost to scour for a gun. He tears shelves from the walls, rips the counter from the floor and obliterates every door in search of the phantom gun. Glass crashes to the floor as jars fly down and splatter preserves across bloodied floorboards. The cash register meets the back wall and shatters, coins and bills blossoming like cold fireworks.
No gun.
He runs back out to the girl's body and looks her over, finding nothing. The evaporated pool stares blandly at him from the grave site. Walking forward numbly, he falls down before it, plucks the bullet and holds for several seconds.
His fingers sting.
It was Zero's.
What's the sound of three hands clapping?