Halloween
Trigger warning I guess for like... sudden gross injury? It's all in good fun. Nobody gets hurt, reeeeally. Written on Halloween and then forgotten for like six months.
Salem,
October, year four
A kid dressed in a veritable Frankenstein's monster of stitched together stretch-velvet shoulder-checked Conrad right in the thigh as she swung around the corner, going as fast as her tiny legs would carry her.
They could probably have picked a better night to go for a walk. A few blocks back, there were lights pulsing in the windows of a monstrous conglomeration of houses, whose walls had been knocked out years before to make room for new connective tissue between them. Music slithered ethereal and drum-heavy down the sidewalks. The moon was waning.
This was the fourth Halloween since the world ended, and then stubbornly refused to stop rumbling onward despite everyone's certain knowledge that it really should have stopped a while back, didn't it get the memo? Their first, after the event, had been an affair Conrad would gladly squeegee from his memory given a bucket of brain bleach and half the opportunity. The usual topics of Halloween were suddenly a lot less fun when they were staring at you through the sunken eyes of a desiccated school teacher. Nobody dared dress up that year. The pumpkin patches were scavenged down to the root for anything edible.
Their second year hadn't gone much better. Earlier this evening, when the sun had just barely settled on the horizon, Hanna had quietly lit a candle among the masses waiting on the shore of the river—he'd said, as he lit it, how the worst part was that they'd never even learned that Trevin kid's last name.
Their third Halloween was a faintly lit night in a string of longer, fainter nights, diurnal people collapsing onto the bed after bloody exhausting stints of necessary field work, nocturnal Conrad rising just in time to be useless for anything except putting on a pot of soup and pushing in wheelbarrows that no one else had had the energy to move. Halloween had been, out of all the nights that month, just a little bit less lonely. In a haze of candle light and cider fumes, Conrad had dared to steal just one kiss.
And here they were now, side by side, he and the doctor. The night was cold but bright, and strung through with the faint sounds of laughter and music. There was always that sober, niggling reminder that elsewhere in the world tonight there was no celebrating, but for the most part—here and now—it was beautiful.
And Conrad was learning not to say things like that out loud to Worth, if he didn't want his mood utterly ruined. Instead, he snuck sideways glances at his friend in the darkness, which the two of them were now equal partners in. The irritable lines in the doctor's face had softened in the moonlight, and his eyes were distant. One word, even one sigh, and that fragile peace would crumble back to ill-tempered rudeness.
Conrad glanced away again. Best not test his luck. The bastard had been able to feel you looking at him even before he turned. Now he was just a basket of snappish paranoia waiting to happen.
Four years, Conrad mused. It felt like so much longer. But when no two days are the same, he supposed, a year counts for a little more.
Down in the cozier streets children were running from door to door wherever candles were placed in the windows. There wasn't exactly a bounty of candy left after four years of post-post-industrial food production, but most of the house owners were getting by with dried fruit and cookies, and if the screaming was anything to go by, one house was giving out those plastic vampire dentures by the handful.
That had been one of Hanna's projects. Reorganize the trick-or-treating tradition, pull together a couple committees, bring a little lost joy back into the world. The world was a scary enough place these days; it helped to be able to get your hands around it for one night at least.
Someone very close to the ground tugged on Worth's coat. She was maybe six if you judged by height, with a silvery witches hat tilted sideways across her head.
Worth looked at Conrad. Conrad looked back, helpless.
"Excuse me," the girl said, "are you vampires?"
"Uh," said Worth. Oh sure, you could drop him into a pit of machete wielding sharks and he'd come up swinging, but you put one unarmed kid in front of him…
Then again, Conrad wasn't any better.
"Yeeees?" Conrad hazarded, reminding himself that Salem was a very forward thinking city and not generally the sort of place where one had to worry about being staked at all hours of the evening.
The girl nodded, very serious. "Only you've got to be real vampires, on account of he's dressed up like a mad scientist."
Worth tugged on the fur lining of his lab coat, nonplussed.
"What are you dressed as?" she asked Conrad, managing to look down her pug nose despite being multiple heads shorter than the vampire.
Conrad wracked his brain. It was so stupid, but he couldn't bare to admit to this girl that he wasn't dressed up as anything. He had this nagging feeling she was going to judge him for it.
"Uuummm," he started. "I'm…"
Worth swooped in, metaphorically speaking, throwing an arm around Conrad's shoulder. "Connie here," he said, "is dressed up as my patient."
The girl looked skeptical. "So where's his blood and guts and stuff?"
Conrad looked down at himself, self conscious, then up again at Worth. The doctor had a wicked gleam in his eye.
"Ah," he said. "Right here."
And then he jammed a nail into Conrad's stomach, pushed up his shirt, and tore up a swath of pale, undead skin from navel to ribs.
Conrad's jaw dropped open. Purplish flesh oozed. The little girl screamed bloody murder and dropped her candy bag as she rocketed down the street, shedding weight for maximum velocity.
Worth unstuck his nail and smoothed the skin back into place with one neat brushing motion. He patted Conrad's speedily healing stomach fondly.
Worth watched her disappear down the street, and after a moment of silence he snorted. "You wait a couple a years," he said, "there's gonna be a damn coalition a witches comin down on that kid's head."
Conrad continued staring down at his own stomach, which had gone back to hiding under a couple layers of clothing.
"Did you just disembowel me?" he asked faintly.
"Oh," Worth said, "nah. You gotta pull out some guts ter disembowel a bloke properly. Come on, they're prolly digging out the fairy wine by now. I'm getting well 'n bloody smashed while I can."
And then the ghoulish motherfucker turned right around on his heel and headed back to the party, like not a damn thing had just happened.
Conrad continued staring down at hi stomach. It hadn't hurt, exactly. It had just been very, very unnerving.
"Happy Halloween," he muttered, with a final nervous look down the empty street, and then he turned as well and raced after his partner.
Behind him, leaves skittered bright and unconcerned across the empty sidewalk.