1982
Maude lay flat on her stomach on the ground, waiting but her patience wearing thin, as her whole left thigh burned continuously like it had been set on fire, every so often she heard a plunk as a piece of lead hit the floor and bounced slightly.
"How much longer is this going to take?" she asked.
Behind her, she heard Silas grunt as he looked up from his work and said to her, "Do you have any idea how many pellets are in a buckshot shell?"
"Eight or nine on average," she said.
"And you got hit by two of them," he told her, "And you already had time to heal up, so I have to dig the skin open again in the first place, and then dig them out one by one."
"Well?" she turned her head to look back towards him.
Silas grumbled and told her, "About six more."
Maude rolled her eyes, and her neck, and beat her head against the floor. "What the hell did I ever do to deserve this?"
She felt a very thin knife dig into the back of her thigh again as Silas suggested, "Picking a fight with a drunken idiot carrying a shotgun seems like a good explanation to me."
"Oh shut up," she told him, and flinched as she felt the knife dig and pick through her flesh again.
Behind her, she could hear Silas chuckling to himself.
"Some jackass gets drunk out of his skull and decides to shoot up the bar, and I'm the one who's wrong?" Maude said to herself.
"At least we got out of there before the cops showed up, you would've had one hell of a time explaining yourself," Silas told her.
"Myself?" Maude craned her head around again, "You're the one who got stabbed seven times and just kept on walking."
"And so what?" he asked, "That's not unusual."
"Maybe it wasn't," Maude said, looking to the front again, "You remember that sheriff Pusser? The one they made a movie about?"
"Eh, I saw the movie anyway," Silas answered.
"They say he was stabbed 40 times and he took himself to the hospital," Maude shook her head forlornly, "Too bad he wasn't Immortal, the people that should be never are."
"Well I don't know about that," Silas said.
"Oh yeah," she sneered, "You and your brothers."
Plunk.
Maude sighed and beat her head against the floor again. It was going to be a long night.
"I still don't get it," she said, "I thought once your body healed from gunshots, the ammunition just…"
"Just got spat out of the body, eh?" Silas asked.
"Yeah."
"Well…usually there's truth to that," Silas told her, "But you have to remember, Immortal healing precedes buckshot. Getting torn open with a rock or a blade? No problem, even the old musket balls, sure, but the body and its healing process couldn't foresee the automatic age, let alone shells suitable for putting holes in elephants, so sometimes we have to speed the process along and dig the rest of it out ourselves. As for the rest of it, of course it's not unusual for the flesh to rebuild and seal over the bullets, but even that can only go so far. After a while you just have to open it all up again and get it out and start fresh."
Plunk.
"No kidding," Maude replied with an annoyed huff.
Once all the buckshot was out of her leg, Maude got off the floor and walked herself into the bathroom to wash all the congealed and dried blood off of her. It had been a long, miserable night and she was ready for it to be over. Being Immortal and living forever might've had its plusses, but it was starting to get tired spending all that time getting in one bar fight after another after another.
Having the local police force on the force instead of on strike like they had back in the 70s hadn't made matters any easier for Maude. The story never changed, no matter how much time passed, the problems always surpassed the number of people qualified to solve them, so as had been the case all her life, Maude had taken it upon herself to step in and even the score, though a lot of times she either wound up temporarily dead or at the very least temporarily severely injured for her troubles. And it seemed to be a universal problem, it didn't matter where in the country they moved: from Tennessee to Arkansas to Arizona to Montana, and now out to New York, anywhere they turned around there were a bunch of violent drunken psychotics who for reasons unknown the law wasn't going to touch, so Maude took it upon herself to take it far past touching, and entirely bash their skulls in when and where possible, which might explain in part just why they were so constantly on the move. Stay in any one place for too long and people were bound to start asking questions and start putting the pieces together.
What was the point in living forever if it couldn't benefit other people, to which the here and now was most of what they would ever know? That was her philosophy, and in all those years it had made for plenty of miserable times for her, but she regretted none of it, and she'd do it again if she had to, and she knew she would do it again before her time was up. That was just the kind of person she'd always been, and she'd be damned if she was about to change that now.
At her size, there were few towels made large enough to cover her short of beach towels, so when she stepped out of the shower she just dried off with one and headed into the bedroom, where Silas was already in the large bed, but not asleep, and as he saw her step in au natural, he let out a long and slow wolf whistle.
"Oh shut up," she told him as she went over to the bed and got in beside him, "Anybody tries looking in the window tonight's gonna be in for a rude surprise."
"Yes," Silas replied, "Permanent blindness."
"I told you to shut up," Maude said.
However, the other Immortal continued to chuckle lowly to himself, so Maude reached over to the nightstand by her side of the bed, picked up a hardback murder mystery she was in the process of reading, and hit him over the head with it, shutting him up immediately if not effectively. Silas looked over towards her and drew one large hand back and when she turned to look at him, he just smiled coyly and waved at her with the other hand, then hit her in the face with the first one, a smashed nose being among the worst damage.
Even in bed, even stark naked, Maude balled her hands up into fists and rested her fists on her hips and he knew she was ready for trouble, and decided it was too late and he was too tired to bother with it. He'd had his suspicions when he first met this woman that he was dealing with somebody as stubborn as he was, but nothing quite confirmed those suspicions like 8 years of being married to her. He didn't question why he'd married her, he knew why plainly enough, and he didn't carry too many regrets for marrying her, he'd certainly done worse, and he could've done far worse than even that. His brothers aside, he generally preferred the company of animals to people, but after a while even animals could only do so much, and that was a story as old as time, as anybody who read Genesis would know; the difference being she didn't come from one of his ribs, she already came with her own complete set of them.
If Maude fell asleep in the darkness that followed, he didn't know, right now his mind was focused on something else. He tried to think back…live long enough, and the years just start to melt together, damn little separates one from another from another in the memory, but, if he was remembering right, it had been…about 90 years now since he'd last had any contact with Methos, about 70 years since he'd last seen Caspian, and about…105 years since he'd last crossed paths with Kronos. When his brothers didn't want to be found, they made sure they weren't found, not by mortals, not by Immortals, not even by one another. Oh, he had no doubt they were all still alive, the alternative was simply impossible. For one thing, they were too mean to kill, for another, they were too old to kill, you didn't live to be 5,000 years old and suddenly one day lose your head, it just didn't happen.
The springs in the mattress creaked as on the other side of the bed, Maude rolled over in her sleep, the only sound out of her a low exhaling sigh of a breath. Silas craned his neck around to look at her in the dark. One large arm hanged over the edge of the bed while the other was draped above her head, the sheet just scarcely covering her body like a provocative art model.
Silas repositioned himself on the bed so he could look straight at her without having to turn his head all the way back, the movement of the springs beneath them having no impact on Maude whatsoever.
Eight years, that's how long they'd been married, longer than some marriages he'd had over the millennia, shorter than others. He tried to think back to the last time. It hadn't been so long ago, only about 150 years, maybe a little more. True indeed after a while the years just blurred together, and it didn't come as a surprise to him after all the time he'd been alive. He didn't wonder that Methos couldn't remember his life prior to becoming an Immortal, he wondered that the whole lot of them didn't snap clear out of their minds years ago for the simple fact that man hadn't been meant to live for 5,000 years in over 5,000 years.
Anyway he tried to think. Tried to remember. It hadn't been all that long, he should remember better than he did. He supposed though that in truth, a large part of it was he didn't want to remember. The beginning was perfectly fine, the middle was perfect as well, it was just how everything came to a sudden, crashing, screaming, bloody halt. A child. She had been pregnant when he married her, that was a large reason why he'd married her, all in a timely manner before the rest of the town found out and tried to force her out for it, arrogant hypocritical bastards. A particularly little thing, there had been plenty of comments that he should've crushed her to death on their wedding night. Her first child, certainly not the first one he'd ever had a hand in raising, he'd had a dozen of those before he even became Immortal, all someone else's albeit but nonetheless true. It had been a very hard labor, a hard, long, drawn out and difficult labor, nothing that he hadn't seen a thousand times before, but all the same unfortunately nothing he could do about it.
Possessing the knowhow was one thing, actually having the resources available on hand to actually make it work was a whole other, and the times just never caught up with what he and the others had known for centuries. Not that they hadn't tried, but there was a great risk to being recognized as a great inventor, a discoverer, the damn human race had a stupid habit of immortalizing them, a poor joke indeed but also nonetheless true. Generation to generation people would know the name, and in the later generations they would know the faces as well, a risk Immortals simply couldn't take. As Methos was always wont to point out, there was always a secondary choice, but that also didn't pan out, that they would let somebody else forge ahead with the ideas they'd perfected and let some other poor sap take the credit and become the national sensation, but fate always had it in for them. It was almost as if the powers that be were directly saying to the Immortals 'No, you may reside on this earth, but you have no place trying to alter what is and to mold the history to come, that will all occur in its own due time'. He never got it, even this late in the game it still didn't make sense.
He could still remember the screams, and the even more deafening silence that eventually followed. Per the time period, just status quo, a common risk that anybody could anticipate, something he'd had to get used to a hundred times before. Still never made it any easier. There had been no additional family, and no neighbors. He dug the grave himself the next morning, one grave for the both of them, only made sense, no sense in separating in death the child and the mother who in life were together to the last minute. They'd had a collection of large and strangely colored stones around their property, they topped the grave perfectly.
162 years, that's how long it had been. And her name had been…Arabella Warren. When the moment was just right, he could still remember.
Maude rolled onto her side again, and opened one eye suddenly when she felt a large hand grab her, squeezing the flesh under her hip. Without turning over, she said to the other person in the bed with her in a warning tone, "If you're doing what I think you're doing…don't."
"Oh be quiet," Silas told her.
Maude's response was a low growl and she reached back and beat his hand with her own.
It went without saying that it was impossible to be Maude's size and not draw attention to yourself. For unknown reasons she'd seen fit to see that she stuck out even further like a sore thumb than before. In an era in which people made constant comments about everything coming back and everything going in cycles, Maude had also seen fit to bring back, for her own benefit alone, a look not quite seen since the fat women in the old silent movies. It was before her time but she'd seen a few movies over the years. Clothes in her size, let alone any that looked good on the wearer, were damn hard to come by so for years she'd resorted to making her own, as such, 90% of her clothes were all various blue, short sleeved, medium length skirted dresses, modern variations on a dress her grandmother had worn. Silas had told her early on that Immortals had no known parents and that the people who had raised her had been an adopted family, but she had her doubts, it had been eerily easy to fit her own dresses based on the original piece she recreated. Grandma was a big girl too, blood or not, it had to be hereditary she decided. In the old photos she'd seen of Grandma, she wore the dress with black stockings and white dress up, button up shoes. Well, stockings were even harder to come by in her size so instead she opted to go bare-legged, and shoes were a 50/50 shot of getting anything that fit, as such hers were divided into one third dress shoes, one third sneakers, and one third knee boots, her only regret being she couldn't get any with steel toes in them.
The dress she'd worn during the bar fight last night was full of holes and covered in dry blood, another one for the burn pile. On average she estimated she lost roughly 18 a year this way, and at that rate she also estimated that the entire eastern states would run out of blue fabric within a couple of years.
Turning around, the large and mean woman looked at herself in the mirror. What did it really matter? she asked herself, in a couple hours it'd be coming off anyway. Today. Eight years ago today they had gotten married, why had they gotten married? That was a question she was still trying to answer, all she could say with any certainty was that it hadn't been a completely miserable time. Knowing what she knew now, given she had already been Immortal before she ever met Silas and had absolutely no idea, she didn't even want to think what would've happened if he hadn't shown up when he did.
Opening the door, Maude left the bedroom and walked out to the staircase and glanced over the banister and down to the first floor, and she headed down the stairs. Silas was waiting at the foot of the stairs, and he looked up at her and let out another whistle.
"Knock it off," she told him as she paused on the third stair from the bottom.
"Or what?" he wanted to know.
Maude extended one leg out so that her boot would connect directly with his groin. One move quicker than the eye and Silas grabbed her ankle in one large hand and jerked it, Maude fell off balance but also fell forward, colliding with him, and they both fell flat on the floor, with her directly on top of him.
"Anymore bright ideas, fathead?" Maude inquired as she sat up and propped one fist under her chin to look down at him.
"Oh, one," he replied, in a low tone with the wind knocked out of him.
"Well?" she asked skeptically.
The last thing she clearly remembered from that night was a couple glasses of whiskey, after that things started to blur.
The next thing she knew was that she was awake, the room was dark but a tint of light was starting to shine through the windows, and she realized she was back in bed, and once again, ready to give any window peepers the final thrill of their sighted lives. The next thing she realized after that was that her pillow was inhaling and exhaling underneath her. Craning her neck back, she saw the reason why was because she'd fallen asleep on Silas's chest, and the immediately next thing she realized was that for once he wasn't snoring like a grizzly bear. She couldn't resist pushing up on her elbows, then reaching up and peeling one of his eyelids open and asking him, "You alive in there?"
She let his eyelid snap back in place and a half snort escaped the man as his eyes opened and he tried to figure out what happened.
"What's going on?" he groggily asked.
"Nothing," Maude answered as she found one of his massive hands and wrapped both of hers around it, "Just…nothing." She moved off of him and fell against the mattress and looked over at him and asked, "So, do you remember anything from last night?"
"Not particularly," he answered.
"Me too," she said, "I liked it."
Somewhere deep in that throat, she could hear him chuckling. Yawning, and stretching, raising a few creaks from somewhere in her back, Maude turned over onto her back and commented to herself, "Just another typical day."
The days weren't the problem, it was the nights that were still so damned bloody, and she couldn't see an end in sight. No matter, now that she knew she'd live no matter what, she'd continue to use it towards her advantage, disadvantageous though it often was.