Disclaimer: Listen. If you still don't understand that Hetalia belongs to Hidekaz Himaruya and Alice Isn't Dead belongs to Joseph Fink after eight chapters of this, you need to seek professional help.
Alfred parked the truck outside of town. Feliciano bought a very cheap used car from an ad online.
"This barely runs," the woman warned, as he picked up the car from his driveway. "Won't last a year."
"Who's thinking that far ahead?" Feliciano retorted, and drove off.
They weren't sure where to start. Victorville was small, but not that small. A slice of suburb too far from the city to be a suburb. Strip malls, and industry, and agriculture, and the great desert close around it, making every apartment complex and shopping center seem no more than permanent wisps of grass along the road.
Alfred and Feliciano spent a few days splitting up and going to local businesses, buying pizza, getting a haircut, buying clothes at Kmart, and everywhere trying to make idle conversation, gently poking their way through to anything strange that maybe people noticed or maybe they forced themselves not to notice.
But everything was normal. Relentlessly so.
Until the McDonald's. Alfred and Feliciano were grabbing lunch together, and in what turned into a fairly involved conversation between Alfred and the girl at the counter about a comic series they were both into, she mentioned something about "The Other Town."
"What other town?" Alfred asked.
"Huh?" she said. "No, no, n-no other town, or- or like, um, Apple Valley, I guess? It's right there, you know, the other town, so, uh…"
She wouldn't let Alfred steer the conversation away from the comics and soon she said she had to get back to work. Wouldn't talk to Alfred again, only nodded vaguely when he said goodbye.
Alfred let Feliciano know about the slip-up immediately.
They started circling back to places they had already been, and started bringing up the phrase "the other town." Never as a direct question, just set into conversation for the person to react or not.
The woman at the hair salon winced when Feliciano brought it up while getting his hair dyed.
"I don't want to talk about it," she said. "They leave us alone. You leave it alone."
The man at the bike shop got angry when Alfred mentioned it. "Don't even say that in here! You don't say those words in my store, you will bring him in!"
"Who?" Alfred asked.
"Get out!" he yelled.
The guy at the party store just shuddered when Feliciano and Alfred mentioned it together. "Jeez, dude!" he said. "You can't just talk about The Other Town."
"Why not?" Feliciano asked.
"Because when you talk about The Other Town, there's a tendency for him to… oh, shit!" he swore.
"What?" Alfred said.
"You two need to hide, right now," he said.
Where they were in their lives, if Feliciano and Alfred were told to hide, they hide. Alfred crouched behind a wire bin of cheap inflatable balls. Feliciano dove behind the back aisle. The door chime rang.
"Hey, Mike," said a voice that was not a voice that Feliciano knew, but… had a familiar tone, like the accidental hollowing of the wind.
"Oh, hey, man! So…" Mike said.
"Son, no need to be worried like that. Just heard that someone might be asking around about The Other Town."
"Oh?" said Mike.
"Yeah. Seen anyone like that?"
"Uh, not that I remember."
"Don't you think you'd remember if they mentioned The Other Town, son? Isn't that the kind of thing that would stick out in your memory?"
Feliciano shifted slightly so he could see out from behind the aisle, and Alfred did the same to peek out from the edge of the bin. The man was wearing a dirty polo shirt. His fingernails were yellow just below the surface, his skin stretched oddly over his face. Feliciano had never seen this man before. It wasn't the Tribulus man, but it was another man like him.
There was more than one.
"Uh, no," Mike said, "you're right. No. No, definitely no one asked about that."
The other Tribulus man stared at Mike for a while. Alfred and Feliciano wondered if they were watching the last few seconds of his life slip away from all of them, but instead the Tribulus man turned around without speaking, and walked out of the store.
Feliciano waited a full minute, then came out. Alfred followed suit shortly afterwards.
He turned to Mike. "Thank you," he said.
"Yeah, screw you," said Mike. "Just get out of here."
And they did get out of there. The other Tribulus man was making his way toward the Vons nearby.
They walked after him.
Inside the Vons, light blared and music murmured. An easy listening strings version of Masters of War. No sign of the other Tribulus man.
What did it mean that there was another one? The one Feliciano and Alfred knew of had seemed a nearly unstoppable force of destruction, and now that force had doubled.
Feliciano and Alfred split up.
Alfred walked down the aisles, and each one was empty. Back again across the store. Where had the rat bastard gone?
Alfred turned a corner in the Frozen Foods aisle, and he was just a few feet in front of him. Back turned, his shoulders bouncing like he was laughing, but the sound was more like a man drowning. Thick, desperate gasps. He shouted no words, just sound and then back to gasping.
A Vons employee turned a corner on the other end of the aisle, saw the man, and immediately walked away.
Alfred retreated a few aisles down, trying to stay out of sight.
Eventually, the other Tribulus man headed back to the exit, not a glance in Alfred's direction. Every few feet his right leg would give, like it had no muscle nor bone in it, and his entire body would stoop to the side and then unsteadily lurch its way back up with the next step.
There was no sign of employees of customers at checkout, and Alfred rendezvoused with Feliciano immediately.
Out in the parking lot, he got into a car - a silver Toyota, a few years old, relatively clean. He turned left out of the shopping center, and they followed.
At first, they were surrounded by strip malls, but then the right hand of the road fell away to desert. Its darkness was complete. Off in the distance, some sort of factory, all glow and smoke. Sweating, breathing human beings on a night shift inside that factory. And on every side, darkness and sand.
They hit a T intersection and made a left, past the bus station. A bus was just pulling out on late night departure to who-knows-where. On the other side of the road was the Route 66 Museum, a museum to road tripping, to distance, to how big and spread out America was.
Both Feliciano and Alfred had experienced how big and spread out it was, the width and length of it. America was a country defined as much by distance as by culture.
The desert edged onto the road. They were outside of town now. Stacks of box cars, another factory. An outpost of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, that greedy giant. They passed under the wire, almost invisible against the sky. They carried the lights to Hollywood, to air conditioning in Malibu. Here was beyond the glamour. Here was only the machine.
They turned again, slag heaps and stars. A road just called Gas Line Road that intersected a block away with Power Line Road. Finally, a military airport of some kind. Barbed wires and hangers. They drove along the fences for a while. The road was completely empty, and so they had to drive without headlights. Alfred watched the car and tried to mirror is movements. It was terrifying, but it also felt peaceful and quiet, like swimming underwater.
A small plane came in for landing, and Feliciano watched the whole thing happen. Red lights blinked their way down, and then finally touched the Earth. And then Feliciano realized that he hadn't been breathing, and then Alfred hit the curb and Feliciano screamed. Alfred's breath hitched in surprise, and Feliciano apologized rapidly as they both stopped and stared at the other Tribulus man's car.
The other Tribulus man drove through a hole in the fence into the airport. The hole looked accidental, but was exactly wide enough for a car. Alfred counted a slow ten, which was more of a thirty for Feliciano, and then he followed. If he noticed them, he noticed them.
Alfred and Feliciano were almost always afraid. In fact, they were absolutely terrified a good ninety percent of their waking time. But they still did what had to be done.
By the time Alfred drove through, there was no sign of him. A shape loomed at Feliciano from the dark. It was huge, with a snub-nosed face and broad wings. A passenger jet. A big one, for international flights. Any company names it once had had been scratched off. Silent, earthbound. A dead giant.
As Feliciano's eyes adjusted, he saw more of them - line after line of dead jetliners. Alfred drove the car slowly through them. He couldn't see the car. At this point, with the engine coughing loudly through the airplane graveyard, they could very well have been the ones being stalked. It would have been laughably easy to circle around behind them.
Alfred passed an enormous wing, and its elongated shadow from the distant lights lingered after him.
"We lost him," Feliciano whispered. "There's nothing."
Alfred remained silent and inched through the lines of airplanes that had avoided disaster again and again, only to end up here, on the ground, forever.
And then, lights up ahead. So close that Alfred had to slam on the breaks, and so close that Feliciano almost screamed again.
Alfred turned of the engine and left the beater behind, Feliciano right by his side as they ran across the hard-packed dirt. His car was pulling through a gate in a high wall, a jet behind him, and the wall became almost intangible again against the desert hills. The wall was featureless, save a small sign by the gate.
The sign read, "Tribulus."
Tasting sour acid in his mouth and feeling Feliciano grab his hand, Alfred circled around and found a point where the hillside rose above the wall. It was thick with thorny bush, but they picked their way through until, panting and bleeding lightly, they reached a point where they could see over the compound.
Inside the wall was a little town. The Other Town. Houses, a market, a gas station, even at this hour the town's population was out in full force.
Feliciano let out a quiet wail of misery, and Alfred was left numbed with disbelief.
"Fuck."
Everyone one of them was like the Tribulus man. All of them. Loose skinned, odd movements, none of them spoke, although sometimes one would laugh, long and loud, and then return to monastic silence.
And then Feliciano and Alfred saw him. The original him. The Tribulus man. The Hungry Man. He was leaning on one of the pumps at the gas station, reading a newspaper.
It was an entire city of them. These things, so dangerous, so evil that a single one of them almost destroyed Alfred and Feliciano both. Were they, each of them, serial killers? Uncaught? Living together buried in this airplane boneyard? On an airbase. Hidden on a U.S. military airbase.
Alfred let out a shuddering breath, and grasped Feliciano's hand tightly. He turned, and looked into Feliciano's eyes. He saw that tears were streaming down his face, and that his body shook with sobs.
Alfred felt his chest tighten. He put his forehead up against Feliciano's, and he felt sorry. He was sorry that he had failed Feliciano, sorry that he had failed Peter. Even a little bit sorry that he failed Arthur.
Feliciano's hand trembled in Alfred's, and Alfred leaned forward and kissed him on the lips gently before pulling away. Their foreheads remained pressed together.
"Feliciano," he whispered quietly, the first tear of what was certain to be many slowly squeezing out of his eye. "Feliciano. Feliciano, I love you."
Feliciano shook, and he struggled to speak. "T-Ti amo, Alfred." His voice and body shivered with each breath he took.
Alfred nodded, and he smiled bitterly. "This… This is beyond us. Let's give up, Feliciano. Let's go settle down somewhere."
The expression on Feliciano's face broke Alfred's heart. It was relief, relief that he didn't have to be the one who had to suggest the idea, but also the shame and misery and pure disgust at himself, that he was about to drop everything he had worked so hard on for so long.
"Let's go home."