The Permanent Efficacy of Grace
4.
The Chosen riding in the back as her escorts freak her out a little bit. The man stares at her intently, like he's worried that if he takes his gaze off her for just a second, she'll vanish out of existence. The woman prays out loud the whole trip. Rook closes her eyes and tilts her head back against the wall of the truck and wishes she could go back in time to the night before, when she was alone in a cabin in the Henbane with a fire going and her most pressing concern was what she should eat.
So much for the benefits of facing one's problems head-on, she thinks sourly. She should have just kept avoiding Jacob. That had been working out beautifully for her; if she'd stuck to that plan, she'd still be warm and well-rested and currently roasting venison for dinner instead of freezing, wounded, and under guard in the back of a Peggy truck, heading down for a session in the local sadist's torture chamber directly after the world's stupidest breakup. God, I hate my life.
That sentiment hangs around for a little over an hour, long enough for them to have reached Holland Valley, though if they're headed to John's bunker, they still have a ways to go. That's when Rook begins to hear the rumble and thump of bass from distant speakers, barely audible over the Chosen's prayer. She slowly opens her eyes, cocks her head, and listens intently.
The music gets louder. The Chosen abruptly stops praying, looking at her compatriot, a little concerned. The back of the armored truck they're riding in is closed off, windowless and without access to the cab, so they can't see what's going on, or ask the driver, for that matter.
"I know this song," Rook announces, grinning now. The Chosen look at her, and she twitches her eyebrows at them, a little bit smug. "This is Diesel Power."
The truck brakes abruptly, and almost simultaneously, they hear an explosion—huge, and close. The truck slides to a stop, there's a pause, then some yelling, Peggies shouting over each other as they struggle to organize. Above all their voices comes one that's unmistakable to Rook: Hurk Drubman yells, "Stick this in your pipes and smoke it, fuckers!"
The battle cry is followed, seconds later, by another massive explosion. Now that Rook knows Hurk is here, she can guess what's going on without needing to see—the first rocket hit the truck in front of them, the second hit the one behind them, and she'd bet her teeth that Hurk brought backup to help him converge on the middle truck, her truck, without having to blow it (and her) sky-high like the others.
Now that she knows she's got allies outside of the truck, going after her guards seems like a much more attractive option to her than it had been before. She sees the same exact realization dawn in their eyes a split second before she gets one foot under her, and brings the other—the one attached to the leg that didn't just take an arrow—swinging up like a hammer, the steel toe catching the man directly across from her under the chin before he can do more than halfway rise from his seat. After spending over a month running up and down mountains and hills all day, her legs are strong, and as he drops back to the bench, stunned, she draws her knee back and then drives her boot heel into his face, twice, three times before the other guard pounces on her.
The scuffle that follows probably takes less than a minute, though it feels like ages, the muffled strains of The Prodigy still pumping away from outside. The quarters are close, both women falling into the narrow aisle between the truck benches, and—Jacob would be ashamed—their training goes entirely out the window in the confines of the space, giving way to grappling and scratching (and the amount of hair-pulling isn't none).
It ends when the Chosen manages to wriggle under Rook's back, gets an arm tight around her throat, and a second later, there's also a gun to Rook's head. She might have been about to pull the trigger then and there—Rook would never know—when another familiar voice reaches them.
"Hey, now—any Peggies in that middle truck better come out with hands where I can see 'em! Your backup's all dead, might as well come out and face us like men."
The Chosen hesitates, just for a second, and then she starts to struggle up, dragging Rook along with her. (She's just a little shorter than Rook but extraordinarily buff; Rook figures that between this lady's muscles and the gun to her head then she's better off playing along, just for now.) She kicks the door open, then, keeping Rook close with that same heavy arm around her neck, she awkwardly maneuvers them out and to the ground.
Sharky Boshaw is waiting there, about a dozen yards down the road, silhouetted against the burning truck that had been the rear of the convoy, holding his trusty flamethrower. Night has fallen, and in the dark, against all that fire, he looks scary as shit—Rook feels her guard go tense against her back. "Hey, Five-O!" he crows when he spots them, sounding as happy as Rook has ever heard him (and it's no surprise—flames are crawling everywhere around them; he's in his element). "How's it going?"
"Pretty good!" she says warmly. "Would be better if not for the gun to my head."
"Oh, yeah," he says, frowning and shifting his attention to the Chosen. "What'd'you wanna do something stupid like that for? It's us against you."
"Hey man!" Hurk has appeared with his rocket launcher shouldered and at the ready; Rook's guard yanks her backwards, off to the side of the road, to keep them both easy in her field of vision.
"Hey, Hurk," Rook says, sounding uncomfortably like Beetlejuice, what with the pressure of her captor's arm against her windpipe. I gotta find more enemies that don't go right for the throat. She glances up the road, past the burning truck that had led the convoy, and sees a commandeered cult vehicle blocking the road, the huge speakers in the truck bed still blasting Diesel Power so enthusiastically that it's a little hard to talk over it. She hazards a guess. "Your music?"
"Hell yeah it is! You know Sharky wouldn't play anything but disco."
"Yeah, I wanted to play some Boney M, get some Daddy Cool, some Rasputin up in here, know what I'm saying?" Sharky adds. "I got overruled."
"Worse songs to get overruled for."
"Everybody shut up!" barks the Chosen, way too close to Rook's ear, making her flinch.
The order draws Sharky's attention again. He hefts his flamethrower and says, "Yeah, I'm gonna give you one chance to drop that gun and step away from our friend before we light you up."
The Chosen, a little breathless from hers and Rook's tussle a moment ago, wheezes a disbelieving little laugh. "Idiot," she says. "You've got a flamethrower. He's got a rocket launcher. If you 'light me up,' you're gonna have to go through her first."
It's a good point. Rook doesn't exactly relish the idea of Sharky opening fire—quite literally—on the Peggy with her in-between them, and of course the RPG is right out. Sharky whistles, sounding disappointed. "Shit," he says. "She's right about that, ain't she, Hurk?"
"Yep, sure seems like she's right," agrees Hurk, peering one-eyed through the viewfinder in a way that's making Rook nervous.
"I sure wish we'd brought somebody with a super-accurate ranged weapon," Sharky laments. "Guess we shoulda planned better. Except—oh yeah—we totally did!"
Rook spots a fuzz of green at the edge of her vision right as the Chosen thumbs back the hammer on her pistol, made rightfully suspicious by Sharky's words. The gunshot that rips through the air, though, comes from a distance, and Rook feels a warm splatter at the side of her face even as her late captor's body drags her nearly to the ground via the arm still heavy around her neck.
"Aw, Jesus, she hit Dep!" wails Hurk.
"No, she didn't," croaks Rook, finally succeeding in dragging the dead Chosen's arm off of her and then staggering back to her feet. She lifts the hem of Jacob's shirt, using it to wipe the blood and gore off the side of her face, shuddering at the fresh touch of cold air to the un-bandaged parts of her belly, and then, after clearing her throat to remove the demonic wheeze from it, she raises her arm high over her head, facing the dark hills off the side of the road, and yells, "Thank you, Grace!"
She doesn't get a response. Hurk and Sharky are approaching, Hurk reaching her first, his rocket launcher already in its neutral position hanging from his back, and she throws her arms around him in a tight, grateful hug. He's sweaty and smells like metal and beer and shifts from foot to foot as he hugs her back, catching her up in a sway that nearly knocks her over and has her struggling to balance them both, breathless with laughter.
"Thought you were a goner this time, Shorty," Sharky says as he arrives on the scene, and Rook barely checks to make sure that his flamethrower isn't still running before practically tackling him—a move she regrets when her waist bangs against his bony hip and the impact sparks an intense flare of pain, racing up her side. She draws back with a gasp, and Sharky goes from laughing to horrified in the blink of an eye. "What is it, Rook? Did they get ya?" he asks urgently.
"No," she says, laying a hand gingerly over the bandage and shaking her head. "Just an old one I forgot about." She changes the subject abruptly so he'll quit looking at her like she's dying. "How did y'all know which truck I was in?"
"Aw, hell, I saw that in a movie once," Hurk says confidently.
"Saw what?" asks Rook, accepting Sharky's flamethrower without question as he hands it over to her.
"These heisters was tryin' to steal some gold offa these three trucks, right?" Hurk explains as Sharky wrestles his sweatshirt off over his head. "Only the gold was only on one of the trucks, and they didn't have all that much time to figure out which was which. So they checked to see which one weighed the most."
"How?" asks Rook, utterly lost. Sharky, in pulling his sweatshirt off, accidentally knocks his cap off as well, managing to snatch it from midair just before it hits the ground.
"Lookin' at the tires."
"Wait," says Rook with dawning horror, "are you talking about remake of The Italian Job?"
"That's right, that was what it was called! The I-talian Job."
Sharky takes his flamethrower back from her with one hand, and hands her the sweatshirt with the other. Normally she'd argue (why should he be the one freezing his ass off in the dark in nothing but an undershirt instead of her?), but she's too in the weeds with Hurk's thought process to even realize what's happening, so as she obediently pulls it over her head, she says, "But, Hurk, the Peggies weren't transporting gold, so how did checking how much pressure the tires were under help you guys?"
"We figured the one with you in it would be a little heavier no offense just with one extra person and all, so we eyeballed it," he says cheerfully. Rook freezes with the sweatshirt half on, just staring out at him through the collar's opening, trying to figure out if this is enough evidence to prove once and for all that there is a God and He's looking out for her, specifically. "Hey, you okay, there, Broseidon?" Hurk asks. "You stuck?" He doesn't wait for an answer, just grabs the shirt and tugs it fully down over her head.
It smells like Sharky—like a brushfire, and a little bit like weed—and it's also blissfully warm. The back of the truck hadn't had heat, and so even with all the fire surrounding them now, she still felt chilled to the bone. The sweatshirt helps, and she shoots Sharky a quick, grateful little look that he pretends he doesn't see before another figure draws her attention—Grace, carefully picking her way down the hill on the opposite side of the road to approach them.
Rook goes to meet her. Grace isn't usually one for hugs, but she figures maybe the occasion warrants an exception, only to rethink that once she sees the look in Grace's eyes. It's not outright hostile, but it's more guarded than Rook has ever seen it, even when they first met at the Lamb of God Church a month back (nothing like providing no-questions-asked backup to a complete stranger to break the ice, Rook has found).
She stops short, releasing an abrupt breath that leaves her mouth in a small cloud of steam. "You know?"
"Everybody knows."
"Ah." Rook stands a little straighter, wipes the relieved smile from her face, taking Grace's cue. "Well. Thank you even more, then. I know you had every reason to just let these trucks roll by."
"Rather have you with us than them. There's still a lot of work to do. That is, if you're still working for the Resistance?"
Well, she's certainly not working with the cult. "I am."
"Good, then." Sharky and Hurk have arrived, looking uncharacteristically grave—the vibe is strong enough for them to have noticed by now, that Grace is not here as a friend, Grace is here as a fellow soldier. She looks over the three of them carefully, then gestures behind her with the stock of her rifle. "We should get going. That was loud."
Like rowdy kids chastised by a teacher, they file after her, leaving the road. Before they get beyond the light of the burning trucks, Sharky—moving just behind Rook—touches her shoulder, and when she turns, he hands her something wordlessly. She holds it up in the flickering light: it's a rather sad-looking twenty dollar bill.
She'd forgotten all about the fucking bet.
She's not sure what her face is doing—something interesting, she bets, because she feels near equal urges to laugh and to cry and neither quite seems to be winning out. She just hugs him to hide her face, gentler this time, minding her side, and feels the low chuckle rumble through his chest before he lets her go.
The warmth Sharky makes her feel fades fast, though, as they follow Grace into the dark. She hasn't had much time to think it through lately, given all that's happened in the last twelve hours alone, but she gets the feeling that Grace's chilly reception signifies the rule, rather than the exception, in how the Resistance is going to respond to her return now that the word is out about her and Jacob.
She tries not to dwell on it. She focuses instead on getting clear of the road and safely away from the destroyed Peggy convoy, and on how happy she is to be safely out of the Seeds' hands after the day she's had.
Much to her lack of surprise, Rook is right about the Resistance's overall reaction to news of her involvement with Jacob.
Not many are outright hostile, fortunately, and some, like Grace, are still willing to work with her. Still, there's no denying that the ground has shifted under her feet, and the results are not great for the Resistance as a whole.
Sharky doesn't seem to have changed his opinion of her in the slightest, although once or twice she catches him giving her a look she can really only describe as worried—and whether that's worried that she'll turn on them now or worried that Jacob had brainwashed her into whatever went on, he's not saying. Both are equally likely coming from him. She's not surprised at his continued loyalty: once, shortly before this began, riding the natural high of a day spent blowing up drug boats in the Henbane, they'd dragged a broken down sofa from the side of the road into a clearing in the woods nearby and had set it alight as an impromptu bonfire, sitting around it and getting steadily drunk as the night progressed on whiskey sourced from abandoned cabins all over the county. There, Sharky had very casually told her he hoped that after this was all over, they'd still be friends.
She hadn't realized till that moment that he really didn't have that many people in his life. At the time, it just made her more ferociously determined to hang out with him, look out for him, but now she's starting to feel guilty. She feels like she's taking advantage of him, like he can't make up his own mind about her and Jacob because he doesn't have much of a choice. She finds herself avoiding him in the following days, and when he doesn't call her out on it, she reads it as relief.
(Hurk also doesn't seem to be bothered by her liaison with Jacob, but she one hundred percent believes that's because he has simultaneously seen too much—he mentioned being in Kyrat right in the middle of the coup a couple of years ago, for fuck's sake—and too little, and has no clue why her hooking up with Jacob would be a big deal. It's a moot point, anyway; soon after he, Sharky, and Grace had pulled off the heroic rescue, he'd gone back to the mountains, something to do with his dad, and obviously Rook is avoiding the mountains like the plague, as much to stay out of Jess's way as Jacob's, so she hasn't seen him again since.)
Jerome, true to what she'd come to expect from him, doesn't seem to be judging her, but he looks at her with such a strong combination of pity and worry that it makes her feel itchy and guilty and she's been avoiding him, too. She saw Nick and Kim only once, dropping by their place the day after she'd been sprung from the convoy. Her purpose was to ask Nick to take a quick trip up to the mountains, to tell Eli that he should by no means allow anyone rescued from the chair back into the Wolf's Den (and exactly why), and she was pretty sure his half-mumbles in response signified a yes, I'll do it, but it was impossible to tell, because he wouldn't look her fully in the eye, and he muttered an excuse she didn't catch and bolted as soon as he possibly could. Kim, who seemed uncharacteristically fidgety the whole time, walked Rook to the door, and paused a second after saying their goodbyes, only to add, "John would've been worse." Rook has stayed away since.
Mary May was pretty short with her when she stopped by the Spread Eagle to drop Boomer off (things have been so up in the air lately that she wants to know he's being taken care of by someone responsible). Grace has been the same way, the one or two times they've stepped out to handle anything—not rude by any means, but quiet outside of necessary communication, no longer making the overtures of friendship she used to.
Things aren't much better in the Henbane Region. Actually, they're worse: when Rook, worried by the fact that her wound isn't healing up very well, stops by to see if Charles can take a look at it, Tracey flat-out refuses to let her into the jail. When Whitehorse reprimands her for it, it kicks up quite a ruckus behind the heavy walls as they fight—loudly—about whether Jacob sticking it to her can be read as evidence that she's just waiting around to kill them all. "He's the exact same as Faith," Tracey insists, just before Rook writes the prison off as a wash and slips away before they can reach a decision. "Once he gets his hooks in, that's it. You can never trust them again." (She's not wrong, Rook thinks, at least not if Jacob's whole programming regime is as infallible as he seems to think it is.)
Obviously, she's staying away from the mountains, and she's avoiding Adelaide too, despite the occasional summons she receives over the radio, usually after cocktail hour. She doesn't think Addie is holding anything against her, she just… doesn't want to get into all of that with her.
She starts working alone, more and more, which a couple of weeks ago would probably have worked out fine, but the days are getting colder, the nights colder still, and she's favoring her hurt side as much as ever. (She keeps it clean and changes the bandages every night, but it's not closing up, every day it gets hotter and sorer, and she's not a total idiot, she knows what's happening, she just… can't, not right now. She keeps promising herself she'll handle it soon. Somehow.)
It's inevitable that the cult starts taking back ground. First it's the scrapyard. Then it's the brewery. Then it's the truck stop, and the hotel, and the summer camp, and none of this would have happened if they were still unified, coordinated against these attacks, but Rook's recklessness has driven a wedge between her and her allies, morale is low, and the cult seems to sense it. She responds to distress calls as soon as she gets them, but she's moving slower, and it seems like every time she reaches a spot, the fight is already over, and despite her efforts, she's not doing great at taking them back all by herself like she was in the beginning.
Planes fly overhead constantly, occasionally peppering the ground near her with bullets and always haunting her until she manages to lose them in the woods or by taking cover in caves. She runs into fewer Resistance members in the wild, although whether that's because they're avoiding her (she distinctly cannot blame them), because there's not that many left free or alive, or because it's getting fucking cold and they're wisely holed up inside somewhere, she can't say.
Shit comes to a head—she thinks it's when she responds to a distress call from Sunrise Farm. The cult is moving back in, and she hauls ass up there to help, only to find herself pinned down in a foxhole taking fire from both sides. If she tries hard, she can convince herself that it's a mistake—that she's looking dirtier and more ragged than usual, that the Resistance includes a ton of people who are not professionally trained soldiers, despite how they see themselves, and that they're just caught up in the chaos of the fight.
If Whitehorse taught her anything, though, it's that coincidence is rare, if it exists at all, and despite her efforts to convince her sinking heart that there's just been some misunderstanding, she doesn't buy it. She finally manages to escape around nightfall (after the cult finishes picking off the limited Resistance members in the area) with no more damage than a few splinters and some torn clothing. In her wake, the Peggies cheer and raise their flags.
She retreats to the McCoy Cabin in the Henbane to lick her wounds, metaphorical and physical, and to brood about the fact that she apparently can't just swing in and casually join any Resistance fight that crosses her peripheral without getting shot at by her would-be allies anymore. She wants nothing more than a drink, but all of her booze has been allocated to the Molotov cocktail stash, and besides, she doesn't think it's the wisest thing to put into her body at the moment. She boils water for a hot compress for her side—the pain of it when she applies it is excruciating enough that she tears up—and she foregoes food for the night, thinking she'll throw up anything she puts in her stomach.
She ends up curled up on the couch near a low fire, tossing and turning all night, trying to find a position that's not painful. Every so often, she opens her eyes, and in the flickering firelight, she sees the tall shape of a man, indistinguishable in the shadows and edged in red, standing by the door, but despite the sight sparking an intense dread in her chest, she can't find the energy or courage to drag herself off the couch and investigate. (In the morning, the cabin is empty, and she chalks it up to sleep paralysis.)
The morning dawns gray, dismal, and frosty. Rook is up at first light, exhausted from a restless night and feeling a touch of chill that makes her worry that fever is imminent. Her side is tight and sore and she has a vague idea that she should head to the Hope County Clinic—regardless of whether they think she's the enemy or not, they won't just let her rot away and die, right? The Hippocratic Oath and all that.
She starts off despite her exhaustion, figuring that she's not going to sleep any better during the day than she did at night, but a series of detours—maybe just fate—herds her down off the path and sees her playing witness to the absolute horrorshow that is O'Hara's Haunted House.
She goes through the house alone and with her pistol ready, checking corners and weathering increasingly gruesome jump scares brought about by figures that she realizes very quickly are not dummies. Glass-eyed Peggies and Resistance members alike jump out at her, over and over, and she's seen a lot over the last month, but she still is in no way prepared for this shit, a serial killer taking advantage of the chaos in the county to put together his dream, something straight out of a horror film.
It gets worse. When she'd first activated the power switch, she thought she saw someone standing at the window of the barn watching, but chalked it up to her seeing things again. Then she finds the freshly-lit cigarette, the rambling note, and, against her better judgment, she answers the phone to insane laughter. When she looks reflexively out of the back window of the barn, she sees branches swaying in the windless day, marking the rapid departure of someone only seconds ago.
"Shit," she mutters through clenched teeth, passing a hand flinchingly over her side—it radiates heat against her palm—but bad timing or not, she can't just fucking turn the other way when a serial killer has been all but dropped into her lap. She knows that right now, in the lingering frost, she can still track him. If she leaves and comes back, she has no chance; he'll be gone for good.
Rather than going back through the nightmare barn, she opts to drop out of the window to the ground below, hissing with pain at the impact, and she sets her feet to the path, keying on her radio as she goes. "Faith Seed, come in please. This is the Junior Deputy, I have something urgent I need to talk to you about."
There's a long pause, during which Rook identifies large bootprints in the frost, heading into the woods. Faith doesn't disappoint, though—after a minute or two, her honey-sweet voice comes through, loud and clear and full of sympathy: "You must be tired, Deputy. Are you ready to talk yet? Are you ready to come home? We're here for you, with open arms."
Rook grimaces as she squeezes through some wet, clinging branches. "Not quite. Maybe later. Did you know there's a serial killer in the Henbane that's been preying on your people and mine?"
Another long pause. When Faith speaks again, her tone is flatter than Rook has ever heard it (and coincidentally, she sounds her age—Rook's age— for the first time since Rook met her). "What."
"I know, I was surprised too. You ever heard of O'Hara's Haunted House? Cause I hadn't till this morning. Then I went through it. He's stuffed our people's bodies, Faith. He's set them up in a little freakshow. I mean I guess it's possible that he just found them all lying around and just preserved them—" (ethically sourced corpses is a phrase that's wedged in Rook's head to stay)—"but personally I think that loft looked like a butcher's shop, not a taxidermist's. Either way, it's fucked, and I need to talk to him at least."
Faith replies quicker this time, though she sounds more uncertain. "Why are you… telling me this?"
"Because I'm on his trail and I'm putting everything else on pause till I catch up with him. If he stays on foot, I think I have a shot, but if he takes to the road, I'll lose him, so I wanted to ask if you could have your people watch the roads even more carefully. Have them look out for men traveling alone."
"I don't…"
"Faith," Rook says, as patiently as she's able (which isn't very), "I know you aren't used to working with me, but I need you to trust that this is a common enemy. We can go back to normal later but we've got a shot at getting this guy now and we shouldn't waste it. Get your people to check out the place, it's south of the truck stop, run it by Joseph if you have to, but help me with this. Help us."
At length, Faith just says "I'll talk to you soon," which Rook chooses to take as a sure thing, can do. She puts away the radio and refocuses on tracking O'Hara.
A/N - if you're out there reading, I'd love for you to say hello and let me know what you think :)