"Good luck, John. I do hope you win. But I also hope it hurts."
[CLICK]
Melanie stared at the paused tape recorder with disdain.
She faintly remembered John once saying that speaking into it felt cathartic for many people. Helped them to get closure for those terrible, scarring events that could never be rationally explained. What a load of nonsense. From the day she had first met him, every story she told that idiotic thing was like prying the wound back open. He was lucky that she didn't decide to smash it. But with a sigh, she restrained her impulses and placed it down on Martin's unoccupied desk so that he could say his piece tomorrow.
It was almost midnight. Melanie was alone at the Institute, though it certainly didn't feel that way with that thing's gaze following her everywhere. She should have left hours ago, but instead she had spent the evening at her desk with her jaw clenched, waiting and seething. She was tired as hell, but she knew she wouldn't be able to sleep. It hard been hard enough since learning the truth about her father, but it was impossible now that she she knew that she might wake up to find the world replaced with a hellscape of dolls and clowns and skin.
Her foot tapped incessantly against the leg of her chair. She knew she couldn't wait here all night. The bullet in her leg screamed at her to get up and do something, anything.
Outside the office window, the lamp-lit street beckoned her to breathe some fresh air. A night out on the town, then? Why not? It could be her last. With a yawn, she went to the break room to drink another cup of coffee, then left the archives into the temperate summer night.
Melanie spent as little time as possible escaping the obnoxiously posh streets of Chelsea and hopped onto the first bus going across the bridge. A quick Google search told her that she would be able to catch the last few hours of a hardcore punk show in Brixton. That was good luck. She had a lot of pent-up aggression to let out before shit hit the fan tomorrow.
Most of the people at the venue were already pretty drunk when she got there, including the band on stage. It was a tiny place, which meant less space between her and the blaring speakers sending harsh reverberations through her bones. More importantly, it meant a tighter, more chaotic pit.
Being relatively lightweight, Melanie was normally content to let herself be pushed around by the barrage of punks trying to charge at the stage. But today she had reached her limit. Today she wanted a fight. So instead of meekly sidling into the pit, she entered by running up and slamming her shoulder into the back of the biggest guy she could find. It was like colliding with a tree, and it hurt like a bitch, but he clearly didn't see it coming and stumbled right into the floor. A hot swell of adrenaline and satisfaction filled her muscles as she watched him collapse. While people stopped to help him up, Melanie didn't even pause to look at his face before forcefully shoving the woman beside her.
After that, she lost all sense of her surroundings as she was caught up in a tornado of chaos and violence. The bigger men in the pit quickly realized that she wasn't afraid to roughhouse, and lost the restraint they usually showed her. Some of them even ganged up on her, and soon she was being crushed between several jumping, yelling, elbowing, human pillars. And it felt fucking good.
When strangers kept such a healthy distance from each other, it was sometimes easy to forget that everyone was made of flesh, bone, and muscle. But here, there was no such restraint. You felt everyone's sweat and smelled everyone's stink.
And when every part of her hurt, she could almost forget about that single, throbbing point of concentrated pain in the middle of her left leg. The one that the doctors couldn't find. The one that whispered to her without words, urging her to rip and stab and bite and smash and kill and put her thumbs in Elias Bouchard's eyes and rip them right out of their sockets, consequences be damned.
Almost.
For a few songs, Melanie was holding her own in the pit better than she ever thought she could have. No, not only was she keeping up with the heavyweights, she was winning. It turned out that all she had to do was paste the mental image of her murdering boss's smug face on everyone around her. All the hate and anger she had been storing up for months filled her with a strength she had no idea she possessed, and soon enough she was nearly keeping her feet rooted to the ground amidst a tide of punks. By the time the last band of the night was wrapping up their set, it had become a game: see how many people it takes to knock down the pissed off chick with the blue hair.
As it turned out, the answer was four. All at once, colliding with what felt like the impact of a small car. For the first time that night, she completely lost her balance. And when she fell, she landed directly on her left kneecap.
White-hot pain burst from the point of impact and spread through her entire body like a lightning bolt as the old bullet wound flared like the moment it was put in her leg. Her ears rang so loud that the sound of drums and guitars temporarily faded into mere background chatter, and when they returned, each snare sounded like a gunshot, each cymbal like a cannon, and every screamed lyric like a command to charge.
When she finally raised her head and looked around, the headbanging punks were now piled corpses, riddled with bullet wounds. And where the band once stood, there was that thing from India. No, that thing that her people had brought to India, which had haunted Amritsar ever since, and now regarded her with such cold hatred and cruelty that she wanted to turn to dust.
It was a pile of rotting corpses, about fifteen feet tall. But their skin was all melted and fused like melted cheese, and their uniforms were sewn together into a clump of sickly, yellowing green. Each pair of hands clutched a bayonet that it thrust outwards, continuously loading ammunition and blindly firing rounds into the air around it. And the smell it gave off… it was the same smell as that train car in Rotherham. The choking stench of rust and old blood.
It had followed her home.
Melanie felt a hand on her shoulder, and before she had time to think, she reached out and twisted it violently. She felt the satisfying snap of breaking bone, then a scream. When she turned around, her ears still ringing so loudly she thought she might go deaf, she saw a young guy in a denim vest collapsed on the ground, clutching the most misshapen wrist she had ever seen. He looked at her with an expression of pure terror and anguish, and people were swarming to help him up. With a jolt, Melanie realized that the hand on her shoulder was probably him trying to check if she was okay.
The band was back and the ghost was gone. Just a flashback, then. She had never been diagnosed with PTSD, but she knew people who were. The way they described it, it was like standing in that moment again.
And yet, she had just snapped someone's wrist with her bare hands.
Nobody else helped Melanie up. They were keeping a wide berth now, and it was up to her to get to her feet, even though her leg continued to throb. She averted her eyes in shame, and yet somehow she didn't feel as remorseful as she thought she should have. All that anger, all that strength… it felt undeniably good to let it out on someone.
The harsh music was starting to grate on her nerves now, so she left as the band started playing their encore. She followed the guy out to check that he had an ambulance on the way, with repeated apologies and offers for future drinks of course. It turned out his name was Jackie, and once he was convinced that Melanie wasn't following him to finish the job, he was quick to forgive her, though there was still a slight quiver in his voice as he spoke. He said that he thought she was quite the badass in the pit and "sorry for sneaking up on you like that," though it was clearly more of a plea for mercy than a genuine apology. She gave him her phone number in case it ever became a financial or legal thing, and the paramedics lifted him off.
Resolving the situation should have made her feel some kind of relief. And yet the whole time they talked behind the venue, that smoldering anger never left her for a moment. She practically had to clench her jaw to hide it.
Why didn't she feel more guilty? Jackie was clearly a good guy trying to help her, and what had he gotten in return? Broken bones.
The worst part was, she knew why. She had known for a long time, hadn't she? How long? Weeks? Maybe part of her thought that aligning herself with the Eye was protecting her from the worst of it. And yet, would the old Melanie have really attempted to assassinate her boss?
Her head was swimming too much to consider the implications of it all. The exertion from the show on top of her already stressful day had made her more exhausted than she thought she had ever been, not to mention bruised and sore. Well, so be it if the world literally ended tomorrow, or if she had terrible nightmares again. She was going to go home and get some fucking sleep.