Jack Sunder
If only the drug had blanked their memories like it had blanked their minds...
Jack stood in the doorway, watching the man he and his friends had rescued. Dressed in street clothes, the man would have looked quite normal, if not for the raw manic terror in his eyes, and the nervous shaking of his body. The man stood in the far corner of the room, staring at Mr. Sunder as if he were death incarnate. Lips twisted and wriggled and for a moment Jack thought he would speak, but they just twisted some more, then opened to bare clenched teeth.
“He’s been like this since he woke up, m’lord.” Sunder glanced at the speaker, the man’s wife, and at the children cowering behind her. They were old enough to walk, but not old enough to survive on their own. “He starts screaming if I go near him – he almost hit me when he threw a bucket at us.”
“He’s seen some terrible things, miss.” Sunder gritted his teeth. “I don’t want to burden you with what was happening down there, save that it was not something fit for anyone to see, let alone be... Well, if I were in his shoes, I don’t think I would be much better.”
“Will he... will he...” The woman bit her lip.
“Will he get better?” Sunder asked, putting voice to her question. “I can’t really tell you. I’ve been around soldiers, and seen them come back from horrible wars as broken men. Sometimes they get better, and sometimes they... sometimes they don’t get better.” He looked over at the man’s wide, panicked eyes, and then stepped out of view of the doorway. “But I’ll tell you this: The soldiers who didn’t have people to go back to? The ones who didn’t have family? They never made it. I can’t tell you that he’ll get better, but...”
“I understand,” she said, and looked down at her child. Jack knew the thoughts going through her mind - she could barely support herself and her child on her own, and if the man were to be a drain... could she really be expected to care for him?
“Forget I came.”
“M’lord?”
“The payment? For rescuing him? Well, I didn’t do a very good job of it, now did I?”
“Sorry, m’lord?”
“What I mean is that you should keep the money. You need it more than we do.”
“Thank you, m’lord.”
“And I’m not your lord. Or anyone’s lord. I’m just a mercenary. A bad one.” Jack leaned his head around the door-frame to look at the man one last time. He seemed calmer, slumped down in the corner with his hands over his eyes, but not a lot better off. Jack walked down the stairs and out of the apartment.
“Is he like the others?” Lore asked once he made it to the street.
“The same. Worse, if anything.” Jack shook his head. “I don’t know how much good we really have--”
“We did good,” Maureen said, interrupting him. “Anything is better than what was happening down there.”
The hairs on Jack’s neck raised at the memory of that hell-hole. He had been trying not to think about it, and hadn’t thought of the result as a relative thing. Well, it was, and it wasn’t.
“Let’s move on to the next one.” Jack looked down at the scrap of paper in his hand, and Maureen’s childish scrawl. At least it was easily readable. “The House of Nene... Lore, do you know this place? It doesn’t have an address.”
“It’s... um... it’s a house of pleasure.” She looked at her feet. “Down south on Cobble Street.”
“Well... if Kem works there, I don’t think she’s going to have a good time.” He started walking south, and looked back at Lore. “Nene isn’t the type that would force a girl to work in a state like this, is she?”
Lore shook her head. “She’s-- don’t think she’s like that, no...”
“Well... lead the way. Maybe Kem isn’t one of the ones that survived, who knows.” He regretted the remark as he said it, and silently cursed himself some more.
Selena
“These are a lot of houses. Names. People.” Perl’s grumbling barely sounded over the rattle of wheels on cobblestones.
Selena stared out the coach's window, vacantly watching the city roll by.
“How many people were there at the feast?” Perl continued.
“A little over five score, I think.” Selena closed her eyes, wishing it would stop what she kept seeing. This time the woman was looking at her, laughing as she sawed at the poor man’s arm. She snapped her eyes open again, and tried to focus on the people outside. Merchants, a market, children playing in a fountain. The fountain was dirty.
“I don’t think I can count that high,” Perl said, oblivious. “I don’t have that many fingers.”
Fingers. Fingers twitching. That arm in the tank. She could see it now, scrabbling at the lid to get out, to get to her, and then there was the smell of formalin as the seal pressed open. “Stop it!”
“What?” asked Perl, staring across at her.
“Stop... just... I don’t know. I wish I could be so calm, like you. I wish I could stop seeing last night. How do you do it?!” She stuck her head outside the window and breathed in deep. The air wasn’t fresh, but it didn’t smell like that nightmare down there. The coachman yelled at some commoners to get out of the way, and in the press of the crowd scattering away, she thought she glimpsed a headless torso, twisting, moving. She shook her head violently, and then felt large hands on her shoulders, grasping.
Selena shrieked and elbowed Perl in the chest. The blow thudded harmlessly again the boiled leather armor, and then she found herself in his arms. Was she hugging him, or was he hugging her?
“I don’t know,” Perl said.
“Don’t know what?”
“How I do it. I just do. It's just how it is.”
Selena pushed the big man away from her. The carriage was slowing to a stop. She heard the coachman say something about arriving.
She looked out the window again. There was the man with half his head smashed in, still moving, still grabbing, biting. She wiped tears from her eyes that she didn’t remember crying.
The man was still there, hunched over and biting into the neck of a street urchin. The child struggled, then blood gushed from his neck, and he went limp. The man looked straight at Selena, one dull eye visible from under the ruin of his face, blood dripping from his mouth.
“Perl...” Selena reached for him with one arm, unable to look away. “Perl, can you see this too?”
The coachman’s terrified scream from on top of the carriage answered her question. This was real.
Next: Chapter 3