Jack wiped her hands as she stared down at her work. Before her were two mounds of freshly packed dirt, one slightly smaller than the other. She stared at the smaller one for a minute, briefly unsure of what sort of words she should say. What words she could say. She offered a half-muttered sentence, half to herself.
“We should… you know, a grave marker,” she finally managed to get out. Rarity stared ahead, not replying, not doing much, save for shivering at the light mist that had begun to drizzle on them. There was blood on her, coating her skin, her clothes, and Jack knew it had broke her in some way. There was no complaint about her ruined clothes, no aghast comment. Only the dull shiver and blank stare. Jack could make a mighty easy guess it was shock. Hell, she felt similar. Everything had an ethereal, unreal feeling to it, as if this was all some kind of dream she’d wake up from any second now.
“Not dream, nightmare,” she corrected herself. Rarity slowly turned her head to look at Jack, who waved it off. “Nothin’.”
“Now what?” Rarity pensively questioned, seeming to be on the search for answers. Jack sighed, focusing on remaining in control. On keeping this going as well as they could.
“No change in plans. West. That’s all that matters. Even now,” Jack answered, forcing herself to be as single-minded as possible to avoid the hurt, the reflection on everything. A desperate bid for escape, to stop her from seeing the elephant in the room.
Rarity was silent for a moment, unsure what to say before a hair of reason seemed to spark back to her, a glimmer of the practical woman she was before the sight of death had yanked away a part of her soul.
“The house,” Rarity said, shutting her eyes and opening them. Jack nodded.
“Right.”
Rarity slowly nodded at that. Jack turned and made her way onward, pushing past Rarity. The rain picked up around them, creating a rhythmic crescendo of pops across the roof of the house.
Jack perked up with a question as they made their way back to the relative safety of the yard. “Do ya have the time?”
Rarity stared at Jack, dumbfounded, before she numbly looked down at her forearm and the designer watch she wore at her wrist—a fleeting thought came to Jack as she looked over her shoulder at the woman, that at least she could make good calls on watch brands. It was at least something practical. But the thought vanished as soon as it came to life within her—Rarity spoke in a low voice.
“Two o’ eight.”
Jack nodded dismissively at that, using the question as a way to try and distract Rarity, try and slowly pull her away from what she had seen and what they had to do later. Jack knew she’d never forget having to drag the bodies. A worm buried in her mind at the thought of Karl. She had heard that corpses would still sometimes twitch after a death. His did in her hands as she dragged him across the mine field and she screamed in surprise at the violent, unrestrained motion. Despite the scream, Rarity had barely reacted, her own hands stained red from moving Kody’s delicate body, death and blood loss making him less like a heavy iron, and more like a bag of feathers. Too frail, too light.
Jack grit her teeth, counted to ten, and returned her focus to the current, the now. Though damn if everything that happened didn’t feel like the current.
They came to the house proper as the rain picked up into an honest-to-God downpour. Jack thought with a brutally painful homesickness that the crops were needing it. It had been a dry fall.
She took off her hat out of habit and stepped inside.
There were no lights on. Jack furrowed her brows at the dimness. The house had been awash with light when her and Karl had left it. Unbidden, her eyes strayed towards the kitchen sink, the bucket of corn and bowl of peas.
She expected the both of them to have disappeared, somehow. But no, there they were, looking all the world as if they were waiting for her and Karl to come back and finish them.
She shook her head, sighed. It couldn't be helped. Everything seemed very clear cut in front of her—take this action, follow it with this one—like her brain was running on robotic instinct.
“What are we gonna do?” Rarity asked again, looking around the house with blank, almost glazed eyes. Jack stared at her for a second, then looked away.
“Sit. Sit fer a moment, ok?” Jack instructed, looking about before she guided Rarity forward and sat her on a recliner within the living room. She pursed her lips, chewing absently upon her bottom one.
Rarity’s shellshock… even if she’d never admit it in a million years, it creeped her out. Gave her the heebie-jeebies. The woman was like a broken clock, a machine that had been hit too hard on its side and now only rattled when it should ring and cry out. Jack didn’t know how to fix it, Jack was afraid she wouldn’t get fixed.
So she focused on what she knew. She motioned around the house in an all-encompassing gesture.
“I'm sure Karl won't mind if we…” ‘Raid his house’ was a bit much, even though that was what Jack almost said. But also… wouldn't they be? She knew the man had some goodies—like, military goodies—stowed somewhere. Hell, there was even a gorgeous-looking shotgun hanging on the coat hanger by the front door.
Jack crossed the living room and took it off the hook, running her hands all over the weapon and checking the sights. It was a show, really. She knew the gun was in peak condition.
Her hand passed over an engraving on the barrel. Kathy, it said in wide, script font. Jack swallowed. She let out a reluctant “fuck,” and put it back onto the hook. She didn’t want a reminder, not like that, despite what it could provide them with; instead, she looked elsewhere, trying to spot more useful supplies.
A hallway closet answered her wants. A pair of walkie-talkies and, even better, a pair of night vision goggles. She tested the switch, trying them out. Instantly, the dim room turned washed out and green, the area highlighted in a sea of it.
Finding nothing else of value there aside from a pair of binoculars that, regrettably, had a cracked lens, Jack stepped away. A small curiosity took hold of her and she stepped into Kody’s room.
There, resting on the footrest of his bed was a high quality holster. She took hold of it and looked it over.
Oiled, looked to be made of buckskin, and soft as hell. Hand-stitched, too. A gift for the boy by the father, perhaps. Not that it mattered much to ponder that now.
Jack hated to be so callous about it all, but knew also that there was no comfort in pondering questions that would never get answered. She took the holster and pressed back out into the living room, dumping the items onto the couch and preparing to head into the kitchen.
Rarity stood nearby, looking like she had woke up from a dream and landed into a nightmare. But her attention had seemed to come back and, as she looked towards the items now on the couch, her brow narrowed.
“So, like that, then,” she commented. Jack said nothing, but Rarity continued, obviously expecting Jack’s non-response. “We’re robbing them like thieves.”
“Did the same exact thing back last town over. Unless yer forgettin’ where we got that Jeep. Not that it did a lotta fuckin’ good,” Jack muttered, moving past Rarity and towards the kitchen. Rarity scoffed, appalled.
“That’s different,” she countered, pointing a finger at Jack, who ignored it.
Jack opened the pantry door and took to loading her arms with crackers and instant noodles, before pursuing a few mason jars filled with jams and vegetables. She snagged what appeared to be a cranberry jam, and then a can of tomatoes before she shook her head.
“Fuckin’ how is it different?”
Rarity’s pale cheeks flushed red in anger. “Jack Apple you know damn well how it’s different. You’re lying to yourself if you think otherwise.”
“I ain’t lyin’,” Jack snapped back, moving past Rarity and back into the living room. She sat the items down on the couch and stared pointedly at the wall as the faint tap of rain drizzled down onto the currently non-sealed windows and rooftop. A moment of this and she spoke again. “They’re dead, Rare. We ain’t. An’ we can’t let the food or supplies jus’ rot. That ain’t what they’d want.”
“As if you knew what they wanted,” Rarity barked back, her originally subdued anger now becoming far more presented. “You knew them barely a day at best.”
“Rare, it still hurts ta see a kid like that gone like he did. Hurts jus’ as bad watchin’ his old man pull the trigger. I ain’t some kinda monster that don’t see that.” She curtly shook her head. “But if we don’t get what we can outta the place we are gonna be hurtin’ for food supplies.”
Rarity made no comment back. Jack took that as a minor victory, and then shut her eyes as the memories tried to come back. She shook them off and went back into the kitchen, started opening cabinets and drawers at random. She opened the one above the fridge, and paused, whistling.
“Man had quite the liquor collection.”
Rarity crossed her arms and glanced away from Jack as she made the comment. The other paused, mellowing a bit.
“Sorry,” she said, more quietly as she grabbed a bottle. She gave a small swirl of the last few mouthfuls of whiskey within and popped open the top. She nearly brought it to her lips, before instead offering it to Rarity.
Rarity watched Jack’s hand for a time, and then took the bottle, not only drinking it, but downing it, her wince as it went down suggesting it wasn’t being finished off for its taste.
“We’ll get through it, sug,” Jack muttered out. Rarity met her eyes, and Jack could almost see all of the doubts and hurts and fears swirling in their depths.
But Rarity nodded.
The rain slowed down and then stopped altogether by the time Jack finished her sweep through the rest of the house for supplies and gear. And a sweep was the word for it. She came in like a locust, gnawing and chewing and taking everything that she could consider useful from the rooms; bed sheets for kindling if they needed to start a fire, or for warmth in their own right; as much food as she could find; she even looped back around to the kitchen and started loading up the unopened bottles of alcohol for Molotovs. And drinking.
Finally, when the living room couch looked like something out of Hoarding: Buried Alive, she went scoured out two packs into which to fit it all.
Rarity was nowhere to be found when Jack came back, so the farmer made quick work of finishing up what she could of the mostly-empty bottles in the kitchen to get a buzz, then retrieving the gasoline from Karl’s shed to make even more Molotovs—‘cause, hell, she was unashamedly scared of the damn Rooters. She didn't combine the bottles with rags quite yet, since walking around with actual Molotovs was like asking for Death himself to come and slap her on her stupid face, but she at least got herself ready to make them when the time came.
The last place she went was Karl's room. She figured the man would have the best stuff close to heart, but the only thing of note that she found was a pretty Mosin-Nagant in Karl’s bedroom closet, loaded and ready to go.
The only problem was ammunition, both for the rifle and for her shotgun. Karl made his own, she knew that much, and she had found plenty of gunpowder and casings in his carpentry shack, but she had no clue how to do it herself. Back on the farm Mac had been teaching himself, fooling around a little in their barn every once in a while, but she’d had no interest in it personally.
She supposed that they could always get ammo in the next town. It just seemed a waste to not grab the powder, was all. Coulda made bombs or something with it. Maybe Karl’s boasting about being self-sufficient had rubbed off onto her. Maybe his paranoia had, too.
Slightly disgusted with herself, she sat back down on the couch and rubbed at her face, fatigued beyond reproach.
“Ya up fer cookin’ dinner?” she called out to Rarity, wherever the woman was. “Think I need ta crash fer a bit.”
There were footsteps, and then Rarity appeared from the end of the hallway, walking into the room.
“We don’t have much time for rest, Jack. We need to leave soon.”
“Leave?” Jack repeated, squinting and tilting her head. “Girl, it’s gonna be nightfall in an hour or two.”
“Well with all the things you took from this place, surely anything that challenges us now would be dealt with a lot faster.” The tone she said it in was sarcastically saccharine, and Jack closed her eyes against an oncoming headache.
“C’mon Rare,” she muttered, a bit pleadingly.
The woman glared at her for a few seconds, then turned her nose up. “Fine. But we are leaving tonight.”
“Tonight?” Jack repeated, giving a rise and fall of her hand. “Ya lose yer senses? Ya really want that pack-a assholes tearin’ inta us? We stay indoors. We stay here.”
“No.” Rarity replied instantly, completely, utterly dismissing Jack’s logic with a single word. “I refuse.”
“Are ya fuckin’ stupid? Seriously?”
“Don’t call me stupid, Jack,” she hotly snapped back. “You’re clearly playing the fool here.”
“Bullshit. I know what’s gonna come out fer us in a bit. It’s safer in here.”
Rarity pointed a stern finger her way. “You damn hypocrite,” she barked out, her gesture trembling. “What happened to a town a day? What happened to finding your brother and sister? Are you giving up on them?”
Jack’s weariness took a backseat and she slowly rose, a glower coming to her face. “You are treadin’ on some thin Goddamn ice,” she warned, her tone low and soft, the opposite of her normally loud and boorish outbursts. Rarity flinched, perhaps thinking she went a bit too far herself, before replying, her tone matching Jack’s.
“I saw a child die in front of my eyes. His blood is still on my clothing and we both saw his father kill himself. I do not want anything else to do with this Godforsaken, fucking house and if I have to walk out by myself then so be it, Jack. You stay “safe”, I’ll continue our arrangement.”
So saying, she turned and headed towards the door. She waited for a few seconds and upon Jack offering no more words or making any motion to go to her, she opened the door and stepped through, slamming it so hard the frame shook.
Jack waited, counting on Rarity to return—expecting the woman’s temper to chill, for her to realize that going out this late was tantamount to suicide, and return to the home, but as the minutes rolled by and the knot in her stomach grew and twitched, Jack swore, taking out a brief but flaming burst of anger on the coffee table, planting the heel of her boot into a leg and knocking it clean off with an audible crack, launching the piece across the carpet and skittering into the wall, where it connected and bounced off, leaving a fist-sized hole in the wall. She grabbed both of their packs and ran outside, taking off at a worried jog northward.
Rarity had been true to her words. She had already gotten almost a quarter mile out even in the scant time Jack had waited for her. She marched briskly, moving at nearly a jog, as fast as her once seemingly delicate legs carried her. Jack considered calling after her, but thought better of it.
She jogged ahead, crossed the yard and jumped the fence, pausing at the outskirts of the minefield, her fingertips rubbing together nervously. Shit scared the everloving crap outta her, even though Rarity had taught her the way to get through it in order to recover Karl’s body. She did the sequence Rarity showed her, feeling like a kid playing hopscotch on a playground, only twenty times more nerve wrecked.
Once she was through, she set off at as fast of a run as her body would allow her, mindful of how it had responded earlier to her pushing herself.
Jack caught up towards the outskirts of the woods; Rarity heard the fast moving footsteps behind her and spared a fleeting, slightly fearful glance over her shoulder before recognizing it simply as Jack. Come to her senses, she thought with a surprising amount of bitterness, and then she shook her head and slowed her place just a little. It was unbecoming of a lady to hold grudges.
They walked a ways out, deeper into the woods until the tree canopy blocked their view of the sky. It was several degrees cooler now than it had been, with a refreshing cleaness in the air. The ground was soggy and soft, the trees still dripping fat raindrops absentmindedly. One of the drops caught Jack on the nape of the neck, the feeling of it akin to an ice cube sliding long her skin, and she winced in surprise and discomfort and swiped it away.
The shadows were already growing long and dark, the night deepening in the woods first, as if it had a primary claim there, as if it couldn’t wait for the show to begin.
Stupid, stupid, stupid, Jack chanted in her mind. She could feel her spine start to knot in terror, then her arms, then her legs. The darker it got, the more nervous she became.
“This was a Goddamn stupid idea,” she breathed to Rarity. She wanted to scream into the woman’s face, but didn’t want to attract the night’s nightmares to their position. “Stupidest idea you’ve ever—”
Rarity stopped dead in her tracks and Jack almost ran into her back.
There, a good twenty feet in front of them, was another Rooter. Jack swore internally, grabbed Rarity’s arm and brought the both of them, very slowly, into a crouch. The thing stopped and inhaled, like the one before had, and again, looked towards their general direction.
Please don’t see us, please don’t see us, please…
She hardly let out a breath for several long seconds, not moving a muscle. The Rooter let out a grunt and started to shuffle along again. Jack made sure to wait very, very long after it had disappeared out of their sight before she slowly stood to her full height. She dropped her bag off of her shoulders, scanned around, and shoved her hand inside quickly, in search of the NVGs.
“Here,” she panted, handing one pair to Rarity. “Since ya fuckin’ insisted on travelin’ in the dark.”
Rarity didn’t respond.
They continued on. Their exodus was silent, their steps the only noise either created, soft as they were. They ran into another Rooter, and followed the same pattern as before with it. The things seemed to rely on their sense of smell more than their sight, and if one stood very, very still, it did not see you. Karl’s information had been right.
They walked for hours, avoiding most everything with the help of the goggles. Fucking things were a lifesaver, Jack thought more than once.
Eventually the woods opened up for them again, and brought them to a camping site where an RV stood, its door open and, as Jack expected before even stepping inside, its occupants gone, the only proof of their existence was a ruined and burnt pot on a now-dead campfire, and a half-eaten banana upon the dash of the RV. Moving, more machine than man, Jack cleared the van and with a nod to Rarity, the first real attempt to speak to her since before they encountered the Rooters, Rarity shut the door behind them, sealing them in the RV throughout the long night. She lowered the shades at the windows and, though realistically it would do nothing, she dropped her now-heavier bag in front of the door, creating a halfhearted blockade.
Jack, meanwhile, sat on the sofa across the door, running a hand absently over the night vision goggles, testing over dozens of knobs and switches, trying to get an indication of how much battery remained in them,
Rarity took in a breath, running a hand over her tangled hair, then crossing her arms. She stared at Jack, who finally finished her examination of the goggles and was checking the batteries in a pair of walkie-talkies, then making sure the receivers picked up. She seemed ready to move onto another make-work project when Rarity spoke, cutting through the silence like a spark of lighting in a black sky.
“Didn’t you do that when you found them?” she questioned. A part of her, the sore, exhausted, annoyed part, wanted to add ‘then again, maybe you hadn’t thought of it, since you’re you’, but she bit her tongue just in time to not let the words escape. Jack didn’t respond, didn’t even look at her. Rarity glared, and almost let the words slip through, just to... well, just to distract herself by starting a fight, really.
Since Rarity was not giving up in the face of blatantly being ignored, Jack sighed and looked up at her. “Well, maybe I just don’t wanna talk to you right now, and I’m keepin’ myself busy so you’ll go away,” she replied in a frustrated growl, a small protesting pop coming from the walkie-talkie in her right hand, a subtle reminder of her strength. She let the object drop to the ground and stared harsly at Rarity. “So go away.”
“You—”
“I said I don’t wanna look at you right now,” the woman snapped. “Goddamnit,” she snarled, burying her face in her hands.
Rarity swallowed. A part of her wanted to comfort the woman—and, selfishly, a part of her wanted to be comforted in return—but she did not know exactly how to go about it when one party refused to even talk about it, which in turn fed into her own frustrations on the matter. She sighed, loudly, irritably, and gave a pointed look Jack’s way, even if the farmer was not meeting the glare.
“As you wish,” she tersely answered. “And, like usual, I appreciate your reassurances as well, considering the events.”
Jack looked up at Rarity, a hot reply on the tip of her tongue. Upon seeing her more tense form and the rarely seen flash of anger in her eyes, Jack relented, albeit a hair.
“Look… can this jus’ wait? Tomorrow? Please?” she asked, her own tone more quiet, a meekness to it not normally present in her more stentorian voice.
Rarity glared for several seconds, debating with herself. The subject needed to be discussed, to be put to sleep, and she was one to face her problems and feelings head-on—and she thought that Jack was, too. Still, perhaps a rest would give them perspective, or at least a day’s distance from the horrid events. She decided to concede to Jack’s request. It wasn’t an easy, instant decision, after today it felt like there was a bottle within her ready to burst, but she knew the limits of her own stamina for tragedy, how to handle shock and despair. Better than Jack, apparently.
“Fine,” she said plainly—because what else could there be said? She could talk all day at Jack, but it would be like talking to a brick wall. “I suppose I’ll find the bedroom, then.”
Jack nodded, staring unseeingly at the floor, trying not to remember.
She did remember, of course, and it seemed that the more she tried to block it out the more it came to the forefront of her brain. Came to her brain like Karl’s brain left the premise. Elvis has left the building, hey.
There came to her a laugh at the thought that slammed into her, but Jack refrained, knowing if she started to laugh she might well not stop until the laughter turned to sobs. Instead she let out a weak snort, which she disguised by coughing, and then took to what she did best to distance herself from her thoughts and feelings.
She sat down and prepared to work.
Jack looked across the RV, searching with the same dull, plodding steps a blind figure might take across unfamiliar territory, before she came to a small cabinet in the RV’s kitchen. She opened it and spotted what she was searching for.
A ceramic mug.
Taking it, she gave a small, tuneless whistle, returning back to the sofa and plopping down. Flipping it over, she ran a thumb over the coarse ring of stone at its base.
She unsheathed the machete and took to running it over the stone, giving it a few small licks, almost as if she was trying to shave layers off the mug’s base. It was a bit cumbersome, the size of it lending itself to a few clunky swipes and movements and she nearly rolled the edge, but she eventually got through, no worse for wear. She sheathed the weapon and almost tossed it to the side, before reconsidering.
Right now, a weapon felt like it was all she had to face the threat they found themselves in. She knew she could count on Rarity, in the back of her mind, but right now she was too pissed to admit that to the rest of herself. Instead of speaking with the woman, calling out to her, hell, maybe even something as simple as telling her everything would be okay, she curled up and held the machete closer to her, a comfort, a warmth in a world that was rapidly turning colder.