Circle Of Steel

[MurderWeasel]

((Darlene Silva continued from But, What Ends When the Symbols Shatter?))

"Jonah?" Darlene called, for the half dozenth time in as many minutes. She wasn't sure whether to bellow at the top of her lungs or whisper as quietly as she could, and so split the difference, landing at a place that swung just above or below her normal speaking voice but was intoned nothing like it. She sounded to herself like an actor trying to fake whisper for the people in the back row, poorly. "Arizona? Anybody here?"

The houses were, Darlene was surprised to find, quite charming. They were little cookie-cutter replicas, small but cozy-looking. She could imagine maybe having one day lived in a house like one of these, or hopefully just a little bigger. It would've been a nice home, a good place to be with a bunch of neighbors and everyone's kids riding the school bus together. It would've taken a little bit of work to get them up to modern standards, but she could sort of imagine what they'd look like in the winter all decked out in beautiful blinking lights with a blanket of snow.

It probably never snowed here, ever, but that was okay. It barely snowed in Chattanooga either. The last time it snowed on Christmas, Darlene was ten. It wasn't even that much. She felt like she'd never had a proper snow experience and now she never would, and she was a bit sad about that for sure, but that wasn't really a thing to be getting her head tangled up in now.

They had not force-marched the entire way back and then searched ever since, much as that had been her initial plan. It had just not been practical. Darlene had almost fallen asleep while walking, even more than when she spent all night reading WIkipedia and then had gym class the next morning, and it had been hard to navigate in the dark, so at some point or other they'd rested and she'd gotten a little sleep and then the announcements had played and a whole bunch more people were dead or had killed. Fortunately, this didn't include anyone Darlene was close enough to to really know super well. She'd had to ask Max when they said Lucas, because even Darlene knew they had a few of those, but it was not the Lucas they'd left with Kelly. And Kelly hadn't killed anyone at all since they left her, so actually that plan had worked out okay! Darlene was kind of proud of that but had not brought it up because the whole situation was still a sort of awkward subject and better let lie.

The dog bounced around in Darlene's bag like usual. The Claw seemed different today, like some of the menace had drained out of it. Maybe she was just getting used to the proximity. Maybe she was more comfortable around Max.

What she was not more comfortable with was the overall state of affairs, because there were a whole bunch of people dead and even though the people she especially wanted to see had been spared, who could say when someone would jump out and attack them? The reminders had eaten at her calm and security some, so Darlene had the gun back in her hand, not armed and readied (she had learned her lesson, really!) but still there, just in case.

She walked along the streets methodically but not super quickly, dragging her feet along so they scrape-scraped through the gravel and dirt. She still felt sweaty and gross. The late morning sun was better than the deluge in the way getting called on to answer a question you didn't know was better than coming into class fifteen minutes late and being forced to stand in front of the room and do jumping jacks. And while this place wasn't huge, there were quite a few houses and she had totally and completely lost track of where among them they were and which ones they'd walked by already, and they hadn't even started knocking on doors yet. And that was just looking at the part where the buildings were mostly intact!

"I was—am, um, I... I thought they came this way," Darlene said to Max, rubbing her right elbow with her left hand. Her right hand wrapped loosely around the gun, but she kept it pointed down at the dirt.

It had been quite some time since they all got separated, and Darlene had had to guess at their destination based on incomplete information. She could've been wrong, and the pair could've gone somewhere way different, could be hiding in the woods in a little hut. Or they could've come here but left, maybe made some sign as to their next stop that would never be found because the trail had gone cold and there were just too many houses. Maybe she'd misunderstood entirely. Maybe they'd dropped the bag of marshmallows because it was too heavy and a monkey had run off with them, some of them falling out as the bag was dragged. Maybe Jonah had meant something else completely.

"We'll find them," Darlene insisted, scanning the rows of identical buildings, watching for movement—Jonah-shaped or otherwise.

[MethodicalSlacker]

"Yes, we will," he said as he followed Darlene through the rows of houses.

The air was hot and sticky today. A thin layer of sweat coated everything, from person to person to building to tree. The smell of hot death hung in the air. It hit Max's nose like a wall, like peanut butter. As with the haze of the heat, Max's thoughts were similarly unplaceable. The morning announcements had barely registered with him. He had almost slept right through them, waking up only a minute or two before the reading began. As a matter of fact, almost all of the various names from previous days had fallen from his head. If he were to resume his prosecution of his senior class, he'd have no idea where to begin anymore. There were the few who he was reminded of each morning due to their prolific status as serial murderers, but anyone with one or two or even three kills to their name was out of Max's recollection.

Despite this, he felt an odd serenity settle over him as the day wore on. It was fine that he had not found anyone, friend or foe, because... well, there was no reason. It was simply fine. It was all fine. There was no point in forming an emotional response to his surroundings beyond quiet contentment. This situation was absurd. Logic could only apply for so long before it crumbled under the weight of coincidence. At any moment, in any place, he could be shot by someone hiding behind a tree, or a bush, or in a building, but this was no different than his everyday life, in which he could at any moment have a heart attack, or a brain aneurysm, or be hit by a car, or any number of deaths. The only thing that had changed was the immediacy of death, its relative proximity to his person—or had that changed at all?

He still carried the claw.

"Yes," Max repeated under his breath.

"We will."

[Max Rudolph continued from But, What Ends When the Symbols Shatter?]

[decoy73]

((Stephanie McDonald continued from Big Spender))

Things had happened? Stephanie might have seen a fight or two, but she'd turned around as soon as things got ugly. The people in question were of no bearing to her. They were just ... noise. More people had died. Gervais had apparently died in some danger zone for, reasons. She didn't care much of what.

Now, she was, somewhere? There were people, two of them. They weren't fighting, just moving along.

She did? Didn't want to be alone? She did know that she was alone, and that maybe this would do something. She cared? Maybe? She couldn't really put her finger on what it was she was feeling.

[MurderWeasel]

For some reason, when Max echoed Darlene's own words back to her, she found herself struggling to believe them.

"Yeah," she said, pointlessly. Agreeing with his agreement with her. She made more dirt circles with her toe. The tip of her right sneaker was getting kind of torn up, with a few frayed ends sticking out from the fabric, but it still held to her feet and that was enough. There probably wouldn't be time for it to fall apart more and become a problem.

Darlene sniffled, then rubbed at her nose with the back of her non-gun hand. She wanted to put her sweater back on but it was probably not to be, even though she'd managed to get it dry; it was so warm and she was sweaty and sticky as-is, and she'd acclimated enough to her present circumstances that thinking about adding heat to it was enough to make her balk.

Looking at Max right now felt much more difficult than it should've been, so Darlene just didn't try. She was conserving energy, and also staying on guard. Her gaze swept over the buildings, trying to decide if they should start knocking on doors, trying to decide which to start with. Maybe the robin's egg blue one? It looked calm and peaceful. Or, or maybe the red one! There was one that was bright red almost but not quite the same color as the sweater Jonah had seen returned to her back at school. Would he wait there? Was it a hidden message?

The world went still for a second as the wheels in Darlene's head turned. Jonah, hidden meanings... the rainbow! Marshmallows or no, this was the rainbow. The houses here, in a bunch of different colors, it was perfect. It must have been what he was telling her, proof she was on the right track. The energy poured right back into her, brought vigor back to her heavy limbs, but then seconds later was sucked straight back out by the clawing vacuum of realization: if Darlene hadn't known in advance that the houses here would be multicolored, then Jonah wouldn't have known either, because they'd been together from the very start of this until he left the message and split. She tried to tell herself that wasn't necessarily the case, that maybe Arizona had been here before they met and had told him, but tricking herself on purpose always made her feel extra stupid when she couldn't make herself forget that she was doing it.

This whole emotional arc took place while she scanned the windows and yards and little pathways between buildings, and occupied so much attention that it took her a half second to realize she'd just seen someone else. Darlene's head slowly clicked a degree back the way it had just been. The figure was a girl who was tall but not Arizona tall, and more importantly was blond and pink-clothed in a decidedly not-Arizona way.

Darlene recognized her, but only in the sense where she'd seen the girl around school. She was one of those really unbelievably pretty girls in this way that felt extremely unfair and made Darlene hate her some in this passive and petty and impersonal way, and that was not the right first impression to carry here but there weren't any other options because Darlene definitely didn't know her name. She raised her left hand again and pushed at her glasses, not accomplishing anything except dirtying up the bottoms of the lenses even more, and they were already all smudged with hand and nose oil and little specks of dead skin crud or whatever usually gunked them up.

Darlene stared hard at the girl, who even at a good distance was clearly not quite so pretty and perfect after days in the wild but still looked unfairly nice, and then pivoted her eyes to Max, though kept track of the newcomer in her peripheral vision. She tugged at his sleeve and nodded towards the girl.

"What do we do?" she asked.

[MethodicalSlacker]

Max felt a tug and heard a wish and looked forward. The person he saw in the distance was one with whom he was vaguely familiar. She was a member of the gay-straight alliance, and a poor student. The story essentially authored its own existence. Max felt a wave of disgust coming on, the deep-seated bias he had towards those befitting of these descriptors struggling back up to the surface after a short period of relative dormancy.

He sighed. Keeping these thoughts out of his mind floated back up near the top of his priority list. Whether or not Max would have liked a person before mattered no longer. More important was the person they decided to be, under duress. Max had no way of knowing if this person in the distance had chosen the path of violence or of peacefulness until he further met them. But, then, it didn't seem especially as if she had much to threaten Max and Darlene with, so it was more likely that she was in need of guidance. She looked lost. Max was lost, once.

"I think we should call out to her," Max said, taking a step away from Darlene. He cupped his hands around his mouth and made efforts to project especially well. Elocution was one of Max's strong suits, but he worried that the last few days of stress had not been especially good for his vocal cords.

"Hey, you," he called, "you look lost. Are you looking for something?"

[decoy73]

There was something. Someone. A guy. With a girl. Calling to her.

"I ... maybe?" She looked in the general direction of the pair. One looking like a frumpy librarian, the other, the guy who spoke, quite chic, definitely good enough taste to go out for a casual night. "I think I'm okay?" It was all just noise, though.

[MurderWeasel]

They were calling out. That was the plan. Right, okay, Darlene was fine with that. She was especially fine because while Max had framed engagement as a group effort, he was the one to do the actual hailing. Darlene had been having a little trouble getting her vocalizations to come out right. She was glad not to try again.

When he moved away from her, Darlene took a half step behind him, fidgeting back and forth, patting the dog with her free hand as she rested her thumb on top of the revolver's arming apparatus. It wasn't that she was getting ready to shoot the newcomer, honest! It was just that, that things could really suddenly take a turn, and they could come under fire from someone hidden somewhere, or the girl could run at them and pull out a big knife or something. And if that did happen, well, then Darlene didn't want to have to waste time getting ready to get ready to start shooting.

The interloper sounded dazed. She did not answer Max properly—it seemed like she was operating on cruise control, responding to the expected greeting question ("How are you?") instead of what was actually asked. Darlene could relate, but also it spiked her anxiety. Something bad had happened. If this girl was Jonah or Max or Arizona, Darlene would've run to her and thrust the dog into her arms and maybe hummed more. But a stranger? Her eyes narrowed behind her dirty glasses, and her lips pressed together tightly, and she started looking around, pivoting her head back and forth as she swept the street with a conscious focus that had eluded her mere moments ago.

The houses didn't seem quite so homey now. There were no white picket fences. There were no fences at all. No privacy, then, no ability to keep others out, to have your own time and space. There weren't really yards. The ramshackle paint jobs spoke of joy and uniqueness, of celebration of difference, but that was only the outer layer. Beneath, every building was the same prefabricated construct. The doors sat in the same orientation, the windows alike in size and distribution between each. Had this been so with the people, too? You can be a little different, the place said, as long as you're fundamentally the same.

At least it made it easier to take inventory. Darlene gave each house a second at most.

Near corner: anyone peering out? Scan from ground to eaves. Take in empty space, dusty road, check for obvious disturbances of dirt. The rain days ago had wiped the slate clean, so she expected anything amiss would be fresh and easy to see.

Front of house: door open or closed or slightly ajar? Front window, intact or shattered? Open or closed? Blinds drawn? Anyone up on the roof? Tracks or signs of recent activity?

Streets between and in front of buildings: anything at all different from the flat span of hard-packed dirt and gravel broken sporadically by tangled weeds? Areas of disturbance to the plants? The glint of metal from abandoned equipment? The lumpy evidence of a shallow grave?

Darlene felt so focused, like she'd never been before ever in her life, but she found nothing. Nothing! No, wait—brown house, down the street, a splatter of something in the entrance, a reddish brown smear on the door, old and dry. It couldn't be related to this girl, could it? She was coming from the other direction.

Once, twice, Darlene tapped her thumb against the hammer of the revolver, though she did not pull it back.

[MethodicalSlacker]

The answer reassured Max not. It seemed like she was stammering out the answer to a question he had not asked. Regardless of her physical well-being, she was mentally absent in some form, and needed guidance. He was more than happy to oblige, if she would simply request his help.

"Maybe," Max repeated, looking to Darlene for a moment. She looked nervous. Jumpy. A wholly understandable response, and one that he empathized with. They had come across a wandering stranger who possessed an unknown capacity for violence. For her hand to hover pendant over her gun was natural.

"What complicates things?" Max asked as he turned back to the stranger, "what makes things a maybe instead of a yes?"

Instinctively, his hand tightened ever so slightly around the pole of the man-catcher.

[decoy73]

What makes it a maybe. The guy was asking her. Her body was fine, so obviously that wasn't the problem. It was

"J-Jessica." Stephanie just slumped over.

[MurderWeasel]

When Max turned to Darlene, she stopped tapping the gun and did her best to not convey how guilty she suddenly felt. She shouldn't be treating it lightly. Well, she wasn't! But she had to be more ready for other things, too. She was pretty much ready for if the girl ran at them. But was she ready for if this was just more talking? She had to be ready to make it not a repeat of what happened with Beryl. She'd promised Jonah.

That was the other thing she was keeping watch for, because she was worried that if things sounded too dangerous or tense then Jonah—if he was even anywhere near here, which he might not be to begin with—would leave. Maybe he'd be being smart, but more likely he'd be taking care of Arizona, or maybe being taken care of by her. But if they got scared away without Darlene seeing them because of something she'd done, she'd never forgive herself, and if she didn't find evidence that that was what had happened but also didn't find them here it would be so very easy to just assume she was to blame.

As Max dug into the newcomer's words, Darlene peered around more, eyes getting narrower and narrower. Sometimes when she was a kid she'd liked to squeeze her eyes super tight but not all the way, either to turn the world into a blurry greyscale slit and pretend it was night, or to feign like she was asleep so her parents wouldn't know she was spying. It had taken a few years before she'd figured out that they'd always known, the whole entire time, because when she really was asleep her face probably didn't get all scrunched and wrinkled. This wasn't quite that much squinting, but everything did look a little different still, less defined. She was waiting for something to pop out and grab her attention, change or clarify everything, but nothing did.

The figure before them moved, but mostly just into a vague position of defeat. Darlene could barely make out the name the girl uttered, and it meant nothing to her. She looked at Max and let her eyes un-squint.

"Who's Jessica?" she said, pretty quiet she thought but she wasn't whispering and maybe she should've been.

[MethodicalSlacker]

"Jessica Rennes," Max answered.

He remembered that one. It was one of the names that registered during yesterday's fugue. A mere day ago, when he was still chasing his foolish, maladaptive goal of keeping some kind of peace. As woefully ineffective as he was, he did become adept at acquiring names and causes of death. Had he forgotten Jessica, he'd have made the terrible mistake of asking Stephanie how she passed on. Even the Max of two days ago would have languished upon hearing this. A suicide left no murderer to punish.

Just as an accident did.

"I'm sorry for your loss," he said, "really, I am."

There was something inside him that wanted to take those words back. A small, weak, pathetic thing, an impulse against the kind of relationship Jessica and Stephanie had nestled deep inside the core aortic chambers of his heart. He'd spent the last few years of his life giving in to that instinct. The desire to distance himself from what he perceived as unnatural bonds. Weeks ago he would have looked down upon Stephanie for who she was. Perhaps in one of his lapses of tact he would have thought to himself that Jessica's death freed Stephanie to pursue the right way to exist, free from hedonistic impulse and homosexual tendency.

Max had not truly gotten over that side of himself. He had not learned on a whim to accept others. An embrace did not magically change every stance he had ever settled on regarding the lives of others. In truth, Max knew it was likely that he would die unmoved, outside the bounds of tolerance.

But what he had learned was just how little his opinions mattered at a time like this.

"Maybe we should find a place to rest," he said to Darlene, though loud enough that Stephanie could hear, "we've been searching for some time, and I feel like Stephanie is someone we ought to look after for a while."

[decoy73]

"I'm sorry for your loss. Really, I am."

That was ... comforting. Maybe. Things were still a little muddled. She just looked at the guy. He seemed to be feeling for her.

"Maybe we should find a place to rest. We've been searching for some time, and I feel like Stephanie is someone we ought to look after for a while."

Stephanie nodded and stepped towards the pair. Yes. Rest was good.

[MurderWeasel]

Darlene was able to not frown, mostly, but only because of the situation being pretty serious. Max was trying to help, she thought. He was distracted and acting a little strange—had been since yesterday—and he had answered the question, but the problem was that "Jessica Rennes" did not mean much more to Darlene than just "Jessica" had. The surname stirred vague recollections of hearing substitute teachers call it for attendance, but that was it. There was no face, no voice, no concept of a person behind it.

At least the next piece provided a slightly better idea. Jessica was a loss to this girl, ergo probably she was dead because that was what was happening to everyone here now. Maybe that was where Darlene knew the name from, then, instead of class. She could sort of believe that, could imagine the voice blasting out and calling it, but when it came to what it was paired with all she had was imagination. Chopped up by Quinn? Strangled by Erika? Napped in the wrong spot and got exploded? Darlene's conception of the killers as a category was generally honed to "Quinn and Erika" because those names came up so much even she had internalized them and also because she didn't know who either of them was at all so they could've been anyone she met anyways. If whoever did Jessica in had been someone Darlene was listening for, Kelly or Lucas or someone less likely to kill but doing it in self defense like Jonah or Arizona, then she would've noticed for sure. When it came to other forms of demise, sleeping in a bad place was the easiest pick because Darlene was pretty sure it had happened to a few people now and also it was scary but bland. If somebody had tried to swim away and been gobbled up by sharks, or a tree had been struck by lightning and fallen and crushed them, or they'd blown themselves up with a whole bunch of fireworks, probably that would've stuck?

But none of that mattered! Max was suggesting they stop and rest (Darlene could sort of get behind that even if she felt a little guilty that they weren't going to keep looking until they fell over) and watch over Stephanie. Darlene was grateful that he'd named the newcomer, and promised herself she'd remember better this time, but also she was really not sure about that.

They had a job to do. They were finding Jonah and Arizona. Did Stephanie care about that? Maybe she did, maybe she was one of their good friends and they just hadn't mentioned her, but why wouldn't they? She wasn't one of Max's good friends; she wasn't acting right for that at all and neither was he. So in all likelihood Stephanie had no real reason to help them on their search, and she was someone who would require looking after for "a while." How did Darlene feel about that?

Not very happy, that was how.

She wanted to protest and say they had to keep moving and searching. She wanted to say she still didn't know who Jessica was or who Stephanie was. She wanted to ask to vote on it.

But also?

She wanted to do what Max wanted, and he wanted to look after Stephanie. And she wanted to do what Jonah would want, and he was exactly the sort of person who would take some totally random girl along and look after her for no particularly good reason just because that's who he was. That was the whole reason Darlene was looking for him in the first place. So fine, they would look after Stephanie for a while.

A little while. The search wasn't going to just end.

"Okay," Darlene said, nodding a couple times with slightly more enthusiasm than strictly necessary. "Let's go find a place to rest."

She moved her thumb way away from the gun lever because it was pretty settled now that nobody needed to get shot. She glanced at her feet and there was a big smooth circle around her right shoe where she'd rubbed all the little rocks and sticks and assorted crud away, leaving just the packed dirt. There was still no sign of anyone else.

"We can keep looking in the morning," she insisted.

[MethodicalSlacker]

Max nodded in confirmation, delighted that Darlene had assumed his position once more. He was also pleased that Stephanie had decided to come with them. She looked more out of sorts with each passing moment. Finding a shelter before nightfall was of the highest priority. Luckily, they happened to be in the one location with an abundance of suitable buildings. Thus began the game of attempting to determine which buildings were hospitable and worthy of their passage through the night.

But not too hospitable. Max possessed no means of determining which of the houses were already occupied. He ruled out the most healthily intact houses for this reason, if only mentally—he'd refrain from sharing this train of thought with Stephanie, for fear of startling her into an even worse emotional state. God forbid they discover a corpse in a front room before Max had time to go ahead and check the house, sending Stephanie into some kind of paralytic shock that he would be unable to wake her from, saddling himself and Darlene with dead weight. What Max was looking for was a vague middle ground between a house that looked relatively untouched by years of disuse, and one that had caved in on itself. A house that others would write off for lack of luxury, one that had an obvious fault, but not an abundance of faults.

He picked a house with some debris on the door, weird bits of fabric and stains of dried darkness, likely faded blood. Most people wouldn't pick to stay in a house with a damaged front entrance, if given the chance. It was nearly a perfect fit for Max's criteria.

"I see a place that looks promising," he said to the girls, "I'll go up and check it out."

With that, he took off at a brisk jogging pace towards the house, eager to get there before Darlene and Stephanie decided if they would follow. His man-catcher felt new again in his hands. If someone jumped out at him, he'd hold them back. If someone was hiding inside, he had leverage on them, a threat he didn't need to make. This wasn't for his own safety. This was to hold threats away from Darlene and Stephanie.

Max took the steps up to the front door, lightly tapped the base of it with the blunt end of the man-catcher, and waited for a moment, listening for movement inside the house.

Nothing.

Good. That was what Max was listening for. The absence of sound. Silence and tranquility, signifying everything. He opened the door and stepped inward.

Had he noticed that the window on the door had been destroyed, he might have thought twice before doing so.

[decoy73]

Stephanie looked at the pair as they headed towards a house. The guy had some pole. Max. That was his name. She was starting to remember things, or at least she was able to focus enough or for long enough to do so.

She headed to the house, following Max and his friend. They could go inside, maybe, where they could hide. Maybe. Was he checking?

"Is it okay in there?"