Mad As Hell and Not Going to Take It Anymore

[Cactus]

One of his attacks made contact, and for a moment, there was silence. No more assaults came his way, no more strikes by way of whatever pole Ace was whacking him with. Good. One of his strikes had hit pay-dirt, and it seemed that his erstwhile teammate was no longer going to be an issue. Jeff's fury did not abate, however. His body was still sore all over, the strikes from the pole undoubtedly leaving welt after welt that he wouldn't be able to soothe at all until he left the cavern. There was no more time to waste, he needed to just do what he knew had to be done; make Paloma pay for her wanton destruction, wait until Ace came out of the cave — if he came out of the cave, and deal with him too.

Then?

Perhaps it was time to start settling some scores.

Listening for a moment, he heard nothing but heavy breathing coming from himself, though the din of the falls coming from behind him drowned out pretty much any small yet subtle sounds that he might have listened for. Nonetheless, his assessment would have to do for n—

"Hngh!"

Of all the things he'd been expecting, he hadn't anticipated the pole that he'd been assaulted with to have an end, but as he felt sharp points jabbing into his throat and his collar, the bat tumbled from Jeff's hands as he reached up to grasp the weapon. Reaching up with both hands, he felt a metallic circle that was now trapping him right around the neck. Grunting in pain, he tried to push himself backward, but was stuck.

Something pierced into the flesh of his throat as Ace pushed him towards the mouth of the cave. That son of a bitch had him; he'd let his guard down. Stupid! It was one of the reasons that the coach had given him when he'd explained why Jeff wasn't going to be playing at quarterback — your game awareness just ain't there, son. He'd taken a moment to breathe, to gloat, and now it was going to cost him.

Feeling the pressure forcing him backward, Jeff wrenched it forward, trying to push back on the pole, at the very least to prevent his throat from being pierced with whatever nasty-looking spines were at the end of his cage.

"You're a dead man, Ace! A DEAD MAN!

If nothing else, his voice still boomed over the ambient sound of the waterfall.

[MethodicalSlacker]

Jeff struggled against the grip of the man-catcher as Max started to push him towards the mouth of the cave.

With any luck, he could dangle him out over the edge, hold him under the waterfall, and the force of the water could take him away. Max twisted and turned the man-catcher to keep Jeff from getting a solid grip on the pole. If he was thinking straight, there was a good chance that Jeff could put his hands around the inside of the claw and pull it apart. Luckily, he was in too much pain for that. The downside being that Max was also in pain, and needed to get closer to his opponent in order to sustain his grip on the weapon. He slid his hands further down the pole—though he remained out of Jeff's reach, the distance between the two of them had been otherwise closed.

Though the two both pushed, it was clear who had the upper hand. Jeff was getting closer to the edge of the waterfall. Though Max's strength was waning, though each step labored him exponentially more, his focus was set. His mind was made up. Jeff Greene needed to die. Not because of his prior crimes. Not because of any relationship with objective morality, to whatever extent that existed. And certainly not because he misidentified Max.

Jeff Greene deserved this because he hurt someone Max cared about. No further justification necessary.

With a grunt, Max gave yet another shove towards the light.

[Cactus]

All throughout football season, Jeff had always held the opinion that Ace was a bit of a bitch. He wasn't as outwardly objectionable as Wyatt or as basically sociopathic as Bret. Nor did he have the same arrogant presumption that Connor the rich boy had. The running back wasn't a snivelling bitch like Kayden or a wet rag like Beau.

Okay, maybe Beau was a bit lower on the tolerance chart than Ace, but not by much.

Beau just sucked.

Either way, at a point through the year, football had stopped being fun for Jeff, and people like Ace and his ilk were why. None of them wanted to put in the effort of actually training or taking things seriously — all of them wanted to be stupid high school goofballs, and a team that could have absolutely decimated any and all competition had been average at best. It didn't help that Wyatt was running around being a menace in the halls of the school more than he did on the football field, or that Connor did literally as much as possible to avoid getting hit at all. But the worst of them all — the one that Jeff couldn't help but look down upon was Ace. The running back had held his vitriol ever since before the season had even started, trying to be mister righteous and looking to be everyone's friend. It was a load and Jeff had seen right through it.

This confrontation only affirmed everything that he'd ever thought. Ace was trying to become a killer, a poor substitute for the famous NFL star that he'd never be. All of his teammates were delusional.

He should have quit football before senior year for as much fun as he hadn't had with it.

Whatever his head was trapped in wasn't going anywhere, and Jeff fought valiantly to try and stop himself from being forced backwards. He didn't look back, but he knew that the edge of the waterfall was just steps outside of the cave; a drop from there going backwards would be deadly. What was worse, Ace didn't even dignify his insult with an answer.

"Little bitch," he snarled. "You're dead, and your little friend is going to suffer for what she's done."

Abel was never a close friend, nor someone who he truly cared all that much about, but Jeff still blamed Paloma for Sven's death, and Sven had been innocent, he had been the best of them.

Looking down at his feet, he kept stepping backwards, the light close enough that he was starting to see features. Glancing down, he was forced back another step; the waterfall getting louder and louder, the cave getting lighter and lighter as the exterior lingered close-by. Grunting again, he looked up, and was momentarily taken aback, enough that his hands loosened their grip on the pole and its strange prison.


This wasn't Ace at all. This was even worse, it was Max, one of the aforementioned pansy-assed baseball players that he'd so easily discounted. As he loosened his grip, the sharp pricks dug back into his neck. What the hell was this thing? It was something out of a damned Saw movie. As the needle-like points were pushed even further forward into his neck, Jeff grunted and threw himself to the side of the chamber. His back and shoulder slammed up against the rock wall, but the rod continued to grind itself into his throat, only his slowly sapping strength preventing him from being impaled.

Ace Ortega — bitch as he was, had a reprieve. If he had to go through Max Rudolph to get to Paloma, so be it. He had no real qualms with Max, but at this point, any chance of reasonable conversation was over.

"You," he growled. He needed to gain the upper hand and the leverage. Somehow.

[MurderWeasel]

The sounds of conflict, the grunts of pain and the clatter of weapons rebounding off each other, they were as unmistakable as they were unintelligible to Darlene. How close was it? Were those hits, or near misses? Was someone dying or dead? Impossible to say. There was a rush of movement, and then a brief flash of light from another angle—Stephanie, closer and carrying the flashlight Darlene had been so stupid not to have at the ready. But it was hard to take much in and keep it straight, especially because her glasses were gone and there was blood in her eyes.

Darlene's breathing was fast, shallow, and she knew that was bad and that she had to slow down but she couldn't, Max was fighting someone, he needed her help, and she'd lost the gun and her glasses and Stephanie should've been helping him, not over here trying to get Darlene back in action. She was fine. She would be fine, just as soon as she found what she'd lost. She could see the splatters of blood across the left side of her shirt, could see the droplets dribbling to the stone floor of the cave, but it didn't matter. She barely felt it in this moment.

Frantically, Darlene glanced around, using the light cast by Stephanie to search for anything to help, but her eyes hadn't adjusted right and it took seconds, too many seconds as the cacophony of combat slipped further away, back towards the entrance.

Then, there: a glimmer of metal, off by a wall.

Darlene surged forward towards it, a scramble on hands and knees that put the lie to any assertions that the pain was manageable or far away, but it couldn't matter yet. Her hand closed around the cool, smooth grip that had become so strangely familiar over the past days. Rearmed, she lifted herself unsteadily to her feet and did her best to run towards the brawl.

It was a stumbling, unsteady venture. Each step threatened to send her sprawling once more. The bag thumped her at the hip again and again, the dog's head bobbing wildly each time, and it was almost enough to take her down. She couldn't slow down, but she wasn't even going fast. Probably she had walked faster—probably if she slowed down and walked she would be faster now, without the constant corrections, but she couldn't.

Nothing existed except the entrance to the cave, which could only have been twenty or so feet from where she'd crawled for the gun but felt at least a mile. There was no loose rock slipping with every step, no Stephanie (trailing behind? Finding the missing glasses? Taking cover? Didn't matter; she wasn't there), no potential that someone else might be lurking still deeper within the cavern. There was only the mouth and the waterfall beyond. Darlene could see the figures there, grappling. They didn't look good, bloody and harried but the details weren't there to her dazzled, myopic eyes. Max was tangling with...

She knew the boy from somewhere, knew that facial hair of all things, but couldn't remember. In a second or two, maybe it would come to her. She didn't have that.

Darlene should've done something brave or smart or noble, but they were tangling with each other, the mancatcher linking them, and Max didn't look good but he seemed to be in control, and, and...

So she held the gun loosely, all the power it had promised seconds ago absolutely useless without a risk she wasn't willing to take.

[MethodicalSlacker]

It was within his reach.

The light poured through the entrance to the cave like the waterfall it diffused through, reaching out to take Max's prize in its bright embrace. Before that threshold there was another, a line in the rock that, once Max crossed it, the pain of continuing forward gave way to the ecstasy of seeing through a vision. This was an argument in motion. There were words in the blood pouring from his side, his shoulder, his head.

But then Jeff managed to swerve him away from the gate. He thrust himself into the wall, his back to the rough stone. They were just barely in the light, now. It caressed their bodies. Max could feel it soothing his wounds. Almost as much as Jeff's words did. A soft caress of a salty tongue. In every burning moment, resolution. Satisfaction. Piety.

"You."

"Me," Max replied. He did not possess the restraint to keep himself from smiling any longer. If he was of the mind to lie, he'd tell himself he was gritting his teeth in pain.

"And that," he continued, cocking his head towards the figure slowly making her own way out of the darkness, "isn't who you think she is.

"She is innocent. And, in hurting an innocent, you are not. Hunmph. Cannot be. Innocent. Hngh. Not that you ever. Mngh. Were."

Max brought his hands further down the man-catcher and brought it back by just an inch and for just a moment to readjust its position on his neck. The teeth on the sides, angled inwards, punctured his skin. Then, Max brought the teeth in alignment with the collar and pushed on the man-catcher with all of his remaining strength.

"Not that I ever was, either."

And then there was—

[Cactus]

The little shit was smiling. Like some sort of a ridiculous movie villain, he forced Jeff back against the wall of the cavern, ever-so-close to the lip of the precipice below. If this was his last villainous monologue, he was doing a piss-poor job, and Jeff punctuated each word with a struggle. While Jeff knew that he himself had a reputation as someone with a bit of a hard edge, this Max guy was something else. Whatever the hell he was blathering on about, Jeff didn't know. He wasn't truly listening. All he did know was that as Max readjusted his grip to bring his hand right up to the teeth of this ridiculous contraption that was digging into his neck, he was going to fight tooth and nail until he hurled this pretentious ass off the waterfall himself, so he could get to Paloma. She needed to pay.

Seizing a moment once Max stopped talking, Jeff let his hands free from the ring and grabbed Max's arm; he may as well have been aiding him in strangulation were the baseball player's hands actually around his throat. This would have to do. Jeff wasn't about to let him go — two could play at this game.

"Go to hell," he snarled, about ready to make his move, when something caught his eye from within the cavern. He glanced over, and instantly he felt like he'd been punched in the stomach; relaxing his grip on Max for a moment.

He didn't even feel the needles of the man-catcher pierce his collar, he was too shocked to register the beeping noise. Instead, all of his attention was on the figure that was lurching, bloodied and beaten, out of the cave. He knew exactly what Paloma Salt looked like; she'd been crazy and dishevelled when he'd last seen her, but this girl? This was someone else entirely.

Jeff Greene had screwed up. He'd attacked the wrong person. Who the heck was she? Jeff couldn't place her. He stared at her, his brow furrowed and his moustache curled back with his lip in disbelief.

"Wait a minute, you're not Palom—"

He should have been paying attention to the beeping noise, because in mid-sentence, his collar exploded, taking his throat, part of the man-catcher and most of his hands with it. For the split-second of life that Jeff Greene had left, he saw blood spray everywhere, and he saw the horrified expression from the girl's face.

She wasn't who he'd thought she was.

She was— she was no one.

Just like, in the end, Jeff was. He was a nobody, a never was. As he felt the life leave his body, all he could feel was a mixture of confusion and disappointment. All of the hard work that he'd put in throughout his life, and it all ended suddenly. He'd slipped, he'd taken his off the ball and made assumptions, assuming that he knew better and that he was doing the right thing. He had been so certain. This had to be Paloma, this had to be Ace!

It was why Jeff Greene had never made quarterback.

It was why Jeff Greene could never avenge anyone.

It was why Jeff Greene was damned from the start.

Jeff had made an assumption and in the end, he was wrong; and now, he was dead before his body hit the floor of the cavern.

B62 - GREENE, JEFF -- DECEASED

[MethodicalSlacker]

—a bright flash, and a loud sound—

—Max flew back from Jeff and fell in a heap on the floor—

—As did the fingers on his hand that was furthest down the man-catcher, closest to the collar—

—Shrapnel had burst out, bits and pieces of collar and man-catcher slicing up his face. Blood seeped from every orifice on his head.










Except for his mouth.

"Darlene," he croaked, struggling hard.

Everything in pain.

[MurderWeasel]

Darlene was too slow. There wasn't anything she could've done anyways, except maybe get perforated by shrapnel, but it didn't feel that way. Her shuffling, unsteady gait felt like a failure. She hadn't even realized what the beeping was, or maybe she could've called out, maybe she could've shot the boy and and aborted the sequence somehow, maybe she could've... done something. Something. She had to do something.

The explosion echoed through the cavern, reverberations shaking her physically, sensations washing over her—the flash of light was too bright, the afterimage left her blinking green and blue, and the sound was too loud, left everything a ringing wail, and she was bleeding from the right forearm now, where a searing hot and sharp piece of something had flown past and gashed and burned her below the elbow, but that wasn't what mattered. It wasn't where her focus was. She had to get there. She had to do something, to stop this from going wrong, even though it was already as wrong as it could possibly be.

Her finger had found the trigger of the revolver at some point, had squeezed it all the way back, but she hadn't cocked the gun. She was only loosely aware of its presence, as she finally, belatedly staggered to Max's side and collapsed. It was only because her hands were full when they needed to be empty. She would have dropped it, but she needed something from her bag so she didn't, letting it rest nestled up against the dog as she pulled out the first aid kit with its cheerful white and red plastic shell. It looked so clean, so untouched. It felt smooth and slick and in that moment maybe it was enough, maybe it would be the magic she needed.

Max called her name.

She knew half because she heard it, a distant whisper over the roaring of falling water and echoing pain, and half because she saw it, the shadows of lip movement behind the fragmented glow that blotted out most of the world. It was one of the few details she could discern, with all that had happened, with her glasses gone.

She reached out towards Max, let her fingers touch the side of his face. They were bloody and he was bloody and she didn't know whose it was.

"It's, I, it's, we'll fix this," she stammered. She could feel herself messing up, missing words, but could barely even perceive her own voice. "It's okay, we'll fix this, I'll figure it out, we'll find Jonah..."

[MethodicalSlacker]

"Don't."

He called and she was there. Always.

Max tried to raise his hand, but couldn't. His left hand had no fingers. His right was attached to a shoulder that had just about given out.

Nothing was moving, actually. Nothing but his lips and his eyelids and his lungs and his heart, and he didn't know for how long.

Couldn't.

There wasn't much left in Max that could want.

What little there was wanted to rest.

To rest, and to say goodbye.

"Don't speak a word."

The sound of the waterfall was peaceful.

It was simple.

He could drown in it.

Max liked the sound.

It was a nice sound.

Max wretched violently forward and coughed up blood onto himself before falling back down to the ground.

He looked up at her and he smiled.

"The time for words is over, Darlene.

It's loooong...

gone."

It was getting darker.

The cave was already dark.

Something twitched in his heart cavity. Max felt something pushing down on his chest, and his breathing got sharp for a few moments before he felt it slow.

"This is taking a while, Darlene."

"Ha."

[MurderWeasel]

Darlene knelt there, above Max, shivering and shaking, watching and listening. She didn't speak.

No words, he'd said. There weren't a lot of things Darlene was really especially good at. Mostly she was average, or kind of below average. Maybe a little better when it came to a few talents that didn't count for anything, singing or slipping into the background when things got scary. But if there was one thing she could do, one thing she was better at than maybe anyone else she knew, it was falling silent when all that needed had been said.

Small droplets of blood dripped from her head and shoulder. She only noticed because they were speckling everything under her, Max and the first aid kit and the floor of the cave. Everything felt cool and smooth. The world smelled like fire and dirt.

She wanted to hum again. To purse her lips and vibrate until the universe was right, somehow, incredibly, but her mouth was dry and she couldn't conjure the meaningless sound. She should've been opening the first aid kit but she wasn't. She knew, just like Max did.

All she could think to offer was a hand on his shoulder, as light as she could. But it didn't feel like enough. It was nothing. She wanted him to know, to understand, to somehow be better.

Slowly, painfully, Darlene leaned over and touched her forehead softly against Max's, held it there.

[MethodicalSlacker]

"Thanks."

He liked the warmth of her head.

He liked the pressure.

Max had a center.

It was good.




















"Sing me a song."

[MurderWeasel]

For a few long moments, Darlene had nothing. She was empty, lost, put on the spot and freezing like she always did. It was a simple request. It was nothing. The least she could do. But nothing came that was right.

Darlene mostly knew two types of songs: Christmas songs and love songs. She sang the former much more often, no matter the day of the year. People teased her or complained to her about it, sometimes, but that didn't matter. She didn't care. Christmas was what you made of it. For Darlene, it was a state of mind, one she sought whenever she could. She didn't even believe in Jesus.

There was nothing Christmas about this. It was way, way too real. Her world was entirely comprised of what seemed to be a little circle of light and blood where she and Max were. The dead boy beyond wasn't there. Stephanie wasn't there. Nobody else was, and nothing. It was just the faintly fading warmth and the smoothness and that one request, and she almost choked and failed.

But she didn't.

Something snapped into place, something she knew she could do without other voices or music or anything, something that it had been a while since she'd broken out but that she didn't even have to think about. Darlene opened her mouth and notes fell loose, quietly at first and then just a little louder.

"My young love said to me, 'my mother won't mind,'" Darlene sang, and as was often the case she found the steadiness and certainty that eluded her in so many other attempts at verbal communication suddenly easy, "'and my father won't slight you for your lack of kind...'"

Far too late to change course, she realized that, like so many other love songs, this was also a ghost song.

[MethodicalSlacker]

Max opened his mouth.

[decoy73]

Stephanie just looked at the fight. Max was fighting a guy, looked like one of the football players. Darlene had gotten up, going somewhere to her left. The fighting was at a

BOOM

Stephanie flinched at the light and sound, covering her eyes from the flash and blinking the spots out of her eyes. She then pointed her light at the source of the explosion. There was the big rod thing, part of which had been blown up. The new guy's neck was just a sea of red, and it had done a number on Max. He was, he was

gone.

And Darlene was singing some song. A sad one, as Max just faded away like Christine had on the first day. There wasn't anything she could really do about it. Stephanie just put her free hand on Darlene's shoulder, for all the good it did.

"Can you promise me everything's going to turn out alright? Like, everyone's going to come out of this just fine?"

And it came to her. The answer was no. Because everything was not going to turn out alright. They weren't going to be fine. This was as far as they could take it. Singing sweet nothings to make it feel a little better for a little while.

[MurderWeasel]

"...and she laid her hand on me, and this she did say, 'It will not be long, love, till our wedding day.'"

Darlene got really quiet for a while.

At first it was like she was locked in a cell. It was just the little circle around her that was real, and now Max no longer occupied that space except in some meaningless technical physical sense. It was pretty dark and Darlene couldn't see a lot, even when there were some moments when things got lighter for a little for some reason. There was no distinct temperature, no real sensations except cool smooth flesh against her forehead, but that was feeling less comfortable and more clammy by the moment.

Finally, little by little, details came back in.

First was the sound. The waterfall thundered around in the background, and that grew or else the ringing in Darlene's ears faded. As she became more aware of it, she pieced it together: the waterfall itself was still there, somewhere outside her bubble, untouched by what had happened. That meant other things were there, too.

The cave, for one, with its slightly chilly air and the earthy scent with faint hints of decomposition and wetness, now cut with undertones of blood and burning. Little nubs of rock were digging into Darlene's legs, making her uncomfortable, but she couldn't properly will herself to get up. The position she was holding made her feel very tense and stuff, but anything else felt like it would require an impossible amount of effort to move into.

Next came the blood. Blood was still trickling from the wounds in her scalp and shoulder and ear. It felt like a whole lot of blood, but Darlene had never really been hurt that badly in the course of her life. It felt like a whole lot of blood the time she was helping her mom cut vegetables and the knife went sideways off the zucchini for some reason and cut a little flap of skin partially loose from her left index finger. She'd screamed and cried and been sure she was going to at least lose the finger, but her mom had washed it off and put some stinging liquid on it and patted it dry and then wrapped it up in band-aids and Darlene hadn't even needed stitches. You could barely even see the little bit of scar left now. She'd been twelve.

She was thinking she should maybe do something about the blood dripping out of her now, which was a lot more than back then but felt less immediately disastrous somehow, when a final piece of the puzzle fell into place: the weight on Darlene's good shoulder wasn't some metaphorical construct or muscle tension, but a hand. She turned and looked up at Stephanie and felt at the same time abruptly very guilty and very angry.

Darlene didn't open her mouth for a few seconds. She let the feelings circle around and still couldn't figure out what to do with them, and so ultimately decided she didn't have to decide right now. There were other things to take care of.

She stood, shrugging the hand off, feeling in her bag and finally finding the flashlight she should've had at the ready to begin with. Darlene clicked it on, swept it over the floor of the cave, caught the twin circles of reflection a few yards away that were her glasses. She fixed the spot in her mind, pivoted a quarter turn, and tossed the flashlight out of the cave, underhand, to be caught by the falling waters and carried away.

Darlene staggered over to where the glasses were, then groped around because even though she'd seen, even though she knew, it was hard to find them in the dark. When she picked them up, she could feel that the left arm was bent pretty bad where she'd been hit. She worked at it, bracing with her thumbs, and twisted the metal back into kind of the right shape. Semi-straight. She put the glasses on and it was so dark she couldn't see any better at all.

Step by step, she made her way back to the lighter place where Max was and sunk back down to the ground next to him, but more comfortably now. She glanced over and just like that, the boy who was dead off to the side came swimming back into her memory. He'd played football, but that wasn't what had made the biggest impression on her. It was mustache, from the party. He'd been in the Truth or Dare circle with the girl who'd gotten her breasts out, and Darlene had been so focused on other parts of that that he'd seemed kind of innocuous aside from his ugly mustache but now here they were. She maybe hadn't recognized him sooner because the rest of his facial hair had come in more over the past week, or because she'd had other things on her mind.

"I think I'm going to go soon," she said to Stephanie.