Watchmen: Red Sky (3/?)
Aug. 5th, 2010 09:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
what_we_dreamTitle: Red Sky (3/?)
Series: Watchmen
Pairing: Dan/Rorschach
Rating: PG-13
Notes: This is UNFINISHED and will remain so. Comic-verse.
Summary: The world doesn't end. So it's up to the capes to clean up the mess. Isn't it?
Rorschach’s journal, November 4th 1985 (later)
Momentary fear Dreiberg would refuse to accept sister’s demise by starting crusade. Am now convinced of validity of new search – in his eyes. Will accompany him to find sister, no further.
Lawlessness already rampant. Witnessed five incidents of breaking and entering – Dreiberg discounted three. Also saw purported “physicians” selling drugs on street-corners; clearly drug dealers taking advantage of lack of pharmacies to hook new audience. Dealt with one while Dreiberg was assisting a woman to fetch child out of over-turned car where it was playing – as though further indication of lack of survival instinct in those under 20 were necessary.
Evening will come soon – soon the city’s new nocturnal face will show itself and I will be ready.
CHAPTER 3
While they can do more good on the streets, they travel quicker underground, and Daniel has already made so many sacrifices for this cause that one more hardly hurts. Rorschach is becoming restless behind him, and Daniel knows he wants to be preparing for nightfall, for dealing with the rise of fall in crime as it comes.
Daniel himself suspects it may still be too early to expect complete chaos after the hours of dark. He hopes so. But he knows Rorschach’s point isn’t invalid. And still, he keeps the man with him by his silence. Part of it is to keep Rorschach out of trouble, to keep him from getting in Veidt’s crosshairs.
Part of it is because, after everything he’s lost, he can’t stand to lose Rorschach too. Logically that’s a stupid sentiment, he knows. Using Rorschach as a second touchstone after Jenny and Nicole may be like buying a cat for comfort – its presence reassures you but when push comes to shove it’s only there because you’re feeding it and doesn’t understand the deeper reassurances you want from it. 8 years ago he would have disputed that as unfair. Even in the early years of Keene, maybe. But it’s been a long time, and from outside sources at least in the past few years Rorschach’s only slid closer towards cold and violent psychosis.
But then, he was never one to listen to other peoples’ judgements.
They come up out of the manhole in an alley near Park and 60th to find the air thick with a familiar stench. This time Daniel doesn’t try to ignore it, immediately drapes a hand over his mouth as his stomach curls and spasms coldly. Tears a strip off the hem of his shirt and ties it around his nose, then glances at Rorschach who seems mostly unaffected. It hadn’t occurred to him before how much of the smell the mask might be blocking out. Rorschach waits until he’s ready, then glances down the cross-streets. There’s no sign of tentacles – god, that still sounds so ridiculous – but the street here is noticeably clearer than those further south. Several of the people they see hurrying by have taking precautions similar to Daniel; few of them give him and Rorschach a second glance.
“Which way?” grates out his partner after a minute, and Daniel nearly jumps, lost in the surrealism of a New York ravaged by a giant squid. It’s the first time he’s really had time to think of it, and he feels a wave of hatred rising against Adrian all over again, this time for destroying his – their – the – city in such a ridiculously farcical manner. Will generations in the future look back on this horror and laugh, or at least smile? Had Adrian turned the destruction of America’s heart into a farce? More importantly, has he made a farce of all these innocent deaths?
“Daniel?” repeats Rorschach, and he fumbles to get the address book out, flips it open to his sister’s page. Beneath her phone number the old address has been crossed out and a new one written in.
“Uh, 749 East 82nd.” He has no apartment number, has forgotten to write it in. Well, that’s less a problem than not having the building. They start walking.
----------------------------------------
The air remains putrid, but they don’t come across any signs of the squid, just more people with handkerchiefs or masks or scraps of fabric wrapped over their mouths. And some without, whose mad eyes shine. Daniel wonders how many new institutions will be built thanks to this disaster. What percentage of New York’s population has been lost not to death but insanity. What the total casualty numbers will look like. From the empty streets, he has a general idea, and it’s boring a jagged hole in his chest.
The streets here are in no better physical condition than the Lower East Side, although the buildings have held up better, probably due to better architecture and building materials. It’s always the poor always who die in catastrophes. He can only pray the decision to move to a higher-rent district in the face of the apocalypse saved Jenny from it.
The smell gets worse the farther they go. Rorschach, walking beside him while keeping a careful watch for crime, clears his throat. “Have theory,” he comments in a flat voice. Daniel’s still picking up his old familiarity with his partner, still retrieving his understanding of Rorschach’s moods and tones as read from posture and tiny changes in his voice, but this one sounds absolutely flat. Daniel says nothing.
“Most likely ground zero either Financial District or Midtown.”
“I agree, but we already found the thing down near the docks; that means Financial.”
“Not necessarily. Could be more than one. Alternatively, could have partially disintegrated on transport.”
“Your saying parts of it might be in different places?”
“Yes. Allows attack on multiple targets, both economic and symbolic centres of city. Also maximizes casualties.”
“That –”
“Morning was dark. Unable to identify whole of creature. Again, possibly only section dropped on Financial District. Accounts for smell and empty streets.”
“We haven’t seen any of it.”
“Not yet.”
“God, Rorschach. It’s – that’s – do you really think Adrian would –” He doesn’t know why he’s asking. He does.
“Veidt’s pragmatic. Also: perfectionist.”
“If you’re going to destroy a city, don’t do it half way?”
Rorschach grunts assent.
All Daniel can think is, I wish we hadn’t stopped halfway.
----------------------------------------
The sun is sinking lazily behind the jagged remains of the skyscrapers on the west side of the Park, leaving the world full of long shadows again, long strips of darkness, when they see it.
Rorschach, damn him, was right.
Daniel has little memory of their early-morning encounter with the thing. Mostly just crazy colours in the flash-light glow, and the thick stinking goo. He can feel his mouth filling with saliva again in sympathy with his earlier reactions, and reaches up to tighten the fabric around his mouth.
The streets here, in sight of the thing, are absolutely empty. Except for the corpses.
He remembers: dawn, red light. Bloody streets.
He knows that was just a trick of the light. Here and now in the red sunset, he’d like to believe the same.
These weren’t peaceful deaths. These people weren’t crushed by the creature, weren’t killed by the shockwave of the transport or structural failure in their buildings. The blood that covers the grainy asphalt isn’t just flowing from the gashes in their necks, stomachs, thighs. It’s on their hands, under their claw-like nails, and around their mouths like parodies of a child’s milk-moustache.
Daniel feels his stomach convulsing, tastes the bile in the back of his throat, and swallows thickly. Rorschach growls low, but makes no other comment and Daniel can’t read anything from his posture except tension.
Their faces, every single one, are convulsed with absolute horror.
Daniel pulls off the mask and leans over to retch into a drain.
----------------------------------------
They make a wide circle around the tentacle lying through the middle of 75th and 76th by unspoken agreement, neither avoiding nor forging their way through the carnage surrounding it like a frame. Although it’s impossible to know what atrocities lie within the surrounding buildings, the bodies lying in the street seem to keep to roughly a third of a mile from the tentacle, with most bunched up within some 20 yards of it.
Daniel feels himself lucky to have gotten off as lightly as he did. Then realises that the thing must still have been alive when it landed, must have been bred for some psychic ability. Must have ripped through these peoples’ minds like paper.
They walk in silence. Past 79th, past 81st, and then onto 82nd.
Down closer to the water, in the direction they need to go, a stretch of bright orange and green tentacle is draped across the street, maybe 3 blocks down. Daniel freezes, staring.
Rorschach glances up at a street sign. “1000 block. Three down.”
Daniel keeps staring, torn between the need to know now, the need to break in there and find them – they can still be alive, they can still be alive – and the overwhelming urge to go back before he sees what’s in there. Before he dashes his hope.
“Daniel?”
Either way, he can’t just keep standing here, being pulled in two. Ripped apart by the same need to maintain hope.
He starts walking, heavy and stiff. Breaks into a jog. Then a run. Before he knows it he’s pounding down 82nd, swerving around empty cars, dodging a fallen newspaper stand, a garbage can. His coat flies out behind him, a poor imitation of his cape. His glasses tip down his nose, jumping with each step.
Daniel arrives, skidding, outside 749 E 82nd and stops. Stares, panting heavily. In his peripheral vision he can see the dark form that is Rorschach, who has apparently kept up without effort, although he didn’t hear him running behind.
From this angle, the building looks almost alright. Only the back corner is sagging, hardly visible through the alleyway between it and the next apartment complex.
It’s sagging because the tip of a flame-red tentacle has fallen through it.
There’s a high whining sound in the air, and Daniel realises it’s him, coming from his throat even as he stares at the building’s dark windows. The front doors are partially open, hanging on an angle. He can’t see anything in the foyer.
“What number?” asks Rorschach beside him, in his usual witness interrogative tone. You can tell it from his criminal interrogative technique because it doesn’t involve broken fingers.
“I – uh – I don’t know. I didn’t write it down. God, Jenny. Damn. Dammit.” He wants to punch something, to drag Adrian out by the collar and force him into that building, or just to –
“If she’s in there –” he says, voice cracking, to try to break himself out of that thought before he goes as crazy as Rorschach.
“I will look,” says Rorschach, using the personal pronoun for the first time in a long time. It’s enough to shock Daniel out of his horror. Enough to mobilize him, anyway.
“We will look,” he says. “It was 4th floor, I’m pretty sure. Close enough to the ground to walk, but not so close security was a concern, she said. I insisted,” he adds, passing a hand over his face, then pushing his glasses back up again.
Rorschach doesn’t answer, just steps forward. Walks up the stairs and into the building with no hesitation in his steps. Daniel follows him, so stiff he can barely bend his knees.
Without electricity the elevator is of course not working. They find the stairs and enter, turning on flashlights as the door closes behind them.
There’s a corpse in the stairwell, halfway between the first floor and the landing. A young woman lying face down, head towards the bottom of the stairs. There are no apparent wounds, no trail of blood, but she’s not breathing. Rorschach pauses, and Daniel knows if he weren’t here the man would have kept right on walking. Well. Wouldn’t have been here at all.
Daniel knows it’s not Jenny. The hair, the clothes, they’re completely wrong. But his heart is clenched so tight he can hardly breathe regardless as he turns her over.
Her mouth, just like the bodies in the street, is a twisted rictus of horror, glossy eyes wide and terrified. Rorschach turns and keeps walking. Daniel leans against the side of the stairwell, trying to catch his breath – he can’t – and then eventually walks past her with his eyes closed.
He wonders if all those years on the street, all the death he’s seen, added to today’s, has just used up his total. Whether he can no longer deal with it, has just run out of the finite supply he started with.
Rorschach, further ahead, opens the door to the fourth floor. It closes behind him with a click, leaving Daniel alone for the first time since they heard the news. Since Laurie left. Since Laurie followed him down into the basement.
It seems like years ago.
He hurries up the stairs after his partner. After possibly the only friend he still has, to face something he isn’t at all ready to.
----------------------------------------
There’s no sign of anything amiss in the corridor, from what he can see in the flashlight’s poor light, except the first two doors on the left kicked open.
The smell in this confined space is suffocating. It’s coming, he realises, from the first door. He doesn’t look inside. There’s no point.
If the thing’s that close, his brain tells him, there’s no point in being here at all.
He doesn’t listen.
Rorschach comes out of the second door, glances back at him. “No,” he says, and moves on to the next. Daniel almost asks whether he even knows what he’s looking for, whether he’s even ever seen Jenny, but the words won’t form in his throat and Rorschach kicks the door in and disappears before he can try to force them.
Daniel turns to the first door on the right, and kicks it in.
The apartment is empty, but the pictures and the lack of packing material show it’s not Jenny’s.
The next isn’t empty, but no one in it is alive. The linoleum is red. It’s not Jenny’s.
The third isn’t empty either. No one is alive. The linoleum, the carpet, the walls are all red.
Daniel sits down with his back against the kitchen counter and puts his head in his hands while the world shatters around him.
----------------------------------------
Time goes away for a while. Meaning goes away for a while. Grief has not even arrived. Everything except the slimy twisting snakes in his gut disappears for him, and all he can think is that they might as well have dropped the nukes. It’s dark and cold and his family is dead.
Rorschach wakes him from his stupor. Daniel still wonders today whether he wouldn’t have just died sitting there against the counter otherwise, rotted away to a twisted skeleton with the two people he still had to love.
“Daniel,” says Rorschach. Probably more than once. It computes, eventually, and he looks up.
Rorschach is standing in the doorway, the beam from his flashlight aimed at the floor between the two of them. Not at the room behind, not at the shredded remains lying on a damp carpet.
He has something hanging under one arm like a coat, arms trailing down towards the floor.
It is, Daniel realises after staring for a few moments, a child.
Daniel wakes up.
“What the – what are you doing?” He’s on his feet in an instant pulling the child away from Rorschach, who doesn’t complain, to cradle her – it’s a girl, perhaps four, perhaps younger – in his arms. “Where’d you get her from?”
Rorschach nods towards the wall. “Two apartments down. Family dead. Child still alive.”
“God. Were there others – the other apartments, I mean?”
His answer is bland, and exactly what Daniel expected. “No.”
“We have to take her with us. We can’t leave her here to wake up to – we have to take her with us.”
“To nearest foster centre,” says Rorschach, immediately. Daniel doesn’t answer.
“We should bring some of her things. Pictures, belongings. Clothes.”
“Social services can fetch them.”
“You really think they’re going to be coming in here anytime soon?” He cannot believe he is having this conversation here, now, and for a moment a wave of grief and guilt washes right over him and he chokes. Then he pulls himself together with only one thought: caring for the child. “We will take care of her until we find someone who can do it better. And we are bringing her things with us,” he says, in a flat tone which is nevertheless close to breaking. He walks out the door carrying the child in his arms, one victim saved from the wreckage.
At least until she wakes up and they discover how mad she is.
----------------------------------------
The apartment is a mirror of Jenny’s. Her parents and brother are dead. He refuses to take in any more than that. “Look for important documents – birth certificates, family information, social insurance numbers. Anything that will help identify her and giver her access to the estate.”
He takes her in to the children’s bedroom. It was clearly shared between her and her brother. One bed is covered with a blanket patterned with planes and trains, the colours dark and depressing in the flashlight’s poor light. The other is covered with bright pastel flowers. He lies her down in her bed and fishes around in the closet until he finds a duffel bag. Packs some clothes from the small wardrobe, the small box of cheap colourful treasures on top of it – plastic rings, bright stickers, a bead bracelet – and looks around for any favoured toys.
“Check for meds,” he shouts to Rorschach, who doesn’t answer. The end of the bed has a row of stuffed animals lined up on it; he chooses the two most-worn, a cheerful lion and a teddy bear. He leaves the child there and walks out past Rorschach, now searching through kitchen cabinets with his usual “read then toss on floor” approach, into the parents bedroom. He finds, as expected, a group of family photographs on the dresser. Takes them out of their frames and shuffles them together. He doesn’t bother looking at them, he knows what he will see. A normal, happy family. There’s no point in thinking that they didn’t deserve this. No one could deserve this.
“Finished,” says Rorschach from the kitchen. Daniel returns to the girl’s room, packs the photos with the bag, swings it onto his shoulder and picks her up.
They leave the building together. No one looks back.
Series: Watchmen
Pairing: Dan/Rorschach
Rating: PG-13
Notes: This is UNFINISHED and will remain so. Comic-verse.
Summary: The world doesn't end. So it's up to the capes to clean up the mess. Isn't it?
Rorschach’s journal, November 4th 1985 (later)
Momentary fear Dreiberg would refuse to accept sister’s demise by starting crusade. Am now convinced of validity of new search – in his eyes. Will accompany him to find sister, no further.
Lawlessness already rampant. Witnessed five incidents of breaking and entering – Dreiberg discounted three. Also saw purported “physicians” selling drugs on street-corners; clearly drug dealers taking advantage of lack of pharmacies to hook new audience. Dealt with one while Dreiberg was assisting a woman to fetch child out of over-turned car where it was playing – as though further indication of lack of survival instinct in those under 20 were necessary.
Evening will come soon – soon the city’s new nocturnal face will show itself and I will be ready.
CHAPTER 3
While they can do more good on the streets, they travel quicker underground, and Daniel has already made so many sacrifices for this cause that one more hardly hurts. Rorschach is becoming restless behind him, and Daniel knows he wants to be preparing for nightfall, for dealing with the rise of fall in crime as it comes.
Daniel himself suspects it may still be too early to expect complete chaos after the hours of dark. He hopes so. But he knows Rorschach’s point isn’t invalid. And still, he keeps the man with him by his silence. Part of it is to keep Rorschach out of trouble, to keep him from getting in Veidt’s crosshairs.
Part of it is because, after everything he’s lost, he can’t stand to lose Rorschach too. Logically that’s a stupid sentiment, he knows. Using Rorschach as a second touchstone after Jenny and Nicole may be like buying a cat for comfort – its presence reassures you but when push comes to shove it’s only there because you’re feeding it and doesn’t understand the deeper reassurances you want from it. 8 years ago he would have disputed that as unfair. Even in the early years of Keene, maybe. But it’s been a long time, and from outside sources at least in the past few years Rorschach’s only slid closer towards cold and violent psychosis.
But then, he was never one to listen to other peoples’ judgements.
They come up out of the manhole in an alley near Park and 60th to find the air thick with a familiar stench. This time Daniel doesn’t try to ignore it, immediately drapes a hand over his mouth as his stomach curls and spasms coldly. Tears a strip off the hem of his shirt and ties it around his nose, then glances at Rorschach who seems mostly unaffected. It hadn’t occurred to him before how much of the smell the mask might be blocking out. Rorschach waits until he’s ready, then glances down the cross-streets. There’s no sign of tentacles – god, that still sounds so ridiculous – but the street here is noticeably clearer than those further south. Several of the people they see hurrying by have taking precautions similar to Daniel; few of them give him and Rorschach a second glance.
“Which way?” grates out his partner after a minute, and Daniel nearly jumps, lost in the surrealism of a New York ravaged by a giant squid. It’s the first time he’s really had time to think of it, and he feels a wave of hatred rising against Adrian all over again, this time for destroying his – their – the – city in such a ridiculously farcical manner. Will generations in the future look back on this horror and laugh, or at least smile? Had Adrian turned the destruction of America’s heart into a farce? More importantly, has he made a farce of all these innocent deaths?
“Daniel?” repeats Rorschach, and he fumbles to get the address book out, flips it open to his sister’s page. Beneath her phone number the old address has been crossed out and a new one written in.
“Uh, 749 East 82nd.” He has no apartment number, has forgotten to write it in. Well, that’s less a problem than not having the building. They start walking.
----------------------------------------
The air remains putrid, but they don’t come across any signs of the squid, just more people with handkerchiefs or masks or scraps of fabric wrapped over their mouths. And some without, whose mad eyes shine. Daniel wonders how many new institutions will be built thanks to this disaster. What percentage of New York’s population has been lost not to death but insanity. What the total casualty numbers will look like. From the empty streets, he has a general idea, and it’s boring a jagged hole in his chest.
The streets here are in no better physical condition than the Lower East Side, although the buildings have held up better, probably due to better architecture and building materials. It’s always the poor always who die in catastrophes. He can only pray the decision to move to a higher-rent district in the face of the apocalypse saved Jenny from it.
The smell gets worse the farther they go. Rorschach, walking beside him while keeping a careful watch for crime, clears his throat. “Have theory,” he comments in a flat voice. Daniel’s still picking up his old familiarity with his partner, still retrieving his understanding of Rorschach’s moods and tones as read from posture and tiny changes in his voice, but this one sounds absolutely flat. Daniel says nothing.
“Most likely ground zero either Financial District or Midtown.”
“I agree, but we already found the thing down near the docks; that means Financial.”
“Not necessarily. Could be more than one. Alternatively, could have partially disintegrated on transport.”
“Your saying parts of it might be in different places?”
“Yes. Allows attack on multiple targets, both economic and symbolic centres of city. Also maximizes casualties.”
“That –”
“Morning was dark. Unable to identify whole of creature. Again, possibly only section dropped on Financial District. Accounts for smell and empty streets.”
“We haven’t seen any of it.”
“Not yet.”
“God, Rorschach. It’s – that’s – do you really think Adrian would –” He doesn’t know why he’s asking. He does.
“Veidt’s pragmatic. Also: perfectionist.”
“If you’re going to destroy a city, don’t do it half way?”
Rorschach grunts assent.
All Daniel can think is, I wish we hadn’t stopped halfway.
----------------------------------------
The sun is sinking lazily behind the jagged remains of the skyscrapers on the west side of the Park, leaving the world full of long shadows again, long strips of darkness, when they see it.
Rorschach, damn him, was right.
Daniel has little memory of their early-morning encounter with the thing. Mostly just crazy colours in the flash-light glow, and the thick stinking goo. He can feel his mouth filling with saliva again in sympathy with his earlier reactions, and reaches up to tighten the fabric around his mouth.
The streets here, in sight of the thing, are absolutely empty. Except for the corpses.
He remembers: dawn, red light. Bloody streets.
He knows that was just a trick of the light. Here and now in the red sunset, he’d like to believe the same.
These weren’t peaceful deaths. These people weren’t crushed by the creature, weren’t killed by the shockwave of the transport or structural failure in their buildings. The blood that covers the grainy asphalt isn’t just flowing from the gashes in their necks, stomachs, thighs. It’s on their hands, under their claw-like nails, and around their mouths like parodies of a child’s milk-moustache.
Daniel feels his stomach convulsing, tastes the bile in the back of his throat, and swallows thickly. Rorschach growls low, but makes no other comment and Daniel can’t read anything from his posture except tension.
Their faces, every single one, are convulsed with absolute horror.
Daniel pulls off the mask and leans over to retch into a drain.
----------------------------------------
They make a wide circle around the tentacle lying through the middle of 75th and 76th by unspoken agreement, neither avoiding nor forging their way through the carnage surrounding it like a frame. Although it’s impossible to know what atrocities lie within the surrounding buildings, the bodies lying in the street seem to keep to roughly a third of a mile from the tentacle, with most bunched up within some 20 yards of it.
Daniel feels himself lucky to have gotten off as lightly as he did. Then realises that the thing must still have been alive when it landed, must have been bred for some psychic ability. Must have ripped through these peoples’ minds like paper.
They walk in silence. Past 79th, past 81st, and then onto 82nd.
Down closer to the water, in the direction they need to go, a stretch of bright orange and green tentacle is draped across the street, maybe 3 blocks down. Daniel freezes, staring.
Rorschach glances up at a street sign. “1000 block. Three down.”
Daniel keeps staring, torn between the need to know now, the need to break in there and find them – they can still be alive, they can still be alive – and the overwhelming urge to go back before he sees what’s in there. Before he dashes his hope.
“Daniel?”
Either way, he can’t just keep standing here, being pulled in two. Ripped apart by the same need to maintain hope.
He starts walking, heavy and stiff. Breaks into a jog. Then a run. Before he knows it he’s pounding down 82nd, swerving around empty cars, dodging a fallen newspaper stand, a garbage can. His coat flies out behind him, a poor imitation of his cape. His glasses tip down his nose, jumping with each step.
Daniel arrives, skidding, outside 749 E 82nd and stops. Stares, panting heavily. In his peripheral vision he can see the dark form that is Rorschach, who has apparently kept up without effort, although he didn’t hear him running behind.
From this angle, the building looks almost alright. Only the back corner is sagging, hardly visible through the alleyway between it and the next apartment complex.
It’s sagging because the tip of a flame-red tentacle has fallen through it.
There’s a high whining sound in the air, and Daniel realises it’s him, coming from his throat even as he stares at the building’s dark windows. The front doors are partially open, hanging on an angle. He can’t see anything in the foyer.
“What number?” asks Rorschach beside him, in his usual witness interrogative tone. You can tell it from his criminal interrogative technique because it doesn’t involve broken fingers.
“I – uh – I don’t know. I didn’t write it down. God, Jenny. Damn. Dammit.” He wants to punch something, to drag Adrian out by the collar and force him into that building, or just to –
“If she’s in there –” he says, voice cracking, to try to break himself out of that thought before he goes as crazy as Rorschach.
“I will look,” says Rorschach, using the personal pronoun for the first time in a long time. It’s enough to shock Daniel out of his horror. Enough to mobilize him, anyway.
“We will look,” he says. “It was 4th floor, I’m pretty sure. Close enough to the ground to walk, but not so close security was a concern, she said. I insisted,” he adds, passing a hand over his face, then pushing his glasses back up again.
Rorschach doesn’t answer, just steps forward. Walks up the stairs and into the building with no hesitation in his steps. Daniel follows him, so stiff he can barely bend his knees.
Without electricity the elevator is of course not working. They find the stairs and enter, turning on flashlights as the door closes behind them.
There’s a corpse in the stairwell, halfway between the first floor and the landing. A young woman lying face down, head towards the bottom of the stairs. There are no apparent wounds, no trail of blood, but she’s not breathing. Rorschach pauses, and Daniel knows if he weren’t here the man would have kept right on walking. Well. Wouldn’t have been here at all.
Daniel knows it’s not Jenny. The hair, the clothes, they’re completely wrong. But his heart is clenched so tight he can hardly breathe regardless as he turns her over.
Her mouth, just like the bodies in the street, is a twisted rictus of horror, glossy eyes wide and terrified. Rorschach turns and keeps walking. Daniel leans against the side of the stairwell, trying to catch his breath – he can’t – and then eventually walks past her with his eyes closed.
He wonders if all those years on the street, all the death he’s seen, added to today’s, has just used up his total. Whether he can no longer deal with it, has just run out of the finite supply he started with.
Rorschach, further ahead, opens the door to the fourth floor. It closes behind him with a click, leaving Daniel alone for the first time since they heard the news. Since Laurie left. Since Laurie followed him down into the basement.
It seems like years ago.
He hurries up the stairs after his partner. After possibly the only friend he still has, to face something he isn’t at all ready to.
----------------------------------------
There’s no sign of anything amiss in the corridor, from what he can see in the flashlight’s poor light, except the first two doors on the left kicked open.
The smell in this confined space is suffocating. It’s coming, he realises, from the first door. He doesn’t look inside. There’s no point.
If the thing’s that close, his brain tells him, there’s no point in being here at all.
He doesn’t listen.
Rorschach comes out of the second door, glances back at him. “No,” he says, and moves on to the next. Daniel almost asks whether he even knows what he’s looking for, whether he’s even ever seen Jenny, but the words won’t form in his throat and Rorschach kicks the door in and disappears before he can try to force them.
Daniel turns to the first door on the right, and kicks it in.
The apartment is empty, but the pictures and the lack of packing material show it’s not Jenny’s.
The next isn’t empty, but no one in it is alive. The linoleum is red. It’s not Jenny’s.
The third isn’t empty either. No one is alive. The linoleum, the carpet, the walls are all red.
Daniel sits down with his back against the kitchen counter and puts his head in his hands while the world shatters around him.
----------------------------------------
Time goes away for a while. Meaning goes away for a while. Grief has not even arrived. Everything except the slimy twisting snakes in his gut disappears for him, and all he can think is that they might as well have dropped the nukes. It’s dark and cold and his family is dead.
Rorschach wakes him from his stupor. Daniel still wonders today whether he wouldn’t have just died sitting there against the counter otherwise, rotted away to a twisted skeleton with the two people he still had to love.
“Daniel,” says Rorschach. Probably more than once. It computes, eventually, and he looks up.
Rorschach is standing in the doorway, the beam from his flashlight aimed at the floor between the two of them. Not at the room behind, not at the shredded remains lying on a damp carpet.
He has something hanging under one arm like a coat, arms trailing down towards the floor.
It is, Daniel realises after staring for a few moments, a child.
Daniel wakes up.
“What the – what are you doing?” He’s on his feet in an instant pulling the child away from Rorschach, who doesn’t complain, to cradle her – it’s a girl, perhaps four, perhaps younger – in his arms. “Where’d you get her from?”
Rorschach nods towards the wall. “Two apartments down. Family dead. Child still alive.”
“God. Were there others – the other apartments, I mean?”
His answer is bland, and exactly what Daniel expected. “No.”
“We have to take her with us. We can’t leave her here to wake up to – we have to take her with us.”
“To nearest foster centre,” says Rorschach, immediately. Daniel doesn’t answer.
“We should bring some of her things. Pictures, belongings. Clothes.”
“Social services can fetch them.”
“You really think they’re going to be coming in here anytime soon?” He cannot believe he is having this conversation here, now, and for a moment a wave of grief and guilt washes right over him and he chokes. Then he pulls himself together with only one thought: caring for the child. “We will take care of her until we find someone who can do it better. And we are bringing her things with us,” he says, in a flat tone which is nevertheless close to breaking. He walks out the door carrying the child in his arms, one victim saved from the wreckage.
At least until she wakes up and they discover how mad she is.
----------------------------------------
The apartment is a mirror of Jenny’s. Her parents and brother are dead. He refuses to take in any more than that. “Look for important documents – birth certificates, family information, social insurance numbers. Anything that will help identify her and giver her access to the estate.”
He takes her in to the children’s bedroom. It was clearly shared between her and her brother. One bed is covered with a blanket patterned with planes and trains, the colours dark and depressing in the flashlight’s poor light. The other is covered with bright pastel flowers. He lies her down in her bed and fishes around in the closet until he finds a duffel bag. Packs some clothes from the small wardrobe, the small box of cheap colourful treasures on top of it – plastic rings, bright stickers, a bead bracelet – and looks around for any favoured toys.
“Check for meds,” he shouts to Rorschach, who doesn’t answer. The end of the bed has a row of stuffed animals lined up on it; he chooses the two most-worn, a cheerful lion and a teddy bear. He leaves the child there and walks out past Rorschach, now searching through kitchen cabinets with his usual “read then toss on floor” approach, into the parents bedroom. He finds, as expected, a group of family photographs on the dresser. Takes them out of their frames and shuffles them together. He doesn’t bother looking at them, he knows what he will see. A normal, happy family. There’s no point in thinking that they didn’t deserve this. No one could deserve this.
“Finished,” says Rorschach from the kitchen. Daniel returns to the girl’s room, packs the photos with the bag, swings it onto his shoulder and picks her up.
They leave the building together. No one looks back.
