Writer's Block Incarnate

Elliot wasn’t sure how long it took for things to go quiet. Even if she had some kind of gauge, who knew how accurate it would be? The smell of smoke and wet earth and heat and gunpowder was filling her up and up and up, over and over again, each breath she took another inhale of something dangerous and vivid; if she wanted to wager a guess, she didn’t know that it would have been anywhere close to the actual amount of minutes she spent huddled in the bathtub with Faith curled into her side, drenched in another man’s blood.

Eventually, though, she forced herself to her feet. Something simmered, just below the surface of her mind, urging her to stand. Her legs felt wobbly and ached from the cramped position they’d been held in. Faith immediately reached for her hand; they picked their way out of the bathroom, one of the assault rifles clutched loosely in Elliot’s hand as it lay slung around her neck, and out into the main room of the bunkhouse.

She realized, then, what it was that had prompted her to stand: that it was quiet. Deathly, sickly quiet. The silence of a grave.

Elliot moved numbly, digging through the closet until she could pull a heavy coat on over her shoulders. Her fingers trembled; whether that was from cold or exhaustion or fear, she couldn’t have said.

Not fear, she thought tiredly, watching Faith watching her, regarding her struggle but staying exactly put where she was. The girl was terribly, awfully still, the way someone might be around a stray dog, one which might snap its teeth at any moment.

Only one thing to do with a sick dog. Isn’t that what Jacob had said?

Her eyes burned exhaustedly. She fixed her gaze on the two bodies, sprawled on the floor, the wet-slick of their blood glinting black in the darkness of the cabin.

“Elliot?” Faith asked.

She had been caught staring. Faith followed her gaze to the two bodies—one seeming to have been with the cult originally, the other an Eden’s Gate defector. Jace, Elliot reminded herself. His name was Jace.

Faith said, “I never liked him.”

“Come on,” Elliot said, brushing past her and out the back door. Indeed, it was equally quiet outside as it had been in the cabin—the sensation that she had crawled her way into someone else’s grave just before the dirt hit the casket.

Faith followed her. Once or twice, as they crossed the compound, there came an agonized sound; a wail, a lament, some kind of sorrowful, trapped-animal noise, from the rubble of one burned down building or another. It was never the same voice, either. Always a different animal, gnawing its own foot to get out of its trap.

She crossed one corpse, and then another—and then a few, tangled together, gripping each other. Milky light barely managed to filter through heavy crowd cover. Around the corner of a building that had had the word GULA spray-painted jaggedly on the side, someone sobbed a broken plea, and snow began to fall.

They’re suffering, she thought, with a strange sadness sweeping over her. John had, once, called her the biggest peggy-killer this side of Hope County, and maybe he had been right, then, but it wasn’t true anymore.

At least she killed quickly. This—these carcasses of people, they weren’t all dead, but they probably wished that they were.

Without much preamble, Elliot shouldered the front doors of the chapel open. They weren’t locked; in fact, one of them had been nudged just slightly ajar, glinting cold, gold light out onto the snow before she shoved it open. Several pairs of eyes turned to fix on her. The dim amber glow of the lights cast eerie shadows on the wall, a heater or two sputtered weakly from separate corners to give the air an infrequent temperature with pockets of bitter cold, and the windows had been tightly shuttered against whatever it was the Family had been burning—their drug of choice, no doubt, but with the amount of time it had spent burning, she had to think it had been in a different form than they had used before. All this, which only served the purpose of making the Chapel feel more isolated from the world and everything that had happened outside of its wooden slats.

The walls wobbled in her vision. Shifted, expanded, clutched inward and then bent back out, so that she felt less like she was in a building and more like she was in the womb of something large and terrible. Elliot opted to try and ignore the feeling that she was being swallowed.

“Deputy,” Joseph said by way of greeting.

He stood at the head of the chapel. Elliot wondered if he had moved at all, while the slaughter was happening, if he had even thought to hide. It seemed not; he was completely unmarked, untousled beyond his usual state of what she could only describe as disrepair (that Joseph somehow always looked put together and homeless had been beyond her, and for so long), and there was an expression on his face that came as reflective, as though he had been given some information that he was still sorting through.

The woman next to him, the dark-haired one that seemed to know John quite well, seemed to have been washed of all color. Something awful had happened, and everyone seemed to be feeling it, except for Joseph.

Faith closed the door behind them, and said, “Father, you’re okay.” Her voice bloomed with warmth and relief; but though her fingers disentangled from Elliot’s, she did not depart to Joseph’s side immediately. Instead, she stayed close to Elliot’s side, her eyes taking quick inventory of the people inside the Chapel and their current state.

“Of course,” he replied. “I knew God wouldn’t—”

Elliot wadded up the blood in her mouth and spit. Joseph’s eyes darted to the floor, and then back to her.

“Elliot kept me safe,” Faith explained, taking a few steps down the center aisle. A few of Eden’s Gate had clustered themselves into the chapel—three. Only three. Was that all that was left? These three little remains, the brothers and Faith, the wounded beasts howling outside for some kind of reprieve?

Joseph said, “I see that.” His words were pointed. It was the first time that Elliot felt moderately aware of the blood caking her face, her hair; absently, she rubbed at her cheek, and felt it slide against her skin, smearing. Well.

“Is that my Dolce & Gabbana?” the brunette beside Joseph asked, her voice tight.

Elliot looked down at the parka, the blood dotting the fur trim around the hood, and then leveled her with a deadpan gaze. The comment seemed so out of place, so far away from the actual carnage and viscera standing just outside the steps of the chapel, that she almost laughed.

“Not anymore.” She paused, eyes flickering around the chapel again. “Where’s John?”

There was a stretch of silence that reigned supreme, opulent; thick and heady as it stretched between them, sticky like taffy. Faith shifted beside her. Absently, their fingers brushed where they stood, the heavy, dark machinery slung around her neck pressing sharp into her sternum through the sweater she wore.

Joseph stared at her, and said nothing.

“He’s—” The brunette next to him stopped herself for a minute. Her expression had hardened to something flinty. “He’s not with you?”

The alarm bells started ringing. Very faintly, at first; just like the breath of a windchime, somewhere in the back of her mind, buried under the static noise that hadn’t shut off even when the speakers had gone dead. She wanted to say, no, he’s not fucking with me, does he look like he’s with me?, and as the thought crossed her mind, the bells got a little louder.

He’s not with you?

“He left looking for you,” Joseph told her. Something insidious idled beneath the timbre of his voice. “You, and that baby, Deputy.”

That baby, he said, with that disgusting little twitch of the corner of his mouth, like he was trying not to smile. That baby. Not ‘your baby’, not ‘the baby’, that baby, a distinct separation. Different.

And mean.

The alarm bells clanged louder now, echoing dully behind her eyes.

“Holy shit,” the brunette beside him breathed out, passing a hand over her face. Her fingers trembled as she fished a carton of cigarettes out of the pocket of the light jacket she’d slung over the chair. Her mouth pressed into a hard, vicious line as she lit one and took a long drag.

Joseph murmured, “Isolde,” as though to suggest she oughtn’t smoke, a tempering voice.

“We let him go,” she snapped at Joseph, her voice trembling. “We fucking let him go out there. We shouldn’t have—we let him go, Joseph.”

Elliot’s throat burned. She was trying to sort it all—that baby, and we fucking let him go out there, and the alarm bells ringing in her head, and the way Joseph’s voice rippled and pulsed like a snake shedding its skin—and what came out of her mouth was, “I’d kill for a cigarette right now.”

Dark eyes turned to her. Isolde gave her a scathing once over—no doubt taking stock of the dried blood and viscera, the assault rifle slung around her neck—and tapped the ash from the end of her cigarette. “I bet you would, blondie.”

She spat more blood on the floor. Turning her gaze to Joseph, she pressed, “Did he say where he was going?”

“Just that he wanted to find you,” Isolde interjected, pulling her coat off of the chair and sticking an arm through it. As though her move to action had reminded Elliot of what was fundamentally wrong with this picture—that she was here, and that John wasn’t, John, who had been a fucking thorn in her side since day one, John, who had tried to pick a fight with local law enforcement for having the audacity to smoke around her, John, who had insisted that they were in love and that he loved her—and suddenly those alarm bells became very, very, very loud.

John had gone looking for her.

“We have to find him,” she said, the words coming out of her abruptly. There were bodies—people—who could be of use to them, even now, she was sure of it. Supplies and weapons and first aid kits and cars. “We have to find John.”

Joseph said, placidly, “No one is stopping you, Deputy.”

Isolde’s head jerked, like she’d been struck. Joseph’s words did land like a slap. He said, without saying, that he would not be sending people out after John; that she was welcome to. Elliot had said we, and Joseph had said you.

The brunette’s voice pitched low. Over the sound of the sputtering heaters, the quiet sobs and whispers, Isolde hissed something at him; it sounded like his name in reprimand, drawing his gaze to her until his head finally turned in an effort to give him her full attention. He said something that Elliot couldn’t hear, his hand going to her arm and squeezing, affectionate and reassuring. Isolde did not look assuaged.

And Faith—who had only ever proven to be a perfect girl—looked at them for a long moment. Each piece of her carefully cobbled and slotted together to make Perfect Girl, and no matter who was talking to her, she was Perfect Girl, and that meant—as much as Elliot wouldn’t have liked to admit it—that Faith was neither here nor there, but somewhere else, in the black spaces between, where she couldn’t be read, which put her in the perfect position to watch.

Quietly, Elliot took in a breath. The world swam for a second—all of the information dripping through her head, an IV of reality bleeding through the strange remains of the Family’s burnt drug in her system.

The blood. The glass, cutting into a man’s neck, easy as room-temperature butter. Jace, and he’s just a boy, they don’t want to hurt you, Deputy.

The blood.

John had gone looking for her.

The blood.

In the corner, someone coughed. Another shuffled. The sounds brushed against her feverish skin, prickling her hackles (John was looking for me) and outside, through the open door, she heard another agonized wail. That trapped-animal sound again, echoing eerily into the doors, and she realized for the first time that Joseph had been sitting in here and listening to those sounds for longer than she had even been registering them.

And Joseph said to Isolde, louder this time, “No. You’ll stay,” and there was a strange moment where it looked like Isolde was going to lose her shit—a feeling Elliot was becoming all too familiar with—before he added, “They need you here, Soli.”

It was very funny, to hear Joseph call the woman by some kind of pet name, to watch his hand slide down the crook of her arm and to her fingers, to realize what it was that was going on there. Elliot watched all of that—did as Faith did, and watched the way Joseph leaned into Isolde, like by proximity alone he could exert his will over her, and watched the way Isolde’s eyes shifted to somewhere, anywhere else that wasn’t Joseph because maybe looking at him felt unbearable—and she thought, Oh, I get it now.

Like always, she would have to do everything herself.

Elliot’s feet moved of their own volition, driving her to the fringes of the chapel where a few scattered husks huddled, eyes glazed from prolonged exposure (yet another thing, she noted; that Joseph must not have left the chapel at all, not even during the chaos, to be so clear-eyed, to be so sober, after all of that permeating the air outside).

John had gone looking for her.

Elliot fisted the shirt of the first one she came across—a woman, her hair plastered to her face despite the cold—and shook her. It felt reminiscent of the thing attendants at pet stores told you not to do with goldfish in their bag; yet, when the woman’s eyes finally focused, she let out a low, agonized moan, like the sight of Elliot was causing her a great sense of distress.

“Keys,” she barked.

The woman’s hand faltered blindly in the dark. Next to her, a younger boy sat huddled against the wall. Her hand collided clumsily with his shoulder and she said the word, repeating it. Keys, keys, keys, the word leaving her mouth in a miserable wail, but the boy remained still, shooting only a wild look at Elliot once over his shoulder.

She grabbed the fabric of his jacket. “Hey,” she snapped, “give me your keys.”

His head snapped to her. He was whispering, furiously, so low and so urgent and so fast she could barely make out what it was that he was saying, his eyes painfully wide and his irises blown out with the black of his pupils. Whispering, over and over, chapped lips forming the same shape, same words—

( bloom eat grin bloom eat grin wrath do you want to )

Elliot, come on, let’s go back to bed.

Elliot jerked her hand back from his shoulder, a wave of nausea rushing over her as she took a step back, and then another. Where had that memory come from?

From the head of the chapel, Joseph watched her. His hand was on Isolde’s arm, and his body was angled toward her, but his eyes were fixed: the sensation of being an ant trapped under a magnifying glass on a hot summer’s day stung rancid in the back of her throat.

She opened her mouth to say something—anything, really; I don’t know what he’s saying, or I need keys so I can find John, or don’t fucking look at me like that, you piece of shit, this is all that’s left of your shitty fucking congregation, don’t you feel fucking stupid now—and before she could, the chapel doors ground laboriously once again as they were pushed open to reveal a young man; dark, slightly worse for wear, but in considerably higher spirits than what seemed to be everyone else. Behind him, a few more lingered, clearly Eden’s Gate.

“Where the fuck have you been?” Isolde demanded. “How long does it take to sort through the dead, Santiago?”

“I checked,” the man replied, sounding a little out of breath. “Every body, alive or dead. He’s not here.”

“Do you have car keys?” Elliot demanded, before Joseph or Isolde could reply. She was eager to put as much distance between herself and the whispering man as possible, but beyond that—John wasn’t here. Most likely, they had taken him. She’d hoped that all of this had been for Joseph: to find him, and kill him. That the groups would cannibalize each other. And now, she thought, she knew better.

The man’s eyes turned to her. He took one sweeping glance over her as she approached, cocked a half-assed smile at her, and said, “Where are you gonna go, mija?”

“Santiago,” came Isolde’s bite.

“Give,” Elliot barked at him. He carried with him the same kind of lazy, arrogant countenance that John did, which only made the whole thing more frustrating.

Santiago’s gaze flickered to Isolde, and then back to her. “I think maybe I will get in trouble if I give you my keys.”

“You’ll get in a grave,” she snapped, “if you don’t give me your keys.”

“Take him with you,” Joseph suggested.

Her head snapped around to meet his gaze. There was a loftiness in his voice, a casualty—take him with you, like it was nothing. He wouldn’t mind, then, that she left. That she went to go look for John. Preferred it, even. He probably hoped she’d die on the way there.

Elliot’s fingers tightened around the dark metal of the assault rifle slung around her neck. For a second, there came a vicious and overwhelming desire to use it—not even to fire it, but to remember what it felt like when she killed Kian. There was something more alluring about the blunt force trauma, about crushing bone beneath the weight of your blows. They had all treated her a little differently after that, Joseph and Jacob and the scuttling, scurrying members of Eden’s Gate. Even John. Maybe they had forgotten.

“He’s John’s,” came Isolde’s voice after a heartbeat. “Man, I mean. John’s...pick.”

She turned her eyes back to the offending man in question. Pearly teeth. Lopsided, jackass grin. He would be John’s pick. Even still, there was something that didn’t settle right with her, something that lingered uneasily under the surface of her mind.

It was quiet. Joseph was quiet. She turned her head to look at him, eyes narrowed, almost expectant.

“Far be it from me to tell you what to do, Deputy,” he told her, the satiny, feel-good timbre of his voice making her skin crawl. He was in awfully good spirits, for a man whose entire congregation seemed to have been wiped out and whose apparent partner in crime was chainsmoking and fishing around in her purse with the sound of what had to be an aspirin bottle rattling. “We only want you safe. Santiago is the most capable body here. Didn’t you want that?” His head tilted, cocked, almost reptilian. “More bodies out there, looking for John?”

We, he said. Elliot couldn’t tell if it was we as in Eden’s Gate, or if Joseph was only referring to himself in that, like some kind of backwater caricature of the Pope.

“Fine,” she said at last. “I’m driving.”

She slipped around Santiago without waiting for his response and pushed her way outside. The cold air hit her hard—harder than she had anticipated, really, with how oddly-temped the inside of the Chapel had felt—and for a second, it felt like the air had been sucked right out of her lungs. The cold, and the lamentations, and the snow falling to the ground almost as if on cue to the suffering permeating the air in the smell of fetid, wet earth and electric, coppery blood.

I love you, Elliot. I love you, with or without the baby.

Her throat felt tight. For the first time since leaving the bunkhouse, it finally registered in her brain that John was gone. He was gone, and he was maybe even dead, and if she had been worried about the baby not having light up toys that sang to him or comfortable clothes, what was she going to do with a baby that didn’t have John?

“You wanna wash the blood off of your face, mija?” came Santiago’s voice from behind her, startling her into shooting him a glare over her shoulder. “I am personally a fan of the look myself, that was not a criticism.”

He made a good point. She probably ought to get it off of her face, at least. Elliot cast a glance around the compound; a few embers of the fires still burned, slowly dying out, and there were a few dark shapes staggering to their feet and trying to make their way to the Chapel now.

Carefully, Elliot lifted her fingers to her mouth and whistled. The sound was shrill and stark against the eerie, blanketed silence of snowfall, and a few of those dark bodies trying to drag their way to the only safe building recoiled. She wondered what the sound must have felt like to the people who had been breathing in the drugs for hours.

No time to think about that, anyway; the sound of Boomer’s barking coming from one of the bunkhouses inspired her movement, Santiago trailing after her meticulously. He was oddly clear-headed, it seemed, which must mean that he hadn’t been at the compound when all of this had happened—hadn’t had the same kind of prolonged exposure. Lucky him.

Elliot pushed the door to the bunkhouse open. It looked like a mess, with a few bodies slumped in the middle, their eyes glassy and milky as they stared at the ceiling. She swallowed back a grimace and that sense of pervasive dread—John is gone John is gone and maybe John is dead—as she picked her way over them, following the sound of Boomer’s frantic barking to the bathroom so that she could open the door.

He bolted out immediately, weaving in and out of her legs and whining, nosing her hands but never staying still long enough for her to really pet him; even just that had relief washing over her. Elliot knelt down beside the Heeler and pressed her face into his neck, holding him there tightly.

“Good boy, good boy,” she whispered. “Good boy, best boy. Did someone put you in the bathroom? Did someone keep you safe?”

He whined and licked her face.

“Sorry,” Elliot murmured, “I know mommy’s yucky right now.”

Behind her, Santiago shuffled through some things and stepped closer, attracting Boomer’s attention and eliciting a deep-throated bark and the lifting of his hackles, prickling all the way down his spine as he growled.

“Sorry, sorry,” he said quickly. “Just a friend. Of your...” His voice trailed off, and he gave her a lopsided grin. “Your mama, doggy.”

“Shut up,” Elliot muttered. She stood, stepping around Boomer to go into the bathroom and start running the sink water. “Don’t move too fast or he’ll bite you.”

“Can’t you tell him not to?” Santiago asked. “Can’t you tell him I’m a friend?”

Elliot stuck her hands under the water—icy and frigid, no less—and began scrubbing her face down. Streams of maroon stained against the porcelain. “Why would I tell him that?”

Santiago made a disgruntled noise. “I suppose if he is going to bite me, my hand would be fine. Or my leg. Just not my face.”

“You really are John’s man, huh?”

“That is the nicest thing you have said to me.”

She rolled her eyes, scraping her nails through her wet-down hair and then shutting the water off. It wasn’t perfect, and the girl staring at her in the mirror looked like a stranger, but it was something.

Elliot dried her hands and did the best she could trying to dry her wet hair as well, pausing to rest her hand over the slope of her tummy. She wondered if it would feel real, eventually, this little life inside of her. She hadn’t felt the baby kick or move really, and if she had, it might have been so fleeting—and her mind so otherwise occupied—she might not have noticed.

I have to find him, she thought, that strange, panicky feeling washing up inside of her again, tightening her throat. I have to find him, for our baby. If not for me, at least for him.

“I don’t mean to rush,” Santiago said from outside, “but it seemed you were pretty urgent before, so...”

She dropped her hand and the towel, stepping out of the bathroom and clearing her throat. He was standing right where he had been before—smart enough not to move—and Boomer had positioned himself Sphynx-like just outside of the bathroom door. She cast a glance Santiago’s way before she said, “Yeah, let’s go.”

Back out into the grave-like silence, Elliot took in a deep breath and closed her eyes. Just a second. She just needed one second to collect her thoughts, to gather herself, to stave off the breakdown for a few more hours. John was gone, and maybe he was dead, and she would just have to do what she could to make sure that didn’t end up being true.

“Keys,” she said, holding out her hand expectantly.

“You’re sure?” Santiago asked, hesitating as he looked at her hand. “I don’t mind driving. I think John would want me to—”

Elliot let out an exasperated breath, turning to face him fully. A part of her almost felt grateful to have him there—it was one more thing she could think about, instead of John’s absence.

“Santiago,” she said.

He smiled at her. It was jarring, surrounded by corpses, to see his perfectly bleached teeth in the lukewarm light of the evening. “Yes, mija?”

“We’re gonna lay a few ground rules.”

“Sure.”

“Rule one: no pet names.” She held up a finger, and then a second. “Rule two: you do as I say.”

“But not as you do?” he idled.

“Rule three: I drive, all the time, unless I specifically tell you otherwise. You think John would have wanted you to drive for me? You’re wrong. John would want you to do exactly as I say, because if you don’t, I’m going to dump your ass in the middle of the woods and let you die of exposure. I’m faster than you, I know more than you, and I will not be putting the life of my unborn child in the hands of anyone else—even if it’s just letting them drive.” Her eyes narrowed. She thrust out her hand, palm up and open. “Keys.”

The brunette eyed her for a moment, running his tongue along his teeth.

Elliot pushed her open hand out again. “The dog bites on command,” she informed him coolly. “Please and thank you.”

His eyes flickered to Boomer, and then after a moment of consideration, he fished the keys from his pocket and dropped them in her hand.

“Whatever you say,” he agreed, as though he hadn’t been dragging ass to give the keys to her. “You’re the boss.”

“Remember that,” Elliot replied flatly, turning on her heel and heading toward the entrance, “when you’re in my passenger seat.”

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It was dark. It was dark, and warm—a little too warm, if he was being completely honest; he could have done without feeling like he was sweating through his shirt and coat—and he was pretty sure that Metallica was playing.

When John managed to get his eyes open, it was to the inside of a truck. One of their trucks. For a moment, he could almost believe that someone had fetched him from the grips of the Stranger. Excellent, he thought, now I will move.

His body remained still. When he considered the effort it was going to take to sit up a little straighter, John thought maybe he was just very tired—after all, he’d been through so much—and yet, his legs would not move. Nor his arms, and nor his back or abdomen. In fact, the only thing that was capable of moving were his eyes. Everything else felt exceptionally, viciously heavy, like he was weighed down by lead.

Great, he thought again, and now I will sit up.

Yet again, it proved too much. He felt his body try to shift, and certainly he felt like it was possible, but he was so tired. So tired, and heavy, and with his eyes open and the dim lights from the dashboard of the truck, it felt like the ceiling of the cab was bending in and bowing out in time with his breaths, with his heartbeat, the seat beneath him creeping up beneath the collar of his jacket to brush against his skin with leathery fingers.

It was Metallica, too. John watched a gloved hand drumming slender fingers against the steering wheel, headlights flashing and dipping with the uneven road. Snow was falling, and sometimes, if he fixed his eyes too hard on the flakes that hit the windshield, he was sure they were growing.

I hunt, therefore I am, harvest the land, taking of the fallen lamb.

He’d never liked Metallica very much, but he did remember that Elliot liked them. A lot. And listened to them. A lot. It felt like so long ago he’d been sleeping in the front seat of a shitty Honda civic, trying to figure out how to best approach her; and in reality, it had really only been a week and some change, he thought. Or had it been two weeks? A few days? Was it Christmas, yet?

A walkie on the dash crackled with a voice, drawing his eyes away from the windshield and to the figure at the steering wheel. Short-cropped hair, dark skin, long limbs reaching across the dashboard—oh fuck fuck fuck fuck me, he thought, watching with something close to abject horror the way it looked like her arm stretched and stretched and stretched out in front of her, half of the truck’s cab pulling like taffy in the corner of his vision and blurring. They had not drugged him before. Not like this. Not anything like this.

And he wasn’t getting rescued.

“Hej, Helmi,” came the voice over the radio. He blinked. The Stranger—Helmi—was holding it closer to her mouth now, having turned the music down a little on a cracked, near-ancient iPhone. “Are you almost here? Kajsa wants to get started.”

“Almost,” she replied. She paused, working her jaw for a moment.

The man on the other end of the walkie seemed to take this as an opportunity for small talk. “Did you see it’s snowing?”

“Yes,” Hemli answered dryly, “I can see it’s snowing.”

“I love seeing It happy.”

Helmi exhaled through her nose. “There’s something I want to check out before I get there. Can you ask Kajsa if—”

“Sorry, hjärtat. She says no.”

John held his breath and tried to take stock of himself. Hands tied with rope. It was hard to move, sure, but the longer he kept his eyes open, the more he was able to squirm, making sure that the Stranger’s eyes didn’t catch him. With the music still coming tinny through the speakers, it offered a little cushioning for him to try and shift himself up into a better sitting position, more directly behind her.

“I didn’t ask,” Helmi said, her voice sparking with irritation. He could see it radiating off of her, in luminescent little waves, violent little red halos blooming out from behind her skull.

“She says no. Not with your cargo.”

John held his breath. For some reason, that made him feel like he was quieter.

“It’s important,” Helmi insisted.

“Do you want me to have her call you?”

Carefully, he tested the rope around his wrists—felt for their thickness, the durability of the knots. They were good. So good that he probably wouldn’t be able to undo them himself, so that did really only leave him one option.

“Yeah,” she snapped, “have her call me.”

“Oh-kay.”

The walkie went quiet. Helmi tossed it onto the passenger seat with force, turning the heat down and turning the music back up. As soon as her hand went for the volume on the radio, John lurched forward—using as much momentum as he could, throwing his hands over the headrest and farther still until he could yank the tension of his binds back toward him, the pressure laid right against the woman’s neck. It was almost a good thing he could barely fucking move, given that now he was practically dead weight; that effort alone had been enough to exhaust him.

Immediately, her hand went to her throat. John sank back further against the seats of the truck, trying to let gravity do all of the work for him; the truck veered wildly, her other hand only barely able to grip the steering wheel and right their direction as she squirmed and thrashed, vacillating between assault against him and assistance for herself; striking him where she could, reaching blindly in the dark of the cab for something to hit him with, but the unfortunate thing there was that even if he’d wanted to, he didn’t think he could disentangle his arms from around the headrest.

“Fucking—” The word came gritted out through his teeth, painful to speak. “Pull—the f-fucking—truck over—and maybe I won’t—”

Autonomy was robbed of him. It took all of about five seconds—though they felt much longer than that—for the slush and snow on the road to grab at the tires of the truck and yank it too hard for her to properly realign it while she was fighting against the pressure of the rope against her neck, sending it sprinting over the edge of the roadside.

And down. And down. And—

The truck lifted briefly from the ground and then collided, the sound of metal-on-metal grinding in the back of his mind and sending splintering pain behind eyes—sensitive, so sensitive—and then again. Up, and down, rocking from side to side, until it finally started flipping onto its various flat surfaces on its way down the hill.

Or mountain. Or cliffside.

It was too hard to tell. Gravity dislodged his arms from their death lock around the headrest, but that mattered very little now; each collision with the ground sent him jostling around the cab (there was a lesson in there, somewhere, about the importance of wearing your seatbelt and making sure your captive was properly secured!), banging around like a marble in a tin until eventually—finally—it slammed into a tree.

Snow flurries dropped from the branches and hit the side of the truck facing upward with a thunk. John blinked rapidly for a second. There was blood on his face, dripping into his mouth, and next to him (in front of him?) Helmi hung slack against her seatbelt.

No time to waste, he thought, and struggled to the door that was facing the world outside. It clicked open neatly.

And then behind him, movement.

John mustered all of his strength to drag himself out of the truck, toppling over the edge of the doorway and into a snowbank. Though it had tried to warm up, now it was snowing, and heavily, and the impact in the ground reminded him quite suddenly of all of his ailments—among being out of his fucking mind, of course, there was the matter of his head, which had gotten slammed around like he was a fucking hula dancer on the dashboard of old fuck’s Lexus, his ribs, his back, fuck, my goddamn back, and—

Boots hit the ground next to him. A hand gripped the back of his collar. John thought he might have swore, but it came out more like a moan, despairing; he was so close to getting out, so close to getting free, and the hand gripped the back of his collar and hauled him out of the snow bank and onto his back.

Another hard collision, almost knocking the wind out of him. John struggled for air, cold seeping through his clothes, and tried to sit up—but it was no use. Above him, the thick clouds blotting out the moonlight and all of the stars swelled and collapsed, folding and folding and folding and folding and—

“You fucking—” The Stranger—Helmi, he reminded himself, despite the sluggish way his brain worked through all the information he’d been trying to absorb in the car, Helmi Helmi Helmi, running a track in his brain over and over again—was seething, driving the heel of her boot into the sternum of his chest and pinning him back against the frozen ground. “You stranded us, you fucking idiot!”

Smoke plumed against the dark sky. The engine of the truck whirred and wheezed laboriously. The air departed his lungs in a comedic whoosh from the impact, and pain splintered up through his chest from the tread on her boots making contact. He only managed to refocus his gaze just in time to see her leveling a gun at him. He heard the switch sound of the safety flicking off.

“I should blow out your fucking brains,” she bit out venomously. Blood was streaming from her hairline and down the side of his face.

John blinked, and blinked again, feeling a strange sort of emotion welling up inside of him. His tongue feeling too large for his mouth, he managed out, “Well are you gonna?”

Her lips pressed together in a vicious grimace. Her fingers tightened on the grip of the gun. Still, she didn’t fire, though she looked like she wanted to real bad.

“Oh, shit,” he slurred, “you need me.”

“Wrong,” Helmi snapped. “I need someone sad and pathetic to gut. If you mysteriously don’t survive the trip, I’m sure one of your brothers will cut it. It seems to run in the family.”

John struggled into a sitting position. No gunshot sounded; the cold metal of it brushed his forehead. A kiss, he thought, a little deliriously, from my delightful captor. What a lovely thing.

She dropped the hand holding the gun to her side again, turning to look at the truck. His hands were still bound, and he didn’t think he’d be breaking into a sprint any time soon, either. Fuck.

His captor stood, surveying the damage on the truck, her mouth twisting into some kind of vicious grimace when he said, “My head hurts really fucking bad.”

“Shut the fuck up,” she deadpanned.

He replied, “You sound like my wife.”

For some reason, that seemed to startle her. He couldn’t quite figure out why—after all, as far as he was aware, that shouldn’t be something that really impacted her—and when he tried to stand, he found that gravity had better ideas for him. Namely, sitting on the ground.

More than that, it reminded John that Elliot and the baby were still back at the compound. Had they been taken too? Had they been hurt? What was the point of having taken him?

Helmi turned, making her way to the truck and digging around where she could reach. She hauled a coat and a bag out, tossing the smashed walkie-talkie into the snow and looking at her phone. The screen stayed black. Once she’d shoved it into her pocket and pulled her coat on, Helmi lifted the bag onto her shoulders and turned to look at John.

“Get up,” she said. “We need to move.”

John sighed. “I don’t think I can.”

“I dosed you very specifically,” she informed him flatly, walking over. “You can still use those twiggy legs of yours to walk, Seed.”

Helmi’s hand shot out before he could protest again, fisting in the front of his shirt and hauling him to his feet. It felt good to stand, again, but the desire to lay back down on the ground (and maybe curl up, sleep for a few hours, that sort of thing) was more than overwhelming.

“Where is she?” he asked, watching as the woman righted herself. “Elliot?”

The woman next to him didn’t respond. She only grabbed his shoulder, pointed him toward where he thought the road might have been, and said, “Move.”

“You know, don’t you?” John pressed again, taking a few unsteady steps forward. “You have like—you know? Like, where she is?”

The barrel of the gun jammed into his back, through the layer of his coat.“Move.”

He did as he was told, though he did think it was odd that she wasn’t taking this opportunity to brag about it. If they had gotten Elliot, this bunch generally seemed pretty chatty. John puffed air out through his mouth, trying to keep his breathing even despite the way the world felt like it was shifting under his feet.

“So,” he started. “How long will—”

“Stop. Talking.”

He closed his mouth.

For a while, they walked in silence. John slogged through the snow, his teeth chattering on occasion, snow flecking his hair and beard and collecting in the space between his coat collar and his neck. He needed to figure out a plan; trying to kill her—or at the very least, knock her out—by inducing a car crash had failed. Big deal. Elliot was, he thought, probably still alive, since they seemed to need him alive for something, and that meant he needed to get back to her. And fast.

Heaving a big breath, he stopped and turned, looking at the woman with his brows furrowed.

“I want to know what’s going on,” he announced, trying very hard to keep his words straight and not slurring even though he was pretty sure she was blinking at different times. “Tell me where the fuck we’re going.”

Helmi regarded him. “No.”

“Tell me where the fuck we’re going,” he said again, “and tell me where the fuck my wife is—”

He was mid-sentence when her free hand—fisted—swung and collided with the side of his face, sending him really back to the ground. Pain bled and bloomed bright behind his eyes; there was already blood in his mouth, but now a fresh fissure split, somewhere, maybe in his lip. It didn’t matter. He heaved, spitting blood out of his mouth as the pain inspired a fresh wave of nausea to crash over him.

Dazed, John tried to collect himself. He had been punched plenty of times before. For some reason, this time, he felt overwhelmed with the childlike urge to cry.

Oh yeah, he thought, wiping the blood from his mouth clumsily, they dosed me hard.

“What part of I don’t mind killing you don’t you get?” Helmi hissed at him. “If you don’t shut your fucking mouth, I’ll put Elliot up on the platter. Is that what you want?”

He swallowed thickly. “You—what?”

“Do you want to shut up,” Helmi ground out, “or do you want her to die, you stupid fuckhead?”

John stared at her. Words just wouldn’t come out; pain was sending fractal spirals across his vision, and it was getting harder and harder to keep his breathing steady, and of course he didn’t want Elliot to die, he wanted her alive, had done so much to keep her alive and now the baby and—

Behind them, a branch snapped. Snap-snap, something thick and heavy crunching in half, the wood splintering so loudly as to imply that it was not your every twig getting broken in half. John’s eyes flickered over the cusp of Helmi’s shoulders to see the dark pines behind her swaying, and then they groaned, as though bearing the weight of something large and terrible.

Cold crept up the back of his neck, and the flushed a sickly-hot through his body. A dark, slick thing slipped between the trees; he thought for sure he could see it, legs long as the tree trunks themselves, a massive swinging body wet as an oil slick, and arms, he thought—arms, hanging from where its head ought to be, instead of eyes or a mouth it was arms, and more than two, snap-snap, another crunching but no wood splinter this time; just bones. Bones crunching between its long, spindly hands before it stopped moving.

He thought of Elliot, staring into the dark of the trees that night, moaning miserably when he tried to drag her down the hill.

The dark mass swiveled toward them. He could see no eyes, and no face, but somehow he felt it—the way it was looking at them.

“F-Fuck—!” John croaked, jumping when he felt something vibrating dully in his pocket. It dragged his attention from the trees just long enough for him to look at Helmi wildly, to catch the way she was now studying him, like she’d been watching him watch it.

In the soft puffs of snowfall and the quiet that had come with the abandonment of Hope County, the vibrating of the phone in his pocket—which had survived his beatdown in the truck—sounded very much like a siren.

John pulled it out of his pocket, very slowly, and stared at the screen as it trembled in his hands. It was a Georgia zip code. They must have wandered into territory where cell service had been available, and now he was getting a phone call from someone from Georgia. Pritchard? he thought, and then physically shook his head. No, not Pritchard. The fucker wouldn’t be calling him. He hadn’t even given him the number to this burner cell. Not Pritchard.

Perhaps, maybe, someone worse.

“If you answer that phone,” Helmi murmured in a low threat, drawing his eyes to her again, “I’ll leave you alone out here, Seed.”

He looked back down at the phone, vibrating in his hand. Each time it buzzed, the sound rippled away from the phone in tidy, pretty little waves. He couldn’t have expressed the inexplicable urge to answer the call with the Georgia zip code—after all, if it was who he thought it was, she was probably the last person he wanted to talk to while he was high out of his fucking mind—but if he were to consider every angle—

(and he ought to, where Scarlet Honeysett was involved,)

—then it seemed like the worse option was to ignore her call.

“I,” John began. He opened his mouth, and then failed to elaborate quite spectacularly.

Helmi’s fists clenched in his shirt. “Do. Not.”

“It’s my mother-in-law,” he managed out lamely, hoarsely, the vibrating of the call—now the second one, as the first had ended—echoing through his skeleton in a funny kind of way that made it feel like his molars were moving each time. “It’s just—I don’t want her coming down here—and she might call the cops, you know, she used to live...here and she might call the fucking cops, and she’ll know where to go, and the cop mentioned the Feds were sniffing around, so—”

Helmi stared at him for a moment, her expression venomous. The world swam deliriously, pulsing in an anxious little vignette around the woman’s lean frame as she loomed in his vision, eclipsing out the sky above them. She took a moment to give him a scathing once-over, as though trying to take stock of whether or not he was well-and-truly incapacitated for the moment.

“On speaker,” she snapped.

“Sure,” John agreed, hitting the green accept button and then the speakerphone button. His phone’s battery life blinked tiredly at him. “H…” His eyes flickered to Helmi. “Hello?”

“Mr. Seed.” It was Scarlet, of course; he could have mistaken her for no one else, even through the phone, the derision so clear in her voice it was nearly palpable. He opened his mouth to say something—despite having no idea what it might be that he would actually say, given that it felt like chewing thumbtacks to say literally anything at all—and her voice came fizzing popping violently through the phone speaker: “Don’t say a single word and just listen to me for a minute, you little backwater rat.”

“Okay,” he replied obediently. His mouth felt numb. He couldn’t stop thinking of the oil-slick body swaying through the pines, his eyes darting to the treeline.

“Shut up.” Scarlet was seething. Red bled from the phone in pretty wisps, making him blink. “The only thing I want coming out of your mouth is an affirmation that you’re bringing my daughter back from wherever you took her. And don’t—” There was a violent punctuation to the t in her don’t, punching through the phone’s speaker. “—think for a second I won’t be able to tell if you’re lying.”

John stared at Helmi, who stared at him in an exceptionally unhelpful way, and worked his jaw absently. He opened his mouth, and then closed it again, conflicted: Scarlet had said not to say anything, but now he could say he was bringing Elliot back, but he wasn’t doing that, so he didn’t say anything.

“Speak,” Scarlet barked, “boy.”

“You said not to.” The words came out of him before he could think about them. “I’m—we’re not—we’re just back—”

“‘I’m, we’re not, we’re just back,’” came her vicious, mocking reply, cutting in over him. “Close your mouth if you don’t have anything coherent to say. I can hear the wind whistlin’ through that empty Goddamn head of yours.”

John closed his mouth. His stomach wrenched quite tight. He blinked rapidly, trying to get his focus back. It was getting harder with each passing second, especially when each of those passing seconds was filled with a new colorful threat from his mother-in-law, especially when that dull, throbbing pain behind his eyes and spreading through his jaw was beginning to bloom harder and hotter, especially when Helmi was watching him stare dumbly at the fucking phone screen as Scarlet’s tirade endured,. There was no shortage of I am her mothers and I promise, there is no one who can ruin your entire life like mes, so that if he’d had a nickel for every time he heard it—well. He’d probably have at least a handful of them.

Elliot’s gonna be so mad, he thought, taking in an exhausted breath while the panic and stress that Scarlet might actually just contact Sheriff Pritchard rather than stay on the phone with him began to mount. She’s gonna be so fucking mad when she finds out her mom called. Fuck me. Fuck fuck fuck. Gonna have to say sorry. Gonna have to say sorry to her, and to her mom, and—

“Are you listenin’ to me, boy?” Scarlet demanded. “Answer me.”

“Y—” John felt his stomach lurch, twisting viciously in his stomach. “Yes, m—”

“I want her back, Mr. Seed. Her, and that grandbaby of mine. Do you hear me?”

“I can’t,” he replied abruptly, “I’m not going to—I can’t do that.”

A moment of silence lapsed. Only a moment and John wet his lips, opening his mouth again to try at another elaboration—a gentle little lie he could say, with Helmi’s dark eyes fixed viciously on him, about how they weren’t going to be coming back.

It was too late; Scarlet’s voice came shrieking through the phone, so that he had to clumsily turn the volume down a few notches. “You think I won’t find you, little boy? You think I won’t drag you back here just to get you thrown in a jail cell? I don’t care what for. I’ll lie until I’m blue in the face just to make sure suffer, John Seed, and I hope that idiotic troupe of brothers you have made your soul right with God, because I’ll see you into a grave before I see the inside of my own casket—”

Feeling that flighty, tight little feeling up in his throat, blurted out, “S-Sorry, mommy—”

Maybe he would rather die. Maybe he would rather let her call the Feds down to Hope County again. He pressed the heel of his palm to his eye, stifling an agonized sound.

“What?” Scarlet’s voice was reaching a kind of fever pitch tone. “What did you just—are you fucking high, John Seed?”

Helmi breathed out a short, snippy holy shit before she slapped her hands on his shoulders, jostling him, and hissed, “Wrap. This. Up.”

“I’m—sorry m—sorry Elliot’s mom,” fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck, “‘m sorry, I just have to um—go.”

“Don’t you hang up on me,” Scarlet seethed, “you pathetic, worthless little rat, don’t you hang up on me!”

John said, “Um.”

“You took her from me. You took my girl from me, and for what? To waste her life? With you? You’re nothing. You’re nothing, John Seed, whatever's left of you is rancid—and by the time I’m through with you, you’ll be less than nothing, you stupid—”

He didn’t realize that he’d been staring at the phone dumbly, mouth hung open like a fish, stranded ashore. He wanted to say something, anything, and nothing would come out; all he could do was stand there and replay her words in his head, let them run on repeat, worthless, nothing, fucking nothing, less than nothing, pathetic, worthless, nothing, pathetic, worthless—

Helmi yanked the phone out of his hand, threw it onto the ground, and stomped on it. Glass cracked under the pressure of her boot heel.

“Wh—” John swallowed thickly. “What—why did—”

“Got tired of listening to her,” Helmi replied flatly. Her eyes swept over him before she grabbed his arm at the crux of his elbow and hauled him to his feet. There was a brief second where his eyes went to the trees again, remembering her threat—I’ll leave you alone out here, Seed—and then she was pushing something plastic and cold into his hands.

John looked at the water bottle, and then back at her.

“Drink,” she said briskly. “And let’s go. You wanna see baby mama, don’t you?”

Helmi brushed past him. This time, she did not wait for him to go first; it was as though she had become satisfied in the knowledge that he needed her more than she needed him, that she was comfortable he had been, effectively, scared straight. But she hadn’t reacted at all to the thing in the trees, hadn’t even batted an eye at it.

It’s not real, he thought, swishing the water in his mouth and spitting the blood out before taking another drink. He grimaced through the plasticky, fetid taste from the bottle, carefully beginning to pick his way up the slope after her. It’s not real. Just this shit they put in my system, that’s all.

He would feel better once it all ran its course. The water would help, and he would bide his time until he could make a go for the gun, and then he’d find Elliot. Everything would be fine.

Behind him, the trees shuddered and groaned. John almost stopped, but before his movement could slow fully, Helmi’s voice echoed from further up ahead.