Fic: The Long And Winding Road (PG-13)
May. 15th, 2010 01:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
apocalypsosOkay, so here's my first ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
apocalyptothon fic.
Title: The Long And Winding Road
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
apocalypsos
Recipient:soundingsea
Fandom: Supernatural
Disclaimer: I don't own the Winchesters. You don't want to get mixed up with guys like the Winchesters. They're loners, Dottie. They're rebels.
Spoilers: General spoilers up to 5.21
Pairings: None
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Scenes from a post-apocalyptic road trip.
Author's note: So I hear you like kickass women, so I put kickass women in your apocalypse so they could kick ass after the apocalypse. \o/
* * *
The Long And Winding Road
* * *
In Minnesota, Jess burns down a church just because she can.
The snarling inferno swallows St. Michael's in minutes, snips away at its whitewashed outer walls and elaborate stained glass in great snapping bites. It's not that there's something evil or inhuman lumbering through the church's sparse and compact interior. There aren't even dozens of slowly mummifying corpses lining the pews in a grotesque mockery of heavenly worship like the women have found in other towns, silently begging for this cleansing sort of respectful burial.
Jess just wanted to burn something. It's not the first time.
“We could have just turned up the heat in the car,” Jo grumbles, joking. It's a bad joke at that. The heater in the Range Rover is shot, quite literally, and it's all Jo's fault. They've all gotten a bit touchy about loud noises and strange voices not their own. It's why the radio's shot as well. Not that there are any functioning radio stations left, of course, but the CD player worked, or did until Jo shot it while they were heading down the interstate. Mary had been driving, and hadn't been amused.
Jess rubs a trembling hand over the low swell of her midsection. The hand holding the empty gas canister, however, is eerily still.
“Pretty,” she murmurs.
Jo's brow furrows with distaste she doesn't bother to veil. None of them are quite sure when Jess broke, but there's no caulk or plaster that'll fix the crack in her now. Two months ago the rest of them found out about her poor put-upon pygmy passenger, and thought that might steer her towards a sliver of sanity. No such luck, it seems.
“You know, you don't have to burn down something in every town we drive through,” Jo calls out.
Jess doesn't answer. The fire, it appears, is the best entertainment she's had in weeks.
Jo huffs out a breath and glances towards the town's meager library from where she sits in the front passenger seat of the Range Rover. The door hangs open the same way that the front door of the library hangs open, like a loose baby tooth hanging from a thread of sore but persistent gum tissue. Jo dangles her legs out of the car and swings them back and forth, the October chill and her relative maturity be damned, and hates this, hates Jess, hates everything all at once.
This is not the way Jo's life was supposed to go.
Hell, this was not the way any of their lives were supposed to go.
*
The volcano probably isn't what cracked the roof. The virus definitely isn't to blame. But there have been other minor everyday tragedies since the hammer slammed down and shattered their fragile world. Accumulated rainwater, a Minnesota winter … any number of things could have turned the contents of Hammond's public library to moldy gelatinous pulp.
Mary pokes with the toe of her shoe at the gray-green muck that pooled on the carpet under a rain-eroded sign that only barely labels the “Periodicals” section.
“So much for catching up on current events,” Ellen murmurs from behind her.
Mary nods, distracted by her tumbling thoughts.
Once upon a time, there was a great green world full of wild wonderful people, she thinks.
“What now?” Ellen asks.
Mary shrugs. There's no such thing as a purpose in life anymore, not since the virus and the volcano and all of those dead men. Mapping out the death throes of the modern world through the last gasps of patchy small-town newspapers passes as a purpose well enough for government work. Simply surviving isn't quite enough, not these days, not in this cancerous bastard world.
Without the final issues of the Nathanville Gazette or the Westbury News or the Augusta Press, most towns are simply worthless deserted graves, lacking a story or context, a few years worth of wear and tear from signifying nothing at all.
This town, unsurprisingly, is no different.
“Aw, hell,” Ellen says, sudden and sharp. “You smell smoke?”
Mary doesn't, not really, not through the thick musty stink of the ruined library. She tilts her head just so and takes a sniff of rancid air. It's hard to pick out the scent of smoke from a dozen worse odors, but it's insistent, that eye-sting of inflamed wood.
“We should leave,” Mary says.
Ellen grumbles something that sounds suspiciously like, “Well, don't dole out all of your words all at once,” but Mary doesn't have it in her to start an argument. She's turned taciturn since John died, since the boys disappeared into the cloudy deadly ether of the west. If the volcano didn't take them, the virus would have, the same way it took all the rest of the men.
Quite frankly, she just doesn't have anything to talk about. Not anymore.
*
Mary and Ellen met over shotguns at dawn.
They ran into each other in Spotwell, which may have been in Iowa and may have been in Kansas. Neither can remember. The borders between states bled quickly once the number of people you ran into in any given week could be counted on one hand with free fingers to spare.
They pulled their shotguns on one another in the middle of Port Street, bookending the armory and a car dealership with their surprise standoff. No one was alive in Spotwell, so their sudden appearances at opposite ends of the street came as quite a shock. You could hear dogs barking from a mile away given the silence, but somehow they'd managed not to hear their own murmurs and footfalls until they were practically on top of one another.
Jo hovered behind her mother, quiet and stubborn, just as ready to shoot as her mother. Mary almost wished they'd fire already.
“Well, don't you come prepared,” Ellen said.
Mary got the impression at the time that she said it more to herself than to this stranger facing her down in the street. She didn't respond.
So many months later when they both stalk out of the Hammond public library, Mary won't remember how long they stood there, guns at the ready. She remembers the faint stench of unburied corpses that threaded through the breeze and the grumbling yowls of now-feral house cats prowling through overgrown lawns. She remembers tires flattened by the summer heat. She remembers a dozen other tiny details, but time's not one of them.
Somewhere along the line, time became worthless.
Ellen's mouth tightened around the corners at she glared at Mary over the barrel of her shotgun. “Shoot first or ask questions,” she grumbled. “Pick one already, would you? My arm's getting tired.”
Jo's mouth quirked, and Mary almost wanted to smile right back at her.
She took a chance, a dangerous one at that, and lowered her arm.
And that was the start of their claptrap caravan.
*
The car reeks of smoke and gas, and the burning remains of Hammond's only church and a few poor architectural casualties nearby glow in the rear view.
Mary clutches the steering wheel with white-knuckled fingers, and commends herself for not pretending the wheel is really a slim young neck shadowed with fading sunburn on the back.
Jo sits in the backseat with Jess, blond bookends to an empty stretch of worn upholstery. Jo scowls out her window at the abandoned cars which freckle the roadsides with their rusting corpses. If they come back this way in a few years, the hollow shells of collapsing automobiles may still litter the shoulders, the remains of dead drivers crumbled into revolting piles in the some of the driver's seats.
With the window rolled down on her side, Jess sticks her hand out into the chilly air and surfs the airstream rolling along the side of the car with her palm. She's dreamy-eyed and smiling sweetly, devoid of worries and pain. You'd think they'd doped her, but their few remaining drugs expired long before they picked up Jess from some muddy roadside in North Dakota.
She gets like this after she burns a church, every damn time.
There are times Mary contemplates pulling over at some well-stocked supermarket in East Bumblefuck, Kentucky, far from the veiled masses of virus-felled corpses in the cities and the ashen remains of the western United States, and shoving Jess out. Let her fend for herself, set fire to whatever she wants. Let her salvage food from whatever is still viable in Gary's Green Grocers and give birth by her crazy fucked-up lonesome.
That's usually the point in her heartless daydream when Mary tells herself no. The human race is dead or close to it. She hasn't seen a man in six months. She hasn't seen a woman other than the ones in this car in two months.
Jess stays, like it or not.
“I'm sorry.”
At first, Mary thinks she dreamed it up, the soft hiding words. But Jo turns to furrow her brow, and Ellen's head whips in Jess's direction from where she sits in the front passenger seat. Mary ponders pulling over so she can stare as well, but she's not willing to take the chance of breaking the moment wide open by shrieking the car to a stop.
“I'm sorry,” Jess says. Her voice doesn't clog with guilty tears as her hand strays absently over her rounded abdomen. “I can't stop. I'm not allowed to stop.”
Mary and Ellen share a look heavy with confusion. It's just enough of a pause for Jo to blurt, “Who's not allowing you to stop?”
Jess doesn't respond. Her hand just circles over her swelling stomach in steady soothing caresses.
Mary stiffens, and quietly hopes her motherly strokes are not an answer.
*
Jo was the one who found Jess, and kicked herself for weeks afterward.
“Pull over,” she insisted, as they were driving out of some podunk seven-house excuse for a town. “Pull over, pull over, damn it,” she said, insistent, and she'd already opened the door when Ellen skidded the car to a stop.
Mary poured out into the street the same time that Jo did, following behind her as she jogged through the growing drizzle towards a muddy lump in the rain-swollen trench along the road. Mary never would have recognized it as a person, sagging and crumpled under the weight of grief. How Jo ever recognized that grimy bump as a person is a mystery.
“You're all right,” Jo murmured, comforting words that comfort none of them. Not even Jess, it turned out, because every time Jo said, “You're all right,” the girl choked out something that sounded like a laugh.
The rule is that they don't approach strangers, old or young, smiling or screaming, unarmed or unstoppable. In this world, those you don't know have just as little to live for as you do. But Jo went to the girl just the same, driven by something, steered toward the wretched mud-soaked girl just as sure as Mary occasionally steered the car westward before stopping herself.
Mary took the girl's hands to lift her up, tugged her upright, played her fingers over the tightened fists the girl wouldn't loosen.
After a moment of soothing words and calming touches from both women, the girl's hands relaxed.
She clutched a box of matches in each hand, fiercely possessive.
*
The next time they stop after leaving Hammond, parking in the cracked weed-strewn lot of a Wal-Mart in Wisconsin, Mary could swear she sees Sam.
They've left Jess alone as they stock whatever supplies they can scavenge from the shelves. It's not much. It never is. It takes time to fish past lumps of mold in the bread aisle and the overpowering stink from the dairy section. Jess will just get bored and wander off anyway. Might as well just point her towards the gardening section and pray she sticks to burning down display sheds or doghouses.
Mary lines a cart with cans of beans and corn and meat. They may not be good anymore, but they don't have the time to do FDA-approved food poisoning tests on the damn things. Better to load up the car and fish through them when mealtimes roll around.
In the next aisle over, Ellen and Jo bicker as good-naturedly as the pair of them can manage over bottled water and beef jerky. Occasionally one of them will laugh harshly, no playfulness in the words. Ellen and Jo don't quite know how to argue with anything approaching good humor.
Mary sighs and thinks of Dean. Dean, who could argue over the remote with his brother but never over whatever overstuffed sandwich Mary waved in his direction. Dean, who with all of his faults could tease and charm to get what he wanted with such finesse you'd grudgingly allow him his way.
Mary misses him. Misses Dean, and Sam, and oh, God, she misses John so very much that it makes her head throb just to think about him most days.
Sometimes she blames herself. Sometimes she thinks, I asked for a normal life, and I loved it while it lived. I had two normal boys and one normal husband, one son at Stanford and one son at the garage with his father, and it was good while it lasted.
Sometimes she thinks, If only I'd taught them to hunt, they'd still be here, all of them, every single one, even though it's not the case. You can't shoot a virus. You can't salt a supervolcano.
Mary pushes the weighted cart in awkward fits and starts toward the front door. “Jess,” she calls. “Come on, kid.”
There's no answer.
The interior of the Wal-Mart is shadowy as it is, the electricity blown and the sky outside growing dark with approaching storm clouds. Just because Mary's eyes adjusted to the lack of light after a while doesn't mean the darkness isn't all much easier to see through.
“Jess,” she calls, and weaves her way around a patio furniture display housing a litter of baby mice in the hollowed couch cushion.
“Jess,” she calls again, and dodges a discarded doll, the plastic eyes torn away by birds or rats or time.
“Jess,” she calls again, and ducks through the entrance to the gardening section –
… and stops.
He's there for an instant, a blink of the eye, a hiss of inhaled breath. His right hand, large and long-fingered and browned by the sun, cups Jess's cheek. His left hand rests on her abdomen, fond and protective.
In a flash he is gone, but the image remains etched on Mary's memory, his tall familiar form burning itself in a silent demand for attention onto her retinas.
She didn't see it. She didn't see it.
She didn't.
Jess hums under her breath, something that might be “White Christmas,” something that Mary hates and fears from the first steady note. Mary doesn't tremble or shake as Jess approaches, the weight of her swollen stomach giving her a definite sway. Jess's smile is beatific, and strange, and hopelessly contented.
Mary still stands frozen in place when Jess comes near. Jess smooths a hand over her midsection, the blessed dome of her belly, and looks Mary straight in the eyes, a rare occurrence.
“He's sorry, too,” Jess says, the words lacking the apologetic tone they should cling to.
She sways past Mary, but Mary doesn't notice. Doesn't pay attention to the increased volume of her humming, or the far-too-graceful bob in her walk. Doesn't note the curiously satisfied smile on Jess's face, or the way that her trailing fingertips leave scorched streaks in the plastic garden-department shelves.
Mary can only see Sam, that living breathing Sam in his clean white suit.
== end ==
apocalyptothon fic. Title: The Long And Winding Road
Author:
apocalypsosRecipient:
soundingseaFandom: Supernatural
Disclaimer: I don't own the Winchesters. You don't want to get mixed up with guys like the Winchesters. They're loners, Dottie. They're rebels.
Spoilers: General spoilers up to 5.21
Pairings: None
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Scenes from a post-apocalyptic road trip.
Author's note: So I hear you like kickass women, so I put kickass women in your apocalypse so they could kick ass after the apocalypse. \o/
The Long And Winding Road
* * *
In Minnesota, Jess burns down a church just because she can.
The snarling inferno swallows St. Michael's in minutes, snips away at its whitewashed outer walls and elaborate stained glass in great snapping bites. It's not that there's something evil or inhuman lumbering through the church's sparse and compact interior. There aren't even dozens of slowly mummifying corpses lining the pews in a grotesque mockery of heavenly worship like the women have found in other towns, silently begging for this cleansing sort of respectful burial.
Jess just wanted to burn something. It's not the first time.
“We could have just turned up the heat in the car,” Jo grumbles, joking. It's a bad joke at that. The heater in the Range Rover is shot, quite literally, and it's all Jo's fault. They've all gotten a bit touchy about loud noises and strange voices not their own. It's why the radio's shot as well. Not that there are any functioning radio stations left, of course, but the CD player worked, or did until Jo shot it while they were heading down the interstate. Mary had been driving, and hadn't been amused.
Jess rubs a trembling hand over the low swell of her midsection. The hand holding the empty gas canister, however, is eerily still.
“Pretty,” she murmurs.
Jo's brow furrows with distaste she doesn't bother to veil. None of them are quite sure when Jess broke, but there's no caulk or plaster that'll fix the crack in her now. Two months ago the rest of them found out about her poor put-upon pygmy passenger, and thought that might steer her towards a sliver of sanity. No such luck, it seems.
“You know, you don't have to burn down something in every town we drive through,” Jo calls out.
Jess doesn't answer. The fire, it appears, is the best entertainment she's had in weeks.
Jo huffs out a breath and glances towards the town's meager library from where she sits in the front passenger seat of the Range Rover. The door hangs open the same way that the front door of the library hangs open, like a loose baby tooth hanging from a thread of sore but persistent gum tissue. Jo dangles her legs out of the car and swings them back and forth, the October chill and her relative maturity be damned, and hates this, hates Jess, hates everything all at once.
This is not the way Jo's life was supposed to go.
Hell, this was not the way any of their lives were supposed to go.
The volcano probably isn't what cracked the roof. The virus definitely isn't to blame. But there have been other minor everyday tragedies since the hammer slammed down and shattered their fragile world. Accumulated rainwater, a Minnesota winter … any number of things could have turned the contents of Hammond's public library to moldy gelatinous pulp.
Mary pokes with the toe of her shoe at the gray-green muck that pooled on the carpet under a rain-eroded sign that only barely labels the “Periodicals” section.
“So much for catching up on current events,” Ellen murmurs from behind her.
Mary nods, distracted by her tumbling thoughts.
Once upon a time, there was a great green world full of wild wonderful people, she thinks.
“What now?” Ellen asks.
Mary shrugs. There's no such thing as a purpose in life anymore, not since the virus and the volcano and all of those dead men. Mapping out the death throes of the modern world through the last gasps of patchy small-town newspapers passes as a purpose well enough for government work. Simply surviving isn't quite enough, not these days, not in this cancerous bastard world.
Without the final issues of the Nathanville Gazette or the Westbury News or the Augusta Press, most towns are simply worthless deserted graves, lacking a story or context, a few years worth of wear and tear from signifying nothing at all.
This town, unsurprisingly, is no different.
“Aw, hell,” Ellen says, sudden and sharp. “You smell smoke?”
Mary doesn't, not really, not through the thick musty stink of the ruined library. She tilts her head just so and takes a sniff of rancid air. It's hard to pick out the scent of smoke from a dozen worse odors, but it's insistent, that eye-sting of inflamed wood.
“We should leave,” Mary says.
Ellen grumbles something that sounds suspiciously like, “Well, don't dole out all of your words all at once,” but Mary doesn't have it in her to start an argument. She's turned taciturn since John died, since the boys disappeared into the cloudy deadly ether of the west. If the volcano didn't take them, the virus would have, the same way it took all the rest of the men.
Quite frankly, she just doesn't have anything to talk about. Not anymore.
Mary and Ellen met over shotguns at dawn.
They ran into each other in Spotwell, which may have been in Iowa and may have been in Kansas. Neither can remember. The borders between states bled quickly once the number of people you ran into in any given week could be counted on one hand with free fingers to spare.
They pulled their shotguns on one another in the middle of Port Street, bookending the armory and a car dealership with their surprise standoff. No one was alive in Spotwell, so their sudden appearances at opposite ends of the street came as quite a shock. You could hear dogs barking from a mile away given the silence, but somehow they'd managed not to hear their own murmurs and footfalls until they were practically on top of one another.
Jo hovered behind her mother, quiet and stubborn, just as ready to shoot as her mother. Mary almost wished they'd fire already.
“Well, don't you come prepared,” Ellen said.
Mary got the impression at the time that she said it more to herself than to this stranger facing her down in the street. She didn't respond.
So many months later when they both stalk out of the Hammond public library, Mary won't remember how long they stood there, guns at the ready. She remembers the faint stench of unburied corpses that threaded through the breeze and the grumbling yowls of now-feral house cats prowling through overgrown lawns. She remembers tires flattened by the summer heat. She remembers a dozen other tiny details, but time's not one of them.
Somewhere along the line, time became worthless.
Ellen's mouth tightened around the corners at she glared at Mary over the barrel of her shotgun. “Shoot first or ask questions,” she grumbled. “Pick one already, would you? My arm's getting tired.”
Jo's mouth quirked, and Mary almost wanted to smile right back at her.
She took a chance, a dangerous one at that, and lowered her arm.
And that was the start of their claptrap caravan.
The car reeks of smoke and gas, and the burning remains of Hammond's only church and a few poor architectural casualties nearby glow in the rear view.
Mary clutches the steering wheel with white-knuckled fingers, and commends herself for not pretending the wheel is really a slim young neck shadowed with fading sunburn on the back.
Jo sits in the backseat with Jess, blond bookends to an empty stretch of worn upholstery. Jo scowls out her window at the abandoned cars which freckle the roadsides with their rusting corpses. If they come back this way in a few years, the hollow shells of collapsing automobiles may still litter the shoulders, the remains of dead drivers crumbled into revolting piles in the some of the driver's seats.
With the window rolled down on her side, Jess sticks her hand out into the chilly air and surfs the airstream rolling along the side of the car with her palm. She's dreamy-eyed and smiling sweetly, devoid of worries and pain. You'd think they'd doped her, but their few remaining drugs expired long before they picked up Jess from some muddy roadside in North Dakota.
She gets like this after she burns a church, every damn time.
There are times Mary contemplates pulling over at some well-stocked supermarket in East Bumblefuck, Kentucky, far from the veiled masses of virus-felled corpses in the cities and the ashen remains of the western United States, and shoving Jess out. Let her fend for herself, set fire to whatever she wants. Let her salvage food from whatever is still viable in Gary's Green Grocers and give birth by her crazy fucked-up lonesome.
That's usually the point in her heartless daydream when Mary tells herself no. The human race is dead or close to it. She hasn't seen a man in six months. She hasn't seen a woman other than the ones in this car in two months.
Jess stays, like it or not.
“I'm sorry.”
At first, Mary thinks she dreamed it up, the soft hiding words. But Jo turns to furrow her brow, and Ellen's head whips in Jess's direction from where she sits in the front passenger seat. Mary ponders pulling over so she can stare as well, but she's not willing to take the chance of breaking the moment wide open by shrieking the car to a stop.
“I'm sorry,” Jess says. Her voice doesn't clog with guilty tears as her hand strays absently over her rounded abdomen. “I can't stop. I'm not allowed to stop.”
Mary and Ellen share a look heavy with confusion. It's just enough of a pause for Jo to blurt, “Who's not allowing you to stop?”
Jess doesn't respond. Her hand just circles over her swelling stomach in steady soothing caresses.
Mary stiffens, and quietly hopes her motherly strokes are not an answer.
Jo was the one who found Jess, and kicked herself for weeks afterward.
“Pull over,” she insisted, as they were driving out of some podunk seven-house excuse for a town. “Pull over, pull over, damn it,” she said, insistent, and she'd already opened the door when Ellen skidded the car to a stop.
Mary poured out into the street the same time that Jo did, following behind her as she jogged through the growing drizzle towards a muddy lump in the rain-swollen trench along the road. Mary never would have recognized it as a person, sagging and crumpled under the weight of grief. How Jo ever recognized that grimy bump as a person is a mystery.
“You're all right,” Jo murmured, comforting words that comfort none of them. Not even Jess, it turned out, because every time Jo said, “You're all right,” the girl choked out something that sounded like a laugh.
The rule is that they don't approach strangers, old or young, smiling or screaming, unarmed or unstoppable. In this world, those you don't know have just as little to live for as you do. But Jo went to the girl just the same, driven by something, steered toward the wretched mud-soaked girl just as sure as Mary occasionally steered the car westward before stopping herself.
Mary took the girl's hands to lift her up, tugged her upright, played her fingers over the tightened fists the girl wouldn't loosen.
After a moment of soothing words and calming touches from both women, the girl's hands relaxed.
She clutched a box of matches in each hand, fiercely possessive.
The next time they stop after leaving Hammond, parking in the cracked weed-strewn lot of a Wal-Mart in Wisconsin, Mary could swear she sees Sam.
They've left Jess alone as they stock whatever supplies they can scavenge from the shelves. It's not much. It never is. It takes time to fish past lumps of mold in the bread aisle and the overpowering stink from the dairy section. Jess will just get bored and wander off anyway. Might as well just point her towards the gardening section and pray she sticks to burning down display sheds or doghouses.
Mary lines a cart with cans of beans and corn and meat. They may not be good anymore, but they don't have the time to do FDA-approved food poisoning tests on the damn things. Better to load up the car and fish through them when mealtimes roll around.
In the next aisle over, Ellen and Jo bicker as good-naturedly as the pair of them can manage over bottled water and beef jerky. Occasionally one of them will laugh harshly, no playfulness in the words. Ellen and Jo don't quite know how to argue with anything approaching good humor.
Mary sighs and thinks of Dean. Dean, who could argue over the remote with his brother but never over whatever overstuffed sandwich Mary waved in his direction. Dean, who with all of his faults could tease and charm to get what he wanted with such finesse you'd grudgingly allow him his way.
Mary misses him. Misses Dean, and Sam, and oh, God, she misses John so very much that it makes her head throb just to think about him most days.
Sometimes she blames herself. Sometimes she thinks, I asked for a normal life, and I loved it while it lived. I had two normal boys and one normal husband, one son at Stanford and one son at the garage with his father, and it was good while it lasted.
Sometimes she thinks, If only I'd taught them to hunt, they'd still be here, all of them, every single one, even though it's not the case. You can't shoot a virus. You can't salt a supervolcano.
Mary pushes the weighted cart in awkward fits and starts toward the front door. “Jess,” she calls. “Come on, kid.”
There's no answer.
The interior of the Wal-Mart is shadowy as it is, the electricity blown and the sky outside growing dark with approaching storm clouds. Just because Mary's eyes adjusted to the lack of light after a while doesn't mean the darkness isn't all much easier to see through.
“Jess,” she calls, and weaves her way around a patio furniture display housing a litter of baby mice in the hollowed couch cushion.
“Jess,” she calls again, and dodges a discarded doll, the plastic eyes torn away by birds or rats or time.
“Jess,” she calls again, and ducks through the entrance to the gardening section –
… and stops.
He's there for an instant, a blink of the eye, a hiss of inhaled breath. His right hand, large and long-fingered and browned by the sun, cups Jess's cheek. His left hand rests on her abdomen, fond and protective.
In a flash he is gone, but the image remains etched on Mary's memory, his tall familiar form burning itself in a silent demand for attention onto her retinas.
She didn't see it. She didn't see it.
She didn't.
Jess hums under her breath, something that might be “White Christmas,” something that Mary hates and fears from the first steady note. Mary doesn't tremble or shake as Jess approaches, the weight of her swollen stomach giving her a definite sway. Jess's smile is beatific, and strange, and hopelessly contented.
Mary still stands frozen in place when Jess comes near. Jess smooths a hand over her midsection, the blessed dome of her belly, and looks Mary straight in the eyes, a rare occurrence.
“He's sorry, too,” Jess says, the words lacking the apologetic tone they should cling to.
She sways past Mary, but Mary doesn't notice. Doesn't pay attention to the increased volume of her humming, or the far-too-graceful bob in her walk. Doesn't note the curiously satisfied smile on Jess's face, or the way that her trailing fingertips leave scorched streaks in the plastic garden-department shelves.
Mary can only see Sam, that living breathing Sam in his clean white suit.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2010-05-15 12:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-15 05:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-15 06:28 pm (UTC)This is awesome. And rocks. Feminist female hunters kicking ass after the apocalypse FTW.
no subject
Date: 2010-05-15 11:51 pm (UTC)This was just...I feel like I should be clapping my hands with glee it's so good!
From the virus to bat-shit crazy Jess to Jo and Ellen STILL arguing even at the end of the world there's nothing that does not rock about this story.
no subject
Date: 2010-05-16 02:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-16 06:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-16 07:07 am (UTC)However, damn that was a chilling read and a very interesting take on an apocalypse and those kick-ass women.
no subject
Date: 2010-05-16 07:15 am (UTC)One little error I noticed, FYI:
revolting piles in the some of the driver's seats.
no subject
Date: 2010-05-16 03:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-16 07:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-17 03:25 am (UTC)And eeee! I wonder if Sam had any idea what he was saying yes to....
This = great.
no subject
Date: 2010-05-24 04:21 pm (UTC)Crazy Jess burning down buildings...
Fun times
no subject
Date: 2010-06-11 03:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-13 04:56 am (UTC)I am excited to check out the Apocalyptothon now.
no subject
Date: 2011-05-03 07:53 pm (UTC)