Tool
Rainbow Muppet Overdrive
It was late when Wren’s group got back, the sun bathing the prison in a fiery orange. Had it been his choice, however, they would've been out even later. The night brought quiet and isolation, precious hours without the iron collar of Marx's, presence weighing heavy on his neck.
The Samaritan picking through their things assembled a pile for the infirmary, sparking an idea in Wren’s mind.
“I can drop that off” he offered quickly, glancing towards the Samaritan.
“Hmph. You sure? I don't want shit from your boyfriend later.” They growled, glaring through heavy brows towards the scavenger. Wren nodded quickly, already picking up the supplies.
“I promise you won't get any. I'm supposed to pull my weight around here, aren't I?” He argued hopefully. The Samaritan just shrugged.
“Fine, whatever. Be quick with it.”
Wren gave a curt nod and scurried off with all the grace of a rat with a chunk of bread. His pace slowed the moment he was out of sight, hoping to make the most of his precious few moments of freedom. He was at the infirmary door far, far too quickly, but he pushed on anyways, slipping into the darkened room and quietly setting the supplies down. He stood there for a long moment, weighing whether or not the doctor would be angry if Wren put the supplies away, oblivious to the other person in the dark.
Madison swam in the road. It was dim and long and it left crossroads in her eyes. It was hard to swim in the road, its inky surface having the consistency of maple syrup. Sometimes, angels drove by on its surface, their wings aflame and their eyes black and empty as pitch. Once in a while, she thought she knew their faces. Sometimes, Madison swam to the bottom of the road, and she could sense the presence of the walking dead, of ghosts, of bones and bleeding in the dark. So far, she'd always been able to come back up, and just....... keep swimming. Sometimes, people came into the road and swam beside her, speaking in riddles or memories, other times she was alone for what felt like forever, time growing thick and slow, with nothing for company but the ooze and her own mind.
It wasn't as hard to swim in the road as she'd feared, at first. The feet that occasionally grasped for her ankles, down there in the deep, were frightening things, but beyond that..... it was mostly hard to have only her own mind for company.
A ripple across the surface of the road made Madison's head turn towards whoever had stepped into the road with her.
"H-hello?" In the real, the sound was a pained croak, but not an unfriendly one.
Wren jumped when the voice croaked from the dark, knocking a plastic bottle of pills onto the ground. It sounded like thunder in the otherwise silent room, probing him to quickly drop to his knees to pick it up.
It took him another moment to find it in the dark before he put it back on the table, sighing and turning towards the sound. "Hello, sorry, I didn't mean to wake you." He offered a small smile. Steadying himself on the counter he'd just put the supplies onto, he hesitantly approached the sound. The mighty power of basic deduction led him to the conclusion that whoever was in here was very sick or very injured, especially considering the lights were out and the doctor was gone. Therefore, they weren't any danger to him.
He couldn't quite see the stranger in the dark, but he could make out the basic shape of someone laying on a gurney. He took another few steps forward, his hand leaving the counter.
"Do you need anything?" He asked as clearly and slowly as he could manage.
The clatter of something against something else hard drew her attention, but a hazy mind and recently ineffective spare eyeball meant Madison couldn't see a damn thing. "I was.... awake."
She paused a moment, and then corrected herself. "Or..... maybe you're..... you're in....... my dream." A small shrug made the shackles on her bed rattle, the sound a different sort of thunder in the otherwise quiet space. In moments that made a little more sense than swimming in the road, Madison understood and approved of the measure. If she drowned and died, there was no point in letting loose a Risen on unsuspecting people. Better to keep her bound to the road, so if she drowned she'd sink to the bottom and join the shuffling masses there.
Did she need anything?
Madison went quiet for a moment. "Could I..... have water?"
The road was hot, and despite the pills periodically given to her, the road was still hot. Sometimes she'd get the shivers hard enough to make everything around her waver in phantom heat. But.... that made a certain amount of sense. Tar, asphalt, these were the lava flows of suburbia and the pounding lifeblood of great cities that slept while the dead and the living crawled over and through them.
Maybe that's whose dream she was having; maybe she and the city were dreaming the same dream. It would make a certain amount of sense. It would explain why she felt so small, and the road so hot as to be liquid around her neck.
Wren paused, gaze moving to focus on the shackles. She was either very dangerous, or a turning risk, judging by that. She didn't exactly sound like she was all there, so he guessed the later.
"You're awake" Wren insisted softly, though at times he wished this was some horrid nightmare. Even before the apocalypse, when his brother first disappeared, he hoped he would wake up and it would be a dream. Now more than ever he wanted to wake up and wander into the apartment they shared when their parents first kicked them out. To look up and see Vick making bacon, to chastise him for eating unhealthily and to tell him about the horrid nightmare he'd had. Vick would laugh, say "You should've known it was a nightmare when I left you, over my dead body!" and make a plate for him. Wren would laugh too.
But there was no waking up.
"Water? Yeah, yeah of course" Wren was pulled from his thoughts. He returned to the counter, rifling through things until he found a couple of water bottles. He flicked on a light switch and started towards Madison once more, but froze.
It was definitely the later.
Back when he first started working in park service, he had been part of a search party for a missing man. He left a family behind, two kids, a wife. Wren didn't find him, but he caught a glimpse of the body before they covered it. He couldn't quite comprehend what he was looking at, the human mind wasn't meant to witness such things. He looked like a bloody red crescent moon.
The stranger was bandaged, thank God, but the missing chunks of flesh and bloody fabric did little to calm the imagination.
"Christ, what did they do to you?" He whispered, mind immediately racing.'Why would the Samaritans do this? Were they keeping her alive just to throw her in the pit? Or, god, was she like him Somebody's pet?' He felt selfish for the next thought that crossed his mind.
'Was Marx going to do this to him?'
He could at least lay that one to rest. Marx wouldn't shoot him in the face, because Marx liked his face. No, if Marx were to get any ideas from this, it would be to blow his legs off so he can't run away. If that happened, he would do the rest himself. He took a deep breath and finished the short trek to Madison's bedside.
"I've got water, do you need help sitting up?"
Being told she was, in fact, awake was exactly the thing a dream would say. They had before.
Sit up?
That's.....that's right, the road wasn't always there, or if it was, it turned solid every now and again, letting her lay atop it and look up at a sky whose stars had winked out a long, long time ago. Madison tried to figure out how to make her stomach muscles clench to lift herself up, and barring that, how to grasp at the bed to roll onto the side that didn't hurt. Nothing worked the way it should have, and the woman realized the tar was still gluey enough to suck at her skin and......
Wait, no. This..... this was a bed a-and that was a voice in the dark and those were cuffs. She knew cuffs, and not in a sexy, fun way; she knew cuffs because she'd put them on people and.... and...
"Yes, please."
She was a fucking detective. So detect already!
"What...... what hospital..... is this?"
Crackerjack idea! That was detecting, right? That counted!
Hospitals were dangerous because dead people didn't stay down. That explained the cuffs. She'd gotten...... she'd gotten shot. That explained why things were so...... so.....Shitty.
Madison lifted herself as much as she could manage to make whatever assistance the man was willing to offer, with only a single, mumbled "Fuckin...." of protest.
Water. Water was so welcome. She was so hot. The asphalt was growing sticky again, and Madison could feel her thoughts sliding through her fingers. Fucking hell.
Wren helped her as gently and slowly as he could manage the moment she agreed, moving as if she was made of ash and may disintegrate if he moved her wrong. Once she was up, he shifted so his shoulder and bicep held her steady, freeing his hand to unscrew the cap from the bottle.
"You're in Lincoln's infirmary" Wren offered before holding the bottle to her mouth, trickling the water between her lips and studying her face and throat to make sure she wasn't choking.
"Lincoln is a prison- well, was a prison." He explained further, pausing as he decided between lying or not.
"You're safe here, you're in a safe place. The dead can't get in, and the people here are good"
No point in worrying her, especially if she was on our way out. If she recovered, he could apologize and explain then.
Madison got down a single, precious swallow before the news of where she was finally filtered through the shifting tar of her mind. Lincoln...... Lincoln was a bad place for assassinatio-......No...... It.... It was a bad place because because because......
And that was when realization hit as the second sip of liquid began its trek down her neck before getting abruptly and unexpectedly detoured into her lungs. Her coughs were deep and wet, and she pushed away the bottle with her free hand. At this rate, she'd rattle right to pieces.
GOD coughing hurt. It hurt her head, it hurt her chest, it was a deep, wracking pain that wrapped into and around itself that nevertheless persisted until the coughs subsided to noisy throat-clearing.
Note to self: better to die clean than sneeze. If this was coughing, then sneezing might literally be fatal, but not in a nice, quick way, but rather in the way a can of Cheez Whiz might react to being abruptly punctured with a stray nail.
Fuck. Lincoln."Shit."
The pain was making her drift and sink simultaneously, and though the woman was having trouble finding the words, the emotional resonance behind them was clear; "Stone walls an'........ an' tin men. Th'..... The knives..... of butchers...... aren't..... aren't friends."
A chestnut eye looked upwards and searched the murky blur of the man's face and tried to magically force comprehension. "They're tools."
She knew she wasn't making enough sense, but Madison wasn't sure where her knees had gone so..... baby steps.
Wren yanked the bottle away as she started to choke, staring at her in a panic while gripping her shoulder.
'Nice job dip shit, you killed her'
He should've just left, he wasn't a damn doctor, why was he still here? Maybe if he hurried it would look like she choked on her own blood or something?
He relaxed a bit when the coughing calmed down, finally releasing his grip on her. She wasn't making a lot of sense, but Wren got the gist. He frowned and nodded.
"Yeah.. yeah. I'm sorry I upset you" he said quietly, thinking for a minute before continuing. "You're very sick right now, let them heal you, and then get out. They won't let you die." he tried to offer a sympathetic smile, but it came off as more strained than anything.
"You need to rest right now, you'll need your strength."
They won't let you die, was not the reassurance the man probably thought it was, and Madison looked almost woeful as she let herself sink back into the relative softness of the gurney, the metal of her cuffs rattling against the railing. Even so, the rest of his words served to mollify her somewhat. Get strong. Get out.
The strain in the man's smile didn't show in the gloom, not with her lightly simmering brain and traumatized skull. Her night vision wasn't at its best. He was a gentle wraith of sweet lies and mixed comforts, and Madison appreciated his presence. Angels were cruel and capricious things, their wings razor-sharp and dipped in the blood of the fallen. Delicate demons lay in quieter places and ghosts whispered in her waking mind and her sleeping one alike, but this one..... this wraith...... he was okay.
"S'.... S'all right."
Madison fell silent for a moment, then asked a somewhat more poignant question than was necessarily intended, her voice slurring the edges of her words and making them into rounder, softer things: "Who were you?"
Wren watched her carefully, being sure she didn't hurt herself before giving her some space. He was about ready to leave when her question broke the quiet.
Who were you?
Thinking back before was like looking into a fun house mirror, except he was the reflection. Twisted and malformed, a shell of his former self. He almost deflected, turned the question around to save himself, but there was no point in upsetting her again. He swallowed hard.
"I was a park ranger." He said quietly. "I was in love with nature since I was a little kid, to be her steward was a beautiful thing. I took pictures of animals, painted landscapes sometimes, but I wasn't very good. I wanted her with me always, wanted to drown in those gentle greens and browns. Especially when my brother... It felt like the city was a monument to his absence, I was never all that social, but he loved people. He loved them so much, and they..." He trailed off, unwilling to say it even so many years later. "I was kind. Gentle. Quiet, but honest. I was a much better person. I... I hope I can be that again one day." He blinked away pathetic tears, refusing to look at the woman in the bed
Madison wasn't expecting a ghost to share such a detailed personal story.
She floated on a still pool and could hear the beating of a heart from somewhere beneath her, the noise vibrating through her sternum and through one whole side of her face. Who had he been in her life to appear before her, now? Was he just a hallucination? No..... the water had been real, Madison was almost sure.
The wraith's words washed over her and through her. They were as much a call to action as they might have been statement of fact. He'd been a park ranger. He'd loved nature. He'd painted landscapes. He'd had a brother. He'd been a kind, gentle person....... before becoming this. She supposed dying would do that to a person.
"M'sorry." Madison said, as though she were personally responsible for all of it. The remorse sounded genuine.
"I'll do better." Though she had no idea from when in her past this ghost had come crawling, if he'd been some gentle nature-lover, he was someone she'd either failed to avenge or failed to save. That's how ghosts worked. Bob Cratchit didn't come to visit some rando.
"I won't stop." Her free hand gestured to her face and she took the wraith's advice; "Get strong. Fight. I'll remember. Promise."
The detective wasn't sure what was wrong with her face, but the deep, raw throb meant there was some funny business going on over that-a-way.
Wren was caught off guard by how genuine she sounded. It brought tears to his eyes that dripped in rivulets down his face. He should be sorry. This situation sucks. Everything sucks and it's never going to get better and that's sad.
He didn't bother trying to stifle the silent tears, he didn't have any pride left to save. He swallowed hard as she promised, a small smile finding it's way to his face.
He didn't know what she meant to say, she was confused and had no idea more than likely, but it gave him hope. "Thank you. Save those that can from becoming what I've become, please." His voice broke as he begged, knowing damn well she couldn't.
He'd give anything to be proven otherwise. "I should get going. Get well soon." The well wishes were empty, filled with pain, but it felt wrong to leave without saying anything at all.
The ghost began to cry, Madison was pretty sure. That wasn't surprising. Being dead probably sucked. He asked her to keep others from dying.
Fair.
Even as he spoke, Madison's vision became blurry, and then a sharp tang streaked down the uninjured side of her face. When she spoke again, it was the whisper of a girl on the battlefield, picking up the shattered sword and battered shield of one of her fallen brethren, half unintelligible and eventually fading into mouthed words. But boy oh boy, she believed.
"I remem...... remember. Peace in Hell. Save who you can....... 'venge those you cain't. I re.... remember. I'll keepm.... keep m' promise."
Black tar swallowed her, the wraith unraveling at the edge of her awareness like so much twine...... though he'd succeeded in reminding her of who she was and the cause she'd dedicated herself towards. An ember came off of the flint of his words and landed in the dry tinder of her heart, flaring it into life once more. Save those she could. Keep them from becoming wraiths in the dark. She could do this. She would do this.
Get strong. Fight. Remember.
From the outside, Madison simply fell back into a discomforted haze that was not quite slumber, marred by the heat of her fever and her body's struggle to survive.
