Molly (1/10)

Chapter 24

Jason lowered his head, stroking Chelsea's hair. The others waited for him. They might have been the Lord's castaways, but they were not without souls.

"What did this to her?" Monica said. "What the fuck happened?"

"They brought their filth up with them," Jason replied, not turning away from Chelsea's death-gaze. "They poisoned the well."

"The well's been poisoned for a hundred-fucking years, Jason."

"Exactly."

He rose up. He didn't see the faces of friends anymore. They were tools, and Jason would use them to avenge Her.

"No one should have to go through this," he said, then walked out of the room.

They followed him, not because they had asked but because like Jason they had loved or learned to love Chelsea, too. She had led them through this maze, and now that she was gone they all--without having to say one word--knew that Jason would know what to do next.

The young, the dead. Jason was proud to call them brothers and sisters, despite their differences. They had been formed of the city, and now the city would receive her children, whether or not this was predestined.

They wove, they burned; they drank the shit and they smoked so that their own little clouds merged with the fog. Jason tilted his head back and took in that disturbance.

What was it like, he wondered, down there?

"Jason."

They were at the station-limits; soon they'd come up to the edge. Jason had anticipated that if enough of them left, someone would come calling. The machinations of a doomed society were, if anything, predictable.

The eyes came first, glowing emerald lights surrounded by darkness, and only when the enemy moved could Jason see their outlines. Men maybe, tinged in metal; it was hard to make out any clear detail for they were covered in faded-greed-padded armor. Knights of some lost crusade, though no god watched over them.

"Shit," Monica muttered.

Jason stepped forth. Hundreds of them, maybe thousands. They came in at an almost-casual gaite. Their eyes never blinked and when they stopped to move it was like looking upon an army of statues. Monsters.

"We're going down," Jason shouted. "Fuck off pigs, or we'll fucking fire!"

Their presence was enough. Their doctrine was that of command, and as such they were not human.

"Fuck off pigs, or we'll fucking fire!"

They dashed behind cover or readied weapons, putrid things that could barely shoot, but that didn't matter. The damned against the damned; so long as revenge was possible, Jason would try.

Lazer-fire burned the atmosphere, and Jason realized his ineptitude.

Monica died in front of him, her torso burned. Cover didn't matter; the guns simply melted the hover cars, the metal tins, the ignored dilapidated rubble. And when they died they died in pure-pain, the sort reserved for the saints.

There went Percy, and Ted, and so many that Jason loved, his friends, his brothers and sisters. He wished it might have been different, but that didn't matter anymore.

He shot them. He didn't know if any died. Soon there were only a handful of the lost left, pushed to the edge.

There lay the city. Jason missed being back on soil, however diseased.

The firing stopped. They stood there. Watching. Waiting.

How many times had Jason been here before?

One approached. He was even taller than the others. On his chest were bullet-holes. If the bullets had been able to penetrate, then surely this was a revenant.